In the meantime, since the negative covenants are growing restless, I can at least share a little news:

1.  Today I am a for-real-and-true Californian.  Two hours into my morning study time at the library, I realized I left a book I needed at home.  I swore gently, dropped off some of my books in my locker, and set off on the 20-minute walk home.  Since I had a little time to kill, I decided to make a cup of tea.  As I went into the bathroom to wash my hands, I heard a banging sound from the back of the house.  Holy cow, I thought, someone’s trying to break in, and I stepped out of the bathroom gingerly, just in time to feel the floor roll underneath me.  It took seven months, but I have finally lost my earthquake virginity.

2.  Today I may be a for-real-and-true Californian, but come this July, I will be Auntie Jenny in the eyes of the law, as well as in the eyes of my best friend’s kids.  The brother who used to send me smartassed letters from science camp, and who charmed an office full of publishing professionals when he was ten years old, has grown up into a responsible young man, and he and his awesome (and awesomely patient) wife are having a boy this summer.  Of course I kicked into full auntie Monty and made him this:

Baby boy, there’s more where that came from, I promise.

3.  To answer the unspoken question:  Oh, my god, I just want to get through this semester without flunking out of law school.

Okay, lovely ones, just for sitting through this nonsense, you deserve some pretty pictures at the very least. 

Let the disclaiming begin.  Dear friends, I had plans for some Cookbook Love essay or other, maybe accompanied by some arty-fantastico food photography.  This will be coming soon enough.  In the meantime, I found myself awake at a ridiculous hour of the morning today.  Since there’s nothing more depressing than studying at 5:30 in the morning, I decided to seize the moment and participate in the 25 things meme, on which several people tagged me on Facebook.  The damn thing took me such a long time to write that I decided to cross-post it to PTMYB.  Most of these 25 things will be old news.  Many more of them will be tedious, the epitome of “today I ate a burrito for lunch/I hate my job” blogging, to use my friend Tristan’s excellent phrase.  But in the end, exercises like these dust the cobwebs off my brain, and in the end, I can’t complain about that.  You certainly may, though.

1.  I have a freckle on my top lip, the result of increased sun sensitivity after I started using Retin-A as a teenager to clear up my skin.  Usually it can’t be seen because it’s under makeup, but I just like knowing it’s there, for some reason.

2.  My mother did a terrific job (and, really, still does) at setting good examples for me.  When I was little, my mother read as much as time would allow; she loved art and art history, and would let me look at her college art history textbooks; she was an early believer in local, sustainable farming and used to shop for vegetables from the truck farmers in Wilmington, Delaware (and she used to bring me along); and as much as she loved me, she didn’t live through me and she didn’t treat me as if I were the center of the universe.  I have reaped only good things from this.

3.  I skipped fourth grade.  This meant that from fifth grade through college, I was frequently the youngest person in the room.

4.  I am no longer the youngest person in the room. Frequently I am the oldest person in the room. I used to feel weird about this until I heard Bill Clinton lament that he had just left a meeting where he was the oldest person in the room, and I thought, “dude, you were SIXTY YEARS OLD before that happened to you.  Do you think any of us will have to wait that long?  Try working retail for a while, dude!”

5.  My second job out of college was in the special sales department at Viking Penguin (now Penguin Putnam).  I started working there less than a year after Viking had published The Satanic Verses, and four months after Ayatollah Khomeini declared the fatwa on Salman Rushdie.  By the time I started, the bomb threats had largely dried up, but every once in a while, someone would feel the urge to call a bomb threat in.  I didn’t panic, mostly because my coworkers were old hands at building evacuation, and this was all in a day’s work for them.

6.  When people ask me if I miss New York, I say no, but that’s not entirely true.  The New York I miss is not the New York I left in August; rather, it was the New York I used to visit as a teenager, and the one to which I moved when I was 21.  It was never easy or cheap to live in New York, but it was easier, and cheaper, and if you were resourceful, it was possible to do a lot with relatively little.  That New York is long gone, and I don’t know if it’s ever coming back.

