Buy a funny red jacket, get a panda absolutely free!*
*Shoes not included.
The story here.
On aging… 01/19/2010
“You should do it. You should just go for it, Liz.”
At 19, a friend of mine might say this about taking one more tequila shot, or maybe about going after the dark and vaguely brooding but probably brilliant artist guy playing pool at the local dive bar. The one who seemed like he’d care about important social issues and occasionally sing karaoke sort of ironically but mostly for fun.
Recently, my friend Shira applied the same phrase as I debated whether I should purchase the standard sized bottle of Listerine or the extra large.
Um, way to go with the auto ad placement, CNN 01/14/2010
Geez.
There’s a pretty good list of ways to contribute to emergency aid in Haiti here. I’m also a big fan of Doctors Without Borders… you can support their efforts in Haiti here. If you’ve lost your credit or debit card, fear not! You can also donate $10.00 automatically to the American Red Cross by texting “HAITI” to 90999. Then you’ll have plenty of time to find that plastic and avoid identity theft!
I made dinner tonight! 01/04/2010
Tonight I made a pretty delicious pasta dish from (almost) scratch! In addition to keeping my New Year’s resolutions of reading, writing and flossing every day, I have only eaten out once this year, so we’re going strong. My friend, Hibben, was visiting from out of town, so I took her to try out The Burger Joint. I’m pretty sure it’s against the law to not take an out-of-towner to Le Parker Meridien’s hidden cheeseburger paradise, and since I respect the law and Jimmy Buffett, I refuse to view this one resolution hiccup as a real transgression.
In any event, tonight I made some killer pasta. I will immediately go on record and admit that I love gnocchi, tomatoes, prosciutto and cream. Well… this dish has all of that, plus tender love and care. The original recipe calls for tortellini and peas, but I’m not a savage and I don’t like vegetables, so I replace the tortellini with mushroom gnocchi and toss the peas out altogether. Rebel, kids, you’ll enjoy life more. But take vitamins too, that way you don’t have to feel guilty about your rebellion. You will also probably avoid scurvy.
To start, you sauté some garlic and 2 oz. of prosciutto for a minute or two at medium-high heat. Word to the wise: buy more prosciutto than that because you will inevitably eat half of whatever you brought home within 5 minutes of walking through your door.
Add 2/3 c. of canned crushed tomatoes and simmer on medium for 10 minutes or so. It’ll look like this!
After that, you add a 1/2 c. of heavy cream, turn the heat up to high, and let the cream reduce as you mix it together with the tomato/prosciutto deliciousness. It should take about 2 minutes, give or take.
Season with salt and pepper, and voilà! You’re a cook! I love baking, but cooking my own dinner always makes me feel inordinately good about myself. Baking is a fun treat, but cooking dinner has a great “you’re a real adult now” vibe to it. It also offers that wonderful “hey, I made something!” moment. Those are my favorite moments. They’re why I do comedy and they’re why I write. You take lots of random stuff that ultimately expresses who you are, and you shove it through a process in hopes that what comes out at the end won’t suck. With comedy and writing, that’s not a given (see: my next-to-most-recent improv performance; see also: this blog post). It’s not really a given in cooking either, I suppose, but I’m a pretty easy-to-please eater and don’t really ever intend to ‘study’ cooking closely enough that I will start to notice the mistakes I’m making as an amateur chef. So here’s to hobbies that we don’t explore too far and can bring us a little bit of humdrum happiness.
Also, I’ve been busy getting materials together for a grad school application I’m working on and will submit tomorrow… more interesting writings to come! I hope!
Obligatory New Year’s Post 01/01/2010
Welcome to twenty-ten, kids. Welcome further to the requisite first-day-of-the-year post. I made it back to New York from Georgia yesterday right in time for New Year’s Eve, the first one I’ve spent here despite being a resident for four whole years. It seemed appropriate to try it out once before leaving in a few months, and it was a pretty fun time. Way to go, NYC/comedians/booze/malfunctioning-but-well-intentioned Star Wars countdown clocks!
I’ve heard people who write down their New Year’s resolutions are more likely to actually keep them. Since I’m a sucker for peer pressure, I’m also thinking that writing mine down in a public space will especially encourage stick-to-it-tiveness. So, without further ado, my resolutions:
1) Write something every day (Oh, look! A blog post about New Year’s resolutions!)
