The black cowboy riding into the sunset:

I’m reading this article about this history of Bisphenol-A, its use in plastics, and its finally being identified as harmful to humans at doses that we are probably routinely exposed to when, say, microwaving leftovers in a Tupperware container.

What we’re now learning are developmental toxins have been an integral part of the celebrated progress of the 20th century.  Plastics made it possible!  Innovation!  Convenience!  The space shuttle!  Abnormal prostate growth!

My exposure to BPA and the rest of them is at once something over which I have little control–for the better part of my life we had no idea this shit was bad, and anyway I was a child who didn’t make my own choices about what containers my food was put into and came out of.  And now that I do know, it makes me want to convert entirely to storing leftovers in used glass spaghetti jars and throw out, I mean recycle, all my plastic containers because I don’t fucking want cancer.

My grandmother had nonmalignant, estrogen-related tumors removed when I was in elementary school.  She was, what, in her early seventies? and it ended up not being a big deal.  I.e. the surgery went well and she’s not suffered ill effect since then.  And then my mother developed the same tumors, ten years later, but she was twenty years younger, and seven years after that they came back as cancer.

It could be genetics, but it could also be shared environment.  The toxic chemicals in pesticides and consumer products, the residual hormones in factory-farmed meat, are developments of the last fifty years, so wouldn’t you expect exposure to have increased and for the effects to be more pronounced in each younger generation?  Fuck me.

So I’m left wondering if there’s the slimmest chance that by spending more money on organic milk, I might save on hospital bills and hardship later.  Or if there’s nothing I can do because anyway I’ve already been exposed, and besides, what else don’t we know is harmful yet?

It’s a problem that there’s no such thing as scientific regress.  Every new development or technology is called progress, when the idea of progress is actually a value judgment, not an objective truth.  Being able to do more becomes synonymous with doing better, and absolves us from evaluating the actual improvement of our lives as a result.  I shouldn’t lay it all on science.  Business is what’s capitalized on this fact, and marketed it and tried to avoid anyone discovering that the things making our modern lives possible and profitable are also killing us.

Accepting that medical catheters and computers and lightweight prosthetic limbs have improved the lives of those of us fortunate enough to have access, really, though, is the Swiffer progress over the mop?  Are plastic sandwich bags progress over the days of tin lunch boxes?  And isn’t if fucked up that if we answer yes, in means that disposability is synonymous with improvement?

But the most serious mistake consists of taking the form for the content: defining all the various terrorists and terrorisms of our time, with their contrasting and sometimes conflicting objectives, by their actions alone. It would be rather as though one were to lump together the Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the Provisional IRA, the Basque ETA, Switzerland’s Jura Separatists, and the National Front for the Liberation of Corsica; dismiss their differences as insignificant; label the resulting amalgam of ideological kneecappers, bomb throwers, and political murderers “European Extremism” (or “Christo-fascism,” perhaps?)…and then declare uncompromising, open-ended armed warfare against it.

This abstracting of foes and threats from their context—this ease with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war with “Islamofascists,” “extremists” from a strange culture, who dwell in some distant “Islamistan,” who hate us for who we are and seek to destroy “our way of life”—is a sure sign that we have forgotten the lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them.

Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books.

“Rice is a political commodity,” said Kwanchai Gomez, the executive director of the Thai Rice Foundation, a research center. “It’s not only an economic one.

Quoted in the International Herald Tribune.

Got back to the office after interviews around 8pm.  Listened to my one message, read my twelve emails, decided to not to do anything about them until Monday.  Hello, weekend.  And I have frittered away most of the evening in front of the internet, watching clips of the Colbert Report episodes from their week in Philly.  And receiving horrible cat scratches that I in no way deserved.

I met our D.C. advocate who works on higher education issues today when he came to work the interview session. Though we’d not previously met, I have seen a lot of press conference photos of him.  That’s the thing about being on the creative team for a nationwide network of organizations.  You know everyone; very few know you. ”That’s a weird thing to say to a person when you first meet them,” he said of my comment about his photos. 

