A few weeks ago, Kristin and I were out at Borders. She was looking for books about macroeconmics, and I was looking for interesting cookbooks on the bargain books rack when I ran across Class with the Countess: How to Live with Elegance and Flair, by Countess LuAnn de Lesseps of "The Real Housewives of New York".
For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it's part of the "rich women catfighting" reality television genre, and Countess LuAnn is known for such elegant, classy gestures as:
-haggling with a street vendor for several minutes over the price of a lightup plastic necklace
-participating with fellow castmember Jill in a classic "Mean Girls" three-way phone calling attack against costar Bethenny
-making fun of costar Ramona's bulging eyes to her face on a cast reunion show
-asking her former housekeeper to come over and cook her a meal under the guise of friendship
-gossiping about the behavior of costars Alex and Simon's children on camera, then lying about it when confronted and blaming Jill
-loudly correcting Bethenny for introducing her incorrectly to her limo driver, in front of the limo driver, by forgetting to include Countess LuAnn's title
Clearly, Countess LuAnn has a lot to teach the world about classily living with elegance and flair, and when I noticed that her book was on clearance for a dollar I decided to take a chance on self-improvement and the opportunity to learn to live just like Countess LuAnn.
Here are the top ten things I learned from reading this book:
1) How to Walk in Jimmy Choos. Thank you, Countess LuAnn, for targetting your book toward the common people and the troubles that we face in our daily lives. Without this section, I wouldn't have learned such helpful things as "practice walking in your shoes at home" and "glide, ladies, glide", just like Victor Melling said in "Miss Congeniality".
2) Satin pillows will help you avoid bed head and facial wrinkles. No scientific source is cited here, so we'll just have to take LuAnn's word for it. Nothing is said about my pillows, which are made of... cotton? I guess? so the message that I'm taking away here is that I should either have satin pillows or no pillows at all.
3) You shouldn't wear leggings, but sometimes you should. I found this bit of advice confusing, rather than classy or elegant. Countess LuAnn states that you should avoid wearing leggings "unless your legs are well toned and shapely", but then later says that I can wear a tunic over leggings "to camouflage figure flaws". Is that unless the figure flaws are in my legs? Because I thought I wasn't supposed to wear leggings unless my legs are shapely, but now if my legs are flawed I can wear the leggings as long as I cover them with a tunic? Which is it? And how does Countess LuAnn feel about jeggings? Do they fall under the confusing Rule of Leggings, or are they a separate category with their own rules?
4) How to Address an Aristocrat in Order of Importance. Again, in a nod to the common people, Countess LuAnn provides a chart that starts with "King/Queen" and ends with "Knight or Baronet", providing information that we among the hoi polloi can't help but incorporate into our daily lives. Next time I run into the Marquess of Western Knoxville, I'll be able to address his Lordship appropriately.
5) "Men essentially want to please you." What men? Where? How can I meet them? 95% of my experience with men suggests that they want you to please them, but if Countess LuAnn knows some other kind of man then I really, really want to know where those men live and how fast I can move there.
6) Racism is horrible because it is unattractive, not because it is inherently wrong. According to Countess LuAnn, "expressing prejudice about race, religion, nationality, or politics is unattractive". Nevermind the dehumanizing consequences of bigotry; all you need to worry about is that it will make you less pretty. Also, expressing prejudice about sexual orientation is apparently totally ok.
7) Your response to an invitation should mirror the language of the invitation itself. For example, "Count and Countess de Lesseps accept with pleasure your kind invitation to the marriage of your daughter on Saturday, the Thirteenth of July, at Two in the Afternoon, and they will both have The Chicken". To all my friends over the years whose wedding invitations I have responded to by checking the "will attend" box on your RSVP card, I apologize for my classlessness.
8) Your kids need cell phones so that you can talk to them inside your own home. As Countess LuAnn explains: "Yelling up and down the stairs can drive me crazy, so we've taken to calling each other on our cell phones". Next time I'm home and my mom yells up the stairs that dinner is ready, I'll be sure to yell back, "You have my phone number!" so that she'll understand what kind of behavior is acceptable.
9) As a guest, you should never complain to your host about anything. They have opened their home to you and offered their hospitality, and you should be gracious and thankful. On the other hand, if there's a hot guy at the party that interests you more than the host, feel free to badmouth the host as your opening line. Countess LuAnn illustrates this with the story of how she sat by the host, playing hard to get, and then when she managed to corner the guy she liked and he asked where she'd been, Countess LuAnn answered, "I've been upstairs, being molested by our host." Maybe she thought that she didn't have to be a gracious, thankful guest since she told that story in the romance chapter rather than the one on the hostess/guest relationship.
