no, i'm not dead.
wow, it's been a long time since i've posted anything here. and not surprisingly, a lot has happened in between.
g and i bought an apartment together--in manhattan! i swear, i never thought i'd end up living in manhattan. i suppose i'll always be a bit of a brooklyn girl since i was born there and i work there, but i'm enjoying living this neighborhood quite a bit. mostly because of the excellent food. :-P
we had our housewarming party this past weekend. as we were preparing, i realized that i hadn't thrown a party in over 5 years--since i moved to nyc, basically. my last apartment in bed-stuy was so small and crowded and sketchy, and the kitchen was so dirty, that i never really felt like i could throw a party there. but i got to entertain on a grand scale again, and boy, was it satisfying. :-) it almost reminded me of the lake street days, except there were more lawyers, hackers, teachers, and martial artists; fewer goths; and no nudity. (oh well!) but there was the same sense of wonder that we had gotten such a diverse group of people together into one place, and of the bizarre, incestuous links that exist between people.
the highlight of the evening for me was, of course, food-related. one of my friends made chocolate sushi: he had rolled strawberry pieces (which were supposed to look like tuna) in a layer of white chocolate ("rice") and another layer of chocolate ("nori"), sliced it up, and put it on a sushi plate with chocolate syrup "soy sauce" and a blob of green frosting "wasabi". it was beautiful. from far away it actually looked like tuna rolls.
ok, so that was a bit of a digression. anyway, i hope to do a lot more entertaining in the future. :-)
the thing that people seemed most fascinated by in our apartment were the bookshelves. g and i have 11 bookshelves in here(!!)--9 tall ones and 2 short ones, almost completely full. we are both compulsive readers and book-buyers, so combining our book collections was our first major project of cohabitation. it was actually more fun that i expected it to be. i had recently read a humorous essay in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Anne Fadiman) about the struggles a couple went through when combining their book collections, so i was expecting the worst. but, like i said, it was actually quite fun. there were a few books we puzzled over ("does Zen and the Art of the Macintosh go in the computers section or the buddhism section?"), but we finally managed to get them in some semblance of order.
we also discovered that we have 2 copies of several books:
1. The Cosmic Code (Heinz Pagels)
2. The Mind's I (Douglas Hofstader and Daniel Dennett)
3. Godel, Escher, Bach (Hofstader)
4. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
5. Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
6. Sputnik Sweetheart (Murakami)
7. Still Life With Woodpecker (Tom Robbins)
8. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Tom Robbins)
9. Shampoo Planet (Douglas Coupland)
10. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
11. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
12. A Different Mirror (Ronald Takaki)
13. 100 Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
14. The Odyssey (Homer)
15. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)
16. Sister of my Heart (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni)
17. A History of God (Karen Armstrong)
18. Confessions (St Augustine)
19. The New Oxford Annotated Bible
20. Consolations of Philosophy (Boethius)
21. A Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
22. There are No Children Here (Alex Kotlowitz)
23. NAUI Scuba Diver (a textbook)
24. Corelli's Mandolin (de Bernieres)--we actually have 3 of these!
25. Snow Crash (Neal Stevenson)
26. Five Major Plays of Anton Chekov
27. The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
28. Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon)
29. A Man in Full (Tom Wolfe)
30. A Prayer for Own Meany (John Irving)
Of course, it seems utterly pointless to have 2 copies of the same book. But at the same time, we are really having trouble with the idea of getting rid of the extra copies. for instance, i know my copy of the great gatsby is littered with underlining and margin notes about stuff i thought was really important in 11th grade. and i know i cried over it. how can you give away something that moved you to tears? even the books that didn't move me as much have shared some history with me.
but i supposed history is the past, you can get rid of the raft after you cross the river, blah blah blah... if anyone is interested in taking one of these duplicates off our hands, let me know. You _might_ be able to convince me. :-P
since my last entry, i've also made progress in kung fu. i finally passed my yellow belt test, and am 2.5 forms away from my green belt test (yikes!). i also just finished learning my first form with a weapon (i know, hard to imagine, right?), and am frequently seen carrying my staff around the city. it's pretty funny to see people's reactions to the staff. i get some funny looks, but most people leave me alone. i've definitely been harrassed a LOT less. but then some people think it's an open invitation to talk to me about martial arts. which i guess i don't mind most of the time, but it's not always well-intentioned. not surprisingly, the police and other security people don't harrass me about it at all. sometimes they even joke around with me about it. i guess i still look pretty harmless, even when carrying a staff. if only they knew, heh heh heh...