I did a really bad job of introducing myself and my job to the groups at the interviews today.  I had no idea that when I said I work with staff in Iowa, Florida, North Carolina and Georgia that they would assume I actually go to those places.  No no, we’ve got telephones and the internet.  But it is a weird arrangement, because never before have I “worked with” people I either rarely see or have never met.

Just the other day one of my clients called me a little smart ass, followed by, “Actually, I don’t know what you look like, so you could be a big smart ass.”  And threatened to look me up on Facebook, for all the good it would do him since in my current profile picture I am wearing a $200 antique lampshade over my head.

Yesterday I saw a black cowboy on my walk home from work.  Yes, at the corner of Ellsworth and 15th, around 7:30pm, there was a black man in a cowboy hat on a brown and white horse, riding off into the sunset. I only learned this term today; apparently the concept is not entirely unknown here, which would explain why the woman crossing the street in 3 inch clear plastic hooker heals was only mildly interested in the fact of his existence, while in my head I was thinking “How did you get here, crazy man, where is your stable?”

I need to pack tonight, as I am cat sitting Miss Morgan again this weekend.  I also have to dress pretty tomorrow as I lose half of my workday to interviews.  Which is just great, since I billed 12 hours yesterday, and 10.5 today, and still, there are things that won’t get done this week.  Work makes the weeks end so quickly.

Wednesday morning the fire alarm went off in our building so we all filed out on to a narrow stretch of sidewalk on Walnut Street, facing the Democratic headquarters and in front of a Kenneth Cole store.

A woman left the hair salon and crossed the street and to ask us, hunched over and in a tone of conspiracy, “so what’s going on?”

“…,” we responded.  “The fire alarm went off.”  She seemed a little disappointed.  And then another woman passing through told us that people were saying there’s a jumper.

And we responded that if there were a jumper, we probably wouldn’t be standing there in just underneath where he would jump from, now would we.

So then the alarm continued to go off throughout the day and the maintenance gentleman would come on the intercom, trying to say between alarm bleats that it was only a test.

“Dis”—bleat—”Disre”—bleat—”Disregar”—bleat—”Dis”—”Onl”—bleat—”Test”—bleat.

Not the most productive afternoon.

I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but something shifted with spring.  Not that we were a sour and gloomy office before, but there is a detectable lightening of the atmosphere in direct proportion to the lengthening light of the day.  Or maybe it’s just a shift in me, because I am so happy that it’s spring, even though that makes me think about how much time has passed since I first moved to Philadelphia and I don’t really like to think about time once it’s gone and there’s nothing I can do about all the things that didn’t happen during.

Like, I didn’t write a novel.  Not that I was planning to, but you know that would be something to look back on eight months of life and say, hey I never joined a gym or went on a date, but at least I wrote a novel. I didn’t join a gym.  So that’s eight months toward my life’s goal of one day doing a pull-up that is completely lost.  Also, I’ve yet to go on a date in Philadelphia.

Cristen and I were talking about this at Dirty Frank’s last night.  This is a bar that is widely described as a “dive,” but there are paper snowflakes hanging from the ceiling and the back wall is covered with mediocre oil paintings of flowers that have $450 price tags, which are things I do not associate with dives.  There is a dart board, though.  Anyway, Cristen is a proponent of the online personals, and besides my general dislike of the concept, I think that over the internet I would come off as scattered and distant, as the internet no longer holds my attention for more than 20 minutes at a time and I can barely be bothered to answer emails from people that I already care about.

The only downside of spring in Philadelphia is that it rains like fuck.  Right now I’m looking out the window above the front door—those have a name, what are they called?—and it looks like the sky is getting ready to shit all over us.

