Quodlibets

"What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

I remember when I first started reading Mimi Smartypants (too lazy to link right now), one of the first entries of hers that I stumbled on was a post written on the anniversary of her friend's death by suicide.  She said she was riding the el and looking at the city at night, at the lights, and thinking, he wanted to leave this?  Really?

I can't say I understood precisely her feelings, though I've often thought that anyone who wants to leave this place for good is bonkers; I've been depressed, but I guess I've never been that depressed, because I simply can't imagine giving up the wonder of living here, now.  I also have never had someone close to me commit suicide.

Last night, when we got home from the concert (this was supposed to be a write-up of the Roger Waters show), S checked his email, and found one from a former co-worker of ours.  Through the grapevine of Borders employees, he found out that another one of our former co-workers had killed himself.  Except that this was something more than a former co-worker, because this was someone I especially had spent some time with (family, I want to reassure you that it wasn't Sh, in case you would worry.  I expect that if I had heard that news, you would have known about it last night.).  I listened to him play his guitar, I was in his home, I went to beer with him.  I became best friends with his boyfriend.  My best friend was in love with him. 

He was a troubled person, and I'd always known it.  He gave up all rights to his daughter some time in proximity to when I met him, yet when I visited his house, her picture was up on his fridge.  He seemed to have a deep loathing for the fact that he felt desire for men, yet he also seemed to love intensely, at times, his boyfriend.  He could barely bring himself to bring out his guitar, except when coaxed a lot, or when prompted by his father.  He had, as I understand, little or no contact with his mother, though his relationship with his father was marvelously deep, and he spoke only kind words about his stepmother.  I know that after I stopped knowing him, after we had both moved on, and after his relationship with my (ex) best friend ended, he went through hard times.  He made manager at a Borders, but couldn't take it.  He moved back home with his dad.  He lost himself.

I remember that he laughed a lot.  He liked comic books.  He sounded a little bit like James Taylor when he sang.  He introduced me to Hem.  He was a good, hard-working manager.  He made me try my first Blue Moon with orange in it.  And even though he was mean to my best friend at times, he wasn't all bad.

I suppose I thought that he loved life enough not to leave, but I also don't know how it was in the last few years.  I simply cannot comprehend.  Any of it.

I find I can only echo Mimi Smartypants:  you wanted to leave this?  Really?

September Concert Series: Sufjan Stevens

I can't think of what to say about this concert, because every time I try to explain things in a logical fashion, it ends up in a big muddle.  I guess I'll start at the actual music, which was only a small portion of the things that make up my opinion on this show.  Sufjan has an impressive array of musicians with him on stage--horns and strings, along with a few multi-purpose musicians--and they make pretty sounds.  I'm not sure I was expecting to see that many people on stage (15, if you include him), but I also can't say how I thought he could reproduce the sounds on his albums without that many people.  And make no mistake about it, this group of people faithfully recreated every sound on the albums.  In fact, that might be my only complaint about the show: things didn't sound that much different than they sounded on the album.

But the show wasn't disappointing, and it wasn't disappointing because of the eccentricity of Mr. Stevens.  He wore some big bird wings (eagle, maybe), and the people supporting him all wore butterfly wings.  He called himself, at one point, "His Majesty's songbird", which is weird, right?  And then he referred to the other musicians as the Chinese...Butterfly Brigade, only there were a lot more words in that title.  I just can't remember them all now.  Yep, Sufjan is pretty weird.  Not that I didn't know that before, but this was just...odd.  And not only the wings, but the uniform.  The whole lot of them wore strange uniform-like outfits.  S said that they reminded him of Hale-Bopp (is that what that cult was called?) outfits, and that they were attired as if ready to committ ritual suicide at the drop of a hat.  It might have been the fact that the pants didn't seem to fit anyone very well.

The thing about Sufjan is that he's Christian.  And that's only a thing insofar as he sometimes beats you over the head with it.  It's pretty easy to ignore his latent piety when you're listening to Illinoise! but it's harder when he's singing very overtly Christian songs right in front of you.  He's a great musician, and I like most of what he does, but it's obviously incredibly hard for me to relate to lyrics that are Christian.  I mean, it's not like we left when he started talking about God, and it's not even like I disliked those songs.  (It's weird, because he's not like, evangelical about it.  But one of his songs is called "Lord-God Bird" and yet again, he stole a rooster statue from a Perkins.  It's all very strange.)  It's just....I'm not even sure.  I mean, I certainly wouldn't turn on Christian radio and start listening, but then again, I'm not sure you'd find Sufjan on Christian radio.  But he wouldn't really be out of place there, though.  This doesn't make sense, because it doesn't make sense to me.  The goddy songs make me uneasy, but the rest of it is so damn beautiful that I just kind of ignore it.  I get the sense that it's what many Christian music fans do with secular music.  Maybe I'm wrong, but it's like...willful denial.

