safety first

the moon has moved about half-way through it's cycle, so that must mean it's time for me to prepare myself for the task before me. yes, i'm talking about going into to work today, that strange place where i move in slow motion (slower than usual) and it takes every ounce of my being concentrating on not getting hurt every second that i'm there.

professional kitchens are set up for disasters. add one hapless klutz like me to the big, scary equipment, knives a-plenty, and the fire balls that the older-than-dirt gas stove makes whenever you try to turn a burner on, and you've got a psa for what not to do while attempting to cook.

so today i thought i'd remind myself of some of my past mistakes in hopes of not repeating them. since i barely ever work any more, i have to be extra vigilant about keeping my clumsiness in check.

let's see, i definitely fell head first into one of those mega-sized garbage cans and did the whole cartoon-esque legs wiggling above the rim for help move. of course this happened in the summer so that the bruise on my arm that looked like a hand print was visible and forced me to say 'no, my boyfriend is not the violent type, i just fell in a garbage can' eliciting that sideways head-tilt from people who aren't sure if i need a domestic abuse hotline number. but since i figure that can only happen to a person once in their life, i'm probably in the clear with that.

i should also try to avoid burning myself. a friend once wrote my name out in bacardi 151 and then lit it on fire and i leaned in with my long ass hair to blow it out like a candle. well, that didn't really happen at work, but it happened, so whatever, i own the story and can use it anywhere. same goes for the time i was driving and a lit cigarette butt (um, i don't smoke) managed to get tangled in my hair and smolder away for a good ten minutes because i thought i had a bad tire that was making that gross rubbery smell. so maybe i don't have to worry about people throwing their discarded butts at my hair while i'm at work, or do i? i know they passed that law and all, but it still surprises me how many chefs smoke in professional kitchens. and no, i don't want to tell you where because some of the places i know this to occur in happen to make delicious food and no one's perfect right?

further in the vein of 'not burning myself' falls grabbing the handle of a pot that just came out an oven, or stirring hot rice so aggressively that a few angry clumps weld to my hand skin.

there have also been many, many knife slips in my culinary career so far, but i have since learned that the sharper i keep my knife the less likely it is to slip, or the more likely it is to cut really deeply when i do slip. which means my awesome knife sharpening skills i learned from the knife master at korin in tribeca are most often put to use when caring for my knife after cutting off a chunk of fingernail.

so if i avoid fire and knives, and garbage cans that look extra dangerous (just to be safe), what does that leave for me to actually do at work? sitting by the espresso machine mainlining lattes sounds about right, until i find a way to make that menacing too.

fun times

i haven't been skiing in over five years.

i love(d) skiing.

b never got into it, and that's probably why i stopped. i feel bad for my twice-used, practically still gleaming, kickass skiis that i bought the winter before i met b. i've been thinking about selling them, but i can't bring myself to do it. although i can't imagine when i'll be able to get away and really enjoy skiing again either.

i wonder if i'll still be any good. not that i was any good before. i did break a woman's nose once when i caught a nasty patch of ice. but whatever, i yelled 'oh shit watch out!' like fifty times before i hit her, she could have moved instead of standing there staring at me.

maybe i miss the independence of it all. or not because i never went skiing alone and didn't even like riding the chair lift alone.

what is it that i miss about it?

i think it's the whole being outside part and seeing snow covered mountains and all the fresh air. i was always the type to just eat a granola bar on the slope rather than go into the lodge and have lunch by the fireplace. but that's also because i'm lazy and hated removing and then replacing all the layers.

maybe i miss all the fun times i had with my friends when we went skiing. sure, kristine had a slow start, as we all did at some point, but it was a great way for us to bond. our friend teresa used to have the best songs for us to sing to distract us from the cold. there was also all the drinking involved in proper skiing, i.e. the 40 of old english (i can't believe i just typed that) in the car on the way to the mountain.

and now i just realized that we were those annoying jackasses on the slopes that everyone hates. so if anyone's in the market for some sweet atomics, 165's i think, let me know.

photo credit--kristine took this one on our last ski trip, forever ago

yo mama did what?!

throughout my interesting and fun-filled day of blog surfing i've seen this image popping up repeatedly. even more surprising was seeing my name mentioned at the end of miss yvonne's post about her tag.

i will now confess my lameness and share that i googled the word 'meme' to see what all the fuss was about. i stopped reading the definition somewhere after i saw the word 'memeticists'.

but now that i realize that it's just a way to talk about myself, i'm totally into it. i thought for a second about trying to pull off that whole 'this is so wack but i guess i'll do it anyway, to be a sport' thing but really, that's not me.

so thanks miss yvonne, for making me feel liked for a hot minute. i don't even care if i incur a horrific backlash when i reveal some of my innermost truths.

