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Lets get ready for some football

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I don’t actually have anything to write about football. Truth be told, behemoths crashing into each other hold little allure.

I do think the possibility of repeatedly getting you’re bell rung, as the cliche goes, might be creating a whole lot of murderous crazy. How is it not the days of Roman bread and circuses?

Still and all, I will probably cook up some chili. It may be a protein laden pot sans legumes of any kind as the man in my life has been getting in touch with his caveman forebears, at least dietetically.

Tomorrow, we will be Romans. We will be Neanderthals. We will be observers. We will be sports fans. We will be Americans.

Cooking time

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Here’s something I’m disproportionately proud of to start the week: I made some seriously kickass chicken soup.

M., the man with whom I cohabit, did something he ain’t never done before since I’ve known him. He packed a lunch for work with said kickass soup. Then he shared with his co-workers, who are now seeking a recipe, so I’ll do the best I can to write it all out.

It’s recipe time boys and girls!

First, days before you make the soup, whip up this recipe from Farm Fresh to You.

Butternut Squash & Swiss Chard Hash
Ingredients
• olive oil
• 1/2 large onion, thinly sliced
• 1 jalapeno, finely chopped
• 1 small, yellow bell pepper, chopped in 1/2-inch pieces
• 1/2 tsp cumin
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• 1 cup butternut squash, cut into 1-inch cubes and roasted
• 1 cup shredded swiss chard, kale or spinach
• salt & pepper
• 2 eggs poached, fried or soft-boiled. Runny yolk recommended.

Instructions
1. To roast butternut squash: Heat oven to 400 degrees F and place cubes on an oiled baking tray. Bake for 20-30 minutes until tender and slightly golden.

2. Heat olive oil in a large skillet over a medium high heat. Add onion and cook, stirring for about 5 minutes until soft. Add jalapeño, yellow pepper, cumin and paprika and cook for another 2 minutes. Stir in Swiss chard and cook for 2 minutes until wilted. Add roasted squash and cook for another minute. Remove from heat.

3. Season with salt and pepper and serve warm with a poached egg on top.
Serves 2
http://voraciousvander.com
Serves: 2

Oh, but don’t do the egg bit. Just use the veggies as a side dish, sans eggy-wegg. Have leftovers.

Cook up a seriously tasty chicken dinner the next night. Maybe use one of Trader Joe’s pretty tasty “Organic brined chickens.” I roasted that puppy up on a bed of leeks with a few slices of red pepper also thrown into the pan.

Eat the chicken. Save the ravaged corpse.

When the weekend comes along, time to boil up your bones and make a broth.

Here’s the tricky part — First, juice a whole bunch of tangerines, while your loved one watches. Let him leave the house to go for a run.

While he’s out, switch out the tangerines from the juicer, clean up the citrus and switch on over to carrots. When you make carrot juice, you end up with a bucket full of ground up carrot bits. All of the juicing guides tell you, you can make stuff with a bucket full of ground up carrot bits. For example, you can make broth.

So, there you are, a chicken carcass, a bucket full of ground up carrot bits, water and a big pot. Boil that shit. Boil it some more. Let hours pass. Throw in some laundry. Not in the soup, in the washer machine. Do your core exercises, while the pot simmers. Maybe a little knitting, while the pot simmers. Update your craptacular blog, and you guessed, the pot simmers.

You’ll end up hours later with a murky orange goop of soupy base goodness. Time to let it cool, strain it into a bowl and recover any meat that ended up at the bottom of the pot. Throw that into the bowl with the lovely, strained chicken broth.

Slap it in the fridge and go out to eat. Drink wine. Carpe the old diem.

The next day, throw the broth back in a big pot. Put the pan, and a bit more water on the fire getting it back up to a toasty simmer.

Rummage around the refrigerator, and pull out the leftover squash and chard hash from the recipe above. Dump the leftovers into the pot.

Wash and chop up some carrots (the other ones in the pack that you didn’t get around to juicing), and throw the carrot slices into the pot.