10) Europeans love naked people. As Countess LuAnn explains: "I don't think people flirt enough. People are far more flirtatious in Europe, but nudity is more accepted there." Is she saying that people in Europe flirt by taking off their clothes? Is that why study abroad programs are so popular?
In closing, I look forward to using these helpful tips to live a more elegant, sophisticated life.
Just as soon as I stop laughing at the hypocrisy and cluelessness of Countess LuAnn writing this book to begin with.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
I cooked all weekend
Next week is housing signup, which means that I have to be at work every night next week until at least 7, when housing signup ends each day. That means that by the time I get home every night I will be tired and won't want to cook, so I decided that I would cook two large items this weekend, and then portion them out to serve myself all week long. Thursday night I looked at recipes and made a grocery list, and Friday night I stopped at the store on the way home and loaded up on groceries.
Since I didn't want to use any of the groceries I'd just bought and I didn't want to dirty up a bunch of pans that I would need the next day, Friday night I made cheddar pepper crostini for dinner, because they were fast, easy, and baguettes were on manager's special at Kroger for a dollar, so I got one. Kroger sells crostini, pre-toasted, in little bags, but that's a ridiculous expense given how easy crostini is to make yourself.
Cheddar Pepper Crostini
1 baguette
olive oil
salt and pepper or herbs, whatever you feel like flavoring it with
cheddar cheese
pepper jelly
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. (I don't know what that is in Celsius or Kelvin, because I live in America.)
Slice the bread diagonally, 1/2 inches thick. Spread the slices on a cookie sheet, without overlapping them, and brush the top of each one with olive oil. (Or spray each one with olive oil cooking spray if you're lazy.) Sprinkle tops with salt and pepper or herbs. Put cookie sheet in the oven for 7 minutes.
While the bread is in the oven, slice up your cheese. You want enough to mostly cover the top of each piece of bread, so that's how much cheese you should use.
When the bread is done, take it out of the oven, top each peice with cheese, and put it back in for another minute so the cheese gets melty.
Open delicious pepper jelly:
I use my mom's, which is homemade and home-canned. It is delicious. If you don't have access to my mom, you should use whatever inferior substitute you can pick up at the store, or you should call my mom and try to get adopted.
Take the bread out again, and drop a teaspoon of pepper jelly on top of each crostini. The heat from the bread and cheese will make the jelly melt a little and spread out over the top:
Easy, delicious dinner. It's like having a sandwich, but fancier.
Friday night I also had to do some prep work for the soup I was making on Saturday. I found a recipe in the huge slow cooker cookbook that my parents got me for Christmas two years ago for Navy Bean and Bacon Chowder, and I like bacon and most kinds of beans, so I figured this would be fun to try. I had a little trouble doing the shopping, though, because the recipe called for dried navy beans and the store didn't seem to have any. They had lots of other dried beans, and I wondered if this might be one of those things like how garbonzo beans are sometimes chickpeas and really the navy beans could be sitting right in front of me by another name, but that was still a problem.
I have no idea what a navy bean looks like.
I guessed that they weren't actually navy, because "Top Chef" did a colored food quickfire challenge a few seasons ago and Tom Colicchio talked about how hard it would be for the person who got blue because there are very few naturally occuring blue foods. It's true. Probably all you can think of is blueberries, and those are really sort of purple more than blue. There's blue corn, immortalized as a shade of the moon that the wolf cries to by Disney's Pocahontas, but I've never heard of blue beans. I walked back over to the canned beans aisle and found navy beans, but none of the dried beans looked like them, so I eventually gave up and bought a bag of Great Northern beans.
They looked sort of like navy beans, and the Great Northern was the name of the hotel in "Twin Peaks", so it seemed like a positive omen to go on. If I'm going to make arbitrary decisions, they might as well be based on TV.
Friday night I had to cover the beans in water, and let them soak overnight. They swelled up from tiny pebbles:
to actual beans:
so on Saturday I dumped them into the slow cooker with a couple of carrots and an onion that I food processed down into paste:
In with that went pepper, 48 oz of chicken broth, and some herbs. The recipe called for Italian seasoning, but I don't have that, so I added oregano, basil, and some thyme. Then I had to cook, crumble, and add eight pieces of bacon. This should have been easy, but while I was crumbling the bacon right out of the oven some of it fell into my mouth and burned my tongue. This is, of course, the fault of the bacon, somehow. Anyway, when everything was in the pot:
I turned on the slow cooker and then ignored it for nine hours. When time was up, I scooped out two cups of the vegetables with a little bit of the liquid, pureed them, and added them back to the slow cooker with a cup of milk. Then I ate a bowl of soup:
with the rest of the baguette from Friday night (I sure got my dollar's worth out of that bread), and split the rest up into four containers for Monday through Thursday dinner.
