Life By The Glass

Hop, Skip, and Go Naked

2008-05-27T19:12:00.000-07:00

My new favorite drink.
And aptly named, let me tell you.
Here's the recipe - perfect for parties because you can use the cheapest ingredients available and it still tastes great. Just make sure you have plenty of time to recover...

2 cans beer
1 can vodka
2 cans lemonade

I know it sounds disgusting, but trust me on this one. Delicious. Some recipes suggest that you use lemonade concentrate, others add sprite to the mixture. I think either of these could be good substitutions for some of the lemonade. Be warned though - you'll be tempted to make up huge batches for parties (I had my first glass out of a blue tupperware tub) but the beer will go flat if it's made too far in advance. Better to make it up 2 cans of beer at a time.
**Bonus** if you add the beer first, you can use the emptied can to measure the other ingredients.

Everyone Wins

2008-05-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

(to the tune of Colors Of The Wind)

Everyone Wins

You think I’m an ignorant drunkard
And you’ve read so many essays,
I guess it must be so
But still I cannot see,
If the drunken one is me,
How can there be so much that you don’t know?
You don’t know…

I’ve seen you eating dinner at the D.C.
And you don’t have a girlfriend, I don’t think
And I’ve been waiting for my chance to “meet” you…
So imagine when I found out you don’t drink.

You think the only people who are people,
Are people you think and act like you –
But if you’d walk the footsteps of a hipster,
You’d learn things you never knew you never knew.

Have you ever seen the sunrise from a stranger’s bed?
Or asked a drunken freshmen why he grins?
If you’d just give in and cave to social pressure
Then you’d get drunk and we’d hook up – Everyone wins!
Yes you’d get drunk and we’d hook up; everyone wins….

Come taste the stale Natty’s of the Soco’s,
Come drink some crystal palace in my room!
Come try some cheap-ass rum punch at this party,
And we’ll see just how much booze you can consume…

Security and campo are my brothers,
The EMS is more than just a friend!
And we are all connected to each other,
In a circle, in a hoop, that never ends!

How high the stoner kids go?
If you turn it down, then you’ll never know!

And you’ll never see the sun rise from a stranger’s bed,
Or wonder what you did the night before!
We need to seize what little time we have together
We need to hang some sort of signal on the door…

You can get good grades and still
All you are is lame until –
You can drink just like the frat boy that’s within

In The Beginning

2008-05-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, there must have been light. This light was invisible, but everyone and everything could feel it, and it was joy and bitterness and hunger and fullness and boredom and fear and infatuation and peace. The light was the way you feel when you eat a sandwich on Tuesday, and it was also the way you feel right before you get sick. It was the sixth time you’ve bumped you toe on the same corner of the bedstead in the middle of the night. The light was the taste of pineapple lollipops, it was misdirected anger, it was unexpected kindness, it was love. It was not hate. But it was everything else.

And because the light was everything, and everything was the light, the beginning was also confusion and chaos, and so the things in the universe developed ways to filter the light, and then ways to reflect it back at each other, and in this way a particular emotion or experience could be remembered and shared at will with any other part of the universe. This became communication.

It started with the stars. Being the largest things there were, the stars got more of the light than any of the smaller objects, and after a while, all of the hope and despair, and the smell of baking bread, and the heat of warm baths, and the shimmer of gasoline in small dirty, puddles, and the excitement of traveling on a jet plane became too much for the stars, and they turned themselves inside out. Now everything that had come in shot right back out, and inside it was dark and quite. This is how the stars became the most selfless things in the universe, giving without ever taking, and it is why today people make wishes on them. However it also meant that the stars were no longer able to absorb light, and that’s why the wishes seldom come true, because they can’t hear us, no matter how hard we try.

After this, there came color, because color reflected some things while letting others through. And by becoming a certain color, an object could reflect something for everything around it, and any time someone looked at the object, they absorbed whatever the object was reflecting, and in this way, there was communication.

Still the light was too much, and so next to come were hardness and softness and squishiness and stickiness, and a whole universe of other textures that deflected or accepted the stronger forms of light, like a door slammed on your finger, or a hand held for the first time in the back row of the movies.

And now they could communicate and share, and they could order the chaos and sort out the confusion. But everything was not perfect. Because when an object chose to take on colors and texture, when it decided to reflect something to the world, it found that now it could only absorb the opposite. When a flower chose as its color perfect happiness, it gave off happiness to everything around it, but it could only absorb sadness in return.

For this reason, things in the universe found it prudent to make colors that were not pure, but mixtures of many different things, becoming, for example, green, which is newness and power and promise, but also illness and jealousy and pride, or red, which is love and warmth and confidence, but also anger and warning and embarrassment. And in this way they might give off happiness and absorb sadness, but because the color was only a small part happiness, they might still hope to absorb some when it was given off by a friend.

With these mixed colors, things got confusing again, because no one could tell whether someone who was, for example, red, wished to project love or anger or heat or scratchiness or the thrill of beating the high score on the pinball machine at the crowded arcade on the boardwalk, or perhaps something else entirely. So the next thing to be created was sound, which was like a secondary filter. And now with sound, the red thing could crackle and pop, and every one would know that it was fire, and something that was green could say “I am envious” and everything around it would know that it was not growing, or, if it was growing, that that was incidental, the important part being the envy.

Of course, of all the objects in the universe, only one kind of object was so worried about this communication that it made itself black and white and brown and beige and tan so that it could reflect a little bit of all the colors (and absorb them too) and it invented clothes and accessories, which were colored things that could be put on and taken off at a moment’s notice, and it thought up a million different sounds to make and called them words or songs or giggles or cries. And these objects, that were called people, were so confusing in their many colors that they began to rely on the words and sounds to communicate with each other.

Now, the more they relied on these fragile secondary filters, the farther away they got from the stronger forms of light, like touch, which became frightening to the people, who mostly tried to avoid them. In fact, they became so worried about what they were reflecting to the rest of the universe, that they developed mirrors, which would reflect everything and absorb nothing. With the mirrors the people thought that they could see how they would be received by the objects around them, but they forgot that communication is about what is absorbed, not what is reflected, and that a mirror could not tell you how another part of the universe would absorb a touch or a sound, or what parts of you they would in turn reflect and not absorb.

Having never before encountered something as absolute as the mirror, no one could know that when they invented it, they would inadvertently invent the feeling of hate. Hate is a perfect reflection without any absorption. It is the denial of communication. This is why people often feel sad when they look in a mirror. But when people thought about the mirror, they had a great realization, which was that if something could perfectly absorb everything that you reflected, it would create the opposite of hate. Immediately the people wanted to believe in this opposite of hate, and so they agreed to name it in order to make it more real. But because the people hadn’t found this anti-mirror and so had never experienced this feeling, they could only imagine what it might be like, and they called it love, even though that already meant something, because it was the best thing they could think of. Then they thought about it some more and decided that this was not strong enough, and so they called it being in love, because it would be like existing in a world where only the very best and happiest light surrounded you at all times. And they were certain that all they had come up with must be true, because they had experienced hate.

As soon as they had discovered this, the people ran out to try and find this anti-mirror in the world. It would have to be very complex, they thought, in order to absorb all of the many different things that each of them reflected, and they searched high and low but could not find it in beautiful paintings, which had many different colors, or in diamonds and jewels, which fascinated many of the searchers because they were translucent and could absorb and reflect at the same time. Still others insisted that they could create the anti-mirror by collecting a group of things which, together, would be able to absorb all of a person, and they set off in search of all the things they would need, but they could never quite find enough of them. Finally, some of the people stopped searching and angrily returned to the mirror, convinced that the secret lay with in it, but there they found only hate, and sat for a long time but could not free themselves.

At this point, the remaining searchers, who had been searching together for a long time now, were very tired, but not yet ready to give up, and so they turned to each other as though to ask the person next to them what they thought might be answer. And since it had been many years and they had used everything they knew of to try to figure out the answer, many of the searchers had used up all of their words and had none left to give to the person they were looking at. And over the long journey much of their clothing had faded, and their accessories had been lost, and they had nothing to reflect colors at the person, not even to give them the general sense of excitement and queasiness that’s reflected by a pair of striped earrings, or moisture and disparity from a paisley tie, or that exhaustion tinged with the sour aftertaste of gooseberry berry jam, for which tangerine swim trunks seemed to be most effective. Many of them then remembered the stronger forms of light, and fighting broke out between some who used their arms and legs to express their despair or frustration, and others tried pressing different parts of their bodies together, touching each other in every way they could think of, and it was pleasant indeed, so for a while they called this making love, but nothing much came of it after all, except to distract them from their search for the anti-mirror. The few who remained didn’t know what to try anymore, so they just looked around, and tried to guess what someone else was thinking.

All of a sudden, one of these last people cried out.

“I have found it!” he said. And everyone around him hurried over crying “Where? Where is it?” but all they saw was a girl sitting on a rock a short distance away.

“It’s right here,” he said, and they looked at him, but he was staring at the girl.

“It’s her,” he said, and his voice was hushed and reverent. But the others looked at her and they did not see it. Slowly they all turned away in disappointment, but in the darkness came another voice.

“No! It’s him! It’s him!” cried a woman, and “Quickly, come and see!”

But when they reached the source, still the group did not see it, and they were again disappointed. “We don’t see anything,” they said, but the man whom the woman had pointed at stood up and shook his head.

“That’s because it’s not me, it’s him,” he said, and with this he pointed at a man nearby, the very one who had occupied his attention.

The crowd looked and looked again with each new shout, but each time they were disappointed because now matter how certain the person who shouted, they could never seem to agree on any one source.

“It must be someone,” an old man reasoned. “It only makes sense that the one thing complex enough to absorb us is something as complex as we are! It must be one of us! Everyone look for him!”

And with considerable fervor the whole group set out to look for the person who would absorb everything of them, the one who would bring them to the light. At this there was much confusion, because everyone seemed to have a different idea about who it might be. And sometimes the crowd would agree on one particular person, and they would exult that person above all else and say that they were sent from the Light as it originally was, and they would capitalize the “L”, meaning that light of the Beginning (which, being in the Middle, they would also capitalize), but they were forgetting that originally the Light contained bad things as well as good and that they were each a part of the Light, but that they had mostly forgotten this fact in their search. So they could never seem to say definitively that they had found what they were looking for.

Still, as the crowd passed by, two people remained, smiling and facing each other, and they did not leave with the rest.

“Why didn’t you leave with them?” asked the girl.

“Why, because I know they won’t believe me,” said the boy, “but I’ve found it. And so I just thought I’d stay here with it as long as I could.”

“I knew it!” said the girl, “because I’ve found it too!”

“Yes,” said the boy. Then, “It’s you.” And he smiled at her.

But the girl frowned at him.

“No,” she said.

“No?” he asked, alarmed.

“No,” she said firmly. “It’s you.”

And for a little while they argued, but neither of them could be swayed. And in the end, it didn’t matter. Both had found what they were looking for, and rather than risk losing it, they decided to stop arguing and let the other believe what they wanted as long as they might stay with them. And for the first time since the stars turned themselves inside out, something in the universe remembered what it was like to absorb the Light as it was in the Beginning, and because they were too busy holding on to it to figure out what exactly it was, they continued to call it being in love, and this led to even more confusion and chaos in the world for which the people needed more words and songs and clothes and accessories, but sorting this out gave them something to do while they were searching, and so they didn’t much mind it at all.

Il Duomo

2008-05-15T08:55:00.000-07:00

One day I’ll go back through the Tuscan hills, which to me are mountains, past the vineyards and the olive groves and the cities set surprisingly beneath a pale yellow sun. I will cast my blue-black shadow over sage grass and foot-worn paving stones, and watch the sunset spring from cloud to cloud in daring acrobatic glory through the pitted surface of a window on a winding train. Somewhere past Cortona, on its tipsy seat, before the perfect dome of Firenze is visible above her crowded streets, I’ll find myself inside the rough arms of an ancient Etruscan city called Arezzo, and I’ll feel at home.
It was the walls that made the city mine. I had to pass beneath them every time I entered, through the arches waiting stoically atop the hill. They made the city feel alive, embodied. American cities sprawl, their edges broken by the tire tracks of SUV’s, sprouting suburbs like fungal faerie rings in concentric circles. They are indecisive. They are an operator’s nightmare, making 411 a game of guess and check with patient callers digging through their memories for different county names to try. My Italian city set its limits and simply made the people chose the safety of the wall or the freedom of the hills beyond.
You cannot be ambiguously in Arezzo, with its shortened towers and it steeply climbing hill - there is in and there is out. It shrugs its shoulders at the baking midday sun, sending cobblestones shivering down it back in crowded streets. Piazzas throw themselves open to the café tables of osterias which open barely long enough each night for a slew of languid dinner dates before they tuck themselves away and watch the people come out and fill the streets with talk and window shop at ten in the evening, pushing children in strollers, making dates, meeting friends.
From where I stay, without the city walls, the throng of people that it holds will disappear, recede behind the stony heights. At my window I count the cypress trees, I trace the aqueducts with a careful finger. There are the city fields, where I would make my stand in time of war, a soupspoon waving proudly above my silver kettle helm. There are the chestnut trees along the swooning track I risk my life to run before I eat and start the day. Gallantly the road sweeps bows to every stuccoed ochre villa, nodding at the gated drive of a minor palazzo where the Count is still a presence here above the town, surrounded by his carefully tended hedges, protected by a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and her child.
And in the distance, my church. A spindly, cobblestone thing, red clay roof and sandstone floating on the lights of the town below it like a lonely vessel on a silent sea. My church, amidst the fairy lights, the eerily fixed reflections of a thousand stars that quivered and hid in the glare from their earthly doubles until the incandescent amber glow was more authentic than the sky above.
I’ve never been. A dozen steps, as long across as the space allowed, set the church apart in the crowded piazza and leveled ministering stares at passerby. They stood like frozen sentries and gathered dust and leaves and tourists until the cold of autumn slowed the summer winds that blew them in and only snow was left to settle there from Sunday night to Saturday. A thousand times I passed them, swept away the smeared edges of forgetfulness with darting glances that kept them crisply marching in the corners of my mind. Occasionally I brushed along their lowest tier, feet finding purchase on the grey gold edges of the rounding blocks of stone, but then some business called me back into the warren of the winding streets. From time to time the evening crowds would force me up along the sagging ranks to make my way as best I could with one leg longer then the other, but I never made it to the top. Something always kept me hobbling along, at cross-purposes to the heavy steps; though I felt their solemn gaze, I never bathed the polished handles of the doors in cooling sweat from palms that clenched unconsciously against the cold until the incline filled my lungs and legs and face with heat that spread beneath my sweaters and my jeans, and struggled through my tangled curls. The heavy doors remained austerely still.
In the morning, my church peaked through the shutters at me, blinking in the early sun. At dusk, the light sank gradually behind its spire: first the yellows, then the oranges, and, finally the reds, until at last only a dusty pink lingered in the mountains, curling through the blue and violet cypress trees, and licking up the gravel roads they walked. And all day in between the pino grigio sunrises and the vin santos sunsets, the light was drawn and dragged and pulled across the layered tiles, as though the spire of the church were acting like a lightning rod for the midmorning sun.
I flirted with it, when I ran, or walked along the hills, or into town. Here and there the olive groves broke apart and let a piece of ancient wall pass in among their ranks, and through these cracks, I could watch my church grow larger or smaller, turn this way and that. I saw it winking at me in the frost, through streams of breath grown heavy in the chilly air. At night I let it walk me home, say goodnight before I went to sleep and wish me pleasant dreams. I saw it every morning when I woke and let it welcome me when I returned from traveling, let it lead me home and wave me off.
And still I never entered it. If the city walls contained me, then my church contained my wanderlust. I could be happy in the grip of Etruscan walls and let my curiosity run through darkened rooms that held the whole of what I’d never seen. Inside the doors I never opened lay a world of things to contemplate, waiting patiently for me to think of them, calling plaintively like pealing bells. I would be happy to be confined and find myself a traveler in the changing light that filtered through the swelling clouds and picked out angles I had never seen although I watched them as I went about my day.
Leaving Arezzo, I felt some part of me tear, my friends running along behind the fleeing train, the chiseled edges of the city softening with distance and a darkness that was tender pink. I sank into the seat, the musical Italian on the speaker like a scratched record I ignored, and felt some part of me that would not leave the loving walls. Against the rushing fields that were flinging me away, I saw the ground rise sharply toward my steadfast church, the buildings leaning on each other for support. I followed alleyways that wound me upwards until at last I caught my breath and leaned a hand against a solid, silent door. I could see it only in pieces, it was so great – the cast iron of the handle and the gleaming white of wood worn down with so many Sundays worth of hands. I felt the heavy grain curl softly and laid my palm against a dark knot. Inside the sound of music whispered through the keyhole and for the first time I thought that I would do it, enter it, confront myself, admit my curiosity was stronger than this strange compelling superstition which told me I would lose all of it if I ever went inside…
The train lurched and I realized that the light had left me staring at my reflection on a darkened windowpane, fled behind the mountains that were leaving me as well and only taking more time in taking leave.
One day I’ll go back through the Tuscan mountains, I’ll take a train towards Florence and get off before that city has the chance to say hello. In a small town called Arezzo, I will buy a bottle of wine and push my legs against the leaning streets until I’m hot and sticking to the inside of my shirt, until I think I may have lost my breath and wonder how I ever made the climb. When I reach the top, a church will be there waiting for me in the sun or covered by a thin layer of snow. It will be empty, or open, or full. I will admire the many steps, the terracotta shingled roof, the well-carved wood of the heavy doors…
And, after a moment, I’ll move on. I’ll pass beneath the walls and out the other side, find a road and follow it as far away as I can get. I will look back, as I go my way, but see that the city no longer holds me in its arms. Instead, a little piece of me has fled inside the church.