Check the crisper in the refrigerator, and discover a bunch of neglected spinach. Clean that up, throw out the leaves of no return, chop or rip it up, and throw that into the pot.

Throw out the beets behind the spinach. They’re wilted and soft anyway, and only in Moscow do you want beets in your soup. This is California, not the Soviet Union. Bad beets. Bye bye beets.

Sit on the couch and let that stuff chill on simmer. OK, not chill exactly. Relax on simmer.

When you finish your core exercises, go back to the pot and grind in a serious helping of fresh pepper. Look around for what other soupy type spices you might have. Hmmm, just in case, throw in a chicken bouillon cube and a bit more water.

Discover the unopened spice mix you got as a Christmas present and check the label. If it says something like “celery salt, garlic salt, pepper and sea salt mixed,” throw some of that junk in. Toss in a little dried rosemary. The old parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Although, probably not the sage.

Back to the fridge — take out the giant jar of minced garlic in oil, and throw a metric shit ton into the pot. Or at least two heaping tablespoon’s worth.

Let that boil a long while longer. Throw in more water if it starts getting low, and check the carrots. If eyes are the windows on the soul, carrots are the windows on your soup’s doneness. Soft carrots equal done soup.

While this all is boiling, fight off the local critics and naysayers who question your simmer. Simmer is good.

Finally, when you’re hungry, declare the soup is done and force all in the house to eat. Or else.

Oh, and it doesn’t hurt to throw in some breast meat from a brand new chicken just to give it some more meat.

Enjoy.

Maybe it’s because another birthday is a-coming

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I thought I had a thought about something to write about here. The jump was a Facebook status I saw with a quote that boiled down to whether you could call yourself an artist.

I usually don’t. Sometimes I do. It’s usually when I am melodramatically claiming insights and wisdom and sensitivities I don’t actually possess. Recently, I did gesticulate and gesture broadly while declaring “Fuck them all, I’m an artist,” to a work friend (he is beleaguered as I am by those people who cannot discern wit and sarcasm from assholic behavior).

Generally, I’m more unsure. Although, as M. will shout at me, ridiculously so. If I don’t trust my words or my way with words, why the fuck should anyone else?

It’s a baby step that I now tell people that I’m a “writer” (yup, note the quotes and do the little airy double-fingered gesture) or admit to blogging or working on a book, now with M.’s sage advice an admitted collection of essays. Essays I can manage; a book creates a dry heave kind of thing in my brain. Hmm, not a great visual that – a retching head.

It’s important, I think, that you have to at some point say “fuck it, I’m in the club.” I’m tired of waiting for permission to decide what I am.

I never or rarely call myself a stand up comedian. I say (admit) I’ve done stand up comedy (and suppose I might again).

At night in dim clubs and bars, there was a mostly unspoken hierarchy, and there was a definitely bitched about gripe of who got to call themselves a comic. I think I took the atmosphere too much to heart, too personally, and I couldn’t bring myself to compare my meager offerings to people who made money and gigged madly and got auditions.

In retrospect, I wish I had brassier balls to front myself as belonging, even if I didn’t feel it inside. After all, I drank beers (and retro-shamefacedly even slept) with clowns who cashed checks built literally on fart jokes. Fart, fucking, jokes.

(Cue the smoke and vaselined lens with swirling colors, I feel a nostalgic memory coming on….

Back in old Boston, there’s a dingy room in a basement of what was once a bank. The tiny tables behind the stage, where comedians impatiently wait there turn, is adjacent to the black, iron wall of the bank’s vault.

I chatted and fiddled with my list of jokes in front of me and nursed a beer. A guy who at the time got paying gigs and took a shine to me, leaned over me to whisper sweet nothings of advice, and no doubt peer from above my head at the fun bags in my blouse.

He explained that I was too smart, and audiences don’t like that. My success, it would seem, would best be served by following his lead. He suggested I stand up from where I was sitting and watch his carefully calibrated performance unfurl.

