Like so many blogs, sites, boards all over this amazing piece of technology called the internet, this little corner has been left idle for many months. But, I am back to reclaim it after all this time. Much has changed in my world since the last entry, but I won't bore this space with all the details.
All the changes stem from one large one - geography. I left New York City in mid-November to set up shop in San Francisco. Many people asked me, incredulously, why I would leave New York. There are many reasons - I wanted a career change, being close to family is a good thing, I love California. Nonetheless, I can't help feeling a tinge of regret and much nostalgia for the city I left behind. Life is radically different now - I drive places (in an adorable new car), I work for an internet startup far away from the finance world, I no longer share a tiny apartment, I spend lots more time with family and I'm generally a lot warmer than I would have been there. For every benefit there's some type of drawback - having an apartment in the city means I have to commute, it also means it's a lot more difficult to go out on weekdays and I've left behind many friends who I miss dearly. On the upside there's still so much more to discover while getting used to a new city and change in lifestyle. Despite the nostalgia, I'm excited about the change because I'm enjoying my job and my apartment and that already is more than half the battle.
There were more I's in that paragraph than any I've written in a long time, so I'll cap it with that. I'm not sure how regularly I'll be able to post, but from now on I'll try to document some of my more interesting adventures - the new sights, restaurants and hills that I will inevitably encounter in my exploration of San Francisco.
A bientot.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Autumn and Edith Wharton
Just when we think the city couldn't get any hotter, damper or more fragrant with that peculiar summer aroma of garbage and wet asphalt, the first autumn chill creeps upon us. It's unexpected, even a little unpleasant when we have to remember to bring a jacket for the evening return. It's strange to think that soon enough we'll forget about the sweltering heat, have no use for all those pretty summer dresses, and will be similarly surprised when spring melts the layers away and the cycle begins yet again.
September and October are good months - the air is mild and the city breathes with relief as the leaves begin to turn, the cultural seasons return as does oyster season (ok, I know it's a myth). My birthday is at the end of October, the time when it usually begins to get quite chilly and rainy, and when all the Ricky's and many empty storefronts turn into slutty-fill-in-the-blank costume warehouses. I haven't done the costume thing for many years, if I were to do it this year, what would I be?
When I was little I used to have dreams of the 19th century - I was always in these dreams of course. These were not realistic explorations of a time gone by, rather they naturally focused on what I was wearing - lovely princess ball gowns of course. The setting was equally sumptuous, and royalty was likely to be involved. I know what it looks like, but no, this discussion has nothing to do with halloween costumes. Rather, Autumn plus 19th century New York equals Edith Wharton. I go through authors in mini-spurts, which means if I like one book I'll read a few more by the same author right after. The first one I read was House of Mirth, and now I'm on to The Age of Innocence. The latter is even more depressing, even though I'm only about halfway through. When I was a child, I never considered the 19th century for what it really was (especially for my oh-so fair sex), never took into account anything other than the glamorous aristocratic trappings that no longer exist in our lives. Wharton lays it all out in the open, having herself come from that world - the wealthy, conservative New York gentry. Blood was everything, one could never escape family, tradition was paramount, ambition uneccessary and love an afterthought.
The hero, Newland Archer is engaged to marry May, but falls in love with her more interesting and clever Europeanized cousin Ellen who is estranged from her husband and wants to divorce him (but is convinced by Archer, a lawyer with no interest in the law, that it would do her no good and would only scandalize her family and damage her standing in New York society even further). So instead of resolving this obvious dilemma by having Ellen get a divorce and marrying her instead, he goes on to marry May, who is naive and dull and who cares only about her trousseau and decorating their house on 34th St. (in today's Murray Hill, a bad omen indeed).
I love reading about people who lived so long ago but walked in the very same streets I walk in today, rounded the same corners, sat in the same benches in Bryant Park. Of course this handful of characters is fictional, but there were thousands just like them in Wharton's actual existence. And as different as their lives and motivations may seem from ours, they are in fact very much the same, only shrouded in formal language, dozens of petticoats and a greater adherence to decorum and self-control (due to a fear of society, not religious deities). Who has not heard of a May - naive, prone to the occasional moment of lucidity, but mostly content to organize her trousseau and throw parties to show it off to society. And Archer - stifled by his surroundings, in the wrong occupation without any clue to what the right one might be, forgoes love when it knocks him down in his tracks because the path he was on is easier and is expected of him. There are dozens of these people running around in this city at this very moment. They have the same problems and may come to the same compromises, but they act slightly differently in the interim in the manner society expects of them.