7.  Before I met my husband, whenever I fell in love, my immediate response was to think “It’s love!  It’s love!  It’s love!  I’m in love! Love love lovvity lovvity love!” (repeat x1,000,000) The day after my husband and I had our first date, my immediate response was to think, “Okay.  This guy is not like all of those other guys.  This guy is different, and if it doesn’t work out, you’re not going to find something this good with anyone else...so for the love of God, DON’T SCREW IT UP.  Don’t scare him off.  Don’t do anything stupid.  Just be good to him, because this is a REALLY GOOD THING.” That was about the moment I suspected I might want to marry him.

8.  I often struggle with focus and attention span issues.  After a lifetime of study skill classes and time management seminars, I am only just beginning to consider that it might be a brain chemical issue.  The jury is still out on that, though.

9.  The only flavor I really don’t like (with the exception of the usual suspects like microwaveable scrambled eggs in a tube and frosting in a can), and have not grown to like, is caraway.  For years I wouldn’t eat rye bread because I thought I hated the taste, but after I had my first taste of seedless sour rye, I knew that what I hated wasn’t the taste of the rye, it was the taste of the caraway seed.  The only place I can tolerate caraway is on a kummelweck roll, the roll used for the mighty Beef on Weck sandwich.  Other than that, I still find it really unpleasant.

10.  When I was 10, I was in a car accident that, by all laws of physics, should have killed me.  I still don’t know how I managed to survive.  I have a permanent lump of damaged tissue on my right shin, as well as a scar from where my leg was cut on the door handle, surrounded by 16 smaller scars rendered by sloppy stitching at the hospital.

11.  Lloyd and I have no children.  This was not a choice on our part; we decided to see what fate had in store for us, and to take the hand we were dealt.  So far that hand does not include kids, and since we’re getting longer in the tooth every day, I don’t think it will.  Sometimes this breaks my heart, because I think Lloyd and I would make decent parents and we could have a great little family.  Other times this fills me with the purest relief.  I certainly wouldn’t be in law school if we had kids—and yes, I worry that I would end up unwittingly screwing up their lives, or Lloyd’s.  Having said all that, when people ask me if we have kids, I still automatically answer “Not yet.”

12.  After one of my coworkers saw David Bowie at Lee’s Art Supply on West 57th Street, I used to hang out there for hours, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.  I never did, although I was told that he was a regular customer.

13.  Among my closest friends are my college roommate, who has been a dear friend for 25 years, and my childhood pen pal, who I met by filling out a “Do you want a British pen pal?” coupon in a teen magazine.  We started writing to each other when we were 12; I met her for the first time when I was 22 and flew to England to meet her and her new baby son; she was maid of honor at my wedding.  With both of these friends, I can go for months without keeping in touch with either of them; yet once we starting talking, it’s like we never stopped.

14.  My first trip overseas was a summer program in the country formerly known as the U.S.S.R., between my junior and senior year of college, in 1987.  Two weeks before the end of classes, I was asked to leave the country by local government-types.  This was not for political reasons.  Yes, there’s a story.  No, it won’t be told here. >

15.  The most shocking thing about law school is how quickly I reverted to my dopey, awkward teenager self.  People will tell returning students that they are at an advantage because they have more life experience, they know that the world doesn’t turn on their grade point average, they have a better sense of what’s really important in life.  I have two words for these people:  Nuh Uh.  I have two more words for these people:  Contact high.

16.  Even though I feel perpetually dopey and awkward in school, I really love my class.  It is composed of brilliant, funny, warm and humane people, people who will laugh with you and will watch your back when your back needs watching, and I could not ask for a better group of people with which to be in school.

17.  While I like actual breakfast food, I love leftovers for breakfast even more.  The day after Thanksgiving is my favorite day of the year.