Today I am 24 years old and it is the first time since my 21st birthday that I have celebrated it in the U.S.  Appropriately, Milie gave me a t-shirt entitled “Voyage of Discovery” in which a ship, waves, and palm trees rise in paper cutout off the pages of an open book. And also one on which the surface of a cutely rendered cup of coffee looks like a computer power button.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Sex Drugs and Coco Puffs by Chuck Klosterman, a guy who’s voice strongly reminds me of the comic book sales guy in the Simpsons if that  guy were to use words like “deconstruction” when talking about Saved by the Bell.  In this book he also addresses the t-shirt as a cultural product that constructs an identity of coolness.

What’s interesting about Threadless and Diesel Sweeties is that their product does not try to be cool by referencing cool things like bands or old TV shows.  They’re trying to be artistically cool, and also, the shopper goes to the site looking for a t-shirt that actually, in some way, reflects her identity or personality. The shirt becomes more cool when the right person wears it by virtue of its being descriptive, and, in a way, it becomes an inside joke because only someone who knows the person knows why that particular shirt is so cool on her.  I especially enjoy Milie’s “Responsible adult, BETA” t-shirt, which was even contextually cooler when she wore it on her 21st birthday.

Last night she wore the Venn Diagram shirt in which the fields are “music you like,” “music I like,” and in the overlap, “music I used to like,” although for her, I think it would be more appropriate to substitute “art” for “music.”  Though that choice probably had more to do with color coordination and the fact that today is laundry day than an actual application to the situation of going out for my birthday.

These two new t-shirts she gave me actually describe four of the most salient facts about me: I read books, I like to travel, I require coffee, and I spend a lot of time on computers.  Which is probably more real information than I’ve provided in my Facebook profile.

If it weren’t for the Facebook, I wouldn’t have gone out last night at all.  Milie and I would have done our laundry this afternoon at the Lucky Laundromat and gone to Pico where Jeremy would have served us free tequila, and we would have reveled in the fact of my existence by eating rich Mexican food and many, many fresh tortilla chips with salsa, and that would have been all.  And also more than enough. We’re still going to do that, incidentally.

But because of the Facebook, the fact of my birthday is public knowledge, and at work we organized an impromptu outing to the South Philly Tap Room.  For the last four years at least, I’ve celebrated my birthday with whomever happened to be conveniently on hand. From my bosses who got me plastered on a weeknight for my 21st, to our motley collection of do-gooder white kids studying abroad in Kolkata and the Indian intellectuals who hosted us, to a bar hop in Jeju City with a couple of my fellow foreign teachers whom I hadn’t seen in months, to last night’s collection of people I know from or through work, family, and two total strangers—this has worked out pretty well for me.

As it was, I didn’t even manage to stay out until my birthday.  I got home sometime after 11, watched a YouTube video of a middle aged man depicting the evolution of dance on Milie’s new iPod Touch (her birthday gift from our parents) and I think I was passing out 1/4 of the way through Harold and Kumar Go to Whitecastle when midnight actually rolled around.

I lost two and a half billable hours to interviews this afternoon.  Annoying.  It’s a bit my own fault since I listed a two hour window as available.  I just never imagined they’d fill it.  And then my five o’clock called at 5:30 and I had to say “I’m sorry, could you please call me back at 6?”  A time that I had not listed as available for interviews.  Car trouble is a less convincing excuse when you are calling your interviewer over the phone.

“What motivates you?” I am scripted to ask.

“Doubters,” he said.

“Doubters motivate you?”

“Yeah, doubters.  Today somebody thinks I won’t succeed; so I’ve gotta prove them wrong.”

Is my string.

Is second dinner time?

I have been listening to the audiobook of Into Thin Air since I started cutting celery for chili around 4 o’clock this afternoon, except for about 15 minutes when a combination of absorption in the story, which is as much about being cold as it is about climbing a mountain, and the chilly apartment drove me to a hot shower.  And assuming this valerian root tea doesn’t take me out, I might have to finish the entire 7 hour, 49 minute and 43 second story before I go to bed.