The only other thing I want to say is that S and I have rotten luck.  We got to the concert on a bus, and we decided to take the bus home, since the concert got over so early.  We didn't wait too long for the bus--10 minutes, 15, something like that--and it was pretty crowded, for whatever reason.  I'm sure a good portion of the bus passengers were fellow concert-goers.  At Irving Park, the bus stopped to let on a good number of persons.  The last guy on tried to use an expired ticket, and instead of getting off the bus when the driver told him to (the guy had also tried to tell the driver that it wasn't expired; the ticket expired at 10, it was 10:45 when we picked him up.  I think the guy was saying it wasn't ten yet?  Which is ridiculous, as the bus flashes the time every few seconds), the guy wouldn't move.  And he wouldn't pay.  So now this man is on the bus, refusing to pay $2.  The bus driver gets off the bus, calls CTA headquarters or whatever.  A cop happens on the scene--and meanwhile, we're all getting restless, sitting on the bus--and they get the guy off the bus.  He wanders away, and were still sitting on the bus, LOCKED in.  Finally, the driver gets back on the bus and tells us we have to wait for a supervisor to come and get a report or whatever.

Well, shit.  We got off the bus, but another one could be 20 minutes off, and the bus driver of our bus couldn't tell us when this bus would pull away.  We also had no cash.  So we had to frigging find an ATM, and then we jumped in a cab.  (And our cab driver was a freaking idiot, and didn't get off LSD (going south) at Fullerton but North, which is stupid.  But I was too tired and upset at this point to say anything.)

What a long night.

September Concert Series: The Who

I did not go.  I sat on the couch sniffling and snuffling and went to bed early.

I have a cold.  Busiest week of the year, and I have a cold.

Welcome, baby!

That little boy on the right?  He's a dad now.

It's the most surreal thing ever, for me.  We were very close for a long time, and it's really weird for me to think that he has a baby now, that he's assumed responsibility for a little girl.  Wasn't it just yesterday that we stood outside that snowy porch? 

Congratulations, J and Rocky!  And welcome to the world, little girl!  You gave your parents some trouble getting here, but the world couldn't be happier to have you.

Update:  I realize that it's rather hazy here, who had a baby.  It was my cousin, one of my dad's sister's sons.  We grew up a block away from them, which is why pictures like the one above exist.

Six Degrees

I don't know if this is common knowledge (though I see you can easily access the information at IMDb), but Don Roos is an alum of Notre Dame.  Beyond that, he is a gay alum of Notre Dame.  I'm not privy to whether he was out as an undergrad, but I do seem to remember that by the time I was an undergrad at SMC, it was common knowledge that he was out in the world, and by that point, The Opposite of Sex had hit, and he was at least some sort of a celeb on campus, at least to the gay kids.  I also think that he was a contributor (alum) to the Notre Dame GLBTQ group that wasn't technically supposed to exist.  I'm pretty sure those contributors kept that group running and going, and doing its good work.

This is only to say that S and I watched Happy Endings tonight, and that I enjoyed it very much.  I hadn't quite realized that Don Roos was the director until the end credits, but in hindsight, I'm an idiot for not knowing, because the film has all the great things about a Roos film, and none of the bad (see Bounce).  I like happy endings, after all, and I felt this film delivered.  As it, well, should.  With a title like that.

You know, and if Don Roos is a supporter of that group, that's fantastic.  Because it's not easy to be a gay college student at a school like Notre Dame.  Which he probably understands very well, which is why he's so keen to help. 

But I'm projecting.

*shakes fist at sky*

I don't like to slag on books, but I just read something that literally made me want to hurl it against a wall.  The book, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, has recieved a fair amount of good press, and I'm not sure if I misunderstood it, or what, but I had no idea I'd be reading Donna Tartt's The Secret History set in high school.  Mind you, I didn't dislike Tartt's book, but I DID dislike STiCP (by Marisha Pessl), because I'm freaking sick of books about students that have some mysterious happenstance, such as a death in them.  Frankly, I'm sick of reading any book set in high school but written for adults. 

