Heading Back For More

Another new list item —

* Compete in one of Matt Timm’s food takedowns again – and win.

I first heard of Matt Timms’ takedowns a couple years ago, when I first moved to Brooklyn — I got a membership to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, because I’m just plain addicted to their annual cherry blossom festival, and as such started attending a lot more events; including their annual fall Chili Pepper Festival. Along with the other events on the chili pepper program was a chili cookoff — overseen by a tall lanky guy with wild hair, featuring five people dishing out little Dixie cups of their creations to all comers so we could vote.

I was charmed enough to stick around for when they announced the winners to see what they won — they got a little certificate and bragging rights, basically. The winner had also been in other such cookoffs Matt Timms ran, I learned — Timms wasn’t part of the garden staff, he was someone who just threw chili cookoffs for fun, mainly at Brooklyn bars.

This was pretty intriguing, and I signed up for the mailing list.

And then I learned they were expanding the kinds of cookoffs. First I heard of a cookie bakeoff…then a fondue cookoff…and then, a year ago, I heard about a bacon cookoff.

Something made me sign up to be in it, despite the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was going to actually make. I wanted something that was fairly unique — something involving candied bacon in some way — but every time I came up with an idea (bacon peanut brittle, bacon candy popcorn) I would go online and learn someone else already had done it. So in the end, I just took a cookie recipe I’ve made before to great success, involving apples, nuts, and a caramel topping, and swapped the nuts out for candied bacon bits and called it a day.

When I showed up, I set up between two other competitors — on my left was a guy who’d made a Sloppy Joe kind of thing involving lots of bacon mixed in with the ground beef, and a sort of cream sauce drizzled on top of each sandwich which had been spiked with bacon salt. To my right was a guy who had cured his own bacon, and told me how he built the smoker in his back yard in Park Slope and smoked it for three days.

I just nodded, impressed, and thought to myself, “well, I’m CLEARLY not going to win.”

But it was wildly fun. The turnout was one of the hugest ones they’d ever had, with about 400 people showing up, including many members of the media. A reporter from Good Morning America was even there with a camera crew, and stopped by my stand for a few seconds to get a shot of herself thrusting one of my cookies at the camera and chirping, “Caramel Apple Bacon Cookies, folks!” while I just smiled knowingly.

They let the media folks hit us up first before letting in the crowds of taste-testers. And then it was a total blur of people shuffling by and picking up a cookie each. Some took a bite right away and nodded thoughtfully, some saved it to eat after the pile of other things already on their plates. In addition to my cookies and the other guys’ meat things, there were bacon truffles, bacon tamales, bacon tacos, bacon cake, bacon lettuce Thai spring rolls…one taster even told me about bacon bourbon ice cream, saying that that ice cream and my cookie would make a killer ice cream sandwich.

In the end, as I guessed, I did not win. But the ice cream won the popular vote (and a local blogger got the recipe for her coverage of the event, so I can make that sandwich).

The Takedowns are becoming a huge thing, now — the winners now get a bit more swag, and — blessedly — also get some help procuring the amount of food they need for their creations. I wanted to try the grits takedown they had recently, but life and time got in the way.

But I think I need to head back and try another time.

 

New addition to the list!

* I want to learn how to ride a horse.

Okay, I admit that this is fueled firstly by the horse-mad phase I went through when I was eleven, and secondly by watching Lord Of The Rings again. But there’s bound to be a way I can learn that.

 

How To Get 1001 Books

So part of reading all 1001 Books involves obtaining those 1001 books. Which you can do one of three ways:

1. Be independantly wealthy enough to buy all 1001 of them, including the rare limited-edition versions of the things that are out of print, and to also have an enormous endless library with polished oak and mahogany shelves and maybe a couple velvet window seats or an enormous cushy armchair and one of those way fun wheelie ladders and a fireplace and Vivaldi softly playing in the background and you can go there whenever you want and the more I write about this the more it makes me want to gnash my teeth that I can’t have it so I’m going to stop now.