18.  I feel more at home, more comfortable in my own skin, working in a bread bakery than I do anywhere else.  The two weeks I spent in continuing education at the King Arthur Flour Baking Education Center in Vermont were among the happiest of my life.  I was doing something I really loved.  I was good at it.  I was training with people who I admired and respected, and I wanted them to find me worthy.  I was making a plan for the future.  At the same time, I recognize that I am lucky that I never opened that bakery after all.  Between the spike in commodity prices and the credit freeze, 2008 would have killed us.  We would be over half a million dollars in debt, and probably would have had to declare bankruptcy.  It is a sobering thing to look at your dream and think “thank God we dodged *that* bullet.”

19.  Counting the summer work I did as a teenager, I have worked as an office assistant, an intern at the Youth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., a title searcher, a newspaper reporter/photographer, a sales assistant in both the publishing and cosmetic industries, a bookseller, a children’s book buyer at the store where I sold books, a temporary switchboard operator at an emergency homeless shelter run by the Red Cross in Brooklyn, a pastry cook, a breadbaker and a standup comic.  (That last one didn’t really pay, and I wasn’t good at it.) With any luck and plenty of hard work, I will also be a lawyer, working on either food policy issues or civil rights.

20.  I once called in sick from work because I was reading a book I loved too much to put down.  (Disclaimer:  Everybody gets *one* sick day in their lives like that.  I’ve had mine.  I won’t be taking any more of those.)

21.  I wish I could throw a baseball.

22.  The only downside to being married is that I can’t fall asleep listening to the radio anymore.  If I were single, that radio would be playing all night long.

23.  Although my grandmother taught me basic garter-stitch knitting when I was little, I didn’t really learn how to knit until I was 38.

24.  My heart still breaks much more easily than it should.  It doesn’t take much.  I keep waiting for it to toughen up a little bit, but it never does.

25.  I miss the way I used to listen to music when I was a teenager.  Call me a sentimental old fool, but I believe there is something almost chemical in the power a song you love has over you when you’re younger.  Occasionally I still find a song that makes me feel that way, and when I do, I feel like a new person.  Hearing a song like that feels like diving into clear water.  It feels like doing the work you were born to do.  It feels like love.

It has been so long since I’ve done anything around here but placeholding with angst-ridden internal monologues.  There is so much to share.  Yet I can’t share any of it.

At least I can’t just yet.  As I’m sure a few people are aware, I finished my first semester of law school last month.  I had big plans for the hiatus between the end of the fall semester and the start of the spring.  My mother and stepfather would be visiting for five days, arriving the day after my last final.  (They did, and we had a splendid time together, even though winter weather—or what passes for winter weather in Santa Clara County—arrived with a vengeance.) Bunni would be visiting the last week of break.  (She did, and we had a bang-up time.  Her photoset of her trip makes me smile.) I would write the letters left unwritten, get the house in order, get some practice driving our new Scion, update my resume, look for summer work, apply for fellowships to pay for my summer work (since it looks like any summer work I garner will be unpaid), pursue some other moneymaking opportunities, and, first and foremost, I would write.  Finally.  There would be no more curtailing my food crank impulses.  I would sit and write like I did in December 2003, when PTMYB was born.

You can guess where this is going.  What I did was sleep in past 7 every morning, change into a handknit sweater that grows increasingly ratty with each wearing, and knit.  I tried to read, but my attention span was shredded, and I couldn’t get past five pages without thinking that I should be doing something else.  The few times I sat down to write, the same horrible thing that happened during my year of unemployment happened again.  Two, three, four hours would roll by while I stared at a blank screen, writing a few lines, erasing them, looking at other people’s work for inspiration, feeling not inspired but depressed that I had fallen so far, so fast.  I knew that our current circumstances would not support seat-of-the-pants planning:  I would need to budget my time as assiduously as I budget money, making a plan and sticking to it, but I had no idea how to do it.  I began to wonder if my inactivity since December 2007, my lack of a full-day schedule, had destroyed my last tenuous shred of initiative, or worse yet, caused me actual brain damage.  I wondered if I would need Ritalin just to get through the Sunday New York Times.  I wondered what it would take to get me out of this, and if Lloyd would want to remain married to me after I was done with school. 

