27

Lunch at Absinthe in the sunshine. Beginning with a bloody mary, ending with a plated candle. One of the drinks on the cocktail menu "is Juanathan's homage to the intricate relationship between whiskey and horses." Amazing. In the bathroom, I thought about how you are supposed to sing Happy Birthday twice when you lather the soap to wash your hands. I made the bubbles and thought, "It's true."

We strolled down the street, discovered a tiny park between Haight and Page, and hopped onto the 71 to go to the Academy of Sciences. When I thought about what I wanted for my birthday, one of my thoughts was I want to see something beautiful, which brought me to the fish. The new museum is really nice despite my memories of the previous version, that I visited for so many weekends and school field trips. Looking at the upside down jellyfish, the tree frogs, the chameleons, the anemones, it all makes me feel so small in the good way, a humbling happy smallness. No matter what happens to me, there will always be lionfish, octopi, and penguins, and all they need to do is breathe.

From the park onto another bus downtown for sushi before the Show. VIP seats at Wicked! Fabulous costumes, great music, epic scenes. Being up close was really a special experience. A criscendo to a fabulous day, the first day of being 27 . . .

As of late - part 2

As of late

From before - part 2

From before

Look What I Made

Look What I Made

Puking, vomiting, upchucking, rolfing, ralphing, yawning in Technicolor, blowing chucks, losing your lunch, spewing, barfing, bringing up, driving the porcelain bus, disgorging, dry heaving, expelling, gagging, heaving, hurling, kecking, losing it, regurgitating, retching, throwing up. It has many names.
My friend Jarred said that his favorite thing in the world was vomiting. His least favorite thing: the feeling before and after vomiting. All pleasurable things in life involve tension and release. Puking is no exception.

Food Related Blunders: Oh God, Why Did I Eat That?

Yesterday: I almost vomited all over a banana. I prefer slightly unripe bananas with a light green tinge around the edges. I underestimated the tinge and selected a banana I thought would be just perfect with sweetness and firm texture. Upon taking the first bite, shivers went down my spine. I tried to chew the dry pasty banana. It tasted like aspirin. I forced myself to eat the mouthful. Bad idea. The banana triggered my gag reflex, and if it had not been for a nearby trashcan, I would have splattered little banana bits all over my shoes.

Once I ate 2 cloves of raw garlic, because I thought it would be good for me. My roommate was of the health conscious variety. Everything he ate was vegan, organic and possibly local. Henry would pick up raw cloves of garlic and pop them in his mouth while eating a bowl of pasta. Imitating his healthy gesture, I ate one and then two cloves of garlic with my food. All was fine for about 5 minutes after finishing my meal, when I suddenly had to race to the bathroom, where my body made evidence of its strong disagreement with my healthy gesture.

Booze: Highway to the Toilet Bowl

16, at a Halloween party, dressed up like the Saint Pauley Girl, eight beers too many. I strolled out onto the patio, and found an unassuming bucket. I released the contents of my stomach, and then picked up the bucket, shouting confidently, “Look what I made! Look what I made!” I put the bucket back down, sat on someone’s lap, and began to kiss him with my unrinsed lips.
After a bit too much at a different party, I escaped to the bathroom. Lamenting the rejection of some forgettable fellow, I began bawling while I was vomiting. Really, crying while vomiting is one of the most awful things ever. You feel as though you are leaking from every corner of your face.

“I think I’m gonna hurl”: One more puke related memory

I used to not believe that anxiety had the power to affect your gastro intestinal system. Then I fell in love for the first time. I hadn’t been sleeping regularly. The butterflies of novelty had my stomach in knots. Eating was difficult. A road trip to San Francisco with friends put 4 days distance between my new love and I. Now this may not seem like a long time, but in new lover time, this is ages, eons. It’s like exponential dog years. I couldn’t stand the waiting. Finally back in Oregon, after a 10-hour drive, we made plans to see each other that night. While I waited I forced myself to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and did the only thing that would put my anxiety to rest. I took a nap. An hour later, I shot out from under the covers on the couch, where I was sleeping and ralphed into another conveniently placed bucket. (They seem to appear for me)
Waiting for him could be equivocated with the moment one clutches the toilet bowl, groaning with nausea, or Jarred’s least favorite moment. In the moments in between our meetings I was often dizzy, stupid, weak in the knees, and glazed with an expression of euphoria. When we were together, I vomited fireworks into the air and all the little sparkling remnants fell down around me as time passed. My heart released without hesitation.