2. Stalk your library for them, thus putting yourself up against the several hundred high school students who also have to read some of the books in question, and making repeated visits to see if the person who has had out the sole copy of Cryptonomicon since last Thanksgiving has happened to possibly bring it back, and pestering the librarians to use Interlibrary loan to get the one copy of Tale Of A Tub that they even know is in the state from that one library in Buffalo, and then later on pay hefty library fines because there’s no way in hell you could possibly read Proust in only three weeks to you’ve had to keep renewing it periodically and then you forgot and now you owe the library twenty bucks.

or:

3. Paperback Swap.

I love Paperback Swap. A former roommate introduced me, when he moved in after the previous roommate had moved out — she was moving away to Australia, and was forced to leave some of her things behind for me to “keep what you want and sell what you don’t.” However — among the things she left behind were fifteen boxes of books, and stoop sales can only do so much.

Enter Paperback Swap. You post a list of books you want to get rid of, and if someone claims one, you mail it to them (you pay for postage, but it’s only a couple bucks) and then you get a point. And then — you can use that point to claim a book off someone else’s list, and they send it to you. I eagerly listed all fifteen boxes of books, and fairly quickly got it down to a much more manageable three shelves. Which means, I also had that many points to trade in for books.

Free books. Oooh.

After first indulging in a couple rare children’s book finds (“sweet, I haven’t read The Tyger Voyage since I was nine!”), I started patrolling it for books off the 1001 list, ordering them as I saw them, and now have a small stack of “to be read” on a side table in the living room.

It’s a nearly perfect system — I still have enough points to stock up when the stack starts running low, and as I read something, I have the option of just keeping it — like I’m probably going to do with the lovely Jacob’s Room — or re-listing it on Paperback Swap and sending it off to someone else (like I’m doing with Tale of Genji, now that I’ve finally finished).

 

Flashbacks To Homework

I have always been a reader — I learned when I was about two and a half, mainly from Mom plunking me in front of Sesame Street a lot. So the goal of reading through the “1001 Books To Read Before You Die” list is actually fairly attainable, and I’m already about 10% of the way through. So you’d think this would be easy.

However.

I’ve not only always been a reader, I’ve always had very definite tastes in my reading. And one of the things that I have always turned up my nose at is silly romances.

…And “silly romances” is a good descriptor for about 60% of the books on the list.

Am struggling through The Tale Of Genji right now – okay, yeah, it’s a classic of the Japanese canon, and some say it’s the first-ever novel or the first novel that analyzes the mindset of the hero or whatever. I can respect that. But all that this “hero” ever seems to be doing is getting into doomed love affairs with delicate beauties and having angst about it, and I keep wondering why I would ever want to read about someone who’s so damn…idly wimpy. “Do something,” I want to tell this guy. “Start a farm, explore a palace, make a sword, build a boat, just do something instead of mooning around writing poetry for ladies of the court.”

But I’m continuing to slog through it, because…it’s part of the goal. At least it’s short.

 

How I Am Finally Going To See The Damn Perseids

The reason why I refer to them as the “damn Perseids” is because…I’ve tried this a couple times before. A couple times, when I was in high school or college, I’ve tried going out on the back deck at my parents’ house at midnight, waiting. The thing is, the Perseids are at their height at about 3 or 4, and while I saw a few shooting stars each time, I usually was nodding off by about 1:30 or 2 and would say “the hell with this” and go to bed.

Last year, I made another valiant attempt to see the Perseids — renting a car via Zipcar, and driving to Robert Moses State Park. I figured it was a foolproof plan, as I could pick the car up at 3, be at Robert Moses by 4, have an hour to watch and start heading back to Brooklyn by 5, and be back home by 6, well before traffic started up. However — as I said on my other blog last year, I hadn’t quite counted on the car I picked up for the attempt having seriously ridiculous car trouble, with a horn that would not stop going off throughout the entire one-hour drive through Long Island.

…But I am determined.