Now I know what it takes.  As shameful as it might sound, it takes feedback.  Specifically, it takes grade-based feedback.

That was indeed a coy way of saying that my grades were posted last week.  The good news is that I am not failing out of law school. The bad news is that while I’m not failing, it’s obvious that my fall methodology of Reading, Panicking, Weeping and Reading once more is not doing me any favors.  My grade spread ranges from the excellent to the worrying.  Fortunately, I have an opportunity to put the worrying grade right, but it’s going to take work, and help, and effort—the kind of effort that precludes staring at a blank screen for four hours, flouncing away tearily and temporarily hating the president who you helped elect because he took all the same first-year classes that you did, and you just know he aced them, hell, he probably ran practice exams for fun, and we HATE that in an incoming president.

(That was a joke.  Please don’t send me hate letters pointing out where the lack of academic rigor in a Commander-in-Chief has left us.  Believe me, I’ve noticed.)

At any rate.  It may be counterintuitive, if not ironic, to start writing more frequently now that my free time is over and the demands of school are rearing their ugly heads, but I’m keen to try.  Even if it means just weekly posting, or lots of placeholding interstitial folderol, it’s better than three months of silence.  I miss the foodish conversation, and I want it back, even if it means I only have two hours on Friday afternoon, or Sunday morning, to partake.

I did get one thing accomplished during break.  One day, Lloyd and I went out to the garage and brought in six boxes of my books, mostly cookbooks.  The boxes are in the bedroom, waiting patiently until our cash flow allows for a new set of bookshelves.  “I’m just going to pull a few things out that I want to look at right away,” I said to Lloyd. “Knock yourself out,” he replied.  He didn’t even blink when he saw what I consider to be a few things.

Dear friends, I can’t tell you how it feels to sit in this new place and hold my old books in my hands, the ones that got me through biting New York winters and sweltering New York summers.  I have my old points of reference back, the source of gingerbread and cold soba noodle dressing, baked cherry tomatoes and pickled greens, onion pie, buttermilk biscuits so tender they fall apart at a cross word, other buttermilk biscuits which are sturdier but no less toothsome.  To have them all back is a tonic, and with any luck—and with work, help and effort—they will take all that worry I’ve been carrying around, and they will peel the skin off it.

Postscript: It is a topic for another day—hey, I have homework —but I figured a little cheesy product endorsement would get the year off to a rollicking start.  My adored friend Sharon gave us this superb cookbook for Christmas, and from the day it arrived, I have been unable to stop cooking from it.  If you are a fan of The Splendid Table on the radio, you will eat this up.  (Not literally, of course—I mean, you want to keep it around so you can cook from it.) If you are unfamiliar with it, this might be the book to make you a fan.  Details will follow—maybe even next week.

To borrow a phrase from my Art Hero, Rene Magritte, Ceçi n’est pas une blog post.  I am less than 30 hours away from my last exam, and it’s a lulu, featuring an hour-long essay and 53 multiple-choice questions on a staggeringly complex body of law—and unlike our other exams, it’s completely closed-book, which means we can’t use the outlines we’ve been preparing all semester, as we could in our other exams.  I have my work cut out for me until then.

Nevertheless, the time comes when you have to step up and acknowledge the moment where a sea change has occurred.  Since school started, much has happened, and I’ve not been able to discuss any of it here.  I didn’t write about the election, or about Thanksgiving, or about the melting economy, or about the enormity of change that started on August 13, when I started law school and never looked back.  I missed it all, but I won’t miss the chance to say this:
What a difference a year makes.