Woman that I am, because I do sadly believe woman are a bazillion times more likely to politely follow these kind of orders, I got up to watch.

No lie, it was painful. Scampering and dancing on stage and a solid gold bit that if my dim mind remembers culminated in the comic gold of not being able to tell if the farts were coming from his dog or his grandmother sleeping on the couch. GOLD!

People do laugh at that shit, I’ll give him that. Although, sometimes it’s the uneasy laugh of watching someone fall spectacularly or the cruel laugh at the handicapped or maybe the giggle from watch monkeys flinging poo at the zoo. So, indeed the room had laughter in it.

A couple of people later, it was my turn. He returned the favor to study my set and give me notes.

It was one of those nights I only sort of remember. My best moments on stage are the ones where like a trained athlete it’s all muscle memory, mechanics and flow. Everything rolls out instinctively, not held up by my conscious (and self-concious) thought of what’s next.

I ripped it. The audience was listening and laughing exactly where I planned. They were silent on my words that would lead to revelation and release. But, in my game, in that ultimate zone, I don’t remember the details.

Admittedly, those nights were rare for me. I could measure my success by the astonished smiles and back pats from my friends and acquaintances back stage.

In a comedy club, a cold handshake with no eye contact tells you your fellow comics are embarrassed for you. In contrast, there’s a warm spread of people reaching out to touch you, pat you, congratulate you, smile when you’ve just nailed it in the end zone.

My would be suitor, smiled and offered the perfunctory hand shake and “good set.” He didn’t try to sleep with me again after that night.)

Those moments are the ones that make me want to sell myself harder. I only wish it didn’t take negative stimuli for me to feel the need to conquer.

There’s a bit more in my head. Stuff about what happens into the next decade, now that I’m about 10 years deep in M.’s and my relationship, just shy of that many years into my California dream, and looking down the barrel to 49, knowing it was 38/39 when it all last shifted seismically. And, as they say on Madison Ave. and Cupertino, wait there’s more.

But, for now, I’ll have to consider a part 2.

Hanging in the gym

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The more things change, the more time passes, the more decrepit I get, nothing really changes. In today’s episode of stasis, I’m in a gym.
The air is redolent with sweat and dust. Sneakers squeak and whistle rubbing against the hardwood floor. Grunts echo from above and below in that cave of acoustics where people go to ooze electrolytes and heat from their pores.

Instructors are speaking sounds that enter my earhole and worm their way into my gray matter, translate into meaningful words that describe actions my body cannot mirror. My whole life it has amazed me that some people can listen to a description of physical action and then carry out said action. I am not one of those people.

It’s continually confounding. I hear the words, I understand the thoughts, but my muscles do not obey. In my head, I am a swan. In my body, I am a penguin on dry land.

I’m actually in the main room of the Muy Thai Academy of San Jose. Pretty much any being on the planet, even those that wiggle and squirm with nary a brain cell in their body, anyone that has ever met me knows that I couldn’t be possibly be here by my own design. Nope, gyms and I, fighting and I, athletics and I are strangers.

But I sleep with someone who seems to love all three. And, so here I am.

It’s probably some kind of cosmic twist of fate, karmic payback that I ended up with a guy who loves the gym and is able to move his muscles in line with his desired goals. I imagine the gods are laughing at me. Probably, it’s from that day that I spotted my bespectacled, rail thin English teacher wandering the single hallway of my high school’s gym building. “Ms. Ford,” I yelled after her, “Are you slumming it?”

My sweat-clothed nemesis, Ms. Ciesla, overheard me. Later during the mandatory instruction I loathed the most, perhaps during a detestable field hockey game as I slowly followed a white ball with a wooden stick, she pounced.

“D-Rob,” or any number of various nicknames and butchery of my hard to pronounce last name, “DId I hear you right, D-Rob? Slumming it? Is that what I heard you say? Slumming it? Do you think I work here in a slum? It’s a slum to you? Really, is that what you said?”