Our landlady received both the rent check that I lost, and the one that we sent to replace it, which means that either I actually mailed the thing and forgot, or a some well-meaning person found it on the ground and put it in a mailbox.

I wish I could know which. In one case I’d feel positive about the fundamentally helpful nature of other people. In the other I case I’d feel like a half-wit.

This morning on my walk to work, I passed three unaccompanied minors, including one in a stroller being pushed by the oldest minor who might have been twelve-years-old.

At some point on said walk, I lost the envelope containing my rent, which I had foolishly stuck in a shallow blazer coat pocket.  Because it was warm enough today to wear a blazer with shallow pockets.  Twelve hours later I walked the same route home on the off chance that I might spot my rent, after 8pm, in the dark, in a gutter and still successfully mail it.

Do you have any idea how much paper trash there is in South Philadelphia?  And yet I would get excited from half a block away at the sight of half a styrofoam cup flattened on the sidewalk that looked from a distance to be the same proportions as an envelope.  Of course, my rent is out there in the world, so why shouldn’t it be in the middle of the sidewalk in front of me?

Needless to say, I didn’t find it.

On the blocks of ninth street between Washington and Christian, there is not a lot of sidewalk between the rutabagas, broccoli, mangoes, pears and squashes on the street side and the severed fish heads and sundries that line the other. At times, you have to navigate around the shoppers requesting their produce, people walking dogs, and the man yelling “Shop bags!” and selling large, handled paper bags in what is reportedly the oldest and largest working outdoor market in the United States.

I ask one man for two red peppers and a bag of carrots, compliment a spice shop attendant on her musical selection as I purchase my thyme, rosemary, arrowroot powder, and Spanish paprika, buy celery from another stand, and a head of organic cauliflower—$1—from a tanned, older-looking Asian woman.

I walk into a Mexican bakery and about die. It. Smells. So. Good. It is all I can do to buy only two .75 cent bags of spaghetti and leave behind every one of those pink donuts, iced loaves, and perfect looking muffins. My mouth waters remembering them to write this sentence. As I wait in line, the cashier seems to be teaching a girl in Spanish about making change.

I go in a crowded Italian grocery that smells like melted cheese, cooking meat and spices. I don’t want to buy anything, but I look at homemade raviolis and gnocchi for a few minutes. I feel like I should say to the couple I am crowding who are trying to stand in line and out of the way, “I’m just here to smell.”

“What can I get you?” asks the man at the other spice shop that’s past the used bookstore where I pick up a bag of Mocha Java coffee beans, half a pound of bulgar, and a bag of walnuts. I end my spree with two bags of grapes being hawked by a guy with only three visible top teeth calling “Grapes! One dollar a bag, one dollar a bag—come on people!”

Which I hadn’t intended to buy, but his tone persuaded me.

Almost nothing in the Italian market is self-service and this is what the market as an institution will always have over the grocery store—that it requires eye contact. That there is a face behind the food, and very little shrink wrap.

Someone once said that the life of a place is in the market. I can’t remember whom. It might have been Prof. Roy on his roof in Kolkata talking about the fruit wallahs in Lake Market. But the market that I imagine when I think of that statement is a Korean one, specifically an image of dried frogs hanging upside down next to dead quail.

I find this statement to be both true in my experience, and to have terrifying implications for a society in which the mall is the new social market space.

I have read recently that credit card debt is rising, that people are increasingly charging necessity items like groceries to their credit cards, and that the rising cost of fuel to transport raw materials like wheat and hops has caused the cost of previously “recession proof” items like pizza and beer to rise.

“Your best option for cheap eats ,” the author of one article writes, “is a gut-busting McDonald’s double cheeseburger for a buck. Makes you want to cry in your beer … if you can afford it.”

My meal of pasta and wheat balls in carrot and red pepper sauce, all of the ingredients for which I bought today in the Italian market, cost $11.25, including spices and other excess raw materials, and the leftovers will be my lunch for the next two days.