French Psychoanalytic Feminism

2008-05-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

An Identity Which Is Not One:
The Banner Under Which We March

In their articles “This Sex Which Is Not One” and “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous respectively discuss the overlapping (dare we say contiguous?) concepts of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine with which they hope to engender a freer, truer manifestation of the female gander. When considering the success of their endeavors, it is important to start by noting that parler femme and l’ecriture feminine amount to much the same thing for our purposes . Both terms describe an act which is more than a seizure of voice – it is a creation, through preparation and performance, of a speech that then allows the existence of the speaker. To put it another way, this voice enables “woman” to begin to escape her identity as masculine object in a world dominated by a symbology that she lacks, one which excludes her at every turn because it creates her as an absence so as to create itself as the state of being. Parler femme serves to address a fundamental schism between the societal structure in which we live and the female person, whose being is fundamentally repressed and whose oppression is made routine by the heavy mantle of lack. Although Cixous and Irigaray’s psychoanalytic approach comes under fire for its questionable relevance in certain situations, I believe that the approach of parler femme is still sound, and that it merely needs to be filled out by a fuller chorus of voices.

To begin with, the problem that parler femme sets out to address is that of our (woman’s) socially generated position as lack, as desire for penis, which has been relegated to the class of individuals known as “women”. The dominant symbology of our (white, western – in a word – ideologically dominant) culture is arranged around the idea of a gender binary. Here “binary” is taken to mean a whole composed of two parts of which the male is positive while the female is negative . Under this system, simply put, the male is the existence, the female the lack. Female sexuality, in particular, is the lack of penis, so that she is neatly created to be the desire for the penis – a constant justification for the existence of man.

This ideological identity is taught to us as something central to sexuality, the sex-act boiling down to the man/penis filling the hole/woman. Under this system, until the woman/hole is filled, she can never be complete, and is thereby controlled through her desire to be made complete by man, as well as by her blindness to her own existence which she is told she cannot own until it is given to her by a male. As women, we are indoctrinated into this ideology through the male phallocentric symbol systems. Viewed in this light, we can begin to understand why a parler femme is necessary in order to escape our place as silence/absence/object in the masculine economy. Our quest for identity is being struck down at its very roots: our thoughts. We are being incapacitated from the start by a language that does not allow for woman as anything but the opposite of man/being.

If our identities, our sexualities are being defined simply as the other to a masculine parameter, what then might a feminine sexuality look like? Luce Irigaray describes a sexuality that is very different from that phallocentric/scopic sexual economy we are taught to take for granted. Irigaray bases her definition on a concept of female genitalia as defined, not as a hole, a zero, but as a plurality. A man's sex organ is singular, objectifiable, she says, whereas a woman's sex is plural, is not an organ, a single object, but rather resides in the touching of plural objects (as of the two vaginal walls touching). It is in this crucial difference that Irigaray is finally able conceive of female sexuality. Here already we can see the need to (re)think in parler femme – we speak of a sex organ as the locus of sexuality, but for woman, sexuality is not in the object but the touch. Our sexuality is not located singularly, in an object, but is everywhere, because it is an action, a relationship.

Historically, we have been unable to conceive ourselves in this manner and so are relegated to an imperfect position in the (voiced) masculine economy of sex organ, sex object. In practice, this objectifiable sexuality is also necessarily scopic. Masculine sexuality, often characterized by a proprietary order, can be understood through sight and the visual relationship created between seer and seen. Sight, like masculine sexuality, has a clear subject and object. Touch, on the other hand, is analogous to (and definitive of) female sexuality, where the relationship is not so easily categorized because both parties touch each other, thereby doing away with the idea of subject and object. Since it is the masculine relationship which is normalized in our culture, women are forced to exist in a world structured around the subject/object relationship and, not being natives to what Irigarary refers to as the “scopic economy” (325), women are relegated to the role of object of desire. In this system, a woman can only ever desire to be desired, she cannot desire something in and of itself.

Parallels can be drawn between a woman’s plural sex being forced into a binary sex system and a woman’s contiguous thought being forced into the metaphorically-dominated form of masculine thought. Desire, which we think of as being sexual in origin extends its reach into the intellectual realm as well – helped along by both substitutive logic, which creates a desire for something which will make us more desirable, and by a capitalist economy, which harnesses this principal to create desire for the consumption on which it runs. Thus the structure of thought is affected by this structured desire, and we can conceive of a female thought, which is, as female sexuality, contiguous.

Central to this female thought, then, is dialogue, because it is the form that bridges and unites the plural selves of woman – it is the verbal/textual equivalent of touch – and woman is constantly engaged in dialogue as a means of unifying her parts. Language on its own (language as object rather than as relation) does not express woman, and so she must harness it through dialogue. The dialogue (as well as the monologue, for they are one and the same to woman, for whom a speech to the self also represents a speech to the Other) is an important tool in the constant (re)creation of her self. When spoken, or written aloud, then, “[w]riting is precisely the very possibility of change” (Cixous 337), because woman can find herself in language instead of trying to find language in herself. “By writing herself, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display” (337), says Cixous, and herein lies the efficacity of parler femme, which will “tear [woman] away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination” (338), becoming the touch which awakens her from the numbing isolation of her artificial, scopic identity, making her aware of the concept of relationship, without which feminine thought and sexuality are impossible.

I hope that I have done some justice to the proponents of a parler femme in setting forth not just a justification thereof, but the need for parler femme to (re)create woman, however, there are several arguments which call into question the relevance of Irigaray and Cixous’s writing on a global scale, and now we must consider those. The first is that they do nothing to address the most direct and physically embodied oppression suffered by women who are not as privileged or educated as the authors, such as genital mutilation, or blatant exclusion and discrimination which keep women from any sort of independence. This first, I believe, is adequately addressed by Arelene Dallery in her article “The Politics of Writing (The) Body”. She points out that a solely political approach may solve the immediate issues but does nothing about the unconscious issues that create the problematic situation. To that end, she offers:

French feminists… have unearthed the deep structures of feminine repression in the symbolic suppression of woman’s subjectivity, body, and desire in the logocentrism of western knowledge. (61)

In other words, Dallery believes, as I do, that dismissing the psychoanalytic work of the French feminists because it does not address the “real” oppression of women misses the underlying issues of an invisible but very real system of symbolic and structural oppression.

This system, while it may legitimately be criticized as one that speaks mostly to white, upper-class, western women, could perhaps express the underlying structures which effect the more apparent oppression of all women. Dallery uses the example of clitoridectomy (something we often think of in terms of Other women), illustrating the interconnectedness of the abstract oppression theorized by psychoanalytic feminists and the “real” (read direct, embodied) oppression undeniably visited on women worldwide:

Symbolically, the construction of women as exchange objects, to be exchanged by men, required effacing the clitoris as an autonomous source of sexuality… Clitoridechtomy, the effacement of the clitoris can be real in some cultures and symbolic in the West. (61)

Here Dallery shows not only how a theoretical understanding of symbology can be important to the day to day struggle against an issue like genital mutilation, but also how consequences of an intellectual, symbolic oppression can be just as invasive as a physical mutilation. Of course bodily pain and the very immediate issues of infection and loss of sensation are spared the women who are spoken to/of by psychoanalytic feminism (in other words, white, upper-class, Western: privileged and educated), but emotionally, intellectually, Dallery’s comparison suggests that these women are suffering from an oppression which – if “comparable” is perhaps a bit strong – is at least analogous.

This point (or perhaps just this author’s reading thereof) may be inflammatory, but I believe it serves an important purpose in an analysis of the usefulness of author’s like Cixous and Irigaray. First of all, to those for whom psychoanalytic feminism seems effete, who would perhaps advocate a more direct/political attack of the day-to-day oppression of women for whom clitoridechtomy is a reality, Dallery offers that

Cixous and Irigaray seem to be saying that unless woman’s unconscious is liberated from repression, unless women can authentically voice their own desire and pleasure, then all forms of political liberation will be to no avail. (61)

Secondly, highlighting the connections and parallels between oppressions suffered by women of vastly different cultural and class backgrounds brings a feeling of camaraderie to a class of people that is notoriously historically lacking in unity – to the point where it is often debated whether it is even appropriate to classify women as a class or to attempt to unite them behind a single front, given the diversity of issues and outlooks within the category. Still, the significance of a greater, shared oppression that typifies a group of people must carry some weight in any attack on the oppression of certain members of that group insofar as those waging war wish to demarcate their cause under that same banner.

So, in considering the relevance of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine to women who are not privileged and highly educated, who can be said to suffer under the direct fire of physically violent or blatantly exclusionary misogyny in situations where their physical person is harmed or coerced – or where the means of an independent life are directly denied them – I believe that Dallery satisfactorily provides the necessary connecting tissues, showing that a theoretical explanation and intellectual solution are to one class of woman as political reform and outside aid are to another – both prongs of the same attack against different kinds oppression; one fighting the manifestations of oppression, the other battling the underlying social structures which allow for those manifestations.

However, where Cixous and Irigaray’s philosophies can be said to fail is in the dissonance with the experiences of women who have the “luxury” of fighting oppression at the intellectual, societal level, but whose cultural structures of oppression differ from those of either author – for instance, middle-class American woman of color. To put it another way, opponents of psychoanalytic feminism who argue that it is does not address the issues of women who are not economically privileged and well-educated miss the point that it serves a function for the women who are that is comparable to, say, a grassroots campaign to teach illiterate women how to read so that they are able to take care of their own affairs when they are abandoned by a male relative. At the same time, their parler femme fails to address the issues of women of different cultural backgrounds in the way that a program to teach women how to read would be ineffective in a situation where women were literate but knew nothing of sex or birth control and so were constantly burdened by unwanted children. In both cases it’s a feasible approach but the wrong specifics.

To this end, I am afraid that I can offer only a plea for the voices of women who feel left out by the parler femme described by Irigaray and Cixous to sing the song of their own particular oppression and begin the process of freeing their bodies and minds. If it is not a man who expects you to be the absence so that his presence is continually confirmed, is it not still the expectations of a man which are creating you always in relation to himself, whatever that relation may be? Perhaps it is not. This is hole is one with which I am unfamiliar and therefore unqualified to fill. I must settle (temporarily, unsatisfactorily) for a sign to caution other travelers in expectation of new voices to speak out in dialogue, creating relationships through which more women are able to embody themselves. This is the purpose of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine, and I argue that any holes in their current incarnation are, far from justification to discard the approach, reason to pursue it even further.

The wHole Thing

2008-05-04T13:17:00.000-07:00

“Do you love me with your whole heart?”
“Yeah. The whole thing.”
~From Pirates XXX (2005)

The hole in my heart is punch shaped, and Yes, that one’s from you.
The one in my head feels like a hangover, but can be traced to the stifling fluorescent lights of a discount shopping center in Hanover, New Hampshire. The one in my stomach has been there since birth, or sometime shortly thereafter when I learned to eat solid food. I think it was created by a stale chocolate graham cracker – though no, I can’t be sure. The one on my right foot is tiny, and was made by the puncturing blade of a custom Ridel figure skate. The one on my left shoulder is filled with white sand. The one on my ankle came from a unicorn.

I remember making the one in my nose with a toothpick at a play date when I was five, but only because that one bled a lot, and my mother insisted she know why exactly I’d done it.

The four in my earlobes were the product of much wheedling, and were ostensibly birthday gifts, although the three in my cartilage were beyond contestation, since I’d gained my majority.
The one on my chin is a scar from a zit I popped because it was giving me a migraine. The one in my eyeball is from a pin that broke when I forgot to take it out before sewing through it, so I stuffed that one with cotton and loose pieces of thread. The thread looks like veins. The cotton does not really look like eyeball jelly. But no one gets close enough to tell.
In fact, no one gets close enough to notice any of my holes any more. Sometimes I cover them with make-up, and pretend that people can’t see them, but I know it’s only pretend. Everyone in the world can see them, plain as day. But they don’t.
To be perfectly honest, no one is looking.

There’s a hole in my watch that I use to hold all of my spare time, and one in my memory that used to hold things like the ways you annoy me – but then it got full, and now I have a huge problem with loitering in the area it used to occupy. In fact, I sent someone in to round everything up and redistribute it, but they just sent things down to the hole in my heart, which was clearly not the right shape. Things kept pushing through anyway, smashing fragile walls, gouging long white scratches and bedraggled corners, and now the hole is jagged and torn around the edges where the Ways I Love You were too big to fit and just burst through, dragged mercilessly behind the Ways I Hate You. Someone tried to fix this by directing them towards the hole in my stomach, but they kept ordering food and then running out on the check. I had to start sending things back, and you know how I hate to do that.
The one in my liver was like a freaking worm hole, that just spontaneously occurred and started gobbling things up, until one day it closed back in on itself and was lost. Too bad the one in my ego won’t do the same.

There is a hole in my heart. And it came from the bite of a batmonkey-boy. This origin complicated everything because it also gave me rabbies, and I had to get shots in my stomach to cure me. So now there’s a hole in my stomach, which looks like a belly button and is right on top of the one I already have, and I have been excessively clear that that can only be filled by a furry pink pony, which tastes like strawberries, and smells like grapefruit juice.

Together, the pony and I will cross the dunes of Mesopotamia, subsisting on wild jelly beans, of which I will eat more than my share, causing the pony to complain that I’m eating them like a chain-smoker eats crack cocaine while he’s waiting for the subway. I will ask what kind of sense that makes.
It makes punch sense.
That’s what kind of sense.
Don’t listen to me, I’m punch drunk.

Straight Up

2008-05-04T11:51:00.000-07:00

The guy I sit next to every Thursday is one of those guys’ guys you always read about but never thought existed if you went to a small girl’s school before heading off to a sort-of-co-ed college out east. He has dark, combed-back hair and a strong chin and makes loud exclamations in class when he feels strongly about something, even if it’s half in jest. When he doesn’t feel strongly, he’s quiet. He sits either hunched at the front of his seat or lounges back against the chair – in or out of the conversation, he doesn’t front. His comments are intelligent, and suggest some investment in the discussion, but if you look at him, it seems he might just as easily be debating the lyrics to a song he used to know or replaying a brilliant save as he scratches a borrowed pen across this week’s assignment. He’s the kind of boy I picture wearing sports jerseys all the time until he’s 18, although I saw him last week in a simple black sweater and a pair of jeans. I watched him talking to friends out of the corner of my eye and imagined that he’s learned the value of a basic black sweater, that he’s learned that it sits well on broad shoulders and a lean frame, and so some of the sports jerseys have gone now that he’s 22, and he only keeps the ones he actually plays in. I bet he knows how to use an iron.
I have a huge crush on the boy I sit next to. It struck me as I listened to him explaining a piece one day in class. Sometimes, in writer’s workshops, the author will give some introduction to a piece about to be workshopped, something about the inspiration or the title, some qualifier, calculated to preempt criticism. He spoke too, when it was his turn. This is what he said:
This piece is shit. I didn’t have time to really write, so I’m not attached to it or anything. You can rip it apart.