See you Friday, dear friends, when I shall be able to think clearly again.  Hopefully.

All of this prevaricating is my way of saying that unless something spectacular (and unforeseeable) happens, I will not be free to write again until after 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 11, when I take the last of my final exams.  (The other three are on 12/1, 12/4 and 12/8; the take-home final for our writing class was 2 1/2 weeks ago, and was a special brand of hell for us law school whoosits.  I never want to live through something like that again, but since we have another semester of it in the spring, I will.) We’re not doing anything special for my birthday on Tuesday, nor will I be roasting a turkey on Thanksgiving.  It’s all finals, all the time, baby.  Well, okay, we’ll probably go out for Thanksgiving, and I’ll bet that I snap and make a Shaker lemon pie from the lemons off our tree, but otherwise, I will be living contract remedies, the major bodies of tort law, various ways to prosecute or defend man’s inhumanity to man, and more Federal Rules of Civil Procedure than you can shake a stick at.  (Disclaimer:  Please do not shake a stick at the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.  They work for you, not against you, even if you’re the poor bastard being sued.)

Dear friends, with any luck, the next new content here will be written on Friday, December 12, from that nifty deck, while I drink my coffee and watch the hummingbirds.  I will have a few hours to kill until my parents arrive from Philadelphia to celebrate early Christmas with us and visit our new digs for the first time.  I won’t even be hung over.  Probably.

That is in fact myself, at my new teeny desk—I have a desk!—in our sunny kitchen, which I’ve found to be the best place in the house to study, except for the late afternoon hours.  Somewhere between 3:30 and 5 p.m., the kitchen gets so bright and so sunny and so warm that study becomes impossible.  When that happens, I screw up my courage, open the sliding door out of the kitchen and sit on the deck, remembering that those Cadillac-sized bumblebees drinking at the morning glories really don’t bother themselves with me:

From here I can peek out at the garden we were lucky enough to inherit from the previous tenant, surveying the zucchini and peppers and string beans and herbs, offering silent thanks to him for providing us with this good stuff.  I can remind myself that soon I will be able to order seed catalogs and make plans for our own garden—because as much as I used to love looking out our living room window at our landlord’s garden (and at the Triborough Bridge looming overhead), and how much I appreciated his sharing the garden’s bounty with us, there is nothing in the world like looking at a garden at which you can call your own shots.  Next year, we will have lime basil and graprao basil and good old-fashioned sweet basil; we will have oregano and marjoram (no more fighting wiry little line cooks for the last bundle of marjoram at the market!); we will hopefully have some sorrel and wild arugula and some form of cowpea or another; and you had better believe that we will have tomatoes, in a riot of colors, so many that I will be unable to leave the kitchen between August and October.

I am aware that I might sound a little boastful now, and I apologize for being so.  Contrary to what the words would suggest, I am not living in the sun, baking myself to freckly pink goodness while I pull oranges off the tree in the front yard and suck them dry.  There is the small matter of law school.  We are now nine weeks into the first semester, five weeks away from the end of classes, six weeks away from final exams.  This time last year, I was still at LuthorCorp, not knowing that I would be cut loose two weeks before Christmas, seeing nothing but long, glutinous failure on the horizon.  Being here, in a bright yellow kitchen, struggling to pull the key elements of law out of a case, boggles my tiny little middle-aged mind.  It is shocking and familiar, enchanting and disorienting, terrifying and thrilling, all at once.  I am biting my knuckles, trying not to make the easy and obvious joke of David Byrne hollering, “well...how did I get here?” Except...I guess I just did.