I didn't want to just eat soup, though, and didn't want to go to the store to buy more baguettes, so for my companion to the week's dinners I decided to make a savory Spinach Bread Pudding with Lemon and Feta that I saw in "Food and Wine" magazine. I made a savory bread pudding once before and it came out really well, so I thought it would be nice this week to come home and heat up a bowl of soup and a square of bread pudding for dinner.
Not surprisingly, bread pudding starts with bread:
The recipe said to use 8 oz of whole wheat bread. A loaf of whole wheat sandwich bread is 20 oz, so I figured I'd be fine with half a loaf and cut that up. Unlike when I made the other bread pudding and had to slice a baguette, slicing up the sandwich loaf was easy because it was already sliced in one direction. Once done, I put it in the oven to toast for ten minutes, and started slicing the baby spinach:
That takes forever. I don't know if there's a trick to it or something that professional chefs use, but I just grab a handful, make a pile, and run the knife through it a few times until the pieces look small enough. Slicing a whole bag of spinach takes a while, but eventually I was done, and mixed it with the bread squares and some feta cheese in a large bowl:
Then I got to work on the part that turns into pudding:
That's two cups of milk, some olive oil, six eggs, lemon juice, salt, pepper, dijon mustard, and some lemon zest. My parents bought me a microplane grater, for zesting, for Christmas, and now I love recipes that ask for zest. I've also been zesting lemons and limes into my tuna salad, but I learned that you have to be careful with that. Too much lemon zest, and suddenly it tastes like you sprayed your tuna with Pledge.
Anyway, after I mixed that I poured it all together in the bowl, tossed it a few times to coat everything, and then poured it into a baking dish and let it sit on the counter for two hours. Then it went into the oven for 40 minutes, and turned out like this:
I sliced it into squares and ate one, and it was really good. The lemon stands out, and the spinach cooks down and keeps the rest of it from drying out. The top is crunchy, but the bottom is soft, and it should go really well with the slight saltiness of the soup.
Now I just have to manage not to eat all of this now instead of waiting for the week.
Since I didn't want to use any of the groceries I'd just bought and I didn't want to dirty up a bunch of pans that I would need the next day, Friday night I made cheddar pepper crostini for dinner, because they were fast, easy, and baguettes were on manager's special at Kroger for a dollar, so I got one. Kroger sells crostini, pre-toasted, in little bags, but that's a ridiculous expense given how easy crostini is to make yourself.
Cheddar Pepper Crostini
1 baguette
olive oil
salt and pepper or herbs, whatever you feel like flavoring it with
cheddar cheese
pepper jelly
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. (I don't know what that is in Celsius or Kelvin, because I live in America.)
Slice the bread diagonally, 1/2 inches thick. Spread the slices on a cookie sheet, without overlapping them, and brush the top of each one with olive oil. (Or spray each one with olive oil cooking spray if you're lazy.) Sprinkle tops with salt and pepper or herbs. Put cookie sheet in the oven for 7 minutes.
While the bread is in the oven, slice up your cheese. You want enough to mostly cover the top of each piece of bread, so that's how much cheese you should use.
When the bread is done, take it out of the oven, top each peice with cheese, and put it back in for another minute so the cheese gets melty.
Open delicious pepper jelly:
I use my mom's, which is homemade and home-canned. It is delicious. If you don't have access to my mom, you should use whatever inferior substitute you can pick up at the store, or you should call my mom and try to get adopted.
Take the bread out again, and drop a teaspoon of pepper jelly on top of each crostini. The heat from the bread and cheese will make the jelly melt a little and spread out over the top:
Easy, delicious dinner. It's like having a sandwich, but fancier.
Friday night I also had to do some prep work for the soup I was making on Saturday. I found a recipe in the huge slow cooker cookbook that my parents got me for Christmas two years ago for Navy Bean and Bacon Chowder, and I like bacon and most kinds of beans, so I figured this would be fun to try. I had a little trouble doing the shopping, though, because the recipe called for dried navy beans and the store didn't seem to have any. They had lots of other dried beans, and I wondered if this might be one of those things like how garbonzo beans are sometimes chickpeas and really the navy beans could be sitting right in front of me by another name, but that was still a problem.
I have no idea what a navy bean looks like.
I guessed that they weren't actually navy, because "Top Chef" did a colored food quickfire challenge a few seasons ago and Tom Colicchio talked about how hard it would be for the person who got blue because there are very few naturally occuring blue foods. It's true. Probably all you can think of is blueberries, and those are really sort of purple more than blue. There's blue corn, immortalized as a shade of the moon that the wolf cries to by Disney's Pocahontas, but I've never heard of blue beans. I walked back over to the canned beans aisle and found navy beans, but none of the dried beans looked like them, so I eventually gave up and bought a bag of Great Northern beans.