The guy I sit next to loses at scrabbulous. He reads Jack Kerouc, Cormac Macarthy, Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut – the kind of authors who wear a coarse persona and substance abuse like a pair of road-worn leather boots, to match their hard-edged, masculine prose– those writers descendant from Hemingway whose natural habitat you might expect to be a dingy bar in the serviceable, local sector of some tropical tourist trap at midday, where they sit, occasionally joking with the bar tender, or buying a bum a drink so they have someone to sit with, and otherwise just keeping quietly to themselves, watching the sun polish the long brass railing on the bar from the door that’s open to catch the breeze more than to entice early customers.
He plays baseball and watches basketball – supports at least two teams that I know of – a college team and one in the NBA. The NBA team is his home team. I imagine he’s the kind of guy who’s been with them for years – went to his first game when he was too small for the souvenir jersey he insisted on buying. He knows they’re not very good, but he would never admit that except to another die hard fan.
He listens to Outkast, Bob Dylan, Nas – you know he drives around in the car he bought himself as soon as he’d made enough money, pumping hip hop on speakers he got installed because he could picture himself pulling up to a bunch of girls he used to know from high school, the base pounding through the rolled up windows that he can’t lower because they’re not automatic and it would ruin the effect to lean over and turn the hand crank. The bands he lists as his favorites are all the kind of stuff that you can rattle off when another guy asks and get approving nods for – the kind of thing it was really cool to listen to in high school, that he probably bought because he heard it on a friend’s stereo one day while they were hanging out in a basement.
He drinks whiskey and belongs to a Southern Comfort fan group. Grew up around DC and classifies himself as a southerner; is interested in women, but married to a guy on the facebook; his profile says he’s looking for friendship in that way that says I’m looking for that girl, but I won’t find her, and even if I do she won’t like me, so whatever, I don’t need that shit… Out of our 387 combined friends at college, we have one in common – a girl I don’t even really know but took a class with freshmen year. The posts on his wall date back two months and say things like “son, whats good, hit me up” and “wiggity wigggity vas up?”, and are from guys with names like Joe, Tyler, and Teddy. His current profile picture shows a happy woman holding a smiling baby with flyaway hair and a big toothless grin in a soft, midmorning light tinged brown by what I would guess was 20 odd years of intervening time and a slight residue of dust from the scanner he used since they didn’t have digital cameras when our generation was born.
The picture before that shows a different kind of grin that I can only assume comes from the two girls who are nothing more than tangled limbs and shining hair, wrapped suggestively around him in what was clearly his idea of a great night. The picture before that is his baseball card shot – all done up in maroon and white, the word Brewers half visible on the cropped lower edge, slight gap between his front teeth unselfconsciously apparent.

I picture him sitting at a bar, ten of fifteen years from now, holding a glass of whiskey, surrounded by smoke from a cigarette he’s holding but not really smoking, occasionally taking a sip from the glass of whiskey in which the ice cube has long ago melted into a thin film of diluting water, thinking about some girl he still sometimes wishes hadn’t left him when he told her to, or maybe about his father, which makes him melancholy regardless of whether the memories are good or bad. Or maybe he’s thinking about a story he’s going to write, because he still does. Write, I mean. Maybe his books are selling right now and he’s meeting with a reporter from some men’s magazine who will also wear a leather jacket and order himself a beer because he has to stay professional but will look wistfully at the whiskey and maybe give in as the night fades on like blue smoke from the forgotten cigarette, and the writer will encourage him with a barely gap-toothed grin and a nod of appraisal that makes the reporter say aw, fuck it all, and buy them both the next round so that they’re just a little bit drunk when they get down to the real questions, and the writer let’s himself be just a little more sentimental than he normally would, and the reporter thinks – this is a real guys’ guy. This is the kind of guy who’d have your back in a bar fight even though you’d only known him as long as three rounds of drinks – and then writes an article that’s more about the kind of whiskey the writer drank and the shoes he had on and the way he shifted his head when he was really thinking about an answer then it is about his latest book.
He’s the kind of guy that girls will be tempted to believe is just waiting for the right woman – the kind of guy who’s single forever because ‘he wants to play the field’, or because ‘he just doesn’t have time to settle down with someone’. But you know that when he walks into his apartment late at night there’s someone there, waiting for him, half ghost, half memory – the idea of a good woman. Someone strong - like his mother, whom he still calls once a week - but who lets him take care of her in small ways because she knows he likes it when she wears his jacket on summer evenings that suddenly get cold, or when she stays in bed on Sunday morning and pretends to be asleep because she knows he’s making her his famous eggs and toast and coffee, and that he’ll smile when he brings it in to her like the little boy in the picture she saw once with flyaway hair and a strong, happy woman holding him in her lap.
He’s the kind of guy you can’t help but laugh at sometimes if you’re really listening to him because he’s still bitter about that popular boy in the fifth grade who hit puberty first and was the star of the basketball team simply because he was a full five inches taller than anyone else. The kind of guy who’ll own up to the stupid decisions he made in high school that nearly got him killed once or twice, or at least arrested. He’s probably had more run-ins with the cops then anyone but his closest friends know about, because they were there too and saw how he talked the officer out of charging them because they got caught in a backyard with a fence that’s too high to jump three blocks down after they ran from the flashing lights, but no one can prove that they weren’t just hanging out in Tommy’s backyard since they got lucky and this house with the fence happens to belong to an elderly man that they know is staying with his daughter for a week in Michigan and who always leaves his back door unlocked because he can’t remember to lock it after he lets the cat in, so their story checks out just enough to fly with a skeptical cop when he’s really spinning it, really hitting his stride and just barely keeping from going too far in a tribute to the sheer rush of adrenaline.

I have a huge crush on this guy I sit next to every week. I don’t know what color his eyes are, but I know there’s something soft about them that seems to fit him best when he’s discussing his work. It’s something unexpected, like the way he’s picky about diction and hates to hear echoes from a word used too often and thoughtlessly.
The boy I sit next to smiles at me sometimes, and sometimes he admires something adorable in the story we’re reading. If he doesn’t like it, if he thinks the work is bad, he doesn’t pay much attention. But if it’s good, you can tell he thinks so, because then he becomes an active member of the conversation. He has things to say, he has opinions. If it’s worth it, he gives a crap.
And so you know, that deep down, this boy I sit next to actually cares. Deep down, more than anything he is afraid that he is alone – not just that no one will understand him, but that understanding someone like him is impossible, and somewhere in the awkwardness of adolescence, he has come to believe that writing is something important, that a good book, a good story, can change things, because it’s been there, buried, as parties raged and parents yelled and teammates scored, and somewhere, between pen and paper, he finds validation. For this boy, writing is justification and promise, it is enticement, it is sex. It is love, as far as he can imagine it. It is everything he will never admit to wanting. It is everything he never believes he’ll have.
The last time the boy I sit next to brought in a piece to be workshopped, he hadn’t been prepared. He scratched something out and sent it out an hour before we met, and when it came to him, the class was silent. At first he joked about it, laughing at how little he’d done, reveling in his detachment and catching my eye. As the silence stretched and the sparse suggestions dried up, his laughter softened too. Five minutes passed and it was over. He looked around at the waiting faces, and saw only finality. Not bad, they said, but that’s all it is. Not Bad. And not good either.
His face fell as he realized it was done, that it hadn’t been any better here and now than it was in his room, that the little voice he would just laugh away, the one that tells him his writing really isn’t any good, maybe is right after all.
Before going on, he had a chance to ask us any questions, but he just shook his head.
I’m kind of disappointed now that I didn’t send out something else. – I would have, if I’d remembered that the class was going to be reading it... – I guess I wish I’d put a little more of myself into it, you know, that I’d actually said something...
And the something soft melts a little bit more in his eyes.
Straight up.

The Storm Has Not Yet Come

2008-05-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

ZIZZI, wearing a yellow dress and a plastic sunflower in her headband, hands out food to the audience saying:

ZIZZI
[smiling and adlibbing as she passes through the audience]

Here. This is for you. Would you like some? This is for you. Have some. Go on. Here, eat this – I’d like some... Have some food.

[when people ask why, or what the food is for…]

This is the food I’d like to be eating. or This is what I won’t be eating. or It looked so good, but I won’t be eating it.

STREGA swathed in layers of fabric and wearing high heels – perhaps with her lower legs exposed, walks in and gets up on a table in front of some people, making sure to interact with people so as to destroy any sense of a fourth wall.

STREGA
[loudly]

Why don’t you carry this for me for a while.

[addressing a man]

That is not a question, Mark.

[***reading from mary daly***]

Why don’t you carry this for me for a while.
I want to perform ON you.

[looking everyone in the eyes]

This is our mourner. Zizzi.

[***reading from mary daly***]

ZIZZI
[sitting, eating carrots]

What would people do if I went off on them?

[STREGA – A voice in the background: The Rhetoric]

It would be really good for me. It would look good on me.

[STREGA – A voice in the background sitting on the table with legs crossed. Casually: Shocking behavior is always fun a first]

Would it really ‘look good’ on me? I think people wouldn’t know what to do

[ZIZZI spits carrot on an audience member and holds their gaze]

I think people wouldn’t know what to do.

[STREGA takes off her mask and turns to ZIZZI as a friend for their argument]

Like, what would people do if I just went off on them?

STREGA
[yelling]

Zizzi! Omygod, I hate you! If you don’t stop being a good friend, I’m going to hate you! I hate you! You fucking take care of me, I hate you! IF YOU DON”T STOP I’M GOING TO VOMIT ON YOUR GYM BAG!

ZIZZI

What would they do?

STREGA
[yelling]

I HATE you! Zizzi!

ZIZZI
[laughing lightly]

I don’t think they’d like it.
STREGA screams and stomps feet and shakes table, causing a ruckus. When she’s finished, she replaces her mask and resumes a detached manner.

My ‘going off’ would look like a ninja. Killing people with a judo chop to the heart.

STREGA

If your your anger were a natural disaster, what would it look like?
Like a volcano?

[ZIZZI chops someone in the audience with a ki-ay]

Like a tornado?

[ZIZZI chops someone in the audience with a ki-ay]

Like an earth quake?

[ZIZZI chops two someone’s in the audience with a ki-ay]

ZIZZI!
[ZIZZI freezes, about to chop someone and turns sheepishly]

ZIZZI

33 degrees but with a wind chill that feels like 7 / so it can still be raining…

STREGA

/No.

Zizzi

Alright Summer weather – wet air, high winds –

STREGA

No storm.

ZIZZI
[in an amused and disbelieving tone]

The Storm hasn’t come yet!

[silence in which ZIZZI sits down and gets out vegetables and ketchup. - Squirting ketchup into a container of vegetables:]

I would like it to rain ketchup on/

STREGA

Zizzi!

ZIZZI

Thank you, Life. For sending us another stand in. Another blonde! /

STREGA

ZIZZI!

ZIZZI

/And this one’s Happy!

[quelling look from the STREGA that ZIZZI doesn’t notice]

Thank you.

STREGA
[w/o mask; as though an attorney interrogating an audience member:]

If you were going to meet your discontent on the street – what gender would it be, and what would it be wearing?/

ZIZZI
[in the background, as opposing council]

/Move to strike!/

STREGA
/That’s too pointed, let me refrase:
ZIZZI
[STREGA turning back to ZIZZI]

The Titanic Song.

[STREGA puts her mask back on and hits play on a boom box and starts dancing interpretively to My Heart Will Go On]

- If my discontent were a childhood song – it would be The Titanic Song.

STREGA
[still dancing]

That’s not a childhood song, but okay…

ZIZZI
[throws a carrot at the STREGA who stops. They stare at each other in disbelief, until, after a pause:]

NO.

[STREGA presses stop on the boom box and sits down to listen to ZIZZI]

Not my heart will go on.

[another pause where they look at each other until ZIZZI gets up on a table, singing:]

It was sad when the great ship went down… hmmmm hmmm hmmm… Uncles and cousins, little children lost their buttons…

[starts to cry]

Imagine how horrified you’d be if you were a mother and you thought some other kid was cutting your child’s clothing.

[ZIZZI and STREGA sit forlornly for a moment]

STREGA

What shape is the hole in your heart?

ZIZZI

That is THE question, isn’t it?

[after a long pause]

I think it’s circular.

STREGA
[gets up and starts to braid ZIZZI’s hair]

I’m picturing you in pearls.

- But if you’d rather have a mask…

…No, I think the pearls.

ZIZZI
No – it’s punch shaped!

STREGA

Hmm?

ZIZZI

The hole in my heart – it’s PUNCH shaped!

[STREGA isn’t listening. They start to hum “What’ll I Do?”]

Shhhh.

2008-02-16T10:56:00.000-08:00

I have a voice, but for some reason, it’s being very quiet at the moment. I think it’s exploring other options. Today I thought it might be interested in doing something, but it just spent ten minutes on my bed beside an open window, batting at snowflakes as they fell. Soft flecks of ice were swarming, condensing and tumbling together, clinging, quivering in the air like a profusion of bees in some apocalyptic vision. Against the backlit cloud cover they were black ashes, bleaching white, exhausted by the unseen flames as they fell down below the tree line. Any snowflake large enough for me to follow in the milieu I swatted with a frozen palm, licking snowmelt from between my fingers – really just spreading the moisture around and then feeling the bitter, peppermint breath of February as it yawned and stretched and rolled out of bed.

My voice has gone to sleep because I sat on it, like when you sit on your foot and it goes all stingy. You then get up and limp a pace or two, perhaps stubbing a toe on the edge of someone else’s desk, managing to injure yourself as well as disrupting their work, spilling their coffee. This assumes, of course, that wherever it is that you were sitting, on your foot, was also someplace that others were sitting, and working, and I suppose at least one desk was compulsory for the scenario, when in fact, you might be saying, I only curl up when I’m at home, and am therefore more likely to have split my shin on the corner of the pantry that has always been too big for the kitchen hallway.

Accident imagery is a peculiar slight of hand my voice resorts to when it wishes to give poetic detail to an otherwise intellectual or romantic situation. It works in both cases, adding a much-needed humanizing element; cooling the savory with a flash of sweet, cutting the syrupy with a pinch of salt. It is literary shtick I’ve affected to make my writing seem more “real”. It also comes from a deeply abiding clumsiness, and a propensity for stubbing my toes on the edges of desks and splitting my shins on the corners of kitchen pantries. Right? ‘What you know…’ as the saying goes.

If my voice were a girl, she would be in prison serving 20 to life on murder one. (The defense would like to call the mind – She’s only theatrically homicidal – the heart – It was a crime of passion! – the liver – She was probably drunk… We would have liked to call the eyes, but they were too tired. Just the thought of it and the defense had to rest.) But my voice is not a girl, it’s just a voice, and the system doesn’t process aberration, so instead it’s wasting away behind spacebars, peering out with sharp, bright eyes between the commas, gnashing razor teeth at the establishment with awkward spacing and excessive punctuation.

Be careful if you cough, and cover your mouth, because my voice might choose just that moment to sally forth, and you would miss it because of your selfish and egoistic illness. Fuck your flu.
It’s a silly little thing sometimes, my voice, insisting on diction that makes very little sense but sounds trippingly from the tongue when read aloud. It’s stubborn. It stays stuck like tea stains on a porcelain cup to concepts and phrases which sink the whole ship for love of a quip that likely means nothing at all in the end. It also hoards atrociously, taping on syllables and building whole extra rooms to make room for some thought or clever phrase. It never seems to throw anything away. In fact I would call it, on the whole, slovenly, untidy even; indolent. I’ve been thinking for years about downsizing, you know, moving into something minimal, something modern. Something… eco-friendly. We’re very interested here in sustainability.

Which perhaps is why my voice is hiding. Perhaps if I make some show of support – read some Wilde, a little Emerson on the side…

I have a voice, but right now, it’s hiding. Right now, at this very moment, it is engaged with strawberry ice cream. It’s taken with a niggling crawl that comes from my sinuses and has moved into my teeth, making my face itch like the devil. I cannot seem to pull it away from a sincere contemplation of the teapot as reflected in the varnish of my desk… It’s wondering if you’ve ever eaten wild boar…. What do I do with that? No really, what do I do?

A Feminine Mystique

2008-01-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

2 Hendrick's Gin
3/4 Strega Liquor
Orange-Carrot juice to taste

shake with ice and strain into collins glass. garnish with decorative toothpicks.

We'll call this week's lesson Allegra Learns The Perils of Double Booking; or iCal For Dummies.
I got cast in a directing workshop, which, luckily, does not conflict with my other activities. Yet.
But, I'm also thinking of signing up for Ballroom dance classes on Tuesdays... I mean, I view my life as a very large game of don't break the ice. How many activities can I add before I crack? The fun's in guessing! Join the office pool!

Charlotte Truman: Issue 1

2008-01-24T06:27:00.001-08:00

Charlotte sat with her feet pressed against the edge of the coffee table. She felt discredited. The room smelled of cooking spice and body odor, and something like vanilla that was just a little off for having been exuded by a slowly desiccating candle. Her sweater neck was chaffing. Wishing she were somehow more engaging, or maybe better liked, she sunk the tender pads of her feet into the age-worn edge and gripped even harder with her toes until they were flat and white against the pitted brown wood. Today Charlotte couldn’t quite find the right time to interject. Or, perhaps it was the interjections themselves that were sub par. Whatever the case, the people in the room with her never seemed to find what she was saying quite interesting enough to look at her when she was speaking, and this made conversation, from her perspective, very difficult.

It had been like this all day.

It had been a very long day.

Charlotte was tired. And something, somewhere, kept popping. It was as though God were inside of her head, clearing his ears by holding his nose and swallowing with deliberate care. Charlotte imagined God pinching his nose. She grinned and glanced around. The people didn’t notice, so she swallowed her spit and tried to take a more active interest in what they were saying. To her left a girl in a purple sweater and a 20-something male seemed to be a part of the larger group discussion but had succeeded in affecting such an intensely disinterested casual interest in each other that the rest of the group was entirely excluded. This was an A + B conversation, it was plain to C.

