$5.15 by USPS. Love you, dad. Sorry I couldn’t wait, but then, neither would you.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about cooking, it’s that you’re never really done exploring an ingredient, and you’re never really done discovering a new way to view an old technique. After enjoying some sliced, roasted kabocha as part of a warm-in-every-sense-of-the-word dinner at the collective house of a friend a few weeks ago, I’d been haunted by lingering whispers of the caramelized squash slices. They were so simple, but so mind-alteringly luscious. It was sust a squash, roasted on a pan with a thin glaze of oil, but I could not stop thinking about it, lusting after it, wishing it was mine. And suddenly occured to me: this is why you have an oven!
So first I bought the squash, then I made big plans for a group dinner at my house and then… it sat there. Thankfully, winter squash are forgiving sorts of things and it outlasted my grand-planning procrastination, sitting patiently among the tragically greening potatoes until I was ready. And when I finally got around to slicing and roasting this beautiful thing the other night, I had this winter vegetable epiphany. When I sat down to my sauteed dinosaur kale, my brown rice and my freshly roasted kabocha squash I remembered why, even in the midst of early tomato season, even splashing around in the opulently marble-lined Hearst Women’s Gym pool at Berkeley, even whilst riding my bike sockless up the alluvial grade for some Tara’s Organic Ice Cream, I knew there was something that summer would never contain. This meal I was sitting down to and the outrageous, gauche sunset outside my kitchen window providing the entertainment would never feel right at 80 degrees, in the middle of summer. It was a moment wherein winter was not just the season that makes you love other seasons, it was one wherein fall and winter and the cold and the wind and the scarves and that feeling of coming in to a house warmed by the radiance of squash in the oven was all I could possibly need.
Dew drops
Dew drops on eyelids
Painting eyelashes, snow-like
Fit the fancy of the evening,
However much of the evening’s left…
Sweat melds with the low clouds on every surface
While men, bushes, road signs and all
Hang specter-like just out of sight
Not changing the mood or raising a pulse-
Just being.
It’s charming to find oneself
Floating down familiar streets
Made unfamiliar with time
With time, distance, fatigue and fog
Ready to be seen again
With new eyes,
Under new circumstances.
It’s pleasant to see things anew
But even better to discover their newness
Haphazardly
In a mist
Under the influence
Of unfurled petals of whimsy, joy and unbridled delight
On the way to a comfortable bed
And a new day just around the corner.
Sometimes life takes a turn for the less expected. Here, witness the space that many a geographer would call a “100 percent corner” (the intersection where retail and office space rent is at its absolute peak) turned into a “99 percent corner” - hella occupied.
There is so much yet to say, but for the moment, you’ll have to settle for this: a little slam-type poem I wrote in my campus occupation heyday at UC Berkeley (November 2009) - inspired by fellow protesters who kept the Anthropology library open all night, and who helped that library get funded to stay open on Saturdays by sleeping over - who gave their well-informed speeches and read their slam poetry and talked Lenin and Marx and right and wrong throughout that long night…
I don’t know if you can hear me
Down there
I don’t know if you can hear me
With my small voice
With my single cry
I don’t know if you can hear me
Through these walls
Made of concrete and steel
And cold materials
They’re good at blocking
Lines of communication
They’re good at keeping
A distance between you and me
I don’t know if you can hear me
So I’m stepping out into the commons
I don’t know if you can hear me
So I’m bringing a few friends
WE don’t know if you can hear us
So we’re speaking a bit louder
And we’re e-nun-ci-a-ting
We’re making meanings clear
With reclarified repe-repe-repetition
Because we don’t know if you’re hearing us
So we’re gonna make it crystal clear
We’re gonna make it so clear
That YOU can understand
We’re gonna say it until you DO understand
Then we’ll say it until you SHOW us you understand
And we’re asking a lot
Because we expect a lot
Because we believe that a lot is possible
And when we believe
You better start listening
Because when we believe, we make it happen
We making it happen if it takes some shouting
If it takes being uncomfortable
Sleeping on cement is uncomfortable
But staying home
Would be more uncomfortable
Staying quiet
Would be more uncomfortable
Lying down and taking it
Would be more uncomfortable
So we’re not gonna lie down for you
We’re not gonna lie low
And talk low
And take it slow
And wait for YOU to show us
YOUR way or the highway
Because it’s not YOUR university
It’s not THEIR university
It’s not the Pfizer or Verizon or
This lecture brought to you by Coca-Cola’s university
It’s OUR university
And we are going
To SHOUT
We are going
To YELL
We are going to march and picket and sleep uncomfortably
Until this splinter in your side
Becomes a brick wall in your path
Until you can see us
As the partners we are
Until you can treat us
As the intelligent, alternative problem-solvers that we are
Until you uncup your hands from your ears
And with your small voice
Call out
And with your loud voice
Call out
With your “I have SEEN the error of my ways” voice
Call out:
YES!
I am ready to STOP talking
And START
Listening.
“A pluot, who was purple, wanted to be part of a group who would explain how to demonize a pear on the top shelf”
One word per person per round on a well-staffed shift of the well-acquainted well-sugared INNA jam ladies adds up to some strange things, indeed…
My every-other Sunday routine…
(special thanks to Ben of Pheonix Pastificio for manning the camera on this…)
And then there was one…
This is what midnight in the jam kitchen looks like.
Inspired by the Vonnegut quote that’s been circulating, today’s art:
Making business cards printed on the pages of a 1912 book called Architectural Drawings and Draughtsmen, salvaged from the free rack outside the UC Berkeley Environmental Design Library over the summer…
I wish I was a robot
I wish I was a robot
An emotionless automaton
Feelings regulated by a well programmed motherboard
Like the kind you find at Echo Park Time Travel Mart.
I wish there was a hibernation setting
I could press when shit goes down
When there’s miles of computations to work through
And coffee’s not enough.
If I was a robot I could press pause
And resume joy when there’s no more mess to mop up
No more waiting for ships to come in
Or lotto tickets to pay off.
If I was a robot I would just shut that whole part down,
Finish about a million todo list items,
Going to screensaver every 48 hours or so
To keep from burning out
Sort out all the messiness
With the detached air of a heartless killer
Then come back to Earth for the payoff,
Conveniently ready to feel again.
But I am just a person who calls herself a reauxbot
Who is really quite human,
Who plays at cucumberdom
But who can’t quite break her habit
Of total nuclear meltdown
With its Boston Molasses Massacre pervasive messiness.
I am just a lady
Who breaks under straws
And weeps enthusiastically over cold cups of tea
And empty sides of beds
And tumbles awkwardly by the ankle
After a spooked runaway horse of a heart
Like in those old westerns,
But with a lot more blood.
(special thanks to Bucky Sinister for the poetic inspiration…)