This year, the time was the biggest challenge — I work during the week now, and the weekend of the Perseids is the same weekend I have another writing commitment; I regularly write reviews for New York’s Fringe Festival for the site nytheatre.com, and the shows I picked were also all right bang on that weekend.

However – I don’t have a show to review Sunday. So – I could jaunt out to see the damnPerseids early Sunday morning.

…Granted, the pessimist in me is thinking that “with your luck, the weather’s going to suck then instead,” but dammit, we will still try…

…Damn Perseids.

 

Thinking Big

So some of the things on my list are clearly long shots. I’ve talked about this list with a couple people, and they’ve raised eyebrows and chuckled at some of the things I mention, gently teasing that “well, I guess that could happen…”

The thing is, I’m not 100% serious about the really long-shot ones either. I mean — seriously, I am so far off from being positioned to write for the BBC that it’s laughable (first: I’m American, second: I haven’t written anything of note, third: I haven’t written anything resembling a draft yet).

So why bother putting them down on the list?

I considered not. But I realized that if I started leaving things off the list on the grounds that they were “unattainable,” it would be all too easy to talk myself into thinking some things were also unattainable when they were really not. Which is all too easy a trap to fall into. Putting even the “crazy” things on this list, on the other hand, encourages you to check out some of the practicalities behind them – and you may find that some of those “crazy” things aren’t all that crazy.

Okay, David Tennant may be a long shot still, but…know something? I looked into some listings on the New York Times real estate section, and “owning my own apartment” isn’t quite as far-fetched as I thought.

 

I think that one of the reasons I wanted to learn how to shoot pool was because I immediately had a teacher in mind.

My friend Pat is such a character that if he didn’t exist someone would be inventing him. His formative years were spent at a Jesuit boy’s school, but then somehow — either by reading The Great Gatsby one too many times or having a really pivotal vacation — he spent a couple years in New Orleans as a pool shark, then just as suddenly packed it in and followed a couple friends to New York to start college. So conversations with Pat tend to be all over the map — one minute he’s talking about going to a voodoo temple with a bunch of frat guys who taught him how to say “show us your tits” in German, and the next minute he’s giving direct quotes from the work of St. Thomas Aquinas to justify a theological argument.

His response to my request for tutoring was typically quirky:

Alright. Pool requires a few things, and they’ll cost ya:

1. cigarettes (I quit, so we can dispense with them altogether if you don’t think you’ll need them to learn)
2. whiskey, American, in moderate quantities
3. enough change to rule the jukebox for a few hours (nobody should be able to shoot straight when crappy music is on. Some people can.
I don’t like those people.)
4. a hat. Baseball caps don’t count. I’m not sure why this is so, but they all wear them in the Hustler, so I’m not gonna argue.
5. a femme fatale. This would have to be someone other than you, cause she don’t play. Usually provided by the pool hall/gods.

I’m probably still going to suck at pool after even a couple lessons. But at the very least, this sounds like the making of a good evening out.

 

The Quilt – Change of Plan…

So — the biggest problem with making a t-shirt quilt was the fact that I…sort of don’t own a sewing machine.

But that actually encouraged me to turn to other people for help — which may also be a good thing overall in general, as I try to be a little Stoic sometimes.

I belong to a knitting group, and there is a lot of double-crafting going on in that group; one member also quilts, another also crochets, still others also spin and still others also make their own jam and preserves. So I asked the quilter how I could get at a cheap sewing machine.

…It’s actually kind of embarrasing that she was the one that reminded me of the obvious – Craigslist. (Duh.)

But then she told me about the Etsy labs, where it looks like I just pay a membership fee and can then use their equipment while they’re open. And — there would be people there who could help with the second problem I’ve got — I sort of don’t know how to sew that well.

So I’d have sewing machines there, and people to help me use them. Perfect!

I got excited enough about my progress to dig out those t-shirts this weekend and start planning. But that’s where I ran into my second obstacle — I actually don’t have enough show t-shirts to make a quilt.

So.