Across the room, someone had started a private conversation with the person next to him as though it were going to be the next topic of group discussion, which resulted in one of those awkward moments when everyone not intended to be part of the conversation realizes that they were never intended to be a part of the conversation and then feels awkward that they are blatantly and expectantly eavesdropping.

Somewhere through the currents of conversation that eddied vertiginously around her and the rasp of orange merino wool on her throat, Charlotte became aware that she was touching the person next to her. She froze self-consciously until she realized that the reason she had become aware that her knee was pressed against the man on her right was that he had taken his left hand and placed it on her thigh. So, she thought, this probably did not seem awkward to him. Unless, she thought again, he had done it unawares. A subconscious, unintentional, knee-jerk reaction… as it were. But then, she continued to think, if she allowed her own knee-jerk reaction – namely, to jerk her knee away from his corduroy covered thigh – he might realize what he had done and feel embarrassed. He might say something awkward and further alienate himself from her, thus further alienating Charlotte from the group at large since this interaction, intentional or not, was the most attention anyone in the room had paid her in at least twenty minutes.

Charlotte did not like to be alienated. Nor did she particularly enjoy alienating the men with whom she came into contact, however brief, or unintentional, that contact was. This was rooted, as most logical social considerations of the opposite gender, and nearly all illogical neurosis, are – in the paralyzing insecurity that she would never meet someone who was not incurably alienated by nearly everything that she did and, most of all, by who she was regardless of what she happened to be doing. Given her history, and the un-happy returns of the day, this did not seem an unfounded fear. In fact, what it seemed, if anything, was a certainty. Charlotte Truman was doomed to be alone for most of the rest of eternity. That is, at least until she finally fell upwards into the stars, sometime shortly after her death.

Annnnnd... -We're Back!

2008-01-24T06:12:00.000-08:00

And I'm sick.

cough cough cough

bluh.

Yesterday was my first day of classes. Here's the skinny so far:
Feminist Theory = 31 women + Zachy Huckel-bauer

Today I have 2 dance classes in a row, and then Literary Non-fiction, where I can finally start writing my memoirs.

Speaking of which - I have to get out of bed and go to the aforementioned classes...
Later Days!

The World Reels...

2008-01-22T14:47:00.000-08:00

I am so Actually upset by the death of Austrailian actor Heath Ledger that I am moved to compose my first blog entry in more than a month.
What will we do without him?!
Heath - what drove you to your death?
How can we avenge you if you've left us no clues?!

oh yeah, and I, like, started drinking again after 39 days so that I could have wine with everyone else for the last week of the program, and then I flew back to the states, and now I'm back at Vassar in my large new single (302A) which happens to have been the room I stayed in the summer I did the Powerhouse program here (awfully auspicious, dontcha think?), and now I'm signing up for classes, starting into design meetings for the 2 shows I'm light designing for (For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide - Feb 21 -23, and Merrily We Roll Along - in April sometime), and seeing a whole bunch of people I haven't seen in 7 months and a whole bunch more that I've never even met.
but whatevs.
Let's focus on what really matters here - namely, who could possibly replace Heath as the Knight of my Heart!

...I knew today was going to be a strange day...

Oh, and I may be re-forming and overhauling this site in the near future, so keep yo' eyes peeled, MOFO!

White Elephant

2007-12-07T23:52:00.001-08:00

I'm dreaming tonight,
Of a place I know,
Even more than I usually do...
And although I know,
It's a long way home,
I promise you -

I'll be home for Christmas...
- IN 1 WEEK!

Yeah, the count down begins.
Which is strange, now that it's here. I suppose that I didn't think about how much time we had left until we hit the 3 week mark and people started counting, But then, my counter got stuck at 3 weeks, and it seemed like it would just always be that awful 3 week interval...
So here we are, with a week. And it's weird.

Guissepe is slowly building us a show.
I have no doubt.
- It's all there.
You know, in his head...

But really, I'm not worried about it.

I'm more concerned about getting as many different Little Things from the Little Thing Machines as I can.
(there are worse addictions, kids)

And today I'm going into Cortona to have lunch at this restaurant someone's teacher told her about. Then I'll finish my Capitan Magnificent mask that's currently drying downstairs.
And maybe then I'll pack.

Hunh.
It is strange to think...

What I'm Doing INSTEAD Of the Wine Tasting

2007-12-04T09:41:00.000-08:00

I finished my philosophy paper!
Which is great. Because that shit was seriously putting the damper on my existence here at the villa.
- By I mean I wrote it in, like, 2 or 3 days, and I literally care so little about it that I felt bad staying up to work on it, even though I had nothing of the actual 6 - 10 page paper written 2 days before it's due.
And, as I keep reminding myself,
MY GRADES DON'T TRANSFER!

HOOha.

Now I can get back to my first love - mask making.
I finished my Zanni. - Without realizing until I was polishing off the last of the wax that his nose just looks like a penis.
Seriously. No idea.

Aside from that, I did a little shopping this weekend.
You know, hopped the train to Firenze and got everything I wanted in, like a half hour.
I also bought myself a mug.
Because - I LIKE mugs.
...alot.

And this one was so cute.
I saw it in the chocolate store. It is blue with stars, and was filled with Baci* (*this means kisses in Italian. Have I told you this before? Probably. It's my new favorite Italian word. Suck it up. If you're good, maybe I'll bring you some Baci.), and it says 'Perche parlare? Tutto l'amore se dice in un bacio.' Which means, roughly, 'Why speak? The entirety of love is spoken in a single kiss'. I thought - this would be such a cute present! -but, I don't have anyone to give it to... And I don't have anyone to receive it from...
So I bought it for myself.
Good purchase.

And now I am relaxing in the last 15 minutes before I go stuff myself again in the Mensa. I am done with final [sic.], and finished with my first day of "Ensemble" with Guissepe. We've already started working with our theme for our final project, namely, Love. Everyone had to contribute one phrase about love to the group's pool of text.

- And now, before I head off, here's my paper. Yes it's very long. No, it's not very good. Why am I putting it up? Cause it's my fucking blog, and I can post what I want!
(I strongly suspect that I simply didn't bother to explain myself and purposefully inserted philosophical/academic jargon to confuse my reader and camouflage this fact. Entertain yourself, perhaps, by drinking every time you notice a hole in the logic of the argument that I skip over.)

Spectacle As Consciousness

Consciousness, long held as an “asylum ignorantiae for all philosophical constructs…. the place where all unresolved problems, all objectively irreducible residues are stored away” , is nonetheless, irrefutably essential to our current interactions with the world around us. More than simply using, or even depending on the sign systems we have, as humans, created in order to share our existences, consciousness is the most omnipresent of sign systems. Evolving, as it has, directly from the interactions between individuals and their world, consciousness both enables and necessitates understanding as such, since without these relationships, signs would be meaningless and unnecessary. As, however, human society fragmented, and man began to experience a collective (yet individual) alienation from the world around him, the consciousness produced in these altering relationships changed too. Consciousness became estranged from dialogue, it became a passive transmission of information from the world to the individual, and the focal point of this change is the Spectacle, as described by Guy Debord. Everything that man produces became for the purpose of the spectacle, and therefore everything that man consumes became spectacle as well, until finally, it is the spectacle that mediates all social and individual interactions, and it is the spectacle through which we analyze and understand. In the current, advanced state of cultural isolation, “the phenomenon of separation is part and parcel of the unity of the world”. Spectacle is the consciousness of the modern age.

Man, in his societies, has not evolved a solitary existence; he is constantly dependant on his ability to live with and be aided by those around him. This shared existence, in turn, is dependent on man’s ability to combine his efforts with another, which is effective only when two individuals can be sure to be dealing with the same experience. Given that it is impossible for two individuals to share the exact same experience even if they are standing side by side, sensorially perceiving the same natural phenomena, man developed systems of signs so as to compare and share experiences with one another. He developed a common ground, a world in which all are capable of sharing.

Simply put, a sign is anything that stands for something other than itself. A tree is a just a tree, contained and present in its existence, until other meanings are ascribed to it. Then, suddenly, this tree becomes a Christmas Tree, and serves to bring to mind winter, family, presents, etc. Through the creation of sign systems, man gains the ability to share his experience of life with another, and in this way to effectively live with and not just in proximity to other humans. Sign systems are, therefore, essential to our humanity as it has evolved, and since they are the medium through which communication is possible, an examination of a culture’s sign systems is crucial in understanding the workings of that culture in as much as it even is a culture. Karl Marx understood this and felt it incumbent upon him to deal, therefore, with our most pervasive system of signifiers, the means through which all interaction is made possible (namely language), before any progress could be made in the dissection of social interaction.

From even a cursory examination, the pervasiveness of language must be unmistakable. As a signifier which stands for nothing other than itself (having no true existence outside of signification), Language, and that all important base unit, the Word, are the epitome of sign systems. Language was created expressly to express, it is a product of our social needs and interactions, “language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well”. Without our interactions with other humans, we would have no use for language (or for any sign system). We would simply perceive the world around us individually, and signs would not exist. However, effective interaction depends on the ability to share the contents of one consciousness with another, and this depends on the existence of a sign system.

To take this a step further, not only is the sign system a product necessitated by social interaction, but so is consciousness – that which is considered to be the most individual of features. Marx states that “consciousness is… from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all”. Unfortunately, what exactly consciousness is, Marx never quite finds his way to explaining any more concretely then in terms that suggest that old, mystic asylum ignorantiae.
This question is, therefore, taken up by V. N. Volosinov in his essay “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language”, wherein he posits that “consciousness itself can arise and become a viable fact only in the material embodiment of signs”. That is to say that, consciousness is not something which takes on signs as a language, some mysterious soul of the human intellect to which signs are a tool, but rather that consciousness is itself merely a tool, a sign system, created in the relation of one human to another. In Volosinov’s words, “understanding is a response to a sign with signs”. This is a compelling explanation when we consider both the form and function of consciousness; the former being entirely composed of signs, and the latter being the management of these signs so as to be able to rearrange and analyze these parts of experience, thereby gaining the ability to analyze and rearrange our actual experience.

The problem with this explanation arises when we consider that foggy area of consciousness often called Intuition. To see where Volosinov’s argument needs clarification, we must start by examining the birth of consciousness in man as Marx did, for it cannot be fully explained as a sign system which evolves from the interaction between two individuals. To begin with, there is Perception – the raw, unprocessed, sensory input. This is the information we receive from our senses, which it is possible (or, at least was possible, at some point, for prehistoric man) to receive passively, without connecting it to a past experience, or including a projection of it in his future. In order to survive, however, man, like the animals, must develop some way of processing the data he receives, and some way to learn, to connect the tree he sees in front of him to the tree he saw in front of him yesterday and the day before, so that he is able to eat things which will not poison him, to avoid animals which might do him harm.

When man can identify that one instance of shape and color and smell and feel is in fact a tree, and, more then that, that a certain tree is of a similar type as one he has seen somewhere else, and that some types of trees provide food, while others do not; when he becomes capable, in short, of learning, he must be said at some level to have started the arduous process of analysis of the world around him. Marx himself calls this “animal consciousness of nature”, and describes it as a “consciousness concerning the immediate sensuous environment and consciousness concerning the limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual”. Volosinov argues that consciousness is the all-important form of our analysis, but at the same time, he insists, this is a consciousness which has arisen from interaction between man and man, not man and nature. Volosinov asserts that “signs emerge, after all, only in the interaction between one individual consciousness and another”, that “consciousness cannot be derived directly from nature”, and so we find a small hole here, in the beginning of man’s ordering of perception, but before the start of his serious dependence on other men. In short, that oft debated realm under whose purview falls the “consciousness” of animals, which is not, by either Volosinov’s or Marx’s standards, true consciousness. Still, it is an awareness, and even, undeniably, some primitive analysis of the world; for how else did we make the jump from unprocessed sensory input to an organization of sense data which can be recognized as something particular outside of the self which needs to be shared with another individual?

The point of these particular arguments, I believe it is safe to assume, is to stress that consciousness is not something that we possess inherently, but which, rather, we evolve in the course of our social interactions. As the stored energy in the sign systems of previous generations changes each successive generation of man, so too is the interaction between one generation and another changed, and as interaction evolves, along with it evolves consciousness.

What is important enough about this point to justify semantic quibbling, is that consciousness evolves in a relationship, although not necessarily a relation between one person and another. The relevance of my critique lies in the fact that, should we accept a definition of consciousness which is born of any relation, and not simply that between two humans, it paves the way for the idea of the evolution of consciousness in a society where the “primordial unity”, the relationships between the various members, has crumbled. When coupled with Volosinov’s point that consciousness is also something that evolves, it allows us to assess what consciousness has become now, in an age which is characterized by fragmentation and fractilization. Man, who’s very existence, and the entirety of his evolutionary tract have been based on creating a relationship with those around him, has become alienated from his world. As Eric Fromm points out, “alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of man to his work, to the things he consumes, to the state, to his fellow man, and to himself”. Alienation has changed places with the unity that was once one of the defining characteristics of man.

How then, could consciousness have gone unchanged?
As all of man’s relationships have become indirect (his relation to what he produces, what he consumes, to his desires, to his body, to those around him, to, in fact, his very life) the unity of his society has deteriorated. Society has become fragmented. The very process of communication, of analysis and dialogue, has taken from man the unity of his individual life. In an effort to unite with his fellows, he subjects himself to the rule of abstract concepts like Time and Nation, he collects the experiences of others – not just as the experiences of others, but as though they were his own experiences. His alienation blinds him to the difference between his own reality and the reality being pressed upon him by the constant influx of signs, and he becomes separated from himself as he actually exists, in search of the self he believes that he can create from the experiences around him.

At the same time, in an attempt to counteract this, man “shares” more of himself, so as to reaffirm his reality by relating it to others. Language, and therefore consciousness, change to express this – all men are experiencing this isolation at the same time, and since they are all talking about it, a strange new society starts to take shape, a society that collectively experiences individual isolation. Consciousness now, evolves from the relationship between man and object, not man and man, for man believes himself to be isolated. Objects have long been the mediators between men if we consider, as Volosinov does, that “signs are also particular, material things”, but the signs through which men communicated before (like language, ritual, and art) were created for the express purpose of communicating between two individuals, and along with being specific signifiers for some experience or emotion, they signify a knowing exchange between two people. Today, the objects with which we interact preserve the illusion of alienation, thus furthering its reality – “it is the sun that never sets on modern passivity”. Somewhere between sign and commodity, Debord calls these modern phenomena Spectacles, and instead of engendering dialogue, the Spectacle allows us to “passively” receive.

If we take for truth the definition of consciousness posed by Marx and Volosinov (namely that consciousness is that which evolves in the “interindividual territory” as a means of processing the societal signs) then it is no great leap to posit that Spectacle had not only become the language of our isolation, but the very consciousness through which we perceive and interact with the world around us. After all, “the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” – a relationship between the individual and his world made possible by some sort of relationship and the use of signs. In further agreement, Debord describes spectacle as something which is “not… added to the real world”, but “the very heart of society’s unreality”, occupying, as it were, the very same throne upon which consciousness sits.

Our alienation complete, we have managed to remove ourselves even from our own inner thought, putting it into an outward show from which, by the aid of mechanical reproduction, we then remove ourselves before it even reaches its intended audience, and that same audience, free of the presence of the being from whom the spectacle originated, has been deceived into thinking that they can receive passively the meaning contained therein. Our language, our ideas, are altered not by interaction with other men, but by the imposed tyranny of the spectacle, and man remains blissfully unaware of the disconnect.

- you actually read to the end? Or did you just skip down? Ah, well, either way... here's your prize: my phrase from class.
'a heart doesn't break, it implodes'

I'm Dreaming Of A...

2007-11-27T08:57:00.000-08:00

...whole plate full of red delicious apples with Smucker's Natural Peanut Butter with Honey.

What?
You thought I was going to say White Christmas?
Those are hardly realistic expectations - thinking that my subconscious should obey the commercialized, sugar sweet sentiments peddled by a bygone era's crooners on "Holiday" LPs that only serve to sacredize the consumerism of a capitalist, "Christian" culture.

- I mean, if you want to be strictly accurate about it, I'm dreaming about slapping people who deserve it and then being punished for doing what I felt that I had been instructed to do. (No mystery there, Scott.)

But back to apples.