They looked sort of like navy beans, and the Great Northern was the name of the hotel in "Twin Peaks", so it seemed like a positive omen to go on. If I'm going to make arbitrary decisions, they might as well be based on TV.
Friday night I had to cover the beans in water, and let them soak overnight. They swelled up from tiny pebbles:
to actual beans:
so on Saturday I dumped them into the slow cooker with a couple of carrots and an onion that I food processed down into paste:
In with that went pepper, 48 oz of chicken broth, and some herbs. The recipe called for Italian seasoning, but I don't have that, so I added oregano, basil, and some thyme. Then I had to cook, crumble, and add eight pieces of bacon. This should have been easy, but while I was crumbling the bacon right out of the oven some of it fell into my mouth and burned my tongue. This is, of course, the fault of the bacon, somehow. Anyway, when everything was in the pot:
I turned on the slow cooker and then ignored it for nine hours. When time was up, I scooped out two cups of the vegetables with a little bit of the liquid, pureed them, and added them back to the slow cooker with a cup of milk. Then I ate a bowl of soup:
with the rest of the baguette from Friday night (I sure got my dollar's worth out of that bread), and split the rest up into four containers for Monday through Thursday dinner.
I didn't want to just eat soup, though, and didn't want to go to the store to buy more baguettes, so for my companion to the week's dinners I decided to make a savory Spinach Bread Pudding with Lemon and Feta that I saw in "Food and Wine" magazine. I made a savory bread pudding once before and it came out really well, so I thought it would be nice this week to come home and heat up a bowl of soup and a square of bread pudding for dinner.
Not surprisingly, bread pudding starts with bread:
The recipe said to use 8 oz of whole wheat bread. A loaf of whole wheat sandwich bread is 20 oz, so I figured I'd be fine with half a loaf and cut that up. Unlike when I made the other bread pudding and had to slice a baguette, slicing up the sandwich loaf was easy because it was already sliced in one direction. Once done, I put it in the oven to toast for ten minutes, and started slicing the baby spinach:
That takes forever. I don't know if there's a trick to it or something that professional chefs use, but I just grab a handful, make a pile, and run the knife through it a few times until the pieces look small enough. Slicing a whole bag of spinach takes a while, but eventually I was done, and mixed it with the bread squares and some feta cheese in a large bowl:
Then I got to work on the part that turns into pudding:
That's two cups of milk, some olive oil, six eggs, lemon juice, salt, pepper, dijon mustard, and some lemon zest. My parents bought me a microplane grater, for zesting, for Christmas, and now I love recipes that ask for zest. I've also been zesting lemons and limes into my tuna salad, but I learned that you have to be careful with that. Too much lemon zest, and suddenly it tastes like you sprayed your tuna with Pledge.
Anyway, after I mixed that I poured it all together in the bowl, tossed it a few times to coat everything, and then poured it into a baking dish and let it sit on the counter for two hours. Then it went into the oven for 40 minutes, and turned out like this:
I sliced it into squares and ate one, and it was really good. The lemon stands out, and the spinach cooks down and keeps the rest of it from drying out. The top is crunchy, but the bottom is soft, and it should go really well with the slight saltiness of the soup.
Now I just have to manage not to eat all of this now instead of waiting for the week.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Delicious
You know what the high point of the visit with my parents last weekend was?
(Other than all of us getting to see each other, I mean.)
Our trip to The Apple Barn, because we had apple fritters with our lunch:
Apple fritters, covered in apple butter, are delicious.
(Other than all of us getting to see each other, I mean.)
Our trip to The Apple Barn, because we had apple fritters with our lunch:
Apple fritters, covered in apple butter, are delicious.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Is that a Diana Ross menorah?
I'm starting to really, really love Nostalgia. Even though the only thing I've bought there (so far) is my fantastic orange clock, whenever I go I see things that I want to buy, or at least can't stop pondering.
Last time I went it was an industrial antique, a set of rusty, corroded doll-head molds:
I didn't buy it, because it was (and still is, as of today) $1100, but isn't it spectacular? I want to hang it over my bookcase and stare at it, but I also fear that when you stare into the creepy doll heads, the creepy doll heads also stare into you. Still, it's unique, it's striking, and I'm still thinking about it a month later. It's not so much an antique as it is art, but I'm not really in the right income bracket to become a serious art collector. I'm barely a frivolous one.