2) Read at least one chapter of an actual book per day (gReader unfortunately will not count.)
3) Cook… at home… and cook cool stuff (On tomorrow’s menu: gnocchi w/ prosciutto and tomato cream sauce… who wants to be my dinner date?)
4) Floss every day (23 years old seems like an OK time to start.)
5) Don’t always overbook.
6) Have a whole bunch of adventures!
Hope everyone had a fun/safe/lovely NYE… and good luck to anyone else trying the ‘ole resolution making/keeping.
Ghost Toast Launch! 11/13/2009
Check out Shira’s and Jake’s web series, Ghost Toast! It’s way awesome. Also, I’m in the first episode. Enough said.
So much for the Renaissance man 09/16/2009
I spent one summer working as a hostess at a 5-star restaurant in Atlanta, and that’s where I met Dorine. Dorine was not a close friend of mine. She was not present at some epically influential moment in my life, or even just one that defined that particular summer experience, and she did not offer me any sage advise that I have carried with me through the years. She was a decent boss, not overly friendly but never nasty or unfair. Basically, we did not connect as people on a deeply emotional level, negative or positive. We liked and, I believe, respected one another, but the last time I saw her was the last day I worked at the restaurant, and neither of us expected any different result. But despite the lack of emotional resonance between us, Dorine registered on my interesting-people-Richter-scale.
Dorine, the restaurant’s sommelier, was an unobtrusive ‘character.’ That is, in an average interaction between Dorine and an average person, that average person would not come away from the experience saying, “That Dorine, what a character!” Her charactery-ness didn’t overwhelm so much as it slowly germinated. If I had to use one word to describe Dorine, it would be ‘purposeful,’ and intent dominated the way she spoke, acted and moved. The sound of her hurried footsteps around the restaurant was unique, and I could almost swear that she didn’t walk like the rest of us, transitioning with each step from the heels to the balls of our feet, but instead bounced from whole foot to whole foot, like one of those old school Tomy wind-up toys, only efficient. It was a World Cup summer, and when France scored a tying goal in a match one afternoon, Dorine – who was in the US from France to further her career by working with the chef who owned the restaurant – tore through the kitchen in a wave of excitement that served as a command to the rest of us to be elated by the development, nationality-smationality. And the thing is, we were.
I remember one conversation with Dorine in particular that summer. It was one of our slowest days, which was a feat considering that the restaurant was doing very poorly in general and would fold a few months after I left. Despite the dearth of patrons, Dorine was diligently setting up the bar as she always did, with a resolute if unrealistic “If I chill it, they will come” mentality. As she prepared the lime garnishes with a painful exactitude, I asked her how long she had been studying to be a sommelier and what led her down that career path. She told me her parents had been in the wine business in France, so she had grown up learning about wine. It only made sense that she would eventually become a sommelier.
Whenever people ask me what I do, I don’t have a succinct response. This is particularly inconvenient at the moment because I have a family wedding to attend in a month, and undoubtedly the question will come up a lot. When people do ask, I usually throw out a disorganized jumble of answers. “Well right now I work for a children’s educational website, but I also write and perform comedy and I do some directing sometimes and I’m probably moving to LA next year because eventually I want to become a television writer-producer…” Or something to that effect. I get a bit jealous of people who have a more clear response: I’m a lawyer, I’m a med student, I sell knockoff Swatches to unsuspecting tourists down by the Seaport. The reaction to someone saying they’re a Swatch swindler is bad. The reaction to someone saying they do this, and this, and this… is worse. Or at least it seems to be now that my answer is muddled. I’ve tossed around a couple theories about this in my head. Maybe it’s because our culture connects what we do and who we are very directly. We hear a person’s profession, and we peg them. In this sense, the “So, what do you do?” catchphrase is as much a tool of categorization as it is a social nicety, and if we define ourselves with a list rather than a single job-identity, maybe it makes us less accessible or immediately understood. Or maybe the problem lies in my delivery, since I’m worried the list of things I’m doing will seem as confused to other people as it seems to me.