On Thanksgiving we went around in a circle and listed the first thing we wanted to eat when we got home. I said a whole jar of Smucker's Natural PB w/ H, and a nice soft pint of Eddy's Sugarfree Mint Chocochip icecream. And some Oreos.
But then we went out for pizza at the pizza and beer place (called O' Scuglizzo? I even LOOKED this time! Damn it! Why can't we remember?) and I decided that, embarrassing as it is, what I want is a double cheese pizza from Zeppe's, with a dozen garlic wings and a 2 liter of Diet Coke. (I know - I'm not even missing NY pizza, I'm missing OHIO pizza...)
And then at lunch I had a red apple with a little of Robert's peanut butter, and I thought - the day when I can sit down and have as much peanut butter as I want will be a happy one. I am going to buy 3 jars. Not because I want to eat that much - I don't even want more then a few spoonfuls - I just want to line them up and look at them while I eat so that I don't feel like I have to ration it out.

What point do we take from all of this?
I don't actually miss food from home.
(The food here is fantastic and fresh, and prepared hot for us twice a day.)
I miss home.

Let's face it, I checked out.
I mean, I tried really hard. You have to give me that - I was motivated for 3 for most of this whole damn semester - but I'm burnt out. I got nothing. And I just don't care.
Too bad about that whole having 3 more weeks thing... That sucks.

And no booze to drink away the remaining hours... I raise my glass (of water) to Good Life Decisions! (Although, I've already decided that I will drink the last weekend, and at this point, I'm looking at bottles of beer in the gelateria and thinking - if I can make it a month, that's something...)

I'll be home for Christmas, You can plan on me. Please have snow and mistletoe, And presents 'neath the tree...
(and Smucker's Natural PB w/ Honey)

I Feel It In My Fingers...

2007-11-23T09:02:00.000-08:00

There comes a day, a day we eagerly await each and every fall, when suddenly, the world looks a bit - merrier. It's a day of joviality, a day of liberation, a day when siblings unite, perhaps for the first time, in a common purpose... To annoy the fuck out of anyone in hearing distance with as many kitschy Christmas jingles as they can remember.
We call this day First-Official-Christmas-Song Day.
Oh, and how we love it.

That's right, folks, dust off the old family vinyls of Bing and Burl, break out the egg nog, and mix liberally with a nice medium bodied rum - you're gonna need it.

My first memory of First-Official-Christmas-Song Day comes from a few years ago, back in the days when my brother and I still argued about the front seat of the family car. We were driving back from Wooster, chock full of turkey and newly minted family memories. I had my legs propped on the dashboard, warming my toes against the heater while my mother filled the car with gas. From somewhere in the back seat, I heard a squeak. I readied myself to drop the seat back into a quick recline, catching whoever was sitting behind me in a vice-like grip between the floor and the maroon upholstery of the back seat when something in the noise made me pause.
"Is it time?" my little brother asked again.

Is It Time. The words sent a chorus of silver bells ringing through my thoughts.
Yes. I thought. It is Time...

By the time my mother got back into the car, we were a 6 or 7 swimming swans into the 12 days of Christmas, and arguing about what came next. This was a recurring problem. Past 7, things get murky. One more leaping lord or dancing lady didn't seem to make all that much difference. Fortunately, this argument was easily resolved by consulting The Source. The Source was a decorative candle stashed somewhere amongst the faux pine wreaths and the plastic holly in our attic on which was inscribed, in miniature, cylindrical perfection, 12 tiny tableaux which depict the various gifts referred to in the song. The candle was always the first decoration to be put out, along with the cotton advent calendar we used to hang on the hallway wall before we lost most of the stuffed tree ornaments.
Hot damn we loved that song...

And then of course there were those hilarious grammar school classics - All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth... I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus... The Chipmunk Song...
Grandma Got Run-over By A Reindeer...
and the ever popular, altered versions of Jingle Bells and Rudolph I'm sure we all still laugh at every time we hear them.
I was always partial to Elvis, so Blue Christmas was in my repertoire practically before I could crawl.
- Jingle Bell Rock was such a stunning piece of musicality that I considered it above the Black Friday to Christmas restrictions placed on other such holiday hits.

And now?
Ah heck, I still can't get enough of 'em!
My holiday play list (which lays dormant for roughly 230 (emotionally) frozen days a year) is 5 hours long and soaks up 285.6 MB on my hard-drive.
I have five versions of White Christmas. (another perennial favorite from the days when a green Christmas seemed just as likely to be a sign of impending apocalypse) And four different Jingle Bells. I don't even LIKE Jingle Bells. Although, to be fair, who does?

This is my absolute favorite way to study for finals or write soul-killing term papers. Curled up in my bed with a candy cane and a couple hours of aural pleasure on my iTunes I can almost forget about years that stress and lack of sleep are slowly taking off my life.

Awww, Christmas...

Given that its the season of giving, I will post here, absolutely free, my top 12 list (all available now on iTunes for your consumptive pleasure):

All I Want For Christmas Is You - Olivia Olson
The Chipmunk Song - The Chipmonks
Silver Bells - Bing Crosby
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas - Rockapella
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer - the Temptations
Blue Christmas - Elvis Presley
Santa Baby - Eartha Kit
The Christmas Song - Mel Torme
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! - Ella Fitzgerald
This Christmas - Donny Hathaway
Donna & Blitzen - Badly Drawn Boy
Please Come Home For Christmas - The Eagles

So please -
frost the sugar cookies,
bust out the grog,
and have yourself a very, merry, Christmas season.

Turkey Day

2007-11-22T03:53:00.000-08:00

I am thankful for
the people I love

Month Old Candy Corn

2007-11-16T04:49:00.000-08:00

There's nothing like turning 21 on October 31st in a country that doesn't celebrate either 21 or Halloween.
Luckily, some people still remember.
Not-so-luckily, the Italian Postal Service is out to get me.

I got the first one of my Birthday care packages today. More then a month after it was mailed.
I've already eaten 90 percent of the sweets contained therein.
I mean - the candy corn wasn't stale at all.
The cookie was a little stale. (just a little)
And the Halloween candy was perfectly fine, as one might expect.

I say, the sugar rush was exactly what I needed to kick it up for these last 10 hours of the week.
(that's clowning until 6, Cabaret until 7:30, dinner until 8:30, and Gianni's Tarentella class until 11ish)
- especially since I stopped putting honey in my tea. It actually made it too good. I was done with the glass before I'd even gotten back to the table. It was also the largest contributer to the 5 or 6 cup a day situation that, I think, was really dragging me down.
I hurt everywhere.
Clowning, is painful.
Physically and emotionally.

We played a "game" last night with plastic water bottles.
Here's how you play:

You (as your clown) stand on the far side of the room, between the wall and a long, thick rope that's stretched across the room about 5 feet in. The others stand at the other end of the room. You, Start. Doing what, you ask? Doing anything and everything you can think of, and several things you can not. If you are funny, they might laugh. if you are not, they start to advance. When they get to the rope, they stop again. Now, here's where it get fun. If you are still not doing anything interesting, they count. They count to 3. They give you a last chance. Do you know what they give you if you, by some miracle, manage to save your self before they hit 3? You get another 3. To do something completely different, but always to the same purpose. Eventually, you cannot do anything else. Then, they cross the rope. With their water bottles (you knew they had to come in somewhere) and Kill you. I'm not joking. If this were the bottle game, and you were telling me this story, I would be walking towards you. With a water bottle upraised.
Oh by the way,
You then repeat the game.
I had to go 5 or 6 times, because, here's something we found out about me,
I can't be funny under pressure.
The closer they got, the less funny I became.

Do you know what I finally did to get myself out of the loop?
I sang.
Cats.

...I think they just got fed up and let me go.

My clown, by the way, is a boozy floozy named Spritz (that's short for Spritzer), with an Eastern European accent of questionable origin, an over-sized trench coat, and a pair of lime green heels that are two sizes too large. She suffers (is that really the word?) from a constant state of inebriation. Ironic, really, given my current state of sobriety. Or perhaps not. The clown comes from inside you - it's the part of you emerges behind the world's smallest mask... (think about it. it'll hit you.)

Take Me The Way I Am

2007-11-13T03:44:00.001-08:00

You can eat grapes off the vine,
but NOT olives off the tree.

You can speak english to Micchela
but Italian only with the clowns.

You can get out at 12:30,
but you can't go to lunch until 1.

You can scheme all you want,
but you can't dance the Manfrina without changing partners.

And no matter how you prepare yourself,
you can never guess which direction will be left when next you look.

Pronto?

I Met An Old Man

2007-11-11T05:28:00.000-08:00

There's a man who's out every morning with his dog.
(The dog, I later learned, goes by Cici)
One day he stopped me. - I'll bring you a book, he said.
True to his word, the next day he handed me a slim volume of Italian verse called Volo Libero.

The bio on the back describes the author as a man born in Arezzo in 1935, who moved back in his later years to focus on writing.

I suspect,
That I met the author.

(I am supposed to meet him again today at 6pm, so that he can give me another book.)

Zoe came up on Friday. She made it through the train strike (which, apparently is common here), and we walked through the rising storm into town, where we purchased some ridiculous sum in groceries at Eurospar.
It's what we do.

Mostly we relaxed, since I always have the best beds. We also took a long walk through the countryside and discussed the books we're going to write. My projects include A History of Tears, and a Dictionary of words to disambiguate "Love".
I'll let you know when they're ready for publication.

Until then -
Have a pear.
(God they're good)

Darjeeling Green

2007-11-06T04:53:00.000-08:00

I am full of eggplant parmesan and honeyed tea.
It's a delicious combination.

I don't understand this public outcry over my temporary sobriety.
- Yo Peeps
I know my witty write-ups of the local liquor have become your lifeblood,
but here's news if you've never met me:
I have a problem with Moderation.
- Just, as a concept. As an abstract. Fuck! As applicable in ANY aspect of my life.-
(and by problem, I mean, I'm physically incapable of being moderate)

So this idea I have to take care of my body -
you know, Sleep more, Eat balanced meals, Not work myself until I'm totally exhausted every day -
This is a good idea. A Good Life Decision.
(a GLD if you will. - Which you will.)

SO -
For the moment. My "glasses" will contain tea.
I'm up to like, at least 3 (if not 5) a day.
(what did I JUST say about moderation?)

Class with our new Commedia teacher - Marcello - is trucking along. He looks like a little Italian Teddy bear, and speaks entirely in l'Italiano. I am working through Capitano and masked-Columbina. So much fun! My group this afternoon will present our version of Twelfth Night with 3 Commedia characters called Fort Night. We are up to 7 hours a day of classes, but the challenge of trying to put up skits which are both technically correct in the mask work and commedia work, and not just comprehensible, but funny in 2 languages, is an interesting one. And Friday I will learn to dance the Tarantella with Gianni. (Oooooh. I can't even wait! Gianni! *sigh*)

Now,
I got my camera finally. So I will start posting some pics. I took a whole bunch while I went for my morning run yesterday. Keep checking in to SEE what I've been talking about all this time.

The Big Two-One!

2007-11-03T05:02:00.000-07:00

I'm not drinking again until I come home.

please. let. die.

Yamas! (or: Why I'll Never Drink Ouzo Again)

2007-10-30T14:50:00.000-07:00

Oh what is there to say?

I saw lighting strike off the top of the acropolis,
I met a Greek man named Dimitri who's besotted with me the night we played a drinking game with the owner of the bar and I ended up tending bar while wearing a Greek flag like a cape.

Lisbon was just as beautiful as I imagined it would be,
and I was the most lonely I have been in a long time.
I was also anxious the entire time I was there
Because a 20 year old woman cannot travel by herself,
Without being made to feel dirty and vulnerable and like a piece of meat.

And London was London.
Zoe took me to a 15th century farmhouse in the English countryside.
I ate fish and chips and beer with Catherine before seeing Hot House at the National theater.
I came home with 4 bags of Pancakes

And it took me nearly 21 hours to get from my bed in London to my bed n Italy.
Because I got on the wrong express train, and found myself 6 hours from home at 9 on a Sunday night,
With trains no longer running to my town.

I don't want to travel by myself ever again.
There' just no reason.

(and in 57 minutes, I will turn 21)
((go figure))

Jug Wine, Oh Jug Wine!

2007-10-17T04:56:00.000-07:00

Oh Jug Wine... You will always hold a special place in my heart.

My first encounter with a Jug Wine, was, of course, the Carlo Rossi Rose wine. A sweet young thing, 'tis. Barely even alcoholic... Well, she has a cousin, my friends! A robust, Italian cousin named Sovini Rosso Costiera. This red Vino da Tavola is "obtained from several grapes with a pleasant dry and sapid flavour", and, like any true lady, is loathe to reveal her age. Ah yes, five liters of a thin red liquid that tastes like dirty water and cuts a fine figure in her thick glass, with the tiny, useless handle hanging uselessly as costume jewelry around the neck of this full figured woman.

And to think I hiked 20 minutes up hill to pick her up...
But I'm smarter than I look. Yes, yes - you see, my intentions were not entirely honorable. No, indeed. Because what I intend to do, is pass her around the table, like the whore she is, loosening tongues, and making me plenty of new friends, until she's all used up and ready to be filled up with something decent at the Count's winery for 3 euros!

Although, until that time comes, perhaps I ought to lay off the booze, because it would seem that I'm getting sick. Yes, I woke up this morning from unsettling dreams about baseball stadiums, old friends, and a boy named Damien whose namesake, I suspect, is Damien Rice (sorry Bryan), feeling worse then when I fell asleep. And I didn't go running. - Because Kevin says I'm too intense. So fine.

(alight, those weren't his exact words. what he sad was more like "you're very INTENSE - but I won't say anything more about that...")

I am too intense, aren't I?
I get that all the time.

fine.
okay.
i'll stop.

TOSO Fragolino Rosso ~ Bevanda Aromatizzata (A Base di Vino)

2007-10-13T04:07:00.000-07:00

This is another way of saying Sweet, 9.5% alcohol by volume, Strawberry Champaign.
It was not, bad.
It was also not great.
Although, when mixed at a rate somewhat higher than the standard 2 - 1 champaign to succo di pesca Bellini recipe, it was... you know, sweet and red, and extremely easy to drink.

It was better than the Sante Bucciarelli Vino Liquoroso.
To be fair, I bought that one because it came in a bottle that looked like a bunch of grapes.
It does have a higher alcohol content (16%) and yet tastes almost nothing like the Vin Santos it's emulating. I mean, same idea, but it is watery where a true Vin Santos has that carmely burnt sugar tang.

***WARNING***
Don't buy alcohol because of the bottle it comes in.

We also ended up with a sweet 6.5% alcohol champaign that Ben bought for us at the gelateria because Danny wanted to go to a wine bar but didn't want to spend alot of dough.

***WARNING***
Don't buy cheap champaign at an icecream shop.
(stick to the profiterole gelato from Il Paradiso - which I finally got last night, because I had this feeling that it closed at 10:30, and it was 10:20, so Ben and Danny agreed to run on my suspicions.
We got there just in time.
- Running for gelato is really satisfying.)

And so ends another week here at the Accademia.
One week to go til fall break.
((Two and a half until my birthday))
(((- you know, in case you wanted to get me something. Or whatever)))
((((Not that my parents should think this is for them - because they actually did send me something, apparently. I was speaking more to the masses. Because I know they would feel awful if they forgot.))))

This week we did Pantalone and Zanni (the servant from Bergamo). I had a bunch of really awkward and uncomfortable failures, and one skit at the end that went pretty good, although she told us it went on too long, and I know that was totally my fault. I held us up because I wouldn't give Pantalone the coin. Ah well, you win some, you lose some. It's fantastic already to see people dissappear into the masks - to watch them on stage and not see the actor, but only the character. I laugh all of the time, which is wonderful, and, I dare say, would probably put me in a better mood if I weren't so exhausted from the work we do on the stances and movements of the Masks. Zanni, permantly bent over from a life of carrying heavy boxes on his back, is not easy to sustain...

Well, I don't have any food. And even though I went to bed at 2:30am, my body and my alarm both decided that I should keep my usual 7:30 am wake up. So I fucked around on Wikipedia for a while (I found out that my mask I bought is one of the 3 traditional carnival masks, called a Moretta, but the least often seen because it is impossible to eat or drink while wearing it, not being equipped with a mouth hole of any sort, and conforming to the face all the way around. Actually, originally, they were designed for french women to wear while visiting the convent, and were held on the face not with ribbon stays, but with a button on the inside of the mask where one's mouth would be, which was held between the woman's teeth, thus preventing the wearer from speaking. Apparently, they quickly became popular because they "accentuated feminine features".
... Like silence?
It's a black mask with two eye holes and a sort of ridge in the center that looks a bit like a turned up nose!

I mean, I bought it, didn't I?
fuck.

L.B.'s mask, though, is a Bauta, which was the favored mask not just for Carnevale, but all year long for privacy on secret (and dangereus?) liaisons, as it's strongly jutting chin line allows the wearer to eat and drink with out removing it. It is worn by both men and women, with a black drapey, cape-y sort of thing, and a tricorn hat. Tipically, the mask was white, although black was also used.