Before I had even made a final decision on which school to attend, ‘mouse had warned me that law school would rewire my brain, literally change the way I processed information and turned it into cogent thought and applied knowledge.  Kids, he wasn’t kidding.  Even as I write this, I am aware that I have fallen far from my old bloggy glory, which was never really all that glorious but was at least linear, and understandable, plain-spoken where it needed to be, multilayered where layers were both allowable and welcome.  Now, though, now things are different. It is all I can do to take subjects and verbs and objects and turn them into more than the sum of their parts.  I am no longer the same person who used to have conniptions over thousand-dollar frittatas, or the political hijacking of the events of September 11, 2001, or the silly and unnecessary maligning of English food, or the crime against humanity that is the value-added, shrinkwrapped russet potato.  In time, I hope I can be that bakerina again, but until then, I am left with subject-verb-object, subject-verb-object, almost like Hemingway, only without the evocative genius or the gaggle of adoring women.

What I can do, though, is thank everyone, every single blessed one of you, who called or wrote or sent care packages, wishing us well and asking us if we were okay.  Dear friends, it is good to know that you are out there, watching our backs, transmitting love with every word.  I can also answer a few FAQ’s, because even though people do frequently ask questions, I’ll be buggered if I can put up an actual FAQ page.

Without further ado:

1.  How is Lloyd?  Does he like his job?

I’m happy to say that Lloyd is the same brave, goodnatured dreamboat he has always been, and I am awed by his willingness to remain married to me while I turn into a keening, school-obsessed lunatic.  His job transfer did indeed come through, and he is now working at his company’s client satellite office at a certain Big Deal Computer Hardware Company.  Said satellite office is in Palo Alto, which leads to our next question:

2.  Are you two really sticking with that lunatic plan to have Lloyd commute to Palo Alto by bus every day?

Oh, sigh.  God knows we tried.  God knows we came to California with our environmental hearts on our sleeves, planning to continue living the mass transit-based life we lived for so many years in New York.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how many buses the local transit authority runs if the shuttle bus from the Palo Alto transit center to BDCHC’s office stops running at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.  So we sucked it up.  We bought the cheapest car we could find, a 1994 Honda Accord with 270,000 miles on it.  Lloyd drove it to Palo Alto every day, trying hard not to worry about those weird rattling noises it made every time he accelerated, braked, turned a corner or did just about anything else.  We had a mechanic look at it and he gave us bad news about the timing belts, i.e. These Things Are Going To Blow Any Minute, And If They Do, Your Engine Will Explode.  After a week or two of profanities and handwringing, we decided that as much as we hated the thought of more debt, we hated the thought of exploding engines even more, so we crossed our fingers, applied for a car loan, received the loan just minutes before the economy collapsed, and used it to buy this:

Yes, it’s a Scion, the station wagon for Gen Y.  Yes, I know that I have forever surrendered my Little Miss Eco-Friendly Mass Transit tiara by buying this car.  I’m still glad we have it.  It gets great mileage and it has a short turning base, an important consideration for someone who hasn’t parallel-parked in 20 years.  Moreover, Lloyd can drive it to work and I don’t have to worry whether the engine will explode on the way.  I’d say the car is worth it.

3.  How do you like law school?

If I had better coding skills, this is where I would insert the .wav file of Gir saying “I...don’t know.” Okay, that’s not entirely true. For the most part, law school is terrific fun, but it’s not easy terrific fun.  For the first three weeks of school, I wanted to cry after every class, wondering why they had let me in, if I would ever understand the material presented to us, and just what I was doing trying to make friends with younger, brighter, cuter, more optimistic and just plain overall hotter people than me.  (I’m trying to decide what was worse:  realizing that during the summer I lost my virginity, one of my best, smartest classmates hadn’t even been born yet, or realizing that one of the smartest professors on campus graduated from college seven years after I did.)

Before I go on much further with the silly neurosis, I do have to address a serious issue, a moment of real pain for all of us.  During the second week of classes, we lost a classmate, a terrific fellow named Timothy Pramer.  Tim fell from a third-floor balcony at the new undergraduate library.  The investigation is still ongoing, and we probably will never know what happened.  Based on conversations I’ve had with some of Tim’s friends, including his roommate, who I count among my friends, he loved his new life in California, he was excited to be in law school and he was hungry to learn, so I’m thinking that what happened to Tim falls closer to the “accident” side of the spectrum.  What I do know is that he was always friendly, chatty and amiable with me, and I wish I’d got to know him better, and I wonder—and miss—what he would have contributed to our in-class discussions.