September and October are good months - the air is mild and the city breathes with relief as the leaves begin to turn, the cultural seasons return as does oyster season (ok, I know it's a myth). My birthday is at the end of October, the time when it usually begins to get quite chilly and rainy, and when all the Ricky's and many empty storefronts turn into slutty-fill-in-the-blank costume warehouses. I haven't done the costume thing for many years, if I were to do it this year, what would I be?
When I was little I used to have dreams of the 19th century - I was always in these dreams of course. These were not realistic explorations of a time gone by, rather they naturally focused on what I was wearing - lovely princess ball gowns of course. The setting was equally sumptuous, and royalty was likely to be involved. I know what it looks like, but no, this discussion has nothing to do with halloween costumes. Rather, Autumn plus 19th century New York equals Edith Wharton. I go through authors in mini-spurts, which means if I like one book I'll read a few more by the same author right after. The first one I read was House of Mirth, and now I'm on to The Age of Innocence. The latter is even more depressing, even though I'm only about halfway through. When I was a child, I never considered the 19th century for what it really was (especially for my oh-so fair sex), never took into account anything other than the glamorous aristocratic trappings that no longer exist in our lives. Wharton lays it all out in the open, having herself come from that world - the wealthy, conservative New York gentry. Blood was everything, one could never escape family, tradition was paramount, ambition uneccessary and love an afterthought.
The hero, Newland Archer is engaged to marry May, but falls in love with her more interesting and clever Europeanized cousin Ellen who is estranged from her husband and wants to divorce him (but is convinced by Archer, a lawyer with no interest in the law, that it would do her no good and would only scandalize her family and damage her standing in New York society even further). So instead of resolving this obvious dilemma by having Ellen get a divorce and marrying her instead, he goes on to marry May, who is naive and dull and who cares only about her trousseau and decorating their house on 34th St. (in today's Murray Hill, a bad omen indeed).
I love reading about people who lived so long ago but walked in the very same streets I walk in today, rounded the same corners, sat in the same benches in Bryant Park. Of course this handful of characters is fictional, but there were thousands just like them in Wharton's actual existence. And as different as their lives and motivations may seem from ours, they are in fact very much the same, only shrouded in formal language, dozens of petticoats and a greater adherence to decorum and self-control (due to a fear of society, not religious deities). Who has not heard of a May - naive, prone to the occasional moment of lucidity, but mostly content to organize her trousseau and throw parties to show it off to society. And Archer - stifled by his surroundings, in the wrong occupation without any clue to what the right one might be, forgoes love when it knocks him down in his tracks because the path he was on is easier and is expected of him. There are dozens of these people running around in this city at this very moment. They have the same problems and may come to the same compromises, but they act slightly differently in the interim in the manner society expects of them.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Testing and Reading
I'm already becoming delinquent and I've barely even started. I suppose I have a legitimate excuse as I was studying for that feared phenomenon that seems ever present in our lives - the standardized test. As children and teenagers these tests are trying rights of passage that sometimes seem to have elusive control over the rest of our lives. As the college admissions process becomes more and more competitive, the stress and pressure around those 3 hours trapped in a room with a #2 pencil continues to increase.
As adults, one would hope we have a little more perspective, yet regression into childhood is almost inevitable when test day arrives. The format of this test was strikingly different (gmat). No droning proctors or #2 pencils in sight, it was all automated and computer adaptive, so while the room was full of other nervous test-takers, the process itself was entirely solitary. And to make matters worse, the scores to these computerized tests are ready right after you take it - the 30 seconds it takes the machine to compute it at the end are gut-twisting. Despite the trappings, and it seems regardless of age, the testing experience is pretty similar from decade to decade. Relief washes over at the end (as long as you didn't screw up), and you take a long walk from all the way downtown to soak in the city and your newly found relaxed self, and maybe get a bit of shopping in. Ok, so maybe I meant me, not you.
The testing thing also put a crimp in my reading for fun. I started The Tipping Point on the plane to Cali in mid-July, and have yet to finish the last stretch. I know I'm about 5 years too late to get excited about this book, but I still find it pretty exciting. Not least of all it is so well written that it's a pleasure to read. Malcolm Gladwell comes from the New Yorker school, and if you glance to the left you'll see how much I appreciate that publication, notwithstanding what I still think is a crazy use of the umlaut (the two dots) over the first of two adjacent vowels. Also, not widely known is the fact that the New Yorker has some of the best and most comprehensive event and cultural listings for New York that I've seen anywhere. Take a look, you'll see what I mean.