I went back today with my parents, who are in town, and the doll-head mold was right there in the window. Upon seeing it, they somehow resisted the siren song of rusty factory salvage, and went on to look at other things, so I followed, and that's where I saw something even more strange:
I stared, and it stared back as I wondered, "Is that Diana Ross? Like, 70's disco Diana Ross? Why is her hair made of bubbles? Wait, are those candleholders? Is that a Diana Ross... menorah?"
Now that I have time to study it, several things have occured to me:
1) It's not a menorah. It doesn't have enough candleholders. It does have enough for Kwanzaa, though.
2) That's not Diana Ross. The eyes are wrong. It is a fabulous diva, though. With those huge gold hoops, the big hair, and the good bone structure, there's not really any question.
3) This may not have any religious purpose whatsoever. It has enough candles for kwanzaa, but then who would that lady be? Lady Kwanzaa? It could be for Diwali, I guess, since that doesn't really call for a specific amount of lights, but again, who would that lady be? And Diwali is about small lamps, not candles. I don't know of any other holidays that use lights, so maybe it's just a secular candleholder of some sort.
Unless, you know, disco is now a religion.
Last time I went it was an industrial antique, a set of rusty, corroded doll-head molds:
I didn't buy it, because it was (and still is, as of today) $1100, but isn't it spectacular? I want to hang it over my bookcase and stare at it, but I also fear that when you stare into the creepy doll heads, the creepy doll heads also stare into you. Still, it's unique, it's striking, and I'm still thinking about it a month later. It's not so much an antique as it is art, but I'm not really in the right income bracket to become a serious art collector. I'm barely a frivolous one.
I went back today with my parents, who are in town, and the doll-head mold was right there in the window. Upon seeing it, they somehow resisted the siren song of rusty factory salvage, and went on to look at other things, so I followed, and that's where I saw something even more strange:
I stared, and it stared back as I wondered, "Is that Diana Ross? Like, 70's disco Diana Ross? Why is her hair made of bubbles? Wait, are those candleholders? Is that a Diana Ross... menorah?"
Now that I have time to study it, several things have occured to me:
1) It's not a menorah. It doesn't have enough candleholders. It does have enough for Kwanzaa, though.
2) That's not Diana Ross. The eyes are wrong. It is a fabulous diva, though. With those huge gold hoops, the big hair, and the good bone structure, there's not really any question.
3) This may not have any religious purpose whatsoever. It has enough candles for kwanzaa, but then who would that lady be? Lady Kwanzaa? It could be for Diwali, I guess, since that doesn't really call for a specific amount of lights, but again, who would that lady be? And Diwali is about small lamps, not candles. I don't know of any other holidays that use lights, so maybe it's just a secular candleholder of some sort.
Unless, you know, disco is now a religion.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Explain this to me, please
I have questions without answers, because I have seen inexplicable things this week.
Mystery #1: There are two vending machines in the basement of the building my office is in.
After nine months or so of bringing in a yogurt for breakfast every day, I've started bringing in a banana instead, but some days I forget the banana and have to go downstairs for Pop Tarts, and that's where I noticed something a little odd. Both machines are owned and operated by the same vending company, but in the machine on the right, Pop Tarts are 85 cents:
In the machine on the left, 75 cents:
Why?
Mystery #2: What do clones have to do with love?
I saw this in the Valentine's Candy section of Wal-Mart:
While I understand that somehow George Lucas needs more money and has to license Star Wars out to candymakers, too, I don't understand these at all. Would loving your clone be masturbation or incest? And why bring love into it at all? Cloning is about science, not romance. And who are these intended for? Here in Tennessee, we have enough trouble with evolution; do we really want to put pro-human cloning candy in the hands of our impressionable children?
Mystery #3: I spotted this on the loading dock last week:
What happens when a microwave goes bad? Does it hang out behind the Five and Dime with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in its t-shirt sleeve, falling in with a bad crowd of surly blenders and antisocial George Forman grills? Is there a toaster oven somewhere holding onto a baby picture and sobbing softly, silently remembering the day when they brought home the little microwave from the appliance section, full of hopes and dreams? And where is the bad, bad microwave going? Is it too late? Or is there still hope that he could turn things around?
We may never know.
Mystery #1: There are two vending machines in the basement of the building my office is in.
After nine months or so of bringing in a yogurt for breakfast every day, I've started bringing in a banana instead, but some days I forget the banana and have to go downstairs for Pop Tarts, and that's where I noticed something a little odd. Both machines are owned and operated by the same vending company, but in the machine on the right, Pop Tarts are 85 cents:
In the machine on the left, 75 cents:
Why?
Mystery #2: What do clones have to do with love?