So it’s been a complex nine weeks, to put it mildly, but I can’t say I’m sorry to be here.  Those bright young kids who terrified the living saliva out of me during the first week have become friends:  funny, kind, sympathetic, interesting friends, about whom no assumptions can be made except that we are all smart kids, and on bad days we wonder just how we’re going to get through law school—the answer being, of course, by being there for each other.  We are also lucky enough to have a really good group of professors showing us the way.  They are all funny, smart to a degree that makes me suspect they all get together and bend spoons with their minds during off hours, and, wonder of wonders, they want to help us become that smart.  They are teaching us the ways of criminal law (in which we learn that we *have* to be able to argue both sides of a case, no matter how open-and-shut the case may be, but the plus side is that class discussions are so much better than anything I’ve ever seen on Law & Order—and I love Law & Order); contracts (in which we learn that contracts scholars are, frankly, full of beans—fascinated by a subject that doesn’t fascinate too many other people, and just itching to crack wise about it all); torts (in which we learn that, contrary to what some politicians might tell you, tort law is about much more than slip-and-fall cases; at its best, it provides avenues of redress for civil rights violations, among other forms of relief for people who genuinely need it); civil procedure (in which we do our “grunt work,” learning what steps we need to take in filing or responding to civil complaints, trying to keep rule numbers straight all the while); and legal writing (in which we learn that everything we know about writing is good knowledge to have in general, but not necessarily useful for writing office memos or trial briefs).  More often than not, I’m glad to take a break at the end of an afternoon and watch Keith Olbermann for an hour, because frankly, this stuff is exhausting.  Having said that, I’m starting to feel the first stirrings of applied knowledge, and I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, I might be learning after all.

4.  Why are you telling us all this when you *could* be talking about what you’ve been baking?  Sheesh.

Ah, honeybunches. I hope I don’t horrify the lot of you when I tell you that I can count on one hand the number of things I’ve baked.  Most of this is due to time constraints, but some of it is also due to our keeping our books stored in the garage.  It’s a roomy garage, but it’s not that roomy, and usually by the time I find the box that has the book I’m looking for in it, there are boxes spread all over the driveway, and I’m sweating, sunburnt and in a bad mood, never good states of mind for baking.  I have done a little baking, though, and as time passes and we get the garage organized, I’ll be back on my game in no time.  To date, though, I have made two raspberry pound cakes, two loaves of chocolate zucchini bread, a focaccia and a loaf of rice bread.  There is more to come, you bet.

5.  How about knitting?  Do you still knit?

I don’t know what I was thinking.  Even though I have four enormous Rubbermaid tubs of yarn in the garage, even though I haven’t finished the socks I started on the flight from New York to San Jose, even though just days before we flew out, I went to Philadelphia for a yarn crawl with Momerina and bought even more yarn, even though I’m still boring away on the Alice Starmore wrap I started after our return from Connecticut last fall, I still felt compelled to visit the sweet little yarn shop in San Jose, buy four skeins of Euroflax and use them to knit curtains for the kitchen window.  Let’s just say that they’re going slowly and leave it there for now.

6.  Are you eating properly?  Are you getting enough exercise?  Are you doing something about your considerable hinders?  Aren’t you going to talk about the election at all?  You do know that there’s a presidential election, right?  And that the Phillies have made it to the World Series for the first time since your wedding day?  Anyone in there?  Hello?

This just in:  Generalissima Bakerina is still dead. 