I have to walk into town to buy groceries.
My roommate just got up.
It's 1:40pm here.
That means I've been up for 6 1/2 hours. I've caught up on my journal, gone for a run, done Bryan's workout on the roof of the Teatrino roof, taken a shower, written another blog, checked to see who's changed their facebook picture, become, as I've just demonstrated, an authority on Carnivale masks, and, though I haven't mentioned anything about it yet, on the Nobel Prize for Literature to boot - the most recent recipient of which, by the way, was Doris Lessing, a British author I hadn't known anyone cared two bits for until today.

...
or maybe I'll have some water, read my Rum book, and take a nap...

I guess we'll just,
see.

Poggio Ulivelo 2004: Vino Nobile di Montepulciano

2007-10-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

Is it wrong to drink every night?
Is it wrong to look forward to meals so?
No?
What's that you say?
...
When in Rome?

Ah... Si. Si si si.

So this wine, my purchase from the winery, is not bad. It's a 2004, which is a good year, remember, and has a fresh tartness to it. The bouquet is light, and almost... pine scented. Not too alcoholic to the nose like some of these other wines. The color is a bit like stage blood - a sort of purpled brick-red.

...
We started commedia today, with our new teacher, Paola.
Our first character was Pantalone, the miserly old patriarch, father of the female inamorata, obsessed with sex and money. His back is straight, knees bent slightly, feet in first, chin thrust forward. He leads with his pointed nose and takes tiny steps forward. When he turns, his head turns first, and then the whole rest of the body turns. He dances with one bent leg at a time. (The way it should be.)

Okay, time to see what Riccardo has made for us tonight...

Ah, Venice...

2007-10-10T01:05:00.000-07:00

Ah - Venice! City of Poor Life Decisions...
...my face hurts.

- Probably because someone punched me there...

Ah. Venice.

Friday I spent a lot of time on the bus. Around noon we took an incredibly boring tour of an incredibly old theater in Vicenza, whose one distinguishing feature was a fairly spectacularly textbookular example of scenic perspective on a proscenium stage and the fact that the fist people to see a play their in 200 years after it's opening were apparently a group of Japanese missionaries who had come to see the Pope. Vicenza was their second stop. I kid you not.
... I had a great sandwich. Trocchiolo. That seems to me turkey sandwich. And some gelato that was terrible, but which fact I didn't realize until I I was mostly finished eating it, and so thoroughly enjoyed.
Then we met the Mask-Maker, Renzo in his atelier outside the city. This highly anticipated stop turned out to be rather a two hour bust. However, he gave the entire thing in Italian (which Kevin translated some of), but I understood at least 90% of what he said. Pretty good considering a month ago I didn't speak Italian at all. His work was beautiful, but in the end, I decided that it would be inappropriate for me to ask him to make me a mask at this point. I mean, it would be like ordering custom ice-skates before you'd ever stepped onto the ice. There is a point at which it isn't even a question of decadence, it's simply inappropriate.

Venice itself, now that they've outlawed cars and turned it completely into one giant tourist trap, did seem cleaner then my last recollection of it. We arrived in the fog, through which we immediately set metaphorical sail in Vaporetti (the water buses) and then lost ourselves in on the way to the hostel. Dory insists that maps are not helpful in Venice, with which I disagree, since I pulled mine out and corrected our course. Our dorm room at the hostel looked a bit like a refugee shelter, but the place was clean and safe and had great free breakfasts (it's called the CSD Foresteria Valdese, book in advance or they won't have rooms), and there was, directly across the street, a store where an old man filled up used 2 liter water bottles with various kinds of wine for 2-3 euros a piece. I drank about 2/3 of a bottle of his prosecco Saturday night. It was, in fact, during the first bottle, standing on a bridge outside the hostel with Danny and Ben, singing to passing tourists in gondolas, that we decided that we should each make at least one PLD that night...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Because Friday night, I put on a hoochy skirt and heels and a couple of us went to the jazz club Danny had found near the Rialto bridge. There were 3 guys and 3 girls, so we sat by gender and pretended we were on a bad prom date. I had a strawberry margarita (on the rocks. always on the rocks if you have the option) and a caipirhina, while Danny, Ben, and Jesse ordered Hoegaarden beers that came in tumbler glasses bigger than their heads. I also had a plate of the Spaghetti neri alla Venizia, or whatever it is that they call the pasta in squid ink that turns your teeth black. It was pretty good. Tastes like squid. And afterwards we stood on the Rialto for a bit and debated with Danny about whether or not it was a good idea for him to jump into a canal.

Saturday,
We woke up and worked our asses off on Giudecca Island in the space they rented for us to work in. The wind was icy and there was a cold rain that whipped the canals up. (what does the water look like, you ask? Well, you've seen lake Erie, right? Yeah, about like that. Particularly on a miserably stormy day) So by the time we got back to the hostel around 6, some prosecco and a hot shower made for a fantastic start to the evening. Then we went out to dinner and tried to get a table for 20 at 'that restaurant that has guacamole', which, of course, we couldn't. But Danny and I hung around after people split out and put our names in for a table for 2. I ordered a bellini while I waited ((which wasn't all that great, but helped to pass the 20 minutes until we got a table)). The guacamole was so so, but the pizza I had, which I chose by asking the waiter che e la tua favorita pizza, had zucchini and parmeggiano and some fantastic salami, and I ate the whole thing, and just generally had a really fantastic time hanging out with Danny.
At 9, we met up with the others and Brian in San Marco's and went looking for the discotecca, which wasn't open yet, so we got bad gelato and I made my first PLD when I decided to stick my hand n the canal because i set it in something gross. It's okay, I washed my hands when we got to the club, and, retrospectively, it was not my P-estLD. The club had a 10 euro cover charge, but that included your first drink, so Sam and I asked the bartender to make us something forte e un po dolce, so she whipped up something with Drambuie, ginger ale, and lemon juice that she gave some silly name to i can no longer remember. Wasn't bad though. reminded me a bit of a margarita.
It was not at this point that I got punched in the face.
No, no. This was the time, for DANCE.
I danced for about 30 seconds with a skeezy Italian boy in a white hoodie, before I let my friends rescue me. I also danced with a lovely Dutch guy named Jens who is possbly the tallest person I've ever met. He had to dance stooped over. swear.
Aaaaand, then I dance with some more people like dory and ben and julie and danny and brian briefly before he turned n for the night but who really remembers it's all a blur.
And then I asked Abigail to punch me in the face.
- Because she and Joya had this thing, and I jumped in on it, and then Danny did too so I punched him, but it wasn't hard enough... and yada yada yada, And so we all walked home at 4 in the morning with Danny still trying to convince me to hit him again.
Sunday was fun.
Okay, that's a lie.
But it was our last class with Brian, and then we had free time, and we decided that we were going to walk around, but Venice is one large crush of tourists on Sunday afternoon, so I ended up buying a sandwich from the Moka Efti Crazy Cafe, where I couldn't help but flirt with the man behind the bar. NO, I mean really. I didn't even really want to be flirting, I just was, and he asked me what Ohio was known for, and I said Corn, and that was that. I went home and went to bed.

Monday we had time to wander before we had to take the 1:20 train to Arezzo, and I decided to just go off by myself, which was the best decision I've made in a long time. I bought myself a mask - an inexpensive one - and I bought L. B. a mask - which fits him perfectly! - and I spoke to the shop keep in Italian and even translated for the Spanish couple that came in. (and by translated, I mean, I realized that they were asking about gold masks, and so I pointed at something gold) And then I bought a Carnevale poster and some more postcards, and I spoke to that woman in Italian too.
On the train ride home, which took forever because it was half an hour late, I ate a pollo and funghi sandwich from a vending machine.
Back home in Arezzo, I have never so anticipated a meal. Riccardo, Mi Piaci.

Jungle Juice

2007-10-10T00:29:00.000-07:00

Jungle Juice:
the generic name for a clear, high proof alcohol (typically Everclear) and a cheap red fruit punch, like bargain brand High-C.
In this case, it was two different kinds of red Fanta, and something vile and 95 proof that my roommate (Donna Ward!) bought from the Iper Co-op.
It was a little strong, I won't lie.
I was a little drunk.

My roommate (Donna Ward!) clams that this is because she (Donna Ward!) mixed the drnk for me herself.
I prefer to think that it was the paper parasol she put in it.
Or maybe it was the other 4 glasses of alcohol I consumed Tuesday evening...
Either way, I need to start a new facebook group. I'll call it - I Get Drunk On Tuesday Nights.
- I don't know why I consistently think that it's a good idea.
No - That's a lie. I know exactly why I think it's a good idea...

So it started with a glass of Cupinero after personal training (cheers Grotowski!), and then a sip of Frangelico after dinner, and just a nip of dessert wine - to settle the meal. And then when you show up at a party and someone offers you Everclear and starts pouring the Fanta... it would be impolite to refuse.
So to make a long story short, had my fifth glass at dinner with Ben, who kept company while he ate his late plate since he was so kind as to do the same for me when I returned from London, and, sure it struck me even then as not the best idea, but what's a little jug wine between friends am I right?
So it was that I had what was, in my opinion, rather a lovely conversation before ending the evening in the hallway, with Little bear, reading Baudrilliard in my pajamas, and finding him far more comprehensible with a bit of alcohol in my system. (I would recommend the article, though - "The Finest Consumer Object: The Body" - which is about how our bodes have become commodities, because we have learned to view them as the vessel through which salvation is possible (whereas it used to be the soul) and consequently, we begin to invest in them, both monetarily and physiologically, which leads him the brilliant term "managed narcissism", and also to some interesting thoughts on the movement from the idea of the body as the center of desire and fantasy (both internal, personal) to the body as something which is capable of an appearance of eroticism (external, the appearance of desire or desirability). And, you know, how women particularly are pressured into the cult of beauty, and the idea of salvation through attainable perfection, which, of course, is not actually attainable, and which simply objectifies the feminine body and alienate the woman from her corporeal self... I could go on, but no one here seemed to care, and I doubt you do either. In class, we watched an (admittedly interesting) documentary about women in person (if you're thinking Pam Grier in The Big Doll House, you are sorely and most unfortunately mistaken), and everyone was relievedly vocal in their relief over not having to talk about Baudrilliard's babble.)
And even as I slipped under my double down comforter, my roommate (Donna Ward!) rolled around in the hallway, caught in the fading thrall of the jungle juice and the green glow of the Uscita Sengnale.

FREE DUTY!!! (Or, Why Champaign And Ice Cream Should Never Be Separated)

2007-10-03T09:43:00.001-07:00

Ah, Ryan Air...

They're like -
The New York City Subway of the sky.

They herd you onto a bus, and then release you at the airplane like a herd of cattle to cram your way onto the converted Boeing 737 and grab whatever seat you can. The seat backs are bright yellow and have the minimal safety instructions pasted at eye level. These include panels prohibiting glasses, earrings, high heels, and false teeth (presumably on the inflatable escape slide?), and detailed instructions for how to open the emergency doors.
Short but practical - Only the essentials...
I don't know whether to be comforted that most of the things they go into on the bigger airlines seems unnecessary, or unsettled by the fact that it feels like this information comes from experience...
They also advertise on the overhead racks. For Bullseye Baggies. "Premium Hard Liquor in a 75ml bag for 5 euro". Buy one, get one free.
...
If I could have caught one of the flight attendants, I would have bought one.
But once we take off, you only catch glimpses of them in passing - surly Irishmen handing out RyanAir magazines on the sly to a random selection of people, pushing the portable bar around and collecting money for cups of water or hotdogs, shuffling your luggage around without asking...
Oh Ryan Air! You couldn't care less if I fly with you, could you?

On the other hand, they get you there on time.
And somehow the turbulence you experence isn't nearly as dsturbing, because your standards are so low at ths point that you can't believe you're still in the air.

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

- So I went to London for the weekend.

It only took me 14 hours to get from the villa to Zoë's flat.
And I did it all in my traveling hat and boots.
((because my life is one giant Grotowski exercise))

But let's get to the point:
(here's a hint - it's in the title)
That's right, my friends,
DUTY FREE.
After perusing the luxury perfumes, I turned to the alcohol,
and lads, it was PLENTIFUL...

In the end, I bought each of us a present.
For Zoe - a bottle of Balsamic Vinegar from Modena. For Me, a bottle of Proseco, and for Catherine, a bottle of Absolut Pear that just made me happy to purchase, despite my aversion to Vodka.

And then I had to carry them.
In my high heeled boots, and my red riding-hood coat, and my felt hat.
At 2am on the streets of London.

The cabdrivers seemed to like it.
The hat was a big hit with that crowd.
Of course, it didn't help me get a cab for the hour that I stood there in front of the Liverpool train station at 1am.

But I made it to Zoe's flat at last, and I didn't even have to go floor to floor calling her name, because she was sitting in the hallway waiting for me, with a jar of peanut butter, some chocolate Digestifs, and a bag of British pancakes.

*Tangent*
So, in England, apparently pancakes come in a bag.
They're FANTASTIC.
I'm not kidding.
I flirted briefly with the idea of buying a suitcase just so that I could take some home with me.
(I can see the homecoming now - "Hey mom and dad! This is my new suitcase, Aaaaaand these are my pancakes.")
*End Tangent*

That being said, Saturday was worth it.

We met Catherine on the street around 10am (I always pictured us meeting this way - we see each other across a crowded street in an exotic locale. You've got on white sneakers, and I'm wearing a hat...) and got all day Tube passes. For lunch I insited that we go to the Hard Rock Cafe for a burger and fries with a chocolate malt that literally cost me $40, and a cheeky spanish waitress named Charo who told us about her trp to Ibiza and probably does very well for herself in tips.
Then we just sat in Hyde Park on a bench.
We took pictures of each other and I made a fuss about the fall and the light.

It was... nice. It was wonderful. It was comfortable and comforting.

I toyed with buying an oil paintng of pirate ships at sunset and finally we made out way back to King's cross and Zoe's flat on Langton Close, stopping at Tesco on the way to pick up yogurt and honey icecream, chocolate, and strawberries for dinner, which we enjoyed with the bottle of Proseco I picked up. Now, Prosecco - a well known type of Italian "vino frizzante", famous for its role in the traditional Italian cocktail, the Bellini - is not, in itself anything that needs to be raved about. The bottle I picked up (8 euro!!! (...yeah, maybe that's it...)) from Villa Sandi was Di Valdobbiadere. Any chance that means 11% alcohol by volume? Because it was. In any case, it was a highly enjoyable champaign. Totally decent. I would describe it, as forte, I think, to borrow a word from the Italians. It was a forte champaigna.
What was amazing, was how Dave got the cork out of the bottle once we'd mangled the thing (it looked like it should pop but heaven help us...!). He used a knife to shave part of it out and then a fork to pry out the rest. I don't want to start shit - but I'ma have to go ahead and say that it officially beats the fork cork screw. Sorry, I just call 'em like I see 'em.

After an evening in at Langton Close, Catherine and I walked back to her recently vacated double (now a single - Thanks Jessica) at Nido and stayed up to talk about... like, getting older, making money, paying for utilities...
It was odd.
And not entirely bad.

...
The return trip only took me about 11 hours. In the airport I bought a mug (yes, I NEEded it) with a map of the London underground that reminds me to Mind The Gap, and a bunch of postcards. I made it back to Termini train station in Rome in time to make the 17:50 train, and fell asleep in the compartment I had to myself, waking to the soft "Buona sera" as the conductor passed through and trying to read city signs as the sun set behind hills that suddenly seem familiar. I got off at Arezzo and the half hour walk back to the villa was like that hike up the stairs in Raymond, and when I walked n the door, there were people there to hug me and food waiting in the mensa.
After a weekend of old friends and my native language,
I found myself glad to be Home,
and excited to be thinking of it that way.

Cupinero 2004 Merlot

2007-09-27T15:25:00.000-07:00

This was described to me as a Super Tuscan.
You would (probably) call it a Merlot.

Cupinero is a relatively new vineyard in the region, and they're not very large, but Paolo recommended them highly.
And of course 2004 is a good year...

It was nice.
(not shining praise, I know)

Danny liked it alot. I think it probably needed to breathe for longer then we let it.
It was very dry, but also extremely light for a red wine. Not much bouquet, although that may have more to do with the fact that we didn't let it sit properly beforehand. The color, though - like garnets. Gorgeous. A dark, rich garnet red. And the bottle looks well, I won't lie.

I think I just preferred the Chianti Classico.
(yes, I swear I'll get that name eventually)

And I would just like to say - because I know that Dory thinks differently, that I did not go drunk to cabaret. I had one glass of wine over a period of like 45 minutes.
Leave me alone.

And, yes, Tramonto, if I had to check in with one word,
tonight it would be Resentful.
Because I think it's bullshit when you say that Secret Friends is about "The Craft".

I finally washed my laundry.
I need to hang it up to dry and go to bed, since I'm not going to sleep until I get back from Londra.

Breathe it in, Breathe it out!
((fuck that))

Need To Fix Something? Well, I've Got A Screwdriver...