It was a rhetorical onslaught not meant to be answered. However, I think I did grunt out a “Yeah.” I think I may have implicated my English teacher and said she would understand.

It was a longer year than usual that year in gym class. It was the year Ms. Ciesla made me play forward in field hockey, scoring zero points to my name and making new enemies on the battlefield. It was the year she made me repeatedly try again and again and again to fling my lower body over a waist-high leather horse. A vaulter I am not, and my stomach purpled by hitting the leather and padded wood full-force in desperate flings vainly trying to will myself to flight attested to the truth. I think it was the year that a tiny little girl spotted me into a handstand that dropped straight to the floor knocking the air from my lungs and ending the class early.

It was the year I embraced myself and my bitter reality of limitations. Mortality and limits crept into my childhood soul.

The not so great pretender

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The above depiction is my little foot ensconced in the finest of paraffin wax. From the ankle down, I occasionally look as pampered and fine as any lady in the court. Above the ankle, I am’s who I am, which is more Popeye than Lucretia Borgia.

In the passing of age, and in the passing of various and sundry jobs to pay the bills, I now find myself side by side with the hoi polloi. For reals, I don’t just work for the one percent, I work among them. People who pay people with calluses to remove their calluses.

I swirl glasses full of fine wine and make decisions on morsels and settle expense accounts. The thing about experiencing luxury on someone else’s dime is that it starts to make sense to set aside a couple of centimes to buy your own comfort.

And, so we do.

Yet, I am’s who I am. And, as I took an apple and a honey stick from a very nice spa that dipped my feet into the above-depicted wax, and I drank their proffered champagne, tea and infused water, I considered survival.

So, here’re some tips for fine living on a shoestring budget, especially if you ever find yourself maybe getting a room on an expense account but otherwise needing to pay for food and survival and whatnot.

First rule of the one percent: Turns out their lives are cushier than ours. They get 800 count sheets, pristine logs in their fireplaces, real honey and a lot more snacks. A lot more snacks.

Corollary rule to live like the one percent: Take your share, everyone else is. Also, take another share. Live as they do. More is more. The rich don’t want, because they take what they need (and maybe a wee bit more).

(And, you know what? They get more. Wee little shampoo bottles are bigger the better the hotel. Bars of soap approach full size, not the bare little wafers lost in skin folds at the lesser establishments. Two-ply to clean your unmentionable crevices not industrial strength sand paper in single ply is how the other half lives.)

At hotels I can afford on my own, there is occasionally a card table set up with a carafe of lukewarm coffee, non-dairy creamer in powdered form, and maybe, just maybe, a box of doughnuts purchased, you hope, that same day.

At fine hotels, there is usually coffee you can brew in your room and coffee service, freshly brewed and monitored frequently, in the lobby. Better yet, fresh fruit is often freshly placed daily in a sparkling bowl somewhere for the guests’ enjoyment. Sometimes there is fresh fruit lovingly place on every single damn floor. Pass by, take an apple. Pass by, take a tangerine. Pass by, take another apple. Go to another floor, see what they’ve got.

You could wake up to gratis arabica beans, but you can live a day on free fruit with no gout to speak of.

Similarly, fine hotels dole out water, like it’s water. When you see a tureen, crock or glass dispenser of cool, cool H2O, often infused with fabulous fruits, juices and petals, grab a cup and drink long and deep. Hydration is easy in four-star hotels. No need for feeding a wrinkly dollar bill into a humming vending machine next to the ice machine.

Second rule of the one percent and of access to water: Fine hotels are an oasis, even if you don’t have a room. The key is acting like you belong.

Clean toilets off the lobby with real towels! Cold and dirty from a harsh walk in the grimy streets of a major city? Listen for the whistle of a uniformed doorman, pass through the doors and the cleanliness that is next to godliness awaits you as the mean streets recede into hushed tones of opulence.

I still own a hand towel I stole one cold winter night, drunk and seeking refuge at the lovely Charles Hotel in Harvard Square.