It just...wasn't good.  It was so promising, too, with the book sort of roughly organized like a syallbus.  There's even a final exam at the end of the book, which turned out to be nearly the worst thing about the book.  In fact, I can't exactly pinpoint why I hated it so much, except that it vaguely reminded me of Prep, which seemed to me one of the most useless, over-hyped books ever.  Why are adults so fascinated with high school?  And why do they always get it wrong?  There are some writers out there writing high school like it really is, but the only people I can think of doing that are YA authors, and their writing for the people in high school.  They'll know fake the minute they see it, which is why YA authors often get it right.

Of course, you can easily make the point that I don't expect reality in all the books I read, and you'd be absolutely right.  I love certain paranormal themes, after all.  But those books aren't pretending to be real.  I feel the same way about romances.  It has something to do with the author, I'm sure.  Part of the reason I hated Prep (and Sittenfeld herself) was because it took itself so damn seriously.  "I'm not chick lit, I swear!  This is SERIOUS literature!  I swear!"  Curtis Sittenfeld practically made that her battle cry.  I don't know what Marisha Pessl would have to say for herself, but I suspect that she thinks she's written a brilliant literary work, and it's really just Veronica Mars + conspiracy theory.  You know, maybe I'm wrong.  But I don't think so.

I suppose I could list the further discontentments, but the truth is that I can list every single element of the book as a reason to not read it:  the characters (pale imitations of well-known stereotypes), the plot (mystery!  conspiracy!  high school popularity!), and even the affectations that seem charming at first but annoy the SHIT out of you by the end of the book, ie the stupid freaking citations from all sorts of books that accompany descriptions of people, situations and places.  It was so...contrived by the end, contrived in a way that seemed more annoying than charming.  I can't really list anything good about the book, because at the end I found that there was nothing likeable about this book.  That's pretty damn annoying, in and of itself.  It's pretty rare that you can find NOTHING good to say about a book.

You know what else is annoying?  I paid for this book.  I wish I could get a refund.  From the author.

September Concert Series: Eric Clapton

I couldn't really say no to these tickets, because I think if I had, my dad might have disowned me.  See, I know my dad loves his wife, but I'm pretty sure that if Eric Clapton asked my dad to run away with him forever, my dad would say yes.  He REALLY loves Eric Clapton.  He thinks Eric Clapton is wonderful.  Tonight.  (God, that was atrocious.)  And I honestly thought that I would like the show.  I figured that like the CSNY show, even if I didn't know the songs, I'd be okay.  Boy, was I fucking wrong.

I hated this show.  I hated this show for so many reasons, but mostly I hated this show because I hate guitar.  I hate that whining "waaah waaaaaaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah" sound guitars make, and I hate when guitar players make their guitars make that sound over and over and over again for 20 minutes.  And then again for the next 20 minutes.  And so on.  That guitar sound makes me seriously consider jamming something HARD into my eardrums, to dull the sound.  That sound is auditory torture for me.  If I was captured for some reason, my captors wouldn't need to torture me; they could just put on some guitar jamming and I'd break instantly, and tell them everything I knew.  At various points in this evening's entertainment, I considered jumping off of the second level to escape, crying in pain, and at one point, I even begun counting architectural elements, my old stand-by from those dreaded My Morning Jacket shows.  Friends, I do not like guitars, and I especially do not like guitars when Mr. Eric Clapton holds them and plays his bluesy solos.

Also, I do not condone back-up singers.  I have never liked them, and I probably never will.  Worst thing ever at a Dave Matthews show?  (Besides all the pre-pubescent drunks, that is.)  The stupid singers they used to bring out for "Stay (Wasting Time)".  At one point during this show, S turned to me and asked, "Do you think the singers ever get tired of doing this?" at which point he imitated the lame arm shuffle the two women were doing.  I thought, look, I don't know about if they're sick of it, but I sure am.  S and I share similar opinions about lame back-up singers with big hair and stretchy black clothing.  We hate them.  The best part of the show was when they left the stage. 

Well, that, and Layla.  "Layla" is pretty good live, but by the time EC played it, I was so mind-numbingly exhausted from the extensive hatred that had taken over my body and mind that I could barely enjoy it.  And I had gone into this whole thing thinking that seeing "Layla" was like seeing "Hey Jude" as performed by McCartney or even "Ohio" as done by CSNY.  I was wrong.  Nowhere near as good.  Not even close.  Then again, that might just be the hatred talking.  See, the hatred even made me dislike "Cocaine" and "Crossroads", two songs I will happily listen to on any other occasion.  That's how bad this was for me.