Pants are like love . . .

. . . a different pair is right for everyone.

Act Four of this week's This American Life podcast hits upon this exact idea. I never thought this sentence would be actualized in story format and lo and behold.

Act Four. Pants Pants Revelation.

Joel and Kate were both working in a psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. They both like each other, and she tries to impress him by always wearing her favorite pair of jeans. Little did she know, the jeans were maybe the only thing about her that he didn’t like. (8 minutes)

Don't Go for the Food, Go for The Toilet

I'm kinda obsessed with bathrooms.

There's nothing better than excusing yourself at a restaurant to go to the bathroom, waiting in a long line to use the restroom, and being pleasantly surprised when you get into the can to see that the owners have taken creative license to make the experience of passing fluid in their establishment an interesting and memorable one. I can't count how many times I have been disappointed that a fancy restaurant hasn't gone to any measures to make their bathroom an either memorable or luxurious experience. If I am paying $60 for a meal, I want their john to be one that I could never afford or imagine myself peeing in at home. It's annoying when you are paying so much for a meal and you get in to relieve yourself to find that the toilet seat is loose, the soap dispenser gives out neon pink industrial soap, and all the fixtures are everyday stainless steel. I remember eating in one fancy restaurant on my birthday, where the soap had run out and they put out a plastic squeeze bottle with a broken cap to pour soap out of. Sad.

I had two seconds of fame once for my Yelp list, "The Best John's in SF" that was featured in a weekly email newsletter. In it, I describe some winners in the category of making peeing interesting. You can make it pretty like Pauline's Pizza (whose black throne in a pink tiled room with chandelier and flamingo light switch cover can't really be topped), pictoral like Minako sushi with a tropical fish mural, luxurious like Rose's Cafe in the Marina (with lilies and wooden toilet seat dispenser) or entertaining like B44 or Pizzetta 211 (with mini televisions looping footage of interesting and culturally appropriate footage in line with the cuisine served, like B44, a Spanish restaurant whose bathroom has reels of a festival in Spain where people make human towers every year at a festival, the paramount being when they send a six or seven year old child up to the top to climb over five stories of people to add an additional 48 inches or so to garner a win) or to the truly wacky bathrooms like the hot toilet water at Sushi Groove. I am still waiting to find a restaurant with a real life bidet or a Japanese Toto installment.

Until then, I will continue to pee pee like a plebeian . . .

Quote from Russell Brand on NPR's Fresh Air

"I don't know if you've ever smoked crack Terry, but it makes you do some very eccentric things." -- Russell Brand

Adventures in Adult Disneyland - Day One

Reporting from the land of sin, prowess, and confidence.

Our day began early very early, 5 am to be exact. When you are at BART at this hour, pretty much everyone on BART is going to the airport.



You can see the casinos when you land in the airplane, the Luxor and the Wynn are basically backed up against the landing strip. On our way in, we were all thinking the same thing, "Wouldn't it be weird to live in Las Vegas, a town full of visitors?" I asked the cabby if he lived in Vegas. He did for all of his 45 years.

I took photos from the cab like a cheesy tourist. Vegas really does feel like a theme park at certain moments, and the roller coaster and miniature buildings of New York, New York fit right in with that.



Unable to check into our hotel, we grabbed some breakfast at the Starbuck's in the casino. The pastries there were not normal pastries, they were huge and all covered with inches of thick icing. The sticky buns were the size of baseballs. They must have gotten them from somewhere in the area.



We then headed to the jacuzzi, mind you, it's probably about 9am in the morning. The desert had yet to heat up the strip, and it was really cold. I kept my knit cap on while cooking in the bubbles.