I do have enough, however, to make a quilted pillow sham. So change of plans!

 

Listen To The Don’ts

Listen to the Mustn’ts, child, listen to the Don’ts,
Listen to the Shouldn’ts, the Impossibles, the Won’ts,
Listen to the Never Haves, then listen close to me —
Anything can happen, child, Anything can be.
— Shel Silverstein

One of the things I really want to talk about is these “Don’ts”. The obstacles that I have, the things that have kept me from doing all of the things on my list up to this point.

Which I realize may sound a little counter-intuitive. I’m supposed to be all gung-ho, and “I can do it! Go me!” But I never really have been much of a “Power Of Positive Thinking” kind of person; I’m just a little too practical. Sheer belief is simply not going to get the job done — you need a road map, you need to know the tools that will get you to where you want to go.

And on any road map, you need to know where the roadblocks are. Because when you know where the roadblocks are, you can figure out how to navigate around them. But the only way to navigate around them is by facing what roadblocks are actually there.

In one of the introductions to one of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novels, Tori Amos wrote a bit about this:

…there is change in the “what is” but change cannot be made till you accept the “what is.” […] if you allow yourself to feel the way you really feel, maybe you won’t be afraid of that feeling anymore.
When you’re on your knees you’re closer to the ground. things seem nearer somehow. If all I can say is I’m not in this swamp, I’m not in this swamp then there is not a rope in front of me and there is not an alligator behind me…

And to be honest, allowing myself to feel dissatisfied is what was at the heart of this. My friend Colin and I joked at the beginning of this year that we were both probably going through mid-life crises, and we jokingly made the New Year’s Resolution that we would “be less lame” in 2010. But — that’s the biggest thing that spurred me on to this, was that I have been pretty lame.

So that’s why I need to look at the obstacles so far — because they’re excuses I was using to let me stay being lame. So instead of excuses, they’re now just problems. And problems can be solved.

 

The list

I’ll probably be adding to this list a lot, but for the time being, here’s what we’ve got. 

Some of the items in here are really clearly beyond the reach of most humans even in the best of circumstances — but I am listing them anyway.  Better for me to add something to the list and try for it anyway, even though I know it’s impossible, than to decide to leave the “impossible dreams” off and then convince myself that something is “impossible” and never end up trying it.

* Learn the bodhran.

I already know piano – sort of – but the piano is not the most portable of instruments.  However, I also found myself getting into Phil Collins’ music a lot when I was growing up, and there was a lot of crossover between piano and drums — I played air drums about as much as I played piano.  Granted, a drum kit isn’t all that portable either — but the Irish bodhran, a hand-held drum, is.  I have one, and right now pretty much all I do is whack it to play along with things like Solsbury Hill or In The Air Tonight.  I should probably learn a bit more.

* See the damn Perseids.

In 2009 I tried driving out to Jones Beach in the pre-dawn to watch the Perseid meteor shower — but the car broke down rather disastrously, and I missed it, arriving at the beach about a half-hour after dawn broke, long enough for me to watch the sunrise and feel whiningly sorry for myself.  The good thing about the Perseids, though, is that they happen annually — and I really doubt I’d have bad enough luck to have two cars break down on me two years in a row.

* Round up friends for a fancy-dress outdoor tea party in Prospect Park, complete with croquet.

I spoke with one of my friends today, and told him about this goal.  He looked a little puzzled, and my only explanation was “imagnining what you’d look like in seersucker just is…entertaining.”

* Write a story for some part of the Doctor Who franchise — radio, print, graphic novel, or even television.

The relaunch of Doctor Who has really claimed 50% of my television viewing — to the point that I’ve imagined a couple scenarios.  …Then when a friend of mine said that one of his high school friends actually wrote some radio scripts for Big Finish Productions in the 90’s, I realized — I have a connection.  I really need to build on this.

* Turn all my play t-shirts into a quilt.