And I'm not saying that Eric Clapton is bad, per se.  I'm more saying that he's not for me.  It's like....I worship at the church of Paul McCartney, and my dad worships at the church of Eric Clapton, and I can attend his church's services, but I just don't get it.  This kind of religion just doesn't work for me.  It's like the head clergyman is talking mumbo-jumbo.  He just ain't making any sense.  Something's getting lost in the translation. 

And lastly, and this is a piddling little thing, but Clapton's whole presentation was pretty lame.  He's not cheesy, like my man Macca, so of course he doesn't utilize pyrotechnics and sappy videos about himself, but I LIKE those things.  I can't help it.  I want some cheese.  I want to look at interesting things, especially if I have to sit through blaring guitar music.  Clapton's shredded curtains and ten basic light displays just didn't do it for me.  And, I was very alarmed by the swinging motion the left-side video screen was making.  I mean, this screen was swaying, back and forth, the whole show.  And it didn't look gentle, either.  I couldn't help thinking that any minute (every minute) it would come crashing down on top of people that I knew and kill them.  Killed at an EC show.  Could anything be worse?  Seriously, if I was having a particularly bad moment, I stared at the screen, and let it transfix me into complacence.

Yes.  That bad.  Give me Pete Yorn at Schuba's any day of the week and twice on Sunday over Clapton and his screechy guitars.  Sorry, dad.  I'm just not that into him.

Black Bean Soup for One

Because you clearly cannot expect S to eat beans.  In any form.

Anyway, the soup was very good.  Definitely something I'll make again, mostly because it's perfectly freezeable, and so next time I want it, I can pull it out of my freezer and have a warm, pretty freaking nourishing/good for me meal.

I found the recipe in Real Simple food, and if this is the only recipe I make from it, it was well worth it.  Here's the ingredients:  1 tsp olive oil, 1 pint (I used a 14 oz tub) fresh salsa, 1 can black beans, 1 can black refried beans, 1 can chicken stock.  I tweaked, as always.  First of all, I forgot to drain the beans, or rather, didn't realize I had to.  So I ended up not using a whole can of chicken stock, because it seemed like way too much liquid.  Also, I wasn't sure if 14 oz was a pint, but I figured that more tomatoes can't be bad, and I was right.  I do think that with a higher quality fresh salsa (mine was from the regular grocery store; next time I want to make this, I'll do it with salsa from TJ's or WF.  Also, I used low-fat/low-sodium chicken stock, to minimize the fat in the dish, and I also used fat-free black refried beans.  I wish I could say that it was so I could cut the fat, but the truth is, that's all I could find in my grocery store.  The whole dish took 25 minutes, from the moment I dumped the salsa in the oil to simmer for four minutes, to the end when I dished it into my bowl.  (Basically, saute the salsa for four minutes.  Add remaining ingredients, bring to a simmer and cook 5 more minutes.  Not kidding.)

I'm sure there's any number of tweaks you could perform on this recipe.  Fresh cilantro if you like it, spicier salsa if you like that.  I personally can see adding more beans, as it seemed to be on the runny side.  Also, I wish I had salted the pot a bit as it was cooking.  I served myself the soup with a dollop of Lite sour cream, and some crappy store-bought guac.  But this would be probably pretty delish with a garnish of fresh tomato or fresh avocado too.  Also, if you had a really high quality guac--Mamacita's, say--it would be dynomite.  But really, if you have a great fresh chunky salsa, you have most of the flavor you need. 

Seriously, this is one meal that I didn't mind making after work.  It was entirely pleasurable.  I'm very happy, and I wish RS Food would cough up some more recipes like this.

This post may bother you if you're more sensitive (than what, I don't know)

Yesterday was my annual, and for those male readers out there who don't understand what "annual" means to a woman, well, that's a woman's annual opportunity to get her vagina manhandled (okay, woman-handled in my case) and probed by a metal duck.  Maybe I'm not most women, but let me tell you, the words "my annual" strike fear into my heart.  Nobody likes these appointments, and the fact that I've got a lifetime of them ahead of me is daunting and maddening.

Anyway, I think everything is okay (though I won't know for a couple of weeks, until the pap is checked or whatever terminology I'm supposed to be using), but I am humbled before my sister, who has been going through this awfulness every three months.  I hope her situation resolves itself, so she can back to dreading this thing every 12 months, like the rest of us.  But that's not actually what I wanted to talk about.  What I actually set out intending to write was a thing about birth control, which is simultaneously the best thing that I've ever done for myself, and the very worst.