We ate at Diablo's, a Chevy's-esque Mexican food restaurant in front of the Monte Carlo. We ordered some spicy mojitos that contained jalapeno seeds. I was doing fine and then one of the seeds lit my tongue on fire. I pleaded the waiter for an ounce of milk and he obliged me with a whole glass.


Still unable to check into our hotel, we wandered the strip and checked out the interior of the Bellagio with the Chihuly ceiling and botanical butterfly house installed in the front area. The Bellagio was definitely my favorite hotel of all the ones they visited. I loved the waterfall/waterworks that happen every hour in front of the hotel in their giant man made lake where spouts of water erupt from the lake to the tune of popular songs. It's a big, glorious, beautiful use/waste of water. We wondered what it would feel like to be on top of one of those water jets when they go off, to which my response was, "That'd be a hysterectomy."



We also went into the Venetian with it's faux-canals, replete with gondola rides and clouds painted on the ceiling inside the casino shops. The cloud motif, I later discovered continued in most of the shopping areas within the casinos, including Paris, Miracle Mile, and Caesar's Palace. Vegas is all about simulation and the being outside while you're inside feeling makes sense, especially in a city where temperatures top one hundred degrees on a regular basis.



Vegas is full of vacation items that are temporal and useful only in their gratuitous celebration of the moment and one's ability to push that moment to the limits of it's ostentation for a relatively cheap price. I am speaking of the mardi gras like necklaces that are sold and the yard long margaritas that you can drink in public.



Finally getting back to the hotel, we napped, got dressed to go out and went to the Paris hotel for the dinner buffet. Having long heard about the Vegas buffet, this was an event we were looking forward to. We arrived and I was both surprised and disappointed. Disappointed that it looked like a regular buffet, no ice sculptures or gold, but surprised that things like crab legs, bouillebaise and cod were available in an all you can eat format. Even though my peeps weren't as crazy about this buffet, it still was the first evidence I had that Vegas has some of the best buffets anywhere. We ate to the point of bursting and were comatose afterwards.

Hoping to earn some free drinks, we played the penny slots at the Paris. The food expanded, the wine they gave us was awful. My friend who played the Kenny Rogers machine had the hot machine. I realized that the old slot machines are better odds-wise than the strictly video machines. It's funny to me that all the casino's look different inside, but their slot machines and tables all pretty much look the same.

Everything in Vegas looks so close, but is actually far away. Space and time are distorted. This is especially true when you are full and trying to get back towards your hotel. Having finally made it, we decided to check out Diablo's. Inside, a cover band playing 80's and 90's rock, a la Lynard Skynard and Pearl Jam, with additional hot pants clad gogo Dancers offering shots in your mouth.



And then we went to sleep . . . .

Chinotto Cocktails

If you haven't had Chinotto, it tastes like sweet orange rinds, like Campari without as much bitterness, an almost licorice flavor. The drink gets its name from a bitter sort of orange. I don't like Campari, but I adore Chinotto. I love that it comes in little glass jars that are really the perfect size for a sweet lunch beverage.

I think it would be really delicious to make cocktails with Chinotto. At first I thought about a good vodka, but a nice bourbon would be better, because the bitter flavors in Chinotto are a lot like the flavors in a Manhattan.

When I googled Chinotto Cocktails I came across this article by Eric Felten in The Wall Street Journal about using Italian sodas to flavor your cocktails which includes two chinotto cocktail recipes that include tequila and apple brandy:

Il Diavolo

2 oz blanco tequila
¼ oz fresh lime juice
1 to 2 tsp crème de cassis
3 to 4 oz chinotto soda

Build in a highball glass with ice and stir gently. Garnish with a slice of lime.

Della Mela

1½ oz applejack (apple brandy)
½ oz Benedictine (optional)
3 to 4 oz chinotto soda

The article also mentions the rise in bartenders making their own sodas from simple syrup and carbonated water. I was recently at The Orbit Room and they had some old fashioned selzer water dispensers behind the bar, which was not only cool but extremely stylish, making the $10 cocktail price tag seem like that much more of a deal if I got to see those kind of antiques on display. Way cooler than the soda "gun" you get at most bars.