I saw this in the Valentine's Candy section of Wal-Mart:
While I understand that somehow George Lucas needs more money and has to license Star Wars out to candymakers, too, I don't understand these at all. Would loving your clone be masturbation or incest? And why bring love into it at all? Cloning is about science, not romance. And who are these intended for? Here in Tennessee, we have enough trouble with evolution; do we really want to put pro-human cloning candy in the hands of our impressionable children?
Mystery #3: I spotted this on the loading dock last week:
What happens when a microwave goes bad? Does it hang out behind the Five and Dime with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in its t-shirt sleeve, falling in with a bad crowd of surly blenders and antisocial George Forman grills? Is there a toaster oven somewhere holding onto a baby picture and sobbing softly, silently remembering the day when they brought home the little microwave from the appliance section, full of hopes and dreams? And where is the bad, bad microwave going? Is it too late? Or is there still hope that he could turn things around?
We may never know.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Two Weekends Ago Part 2: "Sometimes people go there to commit suicide."
Making banana bread wasn't my only adventure two (Or is it now three? I've lost count.) weekends ago. After leaving a cryptic comment on my entry about exploring the Ross Marble Quarry and seeing the giant Alex Haley, Elizabeth finally convinced Kristin and I to go with her, Ben, and William on a mysterious hike to a secret destination.
I say "mysterious" because this is what she told us to prepare us:
1) Bring strong flashlights. You'll need them, even during the day.
2) It's nearby, but most people don't know about it.
3) "Sometimes people go there to commit suicide."
Wait, what was that last one?
"You know, sometimes people go there and kill themselves. But it's totally safe!"
OK, see, I've seen The Descent, and I don't want to die in that movie. (What movie do I want to die in? I dunno, but I prefer that it's one where Tom Welling and I spend the first half making out pretty much the whole time. And clean shaven Tom, not that mess he turns into between seasons.)
"You're not going to die! It'll be fun!"
Yeah, the chicks in "The Descent" thought they were going to have fun, too, and you saw how well that worked out. Still, I picked up Kristin, we drove the Elizabeth and Ben's, and then the five of us piled into their truck and drove to Keller Ridge in nearby West Knoxville. Sure enough, neither Kristin nor I had heard of it, and when we pulled to get onto the hiking trail I realized that we were in a totally different movie:
Abandoned, gated road leading off into the middle of the forest? Great. Now we're going to die in Silent Hill instead. You might think I'm exaggerating, but look:
Plant William alone and vulnerable in the middle of the shot, change it to black and white, and tweak the contrast so all the shadows are darker, and suddenly the forest is totally menacing.
Regardless, we followed Elizabeth into the woods anyway, because that's what you do in those movies.
I figured a couple of fun "along the trail" photos would add a certain poignancy to our demise when the searchers found my camera buried under the corner of the Blair Witch's cabin. After several minutes of uphill climbing we burst through the trees into a gorgeous view of Fort Loudon Lake:
It was a gorgeous day to be out there, but what's hard to see in the pictures is that once we reached the lake, the path pretty much clings to the ridge. If you slip, it's a long, long drop, a point Elizabeth emphasized when we reached the part where people climb onto the rock ledge and then jump off and kill themselves:
It will surprise no one, I'm sure, to hear that I did not climb down there. I'm bad with heights and a little clumsy, and there's really nothing down on the suicide ledge that I need.
Likewise, there was nothing in the cave, a little further down the trail, that I needed, either. Clearly, it was safe, since Elizabeth, Kristin, and William went inside and didn't die:
but when I got to the entrance and crouched down to peer inside my little danger voice said, "Don't. Don't go in, ok?" so I didn't. I think Elizabeth was disappointed, but I really did enjoy the trip and the hike. I'm not totally afraid of new things. I try new food and walk down creepy alleys and drive to places I can barely find on a whim, but when my little danger voice says things like, "Get out of this deserted cemetary right now" or "Don't go any further into that abandoned asylum, ok?" I listen without question, because it's never steered me astray.
And I still had a good time even without going into the Cujo bat cave.
I say "mysterious" because this is what she told us to prepare us:
1) Bring strong flashlights. You'll need them, even during the day.
2) It's nearby, but most people don't know about it.
3) "Sometimes people go there to commit suicide."
Wait, what was that last one?
"You know, sometimes people go there and kill themselves. But it's totally safe!"
OK, see, I've seen The Descent, and I don't want to die in that movie. (What movie do I want to die in? I dunno, but I prefer that it's one where Tom Welling and I spend the first half making out pretty much the whole time. And clean shaven Tom, not that mess he turns into between seasons.)
"You're not going to die! It'll be fun!"