For ten years, I was a theatrical stage manager.  For a couple of those years, it seemed every production I worked on presented all the members of the cast and crew with commemorative t-shirts as opening-night gifts.  But that was about eight years and two dress sizes ago, and I can’t wear them any more; and the designs are a little too esoteric for anyone unconnected with the show to udnerstand, so I really need to do something with them myself rather than donating them.

* Go on a self-guided inn-to-inn walking tour.

This is a European travel idea I’ve gotten hooked on the idea of; it’s a travel package where you’re booked for one night each at a series of hotels.  You spend your first night at one, and then in the morning your hosts give you a map and take your luggage.  Then, while you follow the map to walk to your second hotel, your hosts drive your luggage there to meet you.  You spend the night at the second hotel, pack up again and walk to your third…and so on.

Okay, it’s the lazy way to hike.  But I don’t know diddly about camping, and there are some wonderful packages out there, with itineraries carrying you through the French Alps and through rural Japan and the like.

* Pay off my debt.

About ten years ago – in the year following 9/11 — I had to live off my credit card because of a dearth of work.  I’ve been trying to pay that down ever since.  Being able to spend that much money on me again would make a huge impact.

* Kayak the full length of the Hudson River.

There are a couple of free kayak clubs here in New York, and I discovered one last year — and became very quickly hooked.  You wander up to where they’ve set up, and borrow one of their boats for a half hour — sticking to the one bay or cove they’ve set up in — for completely free.  By this year, I learned that the group considered me to be good at it — good enough to make me think a more ambitious trip is in order.

Kayaking the whole Mississippi would be a little ambitious — but the Hudson, now, that’s more like it.

* Wake up next to David Tennant.

…Don’t judge me.

* Read all 1001 of the “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.”

You’ve seen this book out there — that list of the “1001 books”.  Here’s the secret I learned, though — if you went through high school in the United States, you’ve gotten a head start on this list.  Because you’ve probably read about five of those books already, just because they were assigned to you during Junior year English.

Another secret — some of those “books” are more like “pamphlets.”  Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal?  It’s only five pages long, and that counts as a “book.”  Honestly, this is so doable, I feel like telling everyone that they should just do this already.

* Camp in Yosemite.

I spent only two days visiting Yosemite about nine years ago — and it was nowhere near enough time.  But – the main valley floor also was a little too crowded, which is part of what drove me away.

So I want to go back again — only instead of spending two days and retreating to the youth hostel offsite the way I did last time, I want to stay right there, in some out-of-the-way corner, venturing into the Valley when I want but then retreating back to a tent I’ve pitched in a place only I know about.

* Camp at Floyd Bennett Field.

Of course, I have to have some practice camping first.  And this affords the perfect chance — a campground right here, where I live, in Brooklyn.  I could jsut make it an overnight, I could get there quickly, I could be close enough to civilization to be able to run out and get the cereal/milk/hot dog buns/whatever else I forgot.  The one and only time I camped before this was with my family when I was fourteen, and it was somewhat of a clusterfuck that I probably shouldn’t repeat.  This would be a good way to practice.

Plus — seriously, camping in Brooklyn.  You’ve gotta try it.

* Dress as Columbia for Halloween.

It’s been years since I saw a Rocky Horror Picture Show floor show — but to this day, I remember all of Columbia’s solo in “Time Warp”.  A couple years ago, my mother started giving my brother and I back some of the “stuff” we’ve left with her as Christmas Presents, as part of a hint to help her get it out of her house — and one of the things she gave me back was the pair of tap shoes I got for part of my theater training in college.  I was wondering what I’d do with them — then remembered that Columbia has a tap solo in “Time Warp” as well…and there you go.

* Round up friends for a trip to Shady Glen.

Shady glen is a diner near my Connecticut hometown, and I am convinced it makes the best cheeseburgers known to man.  I have for years been trying to explain to my friends in New York what these burgers are like.  But you can’t describe them — you have to taste them. 

This is for them.  They have to know.  I owe it to them.

* Sell some photos I’ve taken.