I'm on the pill, and have been for four years.  When I dated a woman, I felt incredibly glad not to have to be on the pill, because I'm a little suspect of the hormones they're pumping through you, constantly.  But when I started dating S, I knew it was only a matter of time before we'd have to face the issue.  And I mean, when it all came down to it, the second most effective means of controlling your fertility is the pill, unless you want to use 47 different contraceptive devices at once, and that didn't appeal to me.  Plus, as you all know, I am the most paranoid person on the planet.  I had a friend in his school that used to say that she knew the first time she had sex she would get pregnant, no matter what form of b.c. she used, simply because she knew the world wanted to punish her that. much.  I think I've sort of always harbored that suspicion in my head as well, and so I knew that I didn't want to take any chances.

Hence, the pill.  I take the one that supposedly allows you to NOT gain weight, which is quite a bonus in the contraceptive pill world, let me tell you.  I know more than one woman who had to go out and buy all new bras after her first three months on the pill.  But see, the other side effect of this pill is that it makes you CRAZY.  Like, batshit-insane-screaming-paranoid crazy.  The kind of crazy that must be impossible to live with.  I'm not sure why S puts up with it, except that well, we can probably guess why.  The point is, I hate myself when I'm off the pill.  I started becoming this person who cried CONSTANTLY for a week.  No hot water?  Hours of sobbing.  Don't want to eat exactly what I want to eat?  Hours of sobbing.  Don't email me back?  Hours of sobbing and the life-encompassing feeling that everyone hates me.  It's really that bad. 

I'm not sure why I put up with it as long as I did.  In fact, the only reason I'm stopping dealing with it is a) my pill maker is now making a low-dose pill and b) what's the use of being on the pill if your libido grinds to a shrieking halt?  Which is pretty much where I am right now.  I sincerely and utterly have lost all interest in the thing that I was taking the pill to be able to do.  It's a freakishly horrible catch-22, and it's making both S and I miserable, and creating lots of ugly tension in our relationship.  I'm shocked and surprised that the crazy insane madness hadn't done that ages ago, but S deals with that very efficiently now.  He's had four years of practice, after all.

But this is all roundaboutly getting to the point that I STILL distrust the hormones in those little orange (soon to be pink) pills, and yet I can't see any way of getting around taking them.  No matter that I like the shorter period they give me, or that they've pretty much quelled the cramps.  No, I still think that what I'm doing is essentially not good for me, except that it's great for me.  Can't live with them, can't live without them.  I'd be a basketcase without them, except that I'm a basketcase while on them.  Six of one, half dozen the other.  Best, and worst, thing I've ever done in my life. 

Suffice it to say that I'm hoping the low-dose pills are a little more...stabilizing, shall we say?  It remains to be seen.

In which I cook smelly food

So last night I made sauerkraut.  It wasn't technically supposed to be sauerkraut--I used a recipe called "Sweet and Sour Cabbage"--but nonetheless, sauerkraut it was.  Actually, when I originally decided to try the recipe, I mistakenly thought it was a recipe for sweet and sour cabbage soup.  I'm not sure why I thought it would be soup, considering that the recipe nowhere mentions anything remotely soupy.

You might wonder why I didn't just write up the cabbage last night, and here's the answer:  I didn't eat the cabbage last night.  I meant to, I really did, but the cabbage took WAY longer than a half hour to be ready, and I was hungry.  Plus, after I took my first little taste I knew I'd need kielbasa or bratwurst to actually make use of the dish.  So this morning, I betook my tired butt to the store (before the Bears game) and bought chicken bratwurst and some lite smoked sausage. 

And so that's what I ate just a short half hour ago.  The cabbage was very good--far richer than normal sauerkraut, due to the butter and balsamic, I would think.  And it's not exactly sauerkraut, because it's just a tad too sweet.  But the idea's the same, and it went incredibly well with my (delicious!) chicken brat.  I've frozen two tupperware containers full of cabbage (the recipe made an incredibly large amount of finished product) and I think I'm going to force some on my mom at some point.  I know that's kind of mean, but I think she might enjoy it.  She's the only person I know who really LIKES cabbage, and I figure she may as well try my handiwork.  Maybe I can eat it with her.

So, one experiment down, one to go.  I think I'll end up doing the black bean soup on Thursday (?) or possibly Tuesday.  Not sure.