Dear friends, all is well, really well.  I have landed safely at law school, where I’ve been a brand new 1L for seven days, dancing with the usual suspects of a first-year law curriculum:  Criminal Law, Contracts, Torts, Pleading & Civil Procedure, and the timorous beastie known as Legal Analysis, Research and Writing.  I have made some friends, many of whom were in middle school when Lloyd and I got married, but they don’t hold that against me.  I won’t lie about the workload:  it’s been confounding, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to manage it.  It seems that I either read too quickly, and thus miss a lot of nuance, or I read too slowly and overparse when I could be getting a lot more done.  Fortunately I have a study group, and once we get together, I’m sure we’ll all have a lot to learn from each other.

On a happier, or at least more familiar note, our month of living in hotels is almost over.  Tonight we take a walk-through of our new apartment and receive the keys from our landlord; over the next couple of days we will bring carloads of stuff from our storage space—oh, wait, did I mention that we have a car now?—and on Friday we will check out of our scary hotel, and, after my last class, we will get the bed out of storage and move in for real.  Our new sofa and our cable/internet hookup arrive on Wednesday.  Between that, the unpacking of the kitchen utensils and the arrival of my orders from King Arthur and Penzey’s, we’ll *really* get something done around here.

Thank you, dear friends, for being so patient and kind at a time when I’ve been so spacy and disconnected.  It’s not been an easy process, but overall, it’s been a very, very good one.

The past week has been both so action-packed, and yet so quiet, that it’s hard for me to believe that at this moment seven days ago, Lloyd and I were holed up in the tiniest, most craptacular airport hotel of our shared experience, watching Law and Order: CI, trying to fall asleep so that we could wake up good and early for our car to the airport.  At the time, nothing loomed larger to me than the plane ride, of zipping across space and time, chasing morning across the country, watching the landscape change, bumping gently over the Great Lakes, noticing the ground suddenly becoming closer as we flew over the Rockies, descending into San Jose just before lunchtime.  (The last two flights I had in and out of San Jose, I flew at night, so I had never seen the ground below me before.  “We live here now,” I thought as I watched us descend over flatlands, hillocks and chapparal, and I wanted to laugh and cry all at once.) I had thought, honestly, that once the flight was behind us, the hardest work was behind us, too.  We had packed and shipped and junked our way out of New York City.  Everything else would be gravy.

I won’t say that our first week here has been harder than anything that has come previous to this—nothing, but nothing, will ever be harder than the Thursday the junk men came—but I can’t say it’s been terrifically relaxing, either.  We hit the ground running in San Jose.  From the starting point of the big fugly SUV we rented at the airport (which is too freaking big for most of the available parking spots in town, but works like a charm for moving boxes around, which is why we opted for an SUV as opposed to a nice hatchback or sedan), we have spent the past week travelling the Enforced Cultural Death March that is the freeway.  If I haven’t mentioned it lately, Lloyd is my hero.  He drives that big fugly thing onto entry and exit ramps like nobody’s business, he merges carefully but assertively, he occasionally shows annoyance but he never, ever, ever shows fear.  I, on the other hand, do.

There are about 500 lovely things to do on any given day here, from walking to the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden to visiting my dear Northern California-based friends who have waited patiently for us, but for the most part we’ve been tuckered out by driving from Fremont to San Jose, running a series of errands (getting our storage locker, greeting the big rig full of our stuff and unpacking it, opening bank accounts, etc.) and then driving back to Fremont.  Tomorrow morning Lloyd and I will go to the DMV and take our written test.  Once we have our shiny new California licenses in hand, we can arrange to get that special auto insurance that you get when you don’t yet own a car—so that when we *do* go buy our car, we can say “hey, look, we’re insured!” We’ll start car shopping.  We have finished bike shopping, and even as we speak, we are waiting to take delivery on our new Schwinns.  Monday night, we’ll try to score some groceries.  On Tuesday we finally take the big fugly SUV back to the airport and ride back to our neighborhood via the Airport Flyer.  At some point Lloyd will board a bus to Palo Alto to do a dry run of his commute before he