2007-09-26T18:28:00.000-07:00

Oh - MG.
They make profiterole gelato.

...

No I know. (Deep breathes now)
I was already composing arias to profiterole.

Yo, Fuck 'Il Gelato', I'm officially hoofing it to the Piazza Guido Monaco and "Il Galaxy' for the good stuff from now on.

- But that's really beside the point.
(I didn't even want gelato at 3pm after the gnocchi and PB & J cakes I fashioned out of Ricardo's jam tarts and and some of the Peanut Butter that my (saintly, sweet, no one better) Mother sent in my (enormous, fantastic, envy inducing) carepackage, but when we walked into town, nothing was open, because apparently all of the Italians are sleeping off lunch. Hey, who am I to begrudge them a nationwide nap time? I'm only jealous. And besides, that gave me the opportunity to walk over to the Winery, where I picked out a mid range 2004 red that I'll try later on... How did you use the extra time we got when Lorenza called in sick for our afternoon Italian class? You ... Ah. Yes. You bought alcohol. Yes, yes, I see. - Oh, No! It's not a surprise, no....)

Did I have a point? After that ridiculous parenthetical, it feels more and more like I really didn't have anything better to talk about then that heavenonearthinfrozenform - Profiterole Gelato....
I think I'll name my first child Profiterole....
- Oh, don't worry, I'll spell it Praughphitteroll, or something... It won't be weird.

...

Ah, yes.
Screwdrivers.
(They're in the title, aren't they? You didn't think that was just for shits and giggles, did you? I mean I know YOU did Jason, but there's a logic, I swear... You really don't give me enough credit.)
?

To deconstruct: I suppose the thing that was broken was me - after my second 2 hour movement class of the day, we were hurtin' for certain, and what better way to unwind before dinner then a nice hot shower and a mixed drink? Or three?
Here's my recipe for Screwdrivers:

2 - 4 slugs of Vodka
3 - 5 sloshes of OJ

serve luke warm in a coffee mug

So I put on a nice strapless dress and some pink glittery sneakers (I just love 'dressing' for dinner, don't you? It makes me feel so civilized, even in the most barbaric circumstances.), and stood at my window to talk to the adorable violinist who was passing below me in the last purples of the setting sun on his way to dinner.
After dinner we shaved Nellie's head.
Aaaaannnnd, then I watched The Fountain before bed.

This morning I didn't run.
GO ahead, judge me. I couldn't get out of bed.
(fuck you Grotowski. No, really, FUCK YOU. ...acrobatics of the soul my ass it's just fucking somersaults i hate somersaults and I don't want to rangle tiny chickens any longer...)
And then of course we were hopping around and tapping each other on the collar bone with our toes - BEST thing I've ever done in a movement class, easily, but a lot more down time than we would normally have.

- Have I mentioned that I think that we're wrong about the heart being the seat of love in the body? And why wouldn't I get into that now? ... Yeah. I think it's the collar bone. That's where I feel it. It gets you right on the collar bone. Broken heart? Pfff. Broken Collar Bone. -

... I need to do laundry.
Not that I'm going to get up and do it,
I'm just saying.

...
I better go now.
Quit while I'm ahead.

(2 days)

The Guinness Bar!

2007-09-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

Best bar in Arezzo!
And we went, with 2 Irishmen.
(after watching Boondock Saints with them)

Of course, one of them was drinking Coke Lights, but the other had a Guinness or 2 (really more for our sake, I think - he felt a certain obligation to the experience. - He even watched a bit of the old Football they had playing on a big screen.)

I had a Margarita.
It was not magical.
Their White Russians are much better.

Which is why I ordered one of those next.
It was sweet, actually, a friend of mine bought it for me, because he was buying a round for the birthday boy. First drink a guy has ever bought me, even if it was largely because they were trying to get the aforementioned celebrant to drink something and didn't want him to drink alone. But sweet all the same.

On a more exciting note, the bar tender remembered me, and even though I didn't get to talk to him (or, more accurately, bat my eyelashes, order a drink, and say "grazi" alot) he passed me while I was waiting to order at the bar and did a double-take right out of the cartoons. (I like the baaarrrtender...)

And on the way home, as we wound our way the long way around the city wall since the escalators close at 1am, I got to skip down the big hill with the birthday boy, Ben.
Don't laugh!
...it was fun.

You just wish it was you!

Well, it made me think that maybe that's how I want to ring in MY 21st.
Hurtling down a hill at top speed
holding someone's hand
not scared in the least...

And Ye Shall Find What Ye Seek In A Box of Turning Leaf

2007-09-24T11:42:00.000-07:00

My Mother is the BEST mother in the WHOLE WORLD.

(peanutbutterchocolatepeanutbutterchocolate)

((shoooooooeeeesss.....)

The Charleston Enoteca

2007-09-21T05:13:00.000-07:00

Oh,
'Tis a beautiful thing!

The Charleston Enoteca is THE place to get wine in Tuscany.
No, really. Wine Spectator says so.

((www.enotecacharleston.com))

We had 3 hours off yesterday afternoon, so a friend and I decided to walk down the the Charleston to check it out. This particular Enoteca, which is the Italian word for a wine shop, was recommended by our philosophy professor, and with good reason. A friendly looking (read well lit and well stocked) shop just outside of the walls of Arezzo, it's manned personally by Paolo and Stefano - the owner's son's, who were eager to help us once they divined that we were there to buy and had no idea what we were doing. (we decided to play the look around in confusion until someone comes over to help you game, which worked quite effectively) Paolo saw knew from the start that we didn't speak Italian, although, I countered when he asked, we do, "ma solo un piu".

What proceeded was a very interesting, is occaisionally over-enthusiastically jovial, lecture on Tuscan wines in a mixture of broken English and Italian (which I am really starting to understand). Here's the skinny as we had it from our new best friend Paolo:

The only real Tuscan wine is red wine.
They COULD make white wine.
They don't.

The good years are 2001 (the best of the bunch, a truly fantastic year here), 2004 (which will start to come into its own in a year or two since red wine should be aged for 5 - 10 years before you drink them), and 2006 (which you shouldn't be drinking yet, but which should be great). A 2003 isn't bad, he sad he didn't know about a 2005, but you should NEVER drink a 2002. Terrible year. Too hot, the wines aren't well balanced.

Now, of course, some grapes are more temperamental than others.

You want to drink a 2002 Super Tuscan? Yeah, alright, because the cabernet sauvignon and merlot grapes they use in these wines don't do as poorly when it's a bad year.
Now, anything which uses strictly the Sangiovese grape - like the Chianti Classico northern Italy is famous for - NIENTE. Never, he says. I trust Paolo.
(Paolo, by the way, does not like Barolos. He told us this about 8 times, because, he said, when we talked to our philosophy prefessor, if we couldn't remember whch brother we'd talked to, we could say, He doesn't like Barolos and Scott would say PAOLO! Of course, what I remember was Paolo's name, and not whether it was actually the Baolo he dislikes, or in fact the Brunella or Barbaresco.... It was one of the big "B" Tuscan wines, made from the Sangiovese grape... I'm sure he'll tell us again when we go back - this seemed to constitute an extremely funny joke.)

So, after he showed us several bottles (none of which were under 18 euros) I decided on a Super Tuscan called Cupinero - a small and relatively new vineyard, he says, with a 14.5 alcohol content and a purely Merlot grape base for 22 euro. Danny already knew that he wanted a Chianti Classico 2001, and Paolo recommended one (I'll put the name up here when I get it) with a smooth, well balanced flavor, and a mellow honey bouquet for 26 euro.

((God, it was good.))

I wanted to look at something frilly - a dessert wine or some champaign - and Danny wanted to get a bottle of Champaign for our wonderful junior administrator Dory's birthday, so Paolo gave us a quick run down on that.
Basically, Champaign here is only the stuff you get from the Champaign region of France (Andre was no where to be found), and is super expensive - like at least 80 euro. Sparkling wine, on the other hand, is the same thing, but produced in Italy, and you can find a good bottle for 22 (apparently), so we picked out a bottle of Castello Di Brolio, which is a big name here but, even though Paolo doesn't like the big farms, is still good and not too expensive.

Then we asked him if they had any cheese, because, surprisingly to me at least, formaggio is not easy to get here. He only had what they use in the store (which is also a cafe, it appears), and he said he couldn't sell it too us in less than a full wheel.
Well, I mean, Tuscany is known for their pecorino (sheep's cheese), and we were already into all of this...
So we bought a kilo of cheese for another 22 euro.
And that's how we spent 90 euros at the Charleston Enoteca for 2 bottles of wine and some cheese.

Although, Danny asked as we were checking out which cork screw was cheapest, and Stefano (the other brother) gave us each a Castello di Brolio corkscrew for free.

So that pretty much balances things out, right?

I mean, we'll totally be back.

And in the mean time, I'm full of pasta, desert wine, and I'm ready for a nice siesta before we go out for Chinese tonight.

D'Accordo?

A Note On Light: The Tuscan Country Side at Twilight

2007-09-16T05:48:00.000-07:00

A light pink top light (something with some blue in it), which would echo on the sides in something a little bit more saturated) and diffuse and dusky blue front light - maybe something like L199 Regal Blue and L701 Provence. (I don't have my swatch books, but the Lee site has a great feature called the Swatch Ball - check it out http://www.leefilters.com/lighting/products/colours/).

A slightly more golden pink for the key side light and maybe a very slightly greener blue as the fill side.
No back light, but less saturated versions of the side light for the upstage areas.
As the twilight deepens, the pink comes down and we add a highly saturated blue violet top.

Un Aqua, Per Piacere?

2007-09-16T05:12:00.000-07:00

Firenze was fun.

And by fun,
I mean we only spent about 4 hours there
and despite my best intentions
I was rather monstrously and nauseatingly hung over.

It's only an hour train ride, I'll go back some other time.

- Or, it's only an hour if you don't get over excited and get off at Frirenze Campo Marta instead of Firenze SMN (Santo Maria Novella). Not that we did that. That would be dumb.
...
Fortunately, you can just just back on the next train. If you sit in one of the back cars, it doesn't even appear that they check your ticket ever.

We didn't have a plan. Or a map.
We got off the train, started walking, and found a restaurant to refresh ourselves at. It was a decent place called Rstorante Pizzeria Lorenzo di Medici with menus complete with english subtitles, although the bathroom was occupied for some time by a woman who appeared to have been taking a bath in the bidet.
I had ravioli with truffle sauce.
And a 3 euro coke light in an uber chic can (everyone in Europe really is thinner, even the fucking diet coke cans),
And a slightly desicated bowl of tiramisu which had clearly been sitting out for a while, but was still pretty good.
Jasmine tried the Cantuccini e Vin Santos (biscotti you dip in Vin Santos), which didn't even want to think about ordering but tried anyway because felt that I needed, for the good of the blog, to be able to make some sort of report on it. I liked it, I think. Not too sweet, it would be nice to enjoy it after a good meal - and who doesn't like dunking their cookies in their drink? No one who can rightly be called a Shunk, that's for sure.

Then we browsed the open air market, where I bought postcards, and stumbled into a plazza with a strange statue a church I don't know the name of, and a group of our friends who had come earlier in the day.
This is when I decided to go home when I heard that some people were leaving on the 7:20 train.

What ensued was a brisk walk through tour of Florence, where I saw the Duomo (stunning, green) and a collection of streets and plazzas I remembered vaguely from my last trip to the city (I then realized that I had been to the very place I was standing 10 years before, which freaked me out - it's still strange to think of having done something or been somewhere a decade ago which I remember with more that that childish haze, although I did feel like the city was alot smaller than I remembered.) We ended up at the Ponte Vecchio at about sunset, which was beautiful, because all of the little jewelry shops were starting to turn the lights in their display cases on as the peachy sun sank lower, leaving pockets of shadow and window of glittering light. (the bathroom at the train station was cool too - we had to pay 70 cents, but it was all golden top light reflecting off of pink marble, and each of the open stalls was lit from above by a neon blue glow... totally worth it.)

The train ride back took a good hour and a half, since we stopped at every town in between, but the country side was beautiful, and the company was pleasant, and I was finally starting to get over my hangover.
Even the walk back through the city and up the hill was not too bad (as long as we weren't walking too fast my head wasn't throbbing), and Nellie and I decided to leave our bags by the side of the road and go up on the aqueduct to look at the stars before bed.

Unfortunately, as Nellie was explaining to me that we had to be quiet because f the people in the house nearby woke up they would call the police, a car pulls up and stops and a man gets our and says something booming in Italian. After a good two minutes of hiding made it clear that he was not going to leave, we got down and walked over in a confusion of "Me despiace" and "no capito, io non so".
Ah, but t seems my Italian lessons are paying off, because it only took a minute or two for me to understand that he had seen our unattended bags and been afraid that they were bombs, and once I caught on and answered that we were in fact "tutto qui", the only ones here, we were both so relieved to have been understood that he shook my hand and wished us a buon cera.

Not so bad, on the whole.
Me Piace

I Like The Baa-aaaarrrr-Tender!

2007-09-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

He made us drinks - (to drink) - We drunk 'um - (got drunk) -
And now I think
He thinks
I'm cooooooooo-oool...

Well, Friday night started out well enough....

Maybe I should go back a bit first.

We finished our first week of classes!
Yeay!

It was long.

I think I cried every day.
For any number of reasons.

At least some of them were artistic.

Thursday we had out first cabaret, and I performed with some friends, a piece about 'this life we've chosen' (theater majors in the house, Holla! - You know what I mean. And you can see how I might come out of it bruised if we were doing it right...), which left me considerably sore but generated some really interesting conversation (internal and external). And then dinner with the local white wine I bought at Eurospar. [a Pinot Bianco I can't remember the name of at the moment. It had an interesting flavor - savory almost. I suggested that it tasted a bit like chicken broth, but everyone thought that I was crazy. Very woody, I think, and not at all sweet, but I wouldn't call it dry either really... I have more in the bottle, I'll let you know]. And then two hours of "Tramonto", which translates literally as sunset, although a closer approximation in the English would be something like, "Community meeting that we ritualize in order to increase the chance of tears and the probability of spending all night deciding things like whether or not we should have to make increasingly more extravagant presents to our Secret Friends or walk around feeling like a bad person".

...

I didn't like Tramonto.

So by the time we finished classes on Friday afternoon, we all needed a little release.

it started well enough,
we went into the city around 6pm in jeans and heels to pick up some necessities from the Eurospar. (I bought a dessert wine that was on sale, a mid range Vin Santos to try, and a bottle of Sambuca I thought would be good with the Campari.) We met our movement teacher Brian there (because it's really not that big a city at all) and invited him out for Pizza. We went back to the place we'd eaten at before (No, I still can't remember the name) and I ordered a dark beer called St. Barnardus (for the name and the picture of a happy monk giving you a thumbs up on the blue label. It was 10% alcohol, and, as far as I'm concerned, fairly nondescript, but not bad at all. Similarly, I split a pizza with a friend that we thought sounded like the one we'd gotten last time, which ended up being one of the more traditional variety - meaning no sauce or cheese, just some very thin prosciutto, some fresh slices of tomato, and a bunch of arugala which gave the one the distinct impression that the crust had somehow escaped from the oven and was hiding in a pile of lawn clippings. It was called a Pizza Rustica incase that piqued your intestinal interest.
For all that, it was still great. And after the banana, stacchiatella, and nuttella e pan (best gelato flavor ever) gelato we got from "the good place", I felt fantastic.

Now if only I hadn't had such a strong desire to show off my lovely white halter top...

I did try. I mean, I didn't drink anything at the first bar we went to, but then we hit up the old martini bar, where it's just so pleasant to slip the bar tender a five and pick out something new to try from their posh square menus.

I had a Capirinha again, and Side Car:
Cognac, Cointreau, and lemon juice
Which was not bad, but not as good as the Paladar Havana Side car, which (correct me if I'm wrong) has Tommy Bahamas golden rum, tequila and Cointreau in it (delicious, by the way, I highly recommend it and will post the recipe if I can find it). It's better than a Lemon Drop (not having any vodka in it, and being less sugary since it uses subtly sweet alcohols and real fruit juice instead of sugar water and yellow food coloring. I don't like Vodka drinks, can you tell?)

and, of course, I couldn't let that half a Long Island Iced Tea go to waste - what kind of alcoholist would I be?

So then we decided to try out the local gay bar, Liquid (not Fluid, which for some reason is what I kept calling it) in our search for dance and a good time, but we got side tracked by a bunch of people we know sitting in the Guinness Pub.

That had to be my favorite stop of the evening.
For starters, cute bartender.