More snacks — head to hotel bars at nice places. When the well-off drink, even if it’s the same bottled beer or glass of modest wine as schmoes like me imbibe, the bartender passes snacks. In the olden days, a lot of bars were generous with salty treats, but now snacks are left for the elite. I’ve had prosaic Goldfish and gilded, gourmet Chex mix and the humble peanut.

And, then there’s wifi for them that is bold enough to ask. I’ve yet to have a front desk turn me down when I’ve asked for the password, even as I was nursing a glass of wine at the bar not planning on spending the night.

And, thus, in that last little bit is my ultimate survival tip — Even with the rattle of coin in my pocket, I will remain more like the peoples behind the desk than the ones in front of them. They are my people, my allies, my friends.

Event planning has reminded and taught and refined for me to always be nice, fair and generous to the staff anywhere and any time. Your brother, your friend in arms, your contact to the perks the wealthy demand.

Back about a thousand years ago, I scooped ice cream for my job, when a small cone cost a mere 63 cents. (Total tangent, I still remember the price scale of small and medium cones — 63 and 79 cents respectively. Ice cream sodas with a single scoop were $1.19.)

Some of the clientele were demanding, entitled and willing to push a full-court press to get their penny’s worth of frozen sugar and cream. They got no more than exactly the training manual allotment of cream into their cone and a quick swish in the dish of what Bostonians call jimmies with an extra shake to make sure not too many sprinkles clung.

Manners and attitude, a friendly smile or the humility of a hand digging deep to count out the change penny by penny got you a heaping helping. The small cone teetered into 75 cents worth of ice cream, and the medium might require a cup to handle the excess weight.

The same philosophy holds in the upper echelons. The masters of the universe, they need people like us, and people like us help each other out.

Go ahead, put on your nice shoes and your company manners and mingle in the corridors of the well-to-do. They have snacks.

(By the way, all of the above is part of my ultimate retirement plan. You’ll catch me in a pressed suit, skipping from fine establishment to another with high-end retail adding extra spice and cookies to my day.)

Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

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Ah the holidays. It doesn’t matter the decade, the age or the location, but I get that bluesy feeling that’s best summed up by The Animals or Nina Simone.

But oh, I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Of course, it’s all self-inflicted anxiety. One year maybe I’ll just not give two shits about whether the gifts I get are well-matched and well-received. Maybe I’ll just receive all gifts at face value and not morn the lack of connection.

(Truth be told, that’s one minor complaint at the end. There’s only one thing I received that I thought, “Really?” since it seemed so cookie cutter and impersonal.)

This year, though, was a new chapter. M. and I celebrated at home and hosted. California menu, no snow, fresh produce, avoiding travel all pluses all around.

I have to admit, I have more fun with M.’s family and Chinese New Year. Although, he points out that could be because many don’t speak English, the only language I do. I guess being misunderstood ain’t so bad, if it’s done in Chinese.

It’s all relative

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If I had anything like a soul, I might put fingers to keyboard and write a list of all the things for which I should be grateful. It’s the day before Thanksgiving after all.

But, soulless I remain, so instead I will write about people in sufficient generalities to not attract specific ire.

First, my absolutely first world, privileged, fat, dumb and happy problems. Here I sit in the soft bath of sunlight streaming through a skylight in a state of the art, certified green and excessively comfortable office building. Free Wi-Fi. Free Diet Coke. And, in fact, a free, whole, family-sized pumpkin pie beside me.

Yet, I do not feel free. I have to wait for a ride.

So, my inner whiner is thinking “Oh, poor, pitiful, me. However, shall I survive in a luxurious office, closed now for the holiday, waiting to be transported home?” Moreover, I’m not sure how I can carry my holiday groceries and my free pie to the car, once my ride does come.

It’s a thought that someone who not only saw these images in real life but took the pictures while looking at them with my own eyeballs shouldn’t actually think.

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Ultimately, I will have my soft, white flanks seated upon the rich, puffed fabric of my relatively new car. I will envision if tomorrow’s dinner should have a wee panache of gourmet or just old-school holiday cooking.