As adults, one would hope we have a little more perspective, yet regression into childhood is almost inevitable when test day arrives. The format of this test was strikingly different (gmat). No droning proctors or #2 pencils in sight, it was all automated and computer adaptive, so while the room was full of other nervous test-takers, the process itself was entirely solitary. And to make matters worse, the scores to these computerized tests are ready right after you take it - the 30 seconds it takes the machine to compute it at the end are gut-twisting. Despite the trappings, and it seems regardless of age, the testing experience is pretty similar from decade to decade. Relief washes over at the end (as long as you didn't screw up), and you take a long walk from all the way downtown to soak in the city and your newly found relaxed self, and maybe get a bit of shopping in. Ok, so maybe I meant me, not you.
The testing thing also put a crimp in my reading for fun. I started The Tipping Point on the plane to Cali in mid-July, and have yet to finish the last stretch. I know I'm about 5 years too late to get excited about this book, but I still find it pretty exciting. Not least of all it is so well written that it's a pleasure to read. Malcolm Gladwell comes from the New Yorker school, and if you glance to the left you'll see how much I appreciate that publication, notwithstanding what I still think is a crazy use of the umlaut (the two dots) over the first of two adjacent vowels. Also, not widely known is the fact that the New Yorker has some of the best and most comprehensive event and cultural listings for New York that I've seen anywhere. Take a look, you'll see what I mean.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
California Dreamin'
I love going to new restaurants and exploring food. But who doesn't? For every ten diners it seems there is at least one food blogger or gastro-community participant these days. And yes, I'm guilty of that as well (although this obviously isn't a food blog, unless it becomes one, which is unlikely because I'm probably too peevish and impatient to snap pictures of my food during a meal).
My relationship with food is one of deep and multi-faceted appreciation (I'm not sure it's a two-way street, but I'm willing to live with that). My food background is an amalgamation of sorts - weaned on Russian food (with southern influences like Romania, Georgia, etc), raised in the San Francisco Bay Area with a large dose of Chinese food (when I get a cold I have instinctual cravings for hot and sour soup). Then there was the college blip, with monotonous, low quality dining hall food that contributed nothing to my epicurean evolution. And now in New York, I go out often enough (and cook almost never) that my palette has been spoiled enough to use words like 'epicurean.'
I read the food press and certain restaurant blogs fairly regularly, and am in tune with the trendy styles and ingredients - morels, fiddlehead ferns, 'haute barnyard,' frying everything in sight, etc. Inevitably there are a million things I have yet to try, some of them classic and essential enough to be judged a crucial oversight. Until this past weekend I had never tried steak tartare. It wasn't really because I had just forgotten or certainly not because I had lacked the opportunity, but the idea of raw ground meat didn't quite appeal to my aesthetic sense. I know this makes no reasonable sense because I eat raw ground fish all the time. The reticence had to end with a visit to Blue Ribbon since one of their signature dishes is the steak tartare. I told my friend not to count on me for much more than a taste (just in case), but I probably ended up eating more than my fair share. The dish was perfect, with herbs and capers and home-made potato chips - I have hunger alarms going off in my brain as I write this. Illogical aesthetic aversion will not deter me in the future.
Well, that should probably be a conditional statement, depending on where you are and what aesthetics might have to do with possible health threats. My friend Hui is traveling in Southeast Asia right now, and as a fellow food lover she's reveling in exploring the authentic cuisines of Cambodia and Thailand (wish I could be there too). That enthusiasm has to be tempered by practical concerns, of course. No practical concerns necessary where I'm going for the weekend. Perhaps it's a childhood attachment, but despite all the great restaurants I go to in New York, the simple things just seem to taste better in California - the salads fresher, the herbs more aromatic. Whatever the reason, it's guaranteed to satisfy.
My relationship with food is one of deep and multi-faceted appreciation (I'm not sure it's a two-way street, but I'm willing to live with that). My food background is an amalgamation of sorts - weaned on Russian food (with southern influences like Romania, Georgia, etc), raised in the San Francisco Bay Area with a large dose of Chinese food (when I get a cold I have instinctual cravings for hot and sour soup). Then there was the college blip, with monotonous, low quality dining hall food that contributed nothing to my epicurean evolution. And now in New York, I go out often enough (and cook almost never) that my palette has been spoiled enough to use words like 'epicurean.'