Now, I wouldn't have had anything here, but after sitting down at the table we'd noisily claimed by the front window, it became obvious that we were going to stay, and, after all, as I mentioned earlier,
Cute Bartender
So I walked up and ordered a White Russian:
(the official drink of The Dude in The Big Lebowski, this drink has popular appeal and a creamy sweetness to back it up. It's just Vodka (I know, I know, but I was already in my cups, as they say, and this was something I knew would be decent without being difficult to order) and Kaluha poured on the rocks, with a float of cream on top.
But as he was making it, he got out an extra shot glass and poured in something clear which I assumed was some variation on the recipe, but then he handed me the drink, sans shot, and when I gave him the cash for it, he brought over the extra drink and gave it to me. I asked if it was for me to drink and made the universal sign for downing a shot, which he returned with a smile, so I gladly accepted (what kind of guest would I be to turn down such hospitality in a foreign land) and found that a shot of Sambuca goes well a White Russian. Especially, when it's free.

I am so going back there.

We finally made it to Liquid, which turned out to be about the size and shape of a vassar single and a total bust, and I decided that, after some 7 hours of walking around the city in high heels and carrying a good 5 - 10 lbs. of liquor in my purse, it was time time to go home, which I did, to cap off the night in the Limo with some intense emotional conversation (Dory rocks).

If only I hadn't decided that it was only polite for me to drink the glass of wine that someone poured me before I had the chance to say that I was good...

Things You Might Send Me, If Your Love Was True...

2007-09-13T05:01:00.000-07:00

Ahh, yes.

It's time for a new column.
We'll call this one:

THINGS YOU MIGHT SEND ME IF YOUR LOVE WAS TRUE

Today's installment goes like this:

peanut butter
chocolate
a real pillow
some cute flat shoes
peanut butter
my Vassar hoodie
peanut butter
cookies ( - which might be good with some peanut butter...)

Feeding the Soul: Vin Santos and Bandoneón

2007-09-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

To say that it was a religious experience would really be overstating my first encounter with Vin Santo, the Tuscan dessert wine that was recommended to me when I asked about local drinks. It wasn't bad, though, and I could see enjoying a) something I might not have to bend down to take off the shelf (so to speak) or b) in the Tuscan tradition - cantucci e vin santo - which means with some hazelnut biscotti that you dip in the wine to soften it.
The glass that I had came from our friendly neighborhood winery, and so was Vin Santo San Fabiano, bottled personally by our friendly neighborhood Count. (okay, that's probably not true, but it makes for better reading, and there really is a count, apparently, although I haven't personally been inside yet. I've heard he wears a cape. I'll let you know...)
The wine, which is pressed from dried grapes, has the distinct flavor of dried apricots, and its color is something akin to the blush of aforesaid fruit. Not too sweet this one, and a hint of burnt toast that probably compliments those biscotti.

Now the bandoneón, on the other hand, was Moving.

We had a private concert from Helena Rüegg, acclaimed tango bandoneónista. The bandoneón is similar in appearance to the accordion and sounds (as it should) like a portable organ. It is, the soul of the tango. It made me want to get up and dance, fo' sho.

But you know what they say...

I mean,
It Takes Two To Tango.

(yeah, I went there)

((care to dance?))

So aside from some newly embedded bruises (our cabaret piece is going to rock), classes are going pretty well. It's been a long week - 8 hours of classes yesterday culminated in a "Creative Process" class which basically meant Let's All Cry A Lot; while we think about how shitty this life is and how many times you get knocked over and get back up.

afterwards we all needed a drink.

...or they did homework and I needed a drink whatever anyway...

JK, yo, JK.

But in case you're not L-ing O L yet, not to worry:
Because we all ended up in the hallway for our Runway Walk It Off Party.
That's right, I showed up at our movement teacher's door in high heels and a strapless dress to invite him to join.

Just trying to be neighborly.

Wine In A Juice Box

2007-09-10T04:44:00.000-07:00

For the kid in all of us!

Tavernello makes red (10.5%) and white (11%) juice boxes in packs of 3 for about 1 Euro.
They're, you know, not bad for boxed wine.

Funny thing though, when you wake up and do a half hour run up and down the Tuscan hills, and then you take a 2 hour walk through said hills, and then you trudge through the vineyards to the local park for an hour and a half soccer game with a couple of the local guys... it don't take much to get you crunk.

In fact, it only takes about 1 of the little Tavernello guys.

And then with another, say, 2 glasses of whatever they put out in a carafe with dinner, I was having more fun than I have in a while.

Good thing I went to bed early, because after my run this morning, we had our first day of movement class with Brian Burroughs (read foxy Irish movement teacher) who kicked out butts physically for 2 hours, and then Voice class with Kevin Crawford where we got our vocal butts kicked and ended with a stirring rendition of The Spirit of the wind will carry me home.

At lunch, I took second helpings of even the peas.
I didn't even like peas.
Until today.

Ah food comas...
And now we see the beauty of the siesta.

A Note On Light: Midday September Sun On An Olive Grove In Tuscany

2007-09-09T05:38:00.000-07:00

The light here is extremely bright and dry, but not hot. It's also a clean white that straddles the line between warm and cool - probably best represented by a very subtle lemony yellow tint - something with low saturation and a fairly high concentration of green (but then again, I'm partial to green...). Directionally, it's top heavy, with an even distribution that results from the light reflected off of the grey green olive leaves. I would ideally include an area to the side of the main acting areas where I could take out the front light and get some of the nice long, thick, navy/black shadows from the cypress trees no Tuscan set would be complete without.
Front light: lemon yellow and white
Top light: White
Side light: lemon and a very subtle gray-green

Campari

2007-09-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

I mean, I like it.

No one else did.

Campari - a distinctively red, Italian aperitif with over 60 secret ingredients, usually consumed with soda and an orange twist, although also an essential part of the Negroni.

As a bitters, Campari lives up to it's reputation. At first taste, a slightly floral sweetness is gone entirely once you swallow, replaced by a strong, bitter after taste. Both it's aroma and the first mellow sweetness have something of cut grass about them, but the whole experience is difficult to describe.

Campari is not for everyone. No one else who tried it liked it. They complained it tasted of gasoline.

But, I could see getting very used to this...

We'll have to see.
I'll keep you updated on my burgeoning affair with this exotic Italian.
I know you're just dying to know more.

Pizza and Beer - The Italian Way

2007-09-08T07:23:00.000-07:00

I mean, they do that shit right, yo.
You think pizza and beer, and you think Napoli's and maybe a Bud (don't get me wrong, I love Bud. No really, I actually drink Bud...). Well not here.
The pizzas were fresh - soft bubbly crusts, a little fresh mozzarella, this fantastic spicy grlled zucchini...
And the beers were Belgian. For anyone who's ever tasted Gulden Draak, that means something.

Now, not being a beer drinker, I picked the one that had a pink elephant on the label.
It was called Delirium Nocturnum.
The label on the back said "Strong Beer".
I suppose this would be reffering to it's 8.5% alcohol content.

Not bad over all. t was dark, with a smooth, tangy head of foam, bitter, dark chocolate after taste, and a bouquet that was reminiscent of a cheap red wine.

And again, not being a beer drinker, I'ma go ahead and make pretentious analyses of the beers my friends got, based on the single sip I had of each, okay? Okay.

Leffe Blonde
This strawberry blonde hails from the Abbey of Leffe, where presumably it's brewed by blind, arthritic monks as they practice their throat singing. (Presumably)
It has a light, floral taste that leaves with a lingering sense of the roasted hops.
The alcohol content was 6.6%

Riebedebie
Definitely the best of the bunch ( almost liked this one), Joya picked this out for the Hobo on the front who's wearing red socks and carrying his shoes as he walks away from a night of heavy drinking. I can only assume that this is in some way an allusion to the high 9% alcohol content (also maybe why I liked it so much...).
Another light beer, it was, but with the slightly cloudy cast to it that makes perfect sense when you taste the subtle (damn those monks are good) spices they've added to the light, peachy base.

*Just a side note, the descriptions of these beers come from notes I made with the help of the whole table between sessions of posed "candid" pictures with themes like "Soap Opera", "Christmas Morning", and "Wanton Strumpet". Check facebook for a complete listing, although they are still currently somewhere in the works.

After dinner, it was time to try what everyone really came over here for...
the Gelato.

I, after debating for several minutes at the counter, decided that I couldn't go worse than to pick the three weirdest flavors, and then at least would know. So I got a picolo cono with Fico, Marscapone, and Nutella i Pan. (Fico, for those of you who don't know, is fig). I mean, the nutella was great. Really. And the Fico was alright as a compliment. The marscapone... perhaps was too subtle a flavor for such a bold combination.
In any case, I learned that the good kind of gelato comes in silver tins, and that a girl in a short skirt and black pumps eating the gelato gets a lot of attention.

That should have been the perfect end to the evening, However, it was Jasmine's birthday, and everyone was going out, so I clickity-clacked back to our martini bar where I tried a Gin Fizz and the bartender asked where I was from and murmured something pleasant about Ohio he couldn't possibly have meant when I told him. And then, of course, people wanted to head off to Mr. Bloom's and the Communist bar (no really, I kid you not. You're supposed to be a party member to be able to get in, which apparently gets left by the wayside when it's crowded, but talk about sending off homeland security bells on the way home... "And what were you doing in Italy exactly? Ah, just step right over here for your cavity search please"...)
Thankfully, I came to my senses and went home once we got to the new bar.

A short 30 minutes later, we were back at the cantina, putting on pajamas so that we could head over to the Limonia* (our "24 hour student space" for a late night dish session before bed. I don't think I've laughed that unhesitatingly in a year.

*The Limonia would originally have been the family's Limoncello cellar. It's where we keep our alcohol - in the perfectly temperate WINE CELLAR that's provided for the students' convenience. Yeah, that's right. My program has a student wine cellar. What does yours have?

Caipirinhas and Cute Italians

2007-09-06T12:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, so both of those titular subjects should be singular.
- I've only been here for a day and a half.

I'm living in a fresco.

That's actually a poorly informed metaphor, since frescos generally include human subjects and are often religiously themed.

I'm living Under The Tuscan Sun. Life Is Beautiful.

heh.

I'm exhausted. Probably because we decided to go celebrate last night instead of sleeping.
After the 25 minute walk into town, we found a great martini bar with a hot young bar tender (who didn't seem to notice me aside from mixing me a deliciously strong Caipirinha) and an older bar tender (who kept winking at me as I stood in line). The place was at the very end of the road we chose randomly to wander down and had a posh, futuristic interior. Their fairly extensive menu of cocktails with familiar names and top shelf booze made me nervous with it's complete lack of prices (don't order alcohol without knowing what it costs, kids. P.L.D.), but everything was 5 Euros, which, despite a piteous exchange rate is pretty reasonable.
Then we moved to another bar where half of the group had broken off in search of beers and took over the clean well lighted space to make slightly (less) awkward small talk about assigned reading that no one had read (was I the only one who was excited?). I took a tequila shot there with my roommate - because what kick starts enforced intimacy like inebriation - which they charged us 3.50 for. I suspect that the Italians don't normally do shots, since the bar tender seemed to pull the requested figure out of thin air. - You could see it in the 'are these American college kids going to pay this, because they look like they'll be ignorant enough of the exchange rate and intent enough on intoxication to do just that' look he hid behind his 3 and a half fingers. (...think about it... how do I mean it?)
Fortunately, the walk, which is uphill (BOTH WAYS, conflabbit) is going to be deliciously sobering and slimming, especially in this unseasonably chilly weather. (perhaps the 14 sun dresses I packed were a bad idea)
Of course, it sobered me up just enough to sip some Chivas Regal and try to work into conversation the inappropriate personal facts which seem, to your intoxicated mind, like brag worthy fun facts. It's the impulse that's provoked every game of Never-Have-I-Ever I've ever played. ("Okay, OKAY! What's your favorite body part on a person of the opposite sex? - I mean, on the sex you're attracted to? - Wait, what's, is everyone normal? - I mean, straight? Do we have any... Okay, what's your favorite part of people - and who here do you think has the best... Want to smell me?")

This morning I went for a run, to burn off the rest of the hangover and check out the grounds. We're surrounded by olive groves and cedar trees, and situated about three quarters up a winding one lane road dotted with other Renaissance villas and ending, so I'm told, in a vineyard run by a Count. I am also told, that he does not wear a cape. Disappointing.
After that, we played orientation games which involved running into the center of the circle and shouting your name and increasingly personal facts, immediately after which, anyone about whom the fact was also true descended on you in a clapping, cheering mob of accord. I found the most difficult part to be thinking of answers to questions like "Why are you here?" that were reflective but not maudlin. I'll get there. ("Hi. I'm Allegra, and I want to, correct my crisis of faith...")

The food is great. Did that come out of no where? Sorry, I'm hungry.
Everything gets homemade for us by the mystical Riccardo. Today we had gnochi for pranzo and minestrone for cena (look, I'm practically fluent), but we were told that the wine they'd served us with dinner last night was a celebratory, first night kind of thing. Sigh. You can't have everything I suppose.

So, now that I've wasted sufficient time, I can go to bed without (hopefully) waking up at 4 am.

ciao bella

(god, I'm so fucking continental)

A Mai Tai, a Pain Killer, and a Bikini Martini walk into a bar...

2007-09-04T07:46:00.000-07:00

...and they each order a mojito.

It's not actually a joke.
It's the best and worst idea for a bon voyage party ever.

Here' what all the cool kids are drinking on a school night near you:

Don The Beachcomber's Mai Tai
(mummy's secret "we-don't-have-all-the-ingredients recipe)
1.5 oz dark rum (I recommend Cruzan Black Strap... Boy, do I ever recommend Cruzan Black strap...)
1 oz medium boded rum (like Mount Gay)
3/4 oz lime juice
1/2 oz triple sec (like Cointreau)
2 dashes Angostura Bitters
*1/4 oz falernum
**1 dash Pernod
mint leaves and pineapple garnish

* we used 1/4 oz almound extract + 3/4 oz vanilla vodka
** who has Pernod sitting around? Try something sweet like 1/2 oz peach schnapps + 1/2 oz Malibu, otherwse it's a bit of a bitter drink.

On the whole, these were pretty good. (well mixed, certainly) They have a very complex taste. I would be interested to try it with the Pernod, though, since we really departed from the recipe there, and I think I would have preferred pineapple juice (or pineapple rum) to the peach schnapps.

Allie's Kill It Dead Pain Killers

2 oz Cruzan Black Strap Rum (really, just drink the stuff straight, or with a little Rose's lime and some Grand Marnier - it has a super smooth dark molasses flavor)
1 oz Malibu
1.5 oz Fridays Pre-mixed Pina Colada Mix
garnish with Nutmeg (and don't skimp, this is the most important ingredient even though it's just a dash - that's where that mystical healing aroma comes from)
serve over ice

Considering I invented it, it was my favorite drink of the evening. The plastic coconut cups really capped off the Happy Hour portion of the night.

And then, of course, there was dinner at the Cheesecake Factory, where I tried the Bikini Martini - a drink that sounds like it should be disgusting, but is made up of Malibu, Cruzan Pineapple Rum, and pineapple juice. The Grenadine they poured in to give the thing a disgusting sunburned hue, I could have done without. And I had a sip of the Mojito my mother ordered, since the Cheesecake Factory Mojitos are the reason I started drinking the things. I don't know what their mix is, but if you're looking for a fantastic Mojito, this is the (albeit unlikely) place to get it.

Oh the plane ride is going to be fun tonight!

Pelee Island Ice Wine: Cabernet Franc

2007-09-03T08:20:00.000-07:00

So here's the deal -
I keep a personal journal,
I'll keep a journal of the work I do for the program this semester,
By the time I get to the bog that my father keeps suggesting I write, that makes the third time I've relayed the relatively tedious events of my life in print. That's not even counting all of the mental or vocal rehashing I've done that day, and it doesn't leave any room for private correspondence...
The solution? A themed blog centered on the different things I drink.

Ah! A journal about alcohol! Now you're playing Farnesworth's game!

No, I'm not an alcoholic -
I'm an alcohoIST.

This fall I'll be turning 21, and living in luscious Tuscana - home to fine food and finer wines. What better way to document my time there then by detailing all of the wonderful new (liquid) experiences life presents me with?

Now, to business.
In honor of my impending departure, we celebrated last night with one of the ice wines that have been sitting in our refrigerator for the past several months. The label suggests the sweet rose colored wine will have strong hints of cassis and an after-taste of strawberry jam. What can I say - I like sweet wines. Renowned for their sweetness, which comes from pressing the grapes once they're frozen so that only the ripest grapes will release their juices, this was a particularly fine bottle. Not overly sweet - it actually did deliver on the sugary tartness of strawberries, with just a hint of crystalized sugar and, of course, the lovely flavor of ripe grapes. Excellent with dark chocolate.

Not impressed with my blog so far? Hey, you actually came to the site and read it! Not something I would have done. Don't worry, I suspect the posts will become more interesting once I actually ship off to the continent. And hey - that's tomorrow. Leave me comments, email me, There's nothing like a full inbox in the morning.

ciao