If waiting for a ride is the worst of my life, I guess I do have reason to be grateful. (Not to mention, when I see the cliffs and the ocean of our chosen town, I will forget when I lived close enough to work to bike it.)

All of the above is not what I am writing about. Well, it is. I just did. Only it was an accident.

Instead, I’m writing about sweet, sweet irony and confusion of this life. The relativity that gives this post it’s title, and my theory of relativity is what makes the world go around and around. I suppose Einstein thought the same thing about his.

Every day in my universe, I have to interact with a person who makes me kind of crazy. It’s the special kind of crazy that hits that never grew up from junior high, don’t want to get picked on any more, why is life so hard adolescent scab that never quite healed.

Her gift is one of narrow vision. She’s one of those lucky people who go through life with myopia thinking their field of vision is the ultimate truth. For example, she has her own calculus for all things normal. My in-box, often filled with receipts and other non-paperclipped, letter-sized documents is NOT normal. My clothes elicit a mix of good-natured joshing with full-on criticism and laughter.

Among her offhanded remarks that hit the sullen teenage corner of my lizard brain are consistent and fairly frequent criticisms of all things on the internet but most especially any creation of content. The reader might note — these words are on the web, and I created the content.

Facebook — Silly. (Oh, and even better, Facebook causes divorce. I bet they said that about telephones when they were invented.) ‘Blogs — doesn’t read, nothing there. (I guess in any of them?) Self revelation of any kind in public — self-serving or worse mentally unstable. Smart phones — waste of money. Twitter — unknown. Comments on websites — Stupid. (OK, I might give her that one.)

Maybe I just get cranky, because she also has a lot to say about my Diet Coke and candy fixes. Probably a chemical reaction from my reliance on the richness of preservatives in my diet.

Early on up there, before I started complaining, I mentioned the irony. The irony is that today I heard about the person in her life who criticizes what she does and her choices. I’d give the examples, but, hey now, I’m avoiding the specific.

Probably worth saying my disclaimer — for the purposes of drama I made up all the shit above, not just how the words are strung together but what they are meant to mean.

So, here’s what I learned. Even the most critical people, the ones that go around opining on the right and wrong of life’s minutia. The puritans who pee on your candy and Diet Coke parade. The ones who cannot not share the negative comments and thoughts that leap into their brains. Even those folks suffer criticism.

Maybe, just maybe, the secret will be if we could all stop tell other people what to do. Of course, as I write that I am telling each and everyone one whose tired and wary eyes may fall upon this page what the fuck to do — Let it go. Stop judging and criticizing and offering stuff up to the universe that doesn’t construct anything.

Except for the extreme right wing. As far as I’m concerned, there’s always open season on those morons.

I suppose it could be an allegory

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20121119-235805.jpgHours by the sea. The surf pounding in giant cascades of pure energy. Seals frolicking. A woman, a pole, a snare, some squid and the certainty that crabs just want a free lunch.

Smarter than a lowly crustacean I may be, but they knew to avoid my trap. Well, except for one poor lady crab, bursting with eggs. She, my only victim, caught and released to ensure those eggs get their own fighting chance.

Goddamnit. I just wanted a crab dinner.

If I were Hemingway, the adventure would be ripe with meaning. The failure would speak of the human condition. The agony of hours wasted would chronicle the holes in one life.

Me, I got nothing. And, I didn’t get a crab dinner.

In this week’s episode

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There’s a line in the movie “Auntie Mame” that always resonated with me. If I remember correctly, it’s “Life’s a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

I was obsessing about that line for the better part of the week after my Spanish lesson.

First, probably makes sense to explain the Spanish lesson part. I work in a place that among its benefits is some dough to pay for edumacation. Like many a place, on account of the IRS not minding, I’m offered for them to pay for me to get me get my learn on. Only thing is, you can’t just learn anything, so I opted away from belly dancing (IRS no likes) and into language (everybody likes lingual ed, right?).