Yeah, the chicks in "The Descent" thought they were going to have fun, too, and you saw how well that worked out. Still, I picked up Kristin, we drove the Elizabeth and Ben's, and then the five of us piled into their truck and drove to Keller Ridge in nearby West Knoxville. Sure enough, neither Kristin nor I had heard of it, and when we pulled to get onto the hiking trail I realized that we were in a totally different movie:
Abandoned, gated road leading off into the middle of the forest? Great. Now we're going to die in Silent Hill instead. You might think I'm exaggerating, but look:
Plant William alone and vulnerable in the middle of the shot, change it to black and white, and tweak the contrast so all the shadows are darker, and suddenly the forest is totally menacing.
Regardless, we followed Elizabeth into the woods anyway, because that's what you do in those movies.
I figured a couple of fun "along the trail" photos would add a certain poignancy to our demise when the searchers found my camera buried under the corner of the Blair Witch's cabin. After several minutes of uphill climbing we burst through the trees into a gorgeous view of Fort Loudon Lake:
It was a gorgeous day to be out there, but what's hard to see in the pictures is that once we reached the lake, the path pretty much clings to the ridge. If you slip, it's a long, long drop, a point Elizabeth emphasized when we reached the part where people climb onto the rock ledge and then jump off and kill themselves:
It will surprise no one, I'm sure, to hear that I did not climb down there. I'm bad with heights and a little clumsy, and there's really nothing down on the suicide ledge that I need.
Likewise, there was nothing in the cave, a little further down the trail, that I needed, either. Clearly, it was safe, since Elizabeth, Kristin, and William went inside and didn't die:
but when I got to the entrance and crouched down to peer inside my little danger voice said, "Don't. Don't go in, ok?" so I didn't. I think Elizabeth was disappointed, but I really did enjoy the trip and the hike. I'm not totally afraid of new things. I try new food and walk down creepy alleys and drive to places I can barely find on a whim, but when my little danger voice says things like, "Get out of this deserted cemetary right now" or "Don't go any further into that abandoned asylum, ok?" I listen without question, because it's never steered me astray.
And I still had a good time even without going into the Cujo bat cave.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
"I carried a watermelon."
There's this boy that I kind of like. He's not actually a "boy", by which I mean that he's not under the age of eighteen, not that he's not actually a male, because I think he is even though I haven't officially checked or anything. After tonight, of course, I never actually will, because I ran into that boy that I like at the store, and managed to grind the conversation to an awkward halt in under a half dozen sentences.
Yeah.
I've been running into this boy, who I'm guessing is only a little younger than me, like maybe 30 or 31, at various events and meetings and things since about November or so. Whenever I see him somewhere, though, we always seem to be in passing. One of us is leaving while the other is arriving, or one has to go as soon as whatever is going on is over, or one of us is trapped in the corner talking to a needy friend who can't seem to take the hint that the reason why I'm looking over your shoulder is that the boy that I like is over there and now he's about to head out the door and you won't stop talking about your cat and your car and whatever the hell else it is that you won't stop babbling about while he's leaving yet again without me getting to talk to him.
Not that I would talk to him, anyway, other than to say hi or something, because I am horribly awkward around boys that I think are cute and they always have to talk to me first. This is what happens when you don't come out until after college. Everybody else got to perfect their flirting skills in high school, but you were busy trying to figure out how to pretend to be straight and never learned how to chit chat with boys. Instead, you just run into them at the store and manage to destroy any chance that you might have had to ever talk to him again in just under six sentences.
Here's what happened:
I rounded the corner of the aisle at the store, slowly pushing my cart and wondering if buying a bag of BBQ flavored chips for dinner was a good idea or a bad idea (I decided it was a bad idea, mostly because I was in such a hurry to leave the store and run home to finish dying a thousand deaths of mortification and embarassment that I forgot that I had ever wanted BBQ chips to begin with) when I looked up, and there he was! The boy that I like and never talk to!
O! M! G!, right? Since I'm bald now I no longer have to think, "Oh, God, is my hair ok?" but I did have a fleeting thought of, "Crap! Do I look dumpy in this outfit? And is it sexy dumpy, or homeless bum dumpy? Maybe I don't look dumpy at all? I have cute shoes on. Oh, God, please let him look at my feet," and then it was too late to think anything because there he was, and when he saw me he smiled really widely and his eyebrows went up and I probably looked like Veronica seeing Kevin with the little hearts exploding out of my eyeballs.
"Hey, you." Sentence #1.
"HI!" Overenthusiastic sentence #2.
"What's going on? I haven't seen you in, like, forever." Sentence #3 and #4. Also, you think about how often you see me?
"Oh, just, you know, doing some shopping. I need toilet paper, real bad." Sentence #5 and # OH MY GOD, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST SAY?