I had stopped at the Save-a-Lot for coffee milk on my way home from the market and was delayed in line behind a woman making her purchases on an Access Card. Her bill was apparently more than she expected it to be and so she was verbally running down the items on the cashier’s screen, double checking the values against her assumptions. It turned out she had been slightly overcharged for a bag of apple slices. “That’s not as much as I’d hoped to find there,” she said, and swiped the card with resignation.

I wait impatiently for vegetables to cook and browse the internets.  I watch a video of a soldier throwing a puppy over a cliff.

Now, I’m a person who verges on calloused at the best of times, and I had a very visceral reaction to this minor act of wanton violence.  A combination of the desire to cry and the desire to smack that shit-eating grin off of his fuck face.  Why throw a puppy?  Why?

Hilarity.

As you may have heard, all the writers are in Brooklyn these days. It’s the place to be. You’re simply not a writer if you don’t live here. Google “brooklyn writer” and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it? People are coming in from all over. In fact, the physical act of moving your possessions from Manhattan to Brooklyn is now the equivalent of a two-year M.F.A. program. When you get to the other side, they hand you three Moleskine notebooks and a copy of “Blogging for Dummies.” You’re good to go.

…

There was the famous case of the language poet from Red Hook who grew despondent when the Shift key on her MacBook broke. She couldn’t write for weeks. Overcome by melancholy humors, she jumped into the enchanted, glowing waters of the Gowanus Canal, her pockets full of stones. And … she was cured! The metaphors came rushing back. With eccentric spacing between the letters, but still. Now you see people jumping off the Union Street Bridge all the time. They scramble out in a hurry, trying to get home before they forget the first lines of their memoirs. Their hair falls out, but that’s the price you pay for artistic creation.

…

Every couple of years, I’ll ask a friend or two to read a manuscript, and it happens. You can see it in their eyes. “I hope it’s better than his last one. Or at least shorter.” I know what they’re thinking because that’s what I’m thinking when they ask me. “How much is this friendship worth, in terms of page count?”

Colson Whitehead

I made ghee.

Ghee is my new favorite cooking oil.  It’s transformed from its original state through only work and heat.  Person milks cow (or, traditionally, a buffalo); churning the milk creates butter, and through slow cooking the butter, the milk solids and water are are eliminated, leaving behind the oil. It has no preservatives and can last for months without refrigeration.  Doesn’t that sound like magic?

Yes, I reuse salsa jars.

Food is my new project.  I bought an Ayurvedic cookbook and my spice collection went from off-brand Mrs. Dash, cinammon, salt and pepper, to including bay leaves, curry powder, mustard seeds, and tumeric.

Tonight’s adventure was a recipe for pumpkin soup, but instead of pumpkin, I used butternut squash, and for the called-for “nondairy milk”—a can Thai coconut milk from the Big 8 market, diluted with water—and to soak up that excess of water, half a cup of brown rice.  And then pre-cooked yellow split-peas for protein.

Mmm, creamy soup thick with short-chain fatty acids that are easily absorbed and metabolized by the body, how delicious you are.

An exchange of emails across two work days. N is a senior writer, R is, like, the boss.

Subject: Arriving Today
N wrote:
Environment Florida [one of my organizations, and therefore projects]
Arizona PIRG

+0+@||7 |33+ !!!one1!!eleven!!

Subject: Re: Arriving Today
I wrote:

I can’t decide if that |33+ is intended negatively,
positively, or with any communicative function at all.

Subject Re: Re: Arriving today
R wrote:

Don’t look at me, I’m emoticon-illiterate.

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Arriving today
N wrote

What this means is “Totally elite!”

Being elite is positive. The target date of arrival is 2/1, which means the “must arrive before this day” is 2/15. So I am psyched that your NSLs [newsletters] arrived in that window.