Even though I haven’t seen Dorine in over 3 years, she appeared in one of my dreams recently. I’d like to tell you that in the dream I was facing a tough decision and Dorine showed up to take command and tell me, succinctly, exactly what choice I needed to make. She didn’t though. Instead she made fun of the furniture in my new restaurant because it didn’t compliment the type of cuisine we offered. I kind of liked the mix though.
I’m too lazy to stop watching Law & Order: SVU, much less find scissors to cut off this wristband 08/16/2009
This weekend was the Del Close Marathon in New York. The DCM is pretty much the improv community’s equivalent to a pilgrimage to Mecca, except there’s more alcohol, higher temperatures and a complete irreverence for all things sacred. This was my second DCM, and my attendance improved marginally since last year. I got to more shows (+), pounced more quickly on vacated seats (+), and spoke to more out-of-towners (++). My goals of getting to more morning/early afternoon shows utterly failed (–), though, and I only pulled one respectably late night on Friday (-) . Despite not improving on those fronts, I had a lot of fun with my friends and saw some really great shows. The Straight Men show was destined to be my favorite since, as the name might suggest, it was a bunch of the UCB’s best straight men (the Abbotts to everyone else’s Costellos) thrown together trying to out-reality one another. It was super awesome.
Today was spent mostly recuperating, and by recuperating I mean watching Law & Order: SVU non-stop. There’s something about capping off a weekend devoted to laughter and joy with a marathon of drugs, murder and incest that makes going back to work on Monday morning easier to stomach.
I’m doing the damn thing. 08/12/2009
I recently spent a good three months planning my future career as a clinical psychologist. I was pretty excited about going back to school and eventually entering a field in which I could marry my interest in figuring out how people ‘work’ with my desire to help people (or whatever). I imagined the nice house in Atlanta that I’d share with my husband. We’d have two kids, two cars, a dog and a huge flat-screen TV. Most nights, I’d come home around 7pm with a few bags filled with prepared meals from the Whole Foods buffet. After the kids were in bed, I’d relax for a bit in my delightfully over-sized shower (separate from the bathtub), put on my cotton designer pajamas, and curl up with a mango or passion fruit sorbet on my very plush, neutral-colored couch to watch whichever variety show host that would appropriately appeal to my age bracket and liberal sensibilities. At first, I’d chuckle along with the host’s witty antics as he/she jovially poked fun of pop culture trends and the inane goings-on of public figures. Then I’d spend the rest of the evening angrily communicating with my sorbet via violent spoon-digs that ‘I could do that.’
You know that moment in a movie when the main character is teetering at the edge of an abyss? At this crisis point, pretty often a character that you thought was cute but dismissed as comic relief, or maybe at best a foil highlighting important facets of the protagonist’s personality, steps in and says something that (frequently unwittingly) communicates to the protagonist exactly what s/he needs to do in order to resolve the conflict and leave the audience with that cathartic resolution that they so desire.
I went to Atlanta a couple weeks ago for a week-long vacation. It was a great trip in which I got to bake a peach cobbler with my grandmother, hang out with my friends and family, deal with going to a bar and then needing to drive home afterward, and resume my preferred 4am-1pm sleep cycle. At one friend’s birthday party, I was feeling pretty nauseous, something that had been happening once a day for the past week or so. I still valiantly powered through, nursing a glass of white wine as I caught up with my college roommate, Nina, who had returned to Atlanta recently. Nina listened thoughtfully and nodded as I explained my new life plan. She then asked me what the hell I was doing.
I’m not going to be a psychologist. Instead, I’m doing the damn thing. Currently the damn thing game plan is no more specific than “don’t spend any money for ten months” and then make ‘the move’ out to LA when my lease is up in June. It’s likely that I’ll talk myself out of doing this six or seven times until then, but I’m really hoping I don’t in the end. I’m getting too old for Nina to keep making mystical guidance figure appearances in my life, and plane tickets to Atlanta are never as cheap as you’d expect tickets to a ‘hub’ to be. So please indulge me over the next few months as I fantasize about living near the beach, evading the oppressive and unnecessary BS that is ‘winter’, finding an affordable hybrid and adopting a dog that I will name Bear. Incidentally, I haven’t been nauseous since Nina verbally smacked me and shook me to my emotional core.