There it is. I might as well have just told him that I carried a watermelon
and then just let someone put Baby in the corner.
As soon as I said it, the two of us immediately glanced down, into my cart, where the only grocery I had picked up in the entire store was a huge economy twelve pack of toilet paper. Because, you know, I don't just need to buy toilet paper. I need to buy it REAL BAD. Like there's an emergency at my house, the kind of emergency that makes you need toilet paper REAL BAD. And it's the only thing I need. There's nothing else in my cart but this huge pack of toilet paper that I need REAL BAD because not only do I need it REAL BAD but I need a lot of it, at least twelve rolls, and even that might not be enough, because I need it REAL BAD. Not just the regular kind of need that everybody has but the kind of REAL BAD need that implies that I'm going to leave the store and drive home as fast as I can so that I can use the hell out of this toilet paper.
He looked me. I looked at him. He looked at my toilet paper again.
"Well, I'll let you finish shopping. It was good to see you."
"Yeah, you, too." Also, I wish I was dead, but I'll leave that out, because I've said enough.
You just go on your way, trying to imagine why I could possibly need toilet paper REAL BAD, and I'll be over here trying to imagine why I said it.
Yeah.
I've been running into this boy, who I'm guessing is only a little younger than me, like maybe 30 or 31, at various events and meetings and things since about November or so. Whenever I see him somewhere, though, we always seem to be in passing. One of us is leaving while the other is arriving, or one has to go as soon as whatever is going on is over, or one of us is trapped in the corner talking to a needy friend who can't seem to take the hint that the reason why I'm looking over your shoulder is that the boy that I like is over there and now he's about to head out the door and you won't stop talking about your cat and your car and whatever the hell else it is that you won't stop babbling about while he's leaving yet again without me getting to talk to him.
Not that I would talk to him, anyway, other than to say hi or something, because I am horribly awkward around boys that I think are cute and they always have to talk to me first. This is what happens when you don't come out until after college. Everybody else got to perfect their flirting skills in high school, but you were busy trying to figure out how to pretend to be straight and never learned how to chit chat with boys. Instead, you just run into them at the store and manage to destroy any chance that you might have had to ever talk to him again in just under six sentences.
Here's what happened:
I rounded the corner of the aisle at the store, slowly pushing my cart and wondering if buying a bag of BBQ flavored chips for dinner was a good idea or a bad idea (I decided it was a bad idea, mostly because I was in such a hurry to leave the store and run home to finish dying a thousand deaths of mortification and embarassment that I forgot that I had ever wanted BBQ chips to begin with) when I looked up, and there he was! The boy that I like and never talk to!
O! M! G!, right? Since I'm bald now I no longer have to think, "Oh, God, is my hair ok?" but I did have a fleeting thought of, "Crap! Do I look dumpy in this outfit? And is it sexy dumpy, or homeless bum dumpy? Maybe I don't look dumpy at all? I have cute shoes on. Oh, God, please let him look at my feet," and then it was too late to think anything because there he was, and when he saw me he smiled really widely and his eyebrows went up and I probably looked like Veronica seeing Kevin with the little hearts exploding out of my eyeballs.
"Hey, you." Sentence #1.
"HI!" Overenthusiastic sentence #2.
"What's going on? I haven't seen you in, like, forever." Sentence #3 and #4. Also, you think about how often you see me?
"Oh, just, you know, doing some shopping. I need toilet paper, real bad." Sentence #5 and # OH MY GOD, WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST SAY?
There it is. I might as well have just told him that I carried a watermelon
and then just let someone put Baby in the corner.
As soon as I said it, the two of us immediately glanced down, into my cart, where the only grocery I had picked up in the entire store was a huge economy twelve pack of toilet paper. Because, you know, I don't just need to buy toilet paper. I need to buy it REAL BAD. Like there's an emergency at my house, the kind of emergency that makes you need toilet paper REAL BAD. And it's the only thing I need. There's nothing else in my cart but this huge pack of toilet paper that I need REAL BAD because not only do I need it REAL BAD but I need a lot of it, at least twelve rolls, and even that might not be enough, because I need it REAL BAD. Not just the regular kind of need that everybody has but the kind of REAL BAD need that implies that I'm going to leave the store and drive home as fast as I can so that I can use the hell out of this toilet paper.
He looked me. I looked at him. He looked at my toilet paper again.
"Well, I'll let you finish shopping. It was good to see you."
"Yeah, you, too." Also, I wish I was dead, but I'll leave that out, because I've said enough.
You just go on your way, trying to imagine why I could possibly need toilet paper REAL BAD, and I'll be over here trying to imagine why I said it.
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