5 Days of Sentinel Sandwiches

Day One Smoked Salmon Sandwich



5 days of Sentinel Sandwiches begins. Day One features Salmon salad with dill and pieces of lox on top, butter lettuce, and seeded bun. The Sentinel is a small lunch kiosk with daily changing amazingness. Chef Dennis Leary of Canteen barks out orders and slings out sandwiches in the teeny tiny kitchen.

Day Two Veggie Sandwich with Curried Raisins



Day two featurees the veggie sandwich with mushrooms, swiss chard, golden raisins, curried raisins with sun-dried tomato spread and goat cheese and topped with butter lettuce on seeded bun. I enjoyed the cooked leafy greens, which added extra texture to the sandwich. The goat cheese was spreadable like cream cheese or marscapone. www.thesentinelsf.com/

Day Three Corned Beef



This may be the swansong of the Sentinel, the corned beef with sauerkraut, carmelized onions, gruyere cheese and russian dressing on ciabatta. It has the most bravodo of all the sandwiches and the corned beef was not too salty. I might have gone for a little less meat, and a little more dressing, but that's picking nits. It was a pretty damn amazing sandwich. www.thesentinelsf.com/ Oh and let me also note that all of their sandwiches come with a homemade dill pickle. I have never liked dill pickles before in my life, but I think I may have turned a corner. I really like their dill pickles. They are so refreshing and so crisp, and it was the perfect note after the corned beef sandwich.




Day Four, Meatloaf and Meunster



Meatloaf and Meunster sandwich with mayo and butter lettuce. Wow, this was some serious business. The meat loaf was thick and soft, and cooked with a touch of pink on the inside, so that puddle on the paper in the bottom half of the photo is a mix of mayo and bloody meat juice. Today, I received an Andes mint as opposed to the usual butterscotch.

Day Five, Deviled Ham With Meunster



While remarkably similar to the meatloaf sandwich, the deviled ham and meunster sandwich was distinct in texture and flavor. I looked up the ingredients in deviled ham and it entails mined ham that has been mixed with scallions, sour cream and spices like cayenne, taragon and mustard. It is not as spicy as it sounds. This deviled ham tasted mildly of tabasco and there was a bit too much ham for my taste. The sandwich also had butter letturce, cream cheese, and the occasional walnut.


Bonus Day - Chicken Salad Sandwich



Chicken salad with lemon, sesame and chili. A surprsingly light and very meaty chicken salad sandwich. Shredded pieces of chicken breast are tossed in a light aioli with lemon juice and a touch of sesame and chili. I would put this right behind the veggie sandwich for lightness. Thus concludes the Sentinel's Winter menu. Amen.

BreadxBread

BreadXBread

Sandwich love in full force with poems, carbs, and more. Bloggers after my own heart.

I claim this chest . . .

Classic.

Chicks and Bikes

I just found this blog. I find it cool and fetishistic. It reminds me of girls at car shows.

Chicks and Bikes

Bar Soap

Apartment Therapy's Sexiest Bar Soaps

There is something so personal in a bar of soap. The way it makes you happy, the way other people react to the way you smell. I recently made the switch to bar soap from liquid soap, and love it. I never want to go back. It's cheaper, it lasts longer, it's better for the environment because you're not shipping the water that comes in liquid soap, and there's something so much more tactile and satisfying about it.

i think you just modified my sense of inner peace

I have had yoga instructors that are completely uninvolved, listlessly telling you to breath in breath out, and go back to downward dog.

Then there are the big personalities. These are usually the people who single you out in class, noting that you need to squeeze your elbows together and using your name so the entire class gets to think about your elbows. Yoga is not a competition. I don't appreciate anyone get rewarded or reprimanded during class. It's odd. It's such a personal exercise, why announce other people's achievements/problems to others?

I do enjoy having modifications done. I don't mind the hand pressing my shoulders back or the pull of my hips back in downward dog. This kind of contact makes me feel like the yoga instructor is my yoga buddy, just helping my stretching along. Only a few times have the modifications felt vaguely sexual.