I read the food press and certain restaurant blogs fairly regularly, and am in tune with the trendy styles and ingredients - morels, fiddlehead ferns, 'haute barnyard,' frying everything in sight, etc. Inevitably there are a million things I have yet to try, some of them classic and essential enough to be judged a crucial oversight. Until this past weekend I had never tried steak tartare. It wasn't really because I had just forgotten or certainly not because I had lacked the opportunity, but the idea of raw ground meat didn't quite appeal to my aesthetic sense. I know this makes no reasonable sense because I eat raw ground fish all the time. The reticence had to end with a visit to Blue Ribbon since one of their signature dishes is the steak tartare. I told my friend not to count on me for much more than a taste (just in case), but I probably ended up eating more than my fair share. The dish was perfect, with herbs and capers and home-made potato chips - I have hunger alarms going off in my brain as I write this. Illogical aesthetic aversion will not deter me in the future.
Well, that should probably be a conditional statement, depending on where you are and what aesthetics might have to do with possible health threats. My friend Hui is traveling in Southeast Asia right now, and as a fellow food lover she's reveling in exploring the authentic cuisines of Cambodia and Thailand (wish I could be there too). That enthusiasm has to be tempered by practical concerns, of course. No practical concerns necessary where I'm going for the weekend. Perhaps it's a childhood attachment, but despite all the great restaurants I go to in New York, the simple things just seem to taste better in California - the salads fresher, the herbs more aromatic. Whatever the reason, it's guaranteed to satisfy.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
4th of July Edition
This was probably one of the most anticlimactic 4th of July holidays in recent memory. Not that anyone was expecting much since it fell on a Wednesday and it seems most everyone I know went to work on Tuesday and came back to work today. But clearly our nation's forefathers were scheming to put an even bigger damper on the day. And damp it was. Maybe this was a sign from those same forefathers (perched in the cosmos somewhere looking down on us) that not all was satisfactory with our fair nation.
Everyone knows that grilling and celebrating American independence are basically synonymous. I have no idea how this came about - perhaps grilling is somehow a step in the "pursuit of happiness" direction. In any case, this year I joined the fray. A friend of mine who recently moved in with her fiance on the upper east side invited a bunch of people to a barbecue on her building's terrace, so I made my over there with supplies from Fairway in tow. In the cab going crosstown (both cabs I took that day had crabby and chatty cabbies), the cabdriver was peeved that he smelled food because he was hungry and on his way home. He asked me whether I had gone all the way crosstown just to get groceries. As much as I love Fairway, that is really an absurd proposition. If I lived on the east side, with its lack of quality options, I would probably succumb to Fresh Direct and be deprived of the basic sensory experience of grocery shopping I so enjoy.
The terrace at my friends place is great (subsidized student housing is an amazing thing in Manhattan), so I definitely need to revisit when it's sunny. Just as we started grilling the rain starting coming down in fits and starts, so by the time any of our vittles were done we were quite soaked. After a few hours we retreated to the apartment to have tea and dessert (at this point I should have taken the pure satisfaction of this ritual and replicated it at home to the tune of a cheesy romantic comedy), but the second crucial mission of the 4th of July had not yet been fulfilled. Always gluttons for punishment, we trotted out to the building across the street and waited on the 34th floor rooftop for the fireworks to begin. When we got there it was hardly raining, but as we waited, the torrent really came down. What is it about fireworks that turns us into little kids? That experience never seems to get old, and after waiting a half hour in the rain the fireworks ended up having an enormous cloud of smoke in front of it, obstructing half the view. We didn't even stay to watch the grand finale, because by this point only about a third of the display was visible at all - the wide-eyed child in me was disappointed.
Everyone knows that grilling and celebrating American independence are basically synonymous. I have no idea how this came about - perhaps grilling is somehow a step in the "pursuit of happiness" direction. In any case, this year I joined the fray. A friend of mine who recently moved in with her fiance on the upper east side invited a bunch of people to a barbecue on her building's terrace, so I made my over there with supplies from Fairway in tow. In the cab going crosstown (both cabs I took that day had crabby and chatty cabbies), the cabdriver was peeved that he smelled food because he was hungry and on his way home. He asked me whether I had gone all the way crosstown just to get groceries. As much as I love Fairway, that is really an absurd proposition. If I lived on the east side, with its lack of quality options, I would probably succumb to Fresh Direct and be deprived of the basic sensory experience of grocery shopping I so enjoy.