Photography is a hobby I’ve let slip — then hanging around with my friend Colin, who’s a fine photographer himself, inspired me to kick it back up again.  I’d love to get good enough that I can sell at least one thing as a stock photo.

* Get an essay published.

Actually, part of starting this blog is an effort to generate ideas for me to write essays about.

* Own a home.

* Own a car.

Both are kind of long-shots here in New York.  But — some friends do own cars, and I’ve been sort of a “parking babysitter” a few times — enough to appreciate what having a car would be like.

* Go Zorbing.

The first time I ever saw someone use a Zorb, it was when I saw Peter Gabriel’s last concert; he brought one onstage and sang the whole of his song “Growing Up” while rolling around on stage inside what looked, to me, like this enormous human hamster ball.  The second he started, my friends who’d come with me and I all turned to each other, and we all said, “I want one!”   

* Find the guy I had a crush on when I was twelve and catch up on how life has treated him.

Phil.  Phil and I were in the same Sunday school group when we were twelve, at our church, St. Margaret’s, back in Connecticut.  And we got pretty friendly in class, to the point that everyone teased us about being secretly in love.  We would furiously deny it — but I think that was partly because we were just so heartbreakingly innocent that we simply didn’t know that they were all absolutely right.  After that class session ended, Phil’s family started going to a different church — and I only saw him a couple times after that.  I think, though, if he’d stayed around, he would have ended up being my first boyfriend.

I’ve tried now and again to track him down, without much luck.  I really want to know whether life is treating him well.

* Learn to play pool.

Just because.

* Visit China.

My birthday falls in late February, usually around the same time as both Mardi Gras and Chinese New Year; so I usually fall back on one or the other as a theme for my celebrating.  My 39th birthday was the day before Mardi Gras, so I celebrated there — so I think it’s only fitting to take myself to China for one of my other birthdays.

* Be a live nude model for an art class.

…You know how I was talking about the kid I knew in Sunday School?  That was Sunday School at a Catholic church.  And if you grew up Catholic, there’s something a little delicious about transgressing things.  This seems a safe way to do just that.

* Own a cottage in Woodstock.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve listened to Van Morrison’s album Tupelo Honey too much, but the idea of having a retreat in Woodstock — which I’ve loved every time I’ve visited — just sounds so amazingly peaceful. 

* Rent a cottage on Cape Cod for either a week or a long weekend.

* Drag friends to the Boom Box Parade.

* Drag friends out to a u-pick stand.

* Throw a clambake.

A few of these are things that involve friends – they’re all things I’ve loved on my own that I want to share with others.

* Drive the length of Route 66.

* Drive the length of East Coast Route 1.

* Other Road Trips.

Two of the best vacations I’ve ever had were road trips – first one driving nearly-cross-country, from New York to Las Vegas, on a quest for kitsch that was an absolute BLAST; there is something really grand and epic and life-affirming about a road trip, even when you’ve hit that point that you’re totally lost in the middle of nowhere in Kansas and you’re having a meltdown in the lobby of a chicken restaurant because you don’t want to drive any more, god-dammit and it takes two waitresses and a trucker to calm you down.  (Um. Okay, maybe I said too much.)  The thing is, for every one of those lows, you also have a high where you’ve hit the interstate in Utah where the speed limit is 80, and you’ve dug out the mix tape with “Baba O’Reilly” on it and you can just FLOOR IT.

It’s a huge way to have an awfully big pioneering adventure and I need more of that.

* Spend a week on an English longboat.

These are those little floating houseboats that used to travel the canals in England, the ones that are like fairytale gypsy caravans only on water.  And that really sums it up — they’re like fairytale gypsy caravans, only on water.  That’s why I wanna go.

* Another trip to Chicago.

I’ve been once; I love New York City, but Chicago was a great place to visit; nearly all the architecture was right out of the Arts-and-Crafts/Prairie School period I love best.  Definitely worth another trip back.

…There’s going to be a lot more on this list over the course of my life, I’m sure, but this is a good place to start.