just kidding. i am still pretty harmless. but less harmless than i was before. ;-)
g and i bought an apartment together--in manhattan! i swear, i never thought i'd end up living in manhattan. i suppose i'll always be a bit of a brooklyn girl since i was born there and i work there, but i'm enjoying living this neighborhood quite a bit. mostly because of the excellent food. :-P
we had our housewarming party this past weekend. as we were preparing, i realized that i hadn't thrown a party in over 5 years--since i moved to nyc, basically. my last apartment in bed-stuy was so small and crowded and sketchy, and the kitchen was so dirty, that i never really felt like i could throw a party there. but i got to entertain on a grand scale again, and boy, was it satisfying. :-) it almost reminded me of the lake street days, except there were more lawyers, hackers, teachers, and martial artists; fewer goths; and no nudity. (oh well!) but there was the same sense of wonder that we had gotten such a diverse group of people together into one place, and of the bizarre, incestuous links that exist between people.
the highlight of the evening for me was, of course, food-related. one of my friends made chocolate sushi: he had rolled strawberry pieces (which were supposed to look like tuna) in a layer of white chocolate ("rice") and another layer of chocolate ("nori"), sliced it up, and put it on a sushi plate with chocolate syrup "soy sauce" and a blob of green frosting "wasabi". it was beautiful. from far away it actually looked like tuna rolls.
ok, so that was a bit of a digression. anyway, i hope to do a lot more entertaining in the future. :-)
the thing that people seemed most fascinated by in our apartment were the bookshelves. g and i have 11 bookshelves in here(!!)--9 tall ones and 2 short ones, almost completely full. we are both compulsive readers and book-buyers, so combining our book collections was our first major project of cohabitation. it was actually more fun that i expected it to be. i had recently read a humorous essay in Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Anne Fadiman) about the struggles a couple went through when combining their book collections, so i was expecting the worst. but, like i said, it was actually quite fun. there were a few books we puzzled over ("does Zen and the Art of the Macintosh go in the computers section or the buddhism section?"), but we finally managed to get them in some semblance of order.
we also discovered that we have 2 copies of several books:
1. The Cosmic Code (Heinz Pagels)
2. The Mind's I (Douglas Hofstader and Daniel Dennett)
3. Godel, Escher, Bach (Hofstader)
4. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
5. Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
6. Sputnik Sweetheart (Murakami)
7. Still Life With Woodpecker (Tom Robbins)
8. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Tom Robbins)
9. Shampoo Planet (Douglas Coupland)
10. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
11. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
12. A Different Mirror (Ronald Takaki)
13. 100 Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
14. The Odyssey (Homer)
15. The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)
16. Sister of my Heart (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni)
17. A History of God (Karen Armstrong)
18. Confessions (St Augustine)
19. The New Oxford Annotated Bible
20. Consolations of Philosophy (Boethius)
21. A Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
22. There are No Children Here (Alex Kotlowitz)
23. NAUI Scuba Diver (a textbook)
24. Corelli's Mandolin (de Bernieres)--we actually have 3 of these!
25. Snow Crash (Neal Stevenson)
26. Five Major Plays of Anton Chekov
27. The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
28. Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon)
29. A Man in Full (Tom Wolfe)
30. A Prayer for Own Meany (John Irving)
Of course, it seems utterly pointless to have 2 copies of the same book. But at the same time, we are really having trouble with the idea of getting rid of the extra copies. for instance, i know my copy of the great gatsby is littered with underlining and margin notes about stuff i thought was really important in 11th grade. and i know i cried over it. how can you give away something that moved you to tears? even the books that didn't move me as much have shared some history with me.
but i supposed history is the past, you can get rid of the raft after you cross the river, blah blah blah... if anyone is interested in taking one of these duplicates off our hands, let me know. You _might_ be able to convince me. :-P
since my last entry, i've also made progress in kung fu. i finally passed my yellow belt test, and am 2.5 forms away from my green belt test (yikes!). i also just finished learning my first form with a weapon (i know, hard to imagine, right?), and am frequently seen carrying my staff around the city. it's pretty funny to see people's reactions to the staff. i get some funny looks, but most people leave me alone. i've definitely been harrassed a LOT less. but then some people think it's an open invitation to talk to me about martial arts. which i guess i don't mind most of the time, but it's not always well-intentioned. not surprisingly, the police and other security people don't harrass me about it at all. sometimes they even joke around with me about it. i guess i still look pretty harmless, even when carrying a staff. if only they knew, heh heh heh...
just kidding. i am still pretty harmless. but less harmless than i was before. ;-)