I like the chanting and I want my instructor to help bring me to a spiritual place. A few lines of poetry or a short discussion about energy is wonderful (and I admit to tearing up in class prompted by the spiritual talk), but I did have an instructor once get out a tambourine and sing acapela to us. That felt like a bit much.

Also, my other big debate when it comes to yoga is the music played while you are in class. Personally, I am anti modern music. I don't want to know that you like Moby, Elliot Smith or Damien Rice while we are in class. I come to class to leave things like taste in music behind. It distracts me to have lyrics and modern music while I do yoga. I want to be displaced and for that reason, I favor chanting, music in languages I don't know, or classical music. I'm also down with no music at all.

Karaoke

Things to consider when selecting a karaoke song:

1. How long do I actually want to be on stage?
2. How much will this make my friends laugh?
3. Do I know the words well enough that I will be able to dance or embellish? Conversely, do I know so little of this song that it will be funny for my friends?
4. Do i not care what my friends think? Do I want to indulge some long held fantasy that I can be Patsy Cline or Whitney Houston or Robert Plant or Bob Dylan?
5. Will I ever get on stage? I've already had 4 drinks.

I've often wondered what the WORST karaoke songs to sing are. I nominate slow ballads that not many people know. These are the least interactive songs to select. Things like "Desperado" don't count because everyone knows the words.

Karaoke is a community activity. You go out with your friends and sing for a big group of people who are usually out in packs of friends. They are all just like you and they are not there to pay $6 for a gin and tonic to watch you fuck up some long slow ballad that they don't know the words to. On the other hand, they are there to watch you fuck up songs that they know and love.

Which brings me to the karaoke cliches/standbys. We all know and love them a lot and if you've been to karaoke, you've also seen lots of people try to sing them. Pretty much everytime that I go out for karaoke I hear at least one of these five songs:

1. Don't Stop Believing by Journey (undoubtedly the most popular in my opinion. I hear it without fail)
2. Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns and Roses
3. Me and Bobby McGee by Janice Joplin
4. Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler
5. Living On a Prayer by Bon Jovi

Not a bad way to spend a saturday night and $30 . . .

Monochromacy

Basically every item of clothing that I have purchased in the recent past has been a varying shade of navy blue. I find myself stepping out the door in entirely blue-fits. While it is a little funny, I enjoy indulging in the lack of variance.

Now we all know that monochromacy is completely illegal when it comes to sweatshirt and sweatpants combos. It is completely unacceptable to be seen in public this way, unless you are a)elderly or b)Rocky Balboa.



I asked my roommate her opinion of monochromacy in fashion, and she was totally pro. I think it's really in right now especially if it's an all white outfit, which reminds remind me of the temple garments I recently read about that some Mormons wear while they are at church. The garments were referenced recently in an episode of Big Love that upset the Church of Latter Day Saints.

I also often think of sartorial monochromacy as something that boys and certain types of hipsters do. You know what I'm talking about, that dude who always wore brown hoodies with brown dickies, or hipsters/emo kids/goths/punk rockers/hessians etc. in all black with eyeliner. I use a photo of AFI for reference. I would have picked a better band for reference, but this is all I could come up with in my google image search for "all black clothing hipster."

Incredibly Malleable Horoscope for the week of March 16th

Gemini - You -- or your partner -- could come up with all kinds of good reasons why you can't be successful doing what you really want to do. This is especially true in the first half of the week, when the Moon in your 7th House of relationships squares Saturn in your 4th House of home, family and emotions and Uranus in your 10th House of career. You might not be able to avoid hearing those voices (inner or outer), but you don't have to take them to heart. In fact, I wonder what would happen if, instead of trying to block them from your awareness or buying into their bad wisdom, you started asking them devious questions. Like "Where'd you get that belief?" Or "What makes you think that today's conditions are going to last forever?" You've had at least one stroke of insight about your life's work in the last week and you've got a couple more coming in the next week or two. Nurture those seedlings and shoo away the boo bugs who'd bite them down before they have a chance to grow.

http://wordsforthepeople.com/