R, this in not an emoticon. It is “|33+ 5p33|<” or leet speek, or elite speak. It is used to show the writer’s lack of a social life, coupled with some kind of obscure typing skills.

This is an emoticon, applicable to this situation.

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: arriving today
R wrote:

/ : > /

(Translation: R, with furrowed brow, as youth culture escapes his grasp once more.)

Sitting down to eat my dinner of homemade lentil burger (the recipe from a purportedly Ayurvedic cookbook) I examine the unread items on my bookshelf.  Something to keep me from feeling that I must turn on the television and watch Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader or whatever other shit reality TV turns out to be the least horrible thing on.  After rereading the introduction to Frank McCourt’s memoir, I can’t commit.  Nothing on my shelves is currently appealing, but I am bizarrely possessed to read this one, particular four-line passage from the Bhagavad Gita that I am sure I remember, and marked in the margins with a blue pen—but can’t find. I spend the better part of the evening jumping in and out of the chapters, or “teachings,” as they are called.  It takes me all night.

Krishna says,

What use is so much  knowledge
to you, Arjuna?
I stand sustaining this entire world
with a fragment of my being.

Why did I want to find it so badly?  Not sure, though I have been feeling small lately.

Of all the days not to have a bus token or a single dollar.  12 fucking degrees, and the first time I’ve walked to work since early fall. In our office it hovers in the mid-fifties, and we’re all walking around in hats and coats.  It should not be so pleasurable to wash one’s hands in hot water, but it is an experience approaching ecstasy after a few hours typing with stiff fingers next to a drafty storm window.  The only consolation is that I am not a canvasser.  I could close the blinds for added insulation, but then I would not get to see napkins, styrofoam and other detritus fall out of higher windows.  Or have a moment of day light.  Yesterday was so windy that South Philly’s trash has collected itself—and lodged in trees.  Never had I seen so many plastic bags aloft in a single afternoon.

Omg, where did January go?

Although I spent 10.5 hours in the office today, leaving for only .3 hours to cash a check and buy wintergreen mints, which are my snack obsession, at the end of the day I had tracked only 8.3 hours and not all of them billable. Wtf?

Like a week ago, as I was laying in bed, falling asleep, my thoughts drifted to the events of winter break between the fall and spring semesters of that time that I was a teacher, the massive consumption of soju, cheap beer and $5 vodka, and I suddenly realized “oh my god, that was a year ago.”

I need you to know that I just edited out the comma between “beer” and “and” because, christ, but I have begun to internalize AP style.

I turn 24 in two months. I’ve lived in Philadelphia for 6 months—ridden a bike four times, attended three brunches with college friends, eaten butternut squash for the first time, and watched two entire seasons of Family Guy on DVD.

Time baffles me.

Overweight, middle aged men in face paint, sequins, and feathers,  dancing down Broad Street and calling themselves “fancy.” The Fancy Brigade.  You can’t make that shit up.

Add to this spectacle, the widespread and open consumption of alcohol on the street in the middle of the day and I can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t come to Philly for New Years.

The latest issue of US News and World Report, which we receive because of Milie’s unfortunate trouble with telemarketers, contains 50 tips to improve your life. Maybe it was fewer than fifty. But anyway, one such tip is to make “Do Not” lists. I was also recently forwarded a story, I think from the NY Times, that showed that when doctors made and followed checklists, it decreased the rate of hospital acquired infections. So, though it’s a little early, I have begun thinking about a list of do-nots for the new year.

Do not allow Netflix to lie unreturned in your house for weeks.

Do not fail to push the process button that actually schedules an online payment to your credit card.

And from now on, although it may take up the bulk of your time, do not allow your work to smother your creative enterprise(s).

And if Oliver could add an item from his place in my lap, which does not well accommodate his size, he would ask ‘do not leave ur kitteh lonelee on teh holidaze anymore, plz.’

(Among the other tips—cut back on corn, drink tap water, and take up knitting.)