The terrace at my friends place is great (subsidized student housing is an amazing thing in Manhattan), so I definitely need to revisit when it's sunny. Just as we started grilling the rain starting coming down in fits and starts, so by the time any of our vittles were done we were quite soaked. After a few hours we retreated to the apartment to have tea and dessert (at this point I should have taken the pure satisfaction of this ritual and replicated it at home to the tune of a cheesy romantic comedy), but the second crucial mission of the 4th of July had not yet been fulfilled. Always gluttons for punishment, we trotted out to the building across the street and waited on the 34th floor rooftop for the fireworks to begin. When we got there it was hardly raining, but as we waited, the torrent really came down. What is it about fireworks that turns us into little kids? That experience never seems to get old, and after waiting a half hour in the rain the fireworks ended up having an enormous cloud of smoke in front of it, obstructing half the view. We didn't even stay to watch the grand finale, because by this point only about a third of the display was visible at all - the wide-eyed child in me was disappointed.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
The Inaugural One
So I've been thinking about starting a blog for a while, not because of some needy sense of narcissism, but because I just wanted to write and haven't had much of a reason to since college. Then there's the fear that blogging will cause my writing to become a mess of stream of consciousness, and that writing about irrelevant subjects will quickly wear itself out. The latter may be true, can't predict that one, but hopefully it will be entertaining while it lasts. Speaking of stream of consciousness, I actually really enjoy that kind of writing (blame it on my hidden romantic side). One of my favorite authors, Milan Kundera, writes in a character-driven stream, and I absolutely love it, but it's not quite me. I'm a little bit more pragmatic and disciplined in my style of expression, and I figure that part will remain.
It seems everyone has a blog now, some for practical reasons, but many as a substitute for a diary (paper is so sadly obsolete). Whereas diaries were supposed to be secret and have keys (mine was pink in the 4th grade, I filled out 2 pages and lost the key), blogs are purposefully public, an expression of our inner voyeurism, which at the end of the day might be healthier than all that secrecy. But who cares? I'll be writing because I feel like it and if anyone reads it and it elicits a reaction (like 'this girl is ridiculous'), I guess that's cool too.
Those of us ladies who enjoy acquiring handbags (and I don't mean the ubiquitous Louis Vuitton in all shapes, but different colors and styles for different occasions) know that if you actually use various bags and transfer your essential belongings between them, some non-essentials get left behind. So if you go back to a bag you haven't used in a while you might discover things that may make you reminisce or laugh or scratch your head trying to remember why you would ever go to a Benihana and who could have coerced you to do such a thing.
Well I recently pulled out a big leather bag I used to use in college (the only one I have that fits large books), and found my moleskine notebook at the bottom. These notebooks are great little things, from the convenient size to the little elastic band that secures it. Most of all they look serious, and if you're seen scribbling in one somewhere, you look serious too. Well, like many items of this nature (the pink diary included), I was enamored with the notebook for a total of 10 pages or so, and then almost forgot about it. In those pages I had scribbled quotes that I liked from books or articles I was reading at the time - a collection of gems really. I was on a Milan Kundera run at the time, hence the mention above. I found a quote in there that is so relevant to the whole blogging phenomenon, it's almost prophetic. It's so good that it'll be my parting gift.
"One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived."
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
It seems everyone has a blog now, some for practical reasons, but many as a substitute for a diary (paper is so sadly obsolete). Whereas diaries were supposed to be secret and have keys (mine was pink in the 4th grade, I filled out 2 pages and lost the key), blogs are purposefully public, an expression of our inner voyeurism, which at the end of the day might be healthier than all that secrecy. But who cares? I'll be writing because I feel like it and if anyone reads it and it elicits a reaction (like 'this girl is ridiculous'), I guess that's cool too.
Those of us ladies who enjoy acquiring handbags (and I don't mean the ubiquitous Louis Vuitton in all shapes, but different colors and styles for different occasions) know that if you actually use various bags and transfer your essential belongings between them, some non-essentials get left behind. So if you go back to a bag you haven't used in a while you might discover things that may make you reminisce or laugh or scratch your head trying to remember why you would ever go to a Benihana and who could have coerced you to do such a thing.
Well I recently pulled out a big leather bag I used to use in college (the only one I have that fits large books), and found my moleskine notebook at the bottom. These notebooks are great little things, from the convenient size to the little elastic band that secures it. Most of all they look serious, and if you're seen scribbling in one somewhere, you look serious too. Well, like many items of this nature (the pink diary included), I was enamored with the notebook for a total of 10 pages or so, and then almost forgot about it. In those pages I had scribbled quotes that I liked from books or articles I was reading at the time - a collection of gems really. I was on a Milan Kundera run at the time, hence the mention above. I found a quote in there that is so relevant to the whole blogging phenomenon, it's almost prophetic. It's so good that it'll be my parting gift.
"One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived."
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
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