Besides, they say that old people learning shite like languages helps to ward off the old dementia. We’ll see.

So I take one-on-one conversational Spanish. Miguel comes by and for an hour and a half listens to me butcher his native tongue while awkwardly trying to utter something akin to a coherent sentence. Mostly I fumble around for adjectives, destroy verb tenses and using what feeble few words I know to describe something kind of like, but not really, communicating.

Miguel. Él es muy paciente. Soy un tonto, pero lo intento.

Believe it or not, I actually learned the word “tonto” on Wednesday. It’s not “friendly Indian guide,” like the Lone Ranger might think. It’s idiot or fool.

I was trying to explain to Miguel, again with my infinitesimal Spanish vocabulary, what it meant to be kooky or quirky. We whipped out our phones and language apps and tried to figure out the equivalent expression. We failed. But, I did learn that the Three Stooges are the “Los Tres Chiflados.”

In this week’s episode of my Spanish class, I tried to tell Miguel about our fiesta de el psíquico, where Felix the psychic medium came to our house and gave readings to our friends for a modest fee.

We chatted about talking with the spirit world and psychics. I learned that Miguel believes los muertos no hablan. I gotta agree. I don’t really know whether the dearly departed are up for chats while we drink red wine and/or tea. Wouldn’t once you are dead you would kind of figure, hey, no more mundane chit chat for me?

I learned that Miguel believes in demons, and it could be they, the bad’uns that Felix is actually chatting up. It’s a mysterious thing this existence and life and death and all.

But, I also learned that Miguel kind of thinks I’m nuts. Or maybe he admires me. Nah, probably thinks I’m nuts, which brings me back to Auntie Mame, and the banquet and starving.

In the movie, and in the musicals too — by the way, it’s a toss up between Angela Lansbury and Rosalind Russell as better Mames, sorry Lucy, I love you, but not the same league — Mame is an eccentric “free spirit.” It ain’t always pretty, there are bankruptcies and pregnancies and pissing off people, but she has fun.

I think Miguel thinks I’m like Mame, only I’m almost certain it probably wasn’t a big cultural touchstone in his native Ecuador. So, he doesn’t know that he thinks I’m like Mame.

Maybe I am.

We chatted some more in a mix of Spanish and a little bit of English to get a point across, and he tells me that every lesson he is surprised what I’ve been doing. In his words (and gestures), most people do kind of the same thing all of the time or maybe stick to a few things. For me, and for M., though, the cluster of activities seems to be a bit wider than most.

His example: this week I told him about la fiesta de el psíquico and awhile back it was how both M. and I became ministers in order to marry our friends. And, there is my renewed vigor, as a new season is upon us, for crabbing. And, writing. And, comedy. And, then there is the actual real job.

I gather my list is eclectic.

Of course, old Miguel is one to hablar. He’s a Spanish tutor. But, he’s really a math teacher. His math students are reformed parolees. He also spends some free time writing short stories. Incredibly short, I think he keeps them to 100 words. He read me one and made me try to sort out the meaning as a Spanish lesson. It was about a crab (see above interests).

But, I wonder, why not spend weekends on adventures? Why not try everything? Why shuffle alone in the expected course?

In my head, life’s a reality TV show, and I want to see what’s going coming up in next week’s episode. I want to make sure the team of writers that live in M.’s and my heads comes up with interesting new adventures. I want to order a la carte so I can try a little of this and a little of that and then get seconds on what I like.

How else will I ever find anything I like, if I don’t try everything else?

On a side, definitely tangential but possibly relevant, note, I think this philosophy drives a constant source of amusement in my life, and in M.’s. Apparently, we don’t act our age. To a lot of people that’s admirable, to quite a few it’s puzzling, and to still more it’s evidence we are childish or some how naughty. Near as I can tell, pushing 50 is meant to be a rather serious affair, somewhere between an IRS audit and a trip to the morgue.

I very much risk dying a dilettante. But, by all that is holy, I’d rather have grabbed a plate for the banquet then gone hungry.