1. a few years ago, a very dear friend and i tried to get a new catch phrase started. whenever we really liked something we would say 'that's so my balls!' because it was fun to say balls. then we figured out that we never had balls and were never going to be able to grow balls, so it began to feel more like a cruel joke on us.

2. i would love to be a vegetarian, except that i still get confused about all the different kinds of vegetarians/vegans/whatever there are and i'm afraid of aligning myself with the 'less cool' group of restrictive eaters.

3. i'm obsessed with my tiny head. it's my favorite physical feature.

4. i spent bags and bags of money to go to a fancy culinary school and now the only cooking i do is for my six month old baby. oh wait, yeah, i work about once every fortnight at a catering company too.

5. the picture of the kiddies on my header is actually an original oil painting of me and my brother, done by my nana, that is currently hanging in my living room. it's always been an enigma to me because it's dated 1979, which was the year i was born. my brother wasn't born until 1981. the scary part is that that is EXACTLY how we looked as children, round about five and seven years old. i've tried to get nana to clarify the date question but to no avail.

6. b and i talk about our dog's ass way too much. we're convinced that he can make us millions of dollars because he has the most fascinating pattern of butt swirls that look just like an owl's face (butt swirls being the technical term for the hairs around his little pooter), and no the actual hole is not in the owl's face, the swirls fall beneath that. i tried to take a picture to illustrate this point, but i was so grossed out and crampy from hysterically laughing that there was no way i was going to succeed.

7. i can't lie. my physical reaction to telling a lie has not evolved since i was about four years old. sweat palms, big cheese grin, nervous laughter, shakes, all occurring at the same time.

8. i love really loud concerts. i love really loud concerts in really small and really smelly dirthole bars. the louder the better. no one wants to hear me singing along.

9. weird money is the most obscene thing anyone could make me touch. i define weird money as any coin of monetary value that is one other than the standard penny, nickel, dime, or quarter. i don't understand why they circulate, can we please just smelt them all away to weird money hell already?

10. i'm actually a really happy person. (cue barf sounds) sorry, but it's true.

and i guess that's as good as anything to end with right? right. so whom do i tag? seeing as i'm a relatively new blogger, i think i'll keep this one in the family, because if anyone's going to get annoyed with me sending this i can handle burn ups from them. so there's my dear friend kristine, my husband brian, b's sister bridget, and preacherman (even though you're technically not family, i love hearing stories about things you do when drunk, i mean, things you do everyday :) ).

note: for those of you (b) who haven't heard of this fun little game of tag i'll explain--
the objective here is when you are tagged to post ten things about yourself that we don't already know and then tag ten (or four) other people to do the same.

name games

when i was pregnant i was constantly berated with 'what's the baby's name?' all day, every day. sometimes i would answer with a few of the possible choices b and i were currently favoring, but as soon as i saw the forced smiles and heard 'oh. that's different' i stopped. worse yet was the droning on and on of every possible association a person has to that particular name.

i became so sensitive to the whole name issue that i just stopped talking about it altogether and simply said 'we don't know, we'll name her when we see her' even though we had her name picked out by the time i was five months along. i know people have varying ways of expressing their curiosity and are often just trying to connect with you. this tempered my frustration but also led me to vow that i would never ask a pregnant woman about the name of her baby as long as i lived.

this vow, however, does not preclude my asking of grown adults 'why did your parents name you THAT?!' as anyone who's ever spent a few hours watching major league baseball can tell you, there are some strange names out there.

i've compiled a list of mlb's choicest examples:

1. razor shines. yes, you're reading that correctly. this one is hands down the leader of the pack, mostly because every time i hear it i have all-too-vivid images of that creepy movie 'monkey shines.' i could go on all day, but i'll spare you.

2. coco crisp. can i get a synchronized 'what the fuck' here please? this one has been irking me for some time now, and i know his real given name is covelli loyce crisp, but that doesn't make me stop thinking about chocolate rice crispy treats.

3. milton bradley. two names, ordinary enough in their own right, but put them together and you have and infinite selection of circus and toy-related images haunting your brain for at least five-ten minutes.

4. kosuke fukudome. ok, ok. japanese is a completely different language, with sound combinations nothing like what we americans are used to, but the little kid in me can't help but hear 'go-suck-it fuck-you-do-me' in my head whenever i see this guy's name.