Last night at a New Jersey-themed party I discovered the identity of the man who, several nights previously, I had tried to help a friend avoid on the dance floor. He became the first person to address me in Korean in the United States and we had my second most satisfying conversation of the Aspen vacation. The first being with an alumnus who now lives in San Fran who said my earrings were among his favorite earrings ever, though the number ones were a pair of IUDs that a friend co-opted for fashion.

The really pressing question out of that story being “Used?”

It wasn’t a terribly intellectual conversation, by any means, but to have those words and places, mostly foods and places, in common—Seoraksan, boshingtang—it reinforces that the memory is really a memory and not an extended dream that I woke up from to enter the land of PIRG. Which is how it can feel when an entire year of experience becomes irrelevant to your daily life, although it props up those days in ways that you don’t always recognize. Until you realize that it’s been a long time since anyone intimidated you and you think “Was it eating all that raw abalone that has fortified me forever?”

Pangawayo, I said to the guy as I left a second party, the so-called “‘Stache Bash” where mustaches were required and, if necessary, provided.

Chal hae, he said.

Ji Yeon sent me an email with this picture attached, probably as I was crawling in bed after falling on some ice which, thankfully, cured my hiccups. She says her mother sees it every morning, as it was in their bedroom. Though now, “That photograph is being put in the place which opens well in the eye.”

Like, sometimes I go to a ski resort complete with health spa and don’t learn to ski and have yet to make it to said spa for which I have two passes and only two days left to use them. Or like this morning, I punked out on cross country skiing to sleep in. I have seen pictures that of this skiing trip. The valley is wide, the mountains are high, the snow makes everything look simple and still.  From the confines of my comforter I tell myself that it was supposed to storm today, it’s cold outside, I’m just not ready to fall down on skis before noon, and this particular trip costs an extra $20 for transportation, and all of the money I’m spending here is coming out of my savings, so.  Best not to go.  There’s always next year.

I have taken only cellphone photographs. And only this one is any good.

This is from our snowshoeing tour of a small portion of the top of Aspen Mountain.  Apparently, the population of the city of Aspen was twice the size that it is today back in the 19th century before silver was devalued and the bottom fell out of the local industry.   And that’s at a time when cities were half the size that they are today.  We’re not counting tourists or celebrities, here.

Incidentally, there are instructions in our welcome packet for approaching celebrities, talking up the organization, and trying to get their contact info.  I’m told that Heidi Klum was spotted this week.  I think.  Maybe it was someone else.

The flight attendant said, “Hey look, it’s snowing.”  And sure enough it was snowing, which is somehow more alarming at cruising altitude than on the ground.

I think we rode the queer-express Midway to Denver.  One attendant talked about buying a pair of boots that are otherwise identical to shoes he already owns that are not boots, and which he shines every night, and another, in addition to participating in a conversation about accessorizing, had one hell of a runway strut.

I had peanuts and wheat thins for dinner; my hotel has free internet, but $4 bottles of water, and I think I’m getting a cold.  That’s about the state of things.

We bought a Christmas tree at Home Depot while waiting for Mom to finish with a client who wanted to buy a lot of carpet. Then we had lunch at Bob Evans.

Now the parents are Magyver-ing a tree stand out of a one gallon bucket, some bricks, and scrap wood; we haven’t had a tree in like ten years and couldn’t find the real stand. It’s testing the strength of our family bonds.

Boy, that sounds like a redneck Christmas. Does it change the story if i say that the tree is blocking an over-full bookcase and sits in front of a flat screen TV that confounds me when I try to use it?

I over-anticipated the amount of time it would take to get from work to the airport.  I left in a hurry right at 6.  I’d been in since 8:10 in the morning, but still left with a rock in my stomach the size of my unfinished projects and that sensation of having forgotten something important, although I don’t know what and won’t know until it’s essential that I have or have done that thing which I forgot.

So far there are only two.  My toothbrush and to change my voice mail to reflect the fact that I will be out of the office until after Christmas.  These do not seem important enough.  There must be something else.

I was two hours early for my delayed flight and by the holiday graces of Southwest, was able to change to the earlier Philadelphia to Pittsburgh flight, which should have been leaving just then, but was delayed for another hour.  Although she didn’t make me pay, the desk attendant made sure I knew that I normally would have had to pay $62.  I did have to change terminals, and therefore go through security twice.  And throw away my Vitamin Water.

My seat-mate offered me one of her drink coupons.  And although the flight attendant made sure we knew that these old coupons are actually only worth $1 and not a whole drink, because of flight delays, Southwest would buy our drinks for us.

I got free beer and arrived in Pittsburgh an hour earlier than I had planned to; not much inconvenience for me.

Little frenemies.

I walk into the Castro Grocery and ask for batteries.

“What kind do you need?”

“AAA.”

“How many?”  he asks and pulls out a cardboard box with batteries of different sizes rolling back and forth inside.  I walk the block back home with a single battery.  Which has to be so illegal, but I love it that there is somewhere that I can buy only exactly what I need.  Like a single battery.  Or, when we wanted to make white sauce, a single stick of butter.

The AAA battery goes in the indoor-outdoor thermometer that I bought for $16.04 at Radio Shack.  Radio Shack was having a sale on batteries—four packs for $7 but you have to buy all four packs to get the sale price.  I feel like this one battery will last the entire winter, but I’d end up having to move two years from now with at least three unopened packs of AAA batteries had I let the clerk lure me with his savings.  Savings in bulk—a hidden kind of waste.

Once installed—a push pin into the peeling dry wood of the back door frame—the thermometer indicates 39.4 degrees outdoors, 57 degrees indoors.  I think that means it’s ok to turn the heat on.  Though that delivery of heating oil still hasn’t charged to my credit card—$252 for 82 gallons, about 1/3 of the tank—which means I have an inflated sense of how little in the hole I am.  Better call those people.

I downloaded this program to keep track of my finances.  Working a job where I bill by the hour, I’ve become a little obsessed with the quantification of time and money.  The great thing about this is that not only I can see my net worth at a glance—and what a worth that is—but it lets me categorize purchases.  So with a calculator and a little masochism, I can choose a category—groceries, clothes, etc—and tell you that, for example, I’ve spent $120.80 at the liquor store since August, assuming I never paid in cash.

That number’s not nearly as bad as I expected it to be.

Sometimes I don’t check my personal email for days.  Work has ruined email for me.  But, today I received an email that renewed my belief in the virtue of the internet.  The internet that keeps you one click away from people you shared one college class with, who in bygone days couldn’t have tracked you down two years later.

Hey Sara,

Where are you??  Are you in the U.S.???

If so, I want you to go on a road trip with the Dennis Kucinich for
president campaign.

We are leaving the 29th of November and will end in L.A. at the
presidential debates.  Its going to be really really crazy!!!  We need
some women to go with us.  You were the first person I thought of.

Hm.

I was on the other side of a group interview session on Saturday.  If only it didn’t have to be on Saturday.  Or begin at 8am.  So I’m excited for Thanksgiving.  The break will be nice, though there’s a lot to catch up on by EOB Wednesday.

There was a security guard in the Temple building checking IDs who had a number of exchanges with round-faced, mustached Indian man who also seemed to work there and otherwise stared off into space while I waited by the door for lost-looking interviewees.  Some lady in a short skirt who couldn’t take her eyes off her iPhone was totally a bitch about not having her ID.  Everyone who came in either had kids or an instrument in tow, or was a well-dressed college girl.  We only had two boys out of 17.

I went back upstairs at 11, waited outside the elevator with two girls, high school probably, and a doddering old dude with a cello.  The older girl was saying “Grandpa, you can’t say things like that.”

Grandpa said, “I’m telling you.  I can smell a terrorist.”

“Don’t be so prejudiced, oh my god.”