5. boof bonser. for serious. i don't even feel bad ragging on this clown for that awful name because he sucks and was dead weight on b's fantasy baseball team last year.

i only hope my little girl won't grow up hating her name. now that i think about it, i grew up hating my name. i was probably in college by the time i realised that i actually liked having my name. it was hard though, being a child of the 80's and hating my mom for not naming me 'tiffany' or 'jem'.

aaaannnnd, now i'm over it. that's why they made it legal to change your name. so little miss, if you're 25 and hate your name, come talk to me first and i'll pick out a new name for you.

deep thoughts, way too deep

i love to try new things, and generally, the more spontaneous the notion, the better. i find the excitement and anticipation of experiencing something for the first time is addicting. this however, will usually dissipate entirely after i try whatever it is that i have lined up for myself.

i was probably about ten years old when i was really into horseback riding. and by 'really into' i mean that i begged my mom to take me because it looked like a lot of fun. so we went, once. not only did the mean old nag refuse to walk faster than the rate of the grass growing, but it bit me on my little pencil-sized arm after the ride. i had horse tooth imprints for two weeks. i quickly realized that the horse smell and perpetual fog of flies was not something i'd be willing to put up with if i pursued horseback riding.

next was water skiing. i guess my first mistake here was that it was in the hudson river. big foul. not only have mutant three-eyed fish been caught here, but it has long been used as a through-way to haul excess new york city garbage upstate for dumping. regardless of starting out with such a handicap, i gave it my all, for about an hour. after managing to get vertical maybe twice, and swallowing way more of the hudson than i was comfortable with, i gave up. only i chose the worst place in america to give up, the swampy side of the river with algae so thick that i was instantly enveloped in slime. as i sat there in the menacing goo, waiting for the boat to bring the rope around, my mind filled with images of all the little bugs and critters that called the algae home swarming all over my body. i was near hysterics by the time i was pulled from the water.

move along to sky diving. now this was one that i was really super excited about. it just sounded so brazen and yet whimsical at the same time. i was maybe 25 and for a very dear friend's birthday, myself and our third dear friend decided to jump out of a plane together. oh yeah, and we actually paid an additional $85 to have an extra person jump with each of us to record us on dvd. i don't even need to talk about what it felt like watching my friend disappear into the clouds, becoming infinitely smaller. but i will say that those instructors need to tell beginners that if you open your mouth really wide going 120 miles per hour, it makes it really hard to breath. so hard, in fact, that you can feel as if you're suffocating and convince yourself that you will arrive on the ground in a tragic heap of dead flesh and bones. that information would have been much more helpful than the jokes about my straps being loose. having made it to the ground safely, i vowed to never watch the dvd of my horrifying experience, although i can't bring myself to throw it away.

now i'm at a crossroads.

i am thoroughly intrigued by my cousin's practice of fire walking. it seems to be a challenge to purify your thoughts in such a focused way as to be able to walk across fire and emerge stronger rather than weakened by the flames.

as much as i want to conquer the fire, i don't want it to conquer me.

am i better off leaving this one alone, to let the idea live on only as a fantasy in my head? my track record speaks for itself, but have i come far enough in my life that i can overcome my own self?

this is the point at which my head explodes and i become the universe, as theodor learns in 'the mysterious stranger,' "nothing exists save empty space--and you."

a message to the man riding his motorcycle over the mountain by west point

dear sir, you are obese.

i hope that this is not news to you, but if it is, i truly am sorry to be the one who had to clue you in.

i address you today, sir, because yesterday when i was driving behind you, just past bear mountain, your massive body weight tilting dangerously close to the surface of the road was enough to give me severe anxiety for the next 12 hours.

every time you negotiated one of the many curves in the road, i had to brace for the inevitable event of your massive self no longer defying gravity and wiping out right in front of my eyes, at 60 miles per hour. you must have developed the balance of a ballerina, because according to the laws of physics, as i understand them, you should no longer have any legs left to wrap around your hog. in which case, i must praise you for such an accomplishment.

that feat, however astounding, does not negate the sensation that overcomes me when i see you whipping around curves on the side of a mountain that i'm about to witness a real live death. aren't there laws and weight limits about this very situation? didn't they invent that harley trike just for this kind of thing?

just some food for thought sir, the next time you put on your tiny helmet and climb aboard your toy-sized motorcycle. maybe it's not such a great idea to push your luck so far.

i don't expect you to remember

'hey b, guess what today is?'

'uhhh, can you just tell me?'

'sure! today is the five year anniversary of the night we met.'

'awwww, really, five years already? i feel like i was in high school last week.'

'oh honey, those days are LONG gone. but i just realized myself what the date was and since my mind is full of useless details, i thought i'd share that one.'

'well i know our wedding anniversary, and all our birthdays because they're all in the same week, but are there any other dates that i need to keep track of?'

'may 19th was the day we brought monster home, if you want to count that because we never knew when his real birthday was. or don't because we could just as easily say he was born here on his gross chair.'

so here's to you b, and your amazing pick up line that has since led to the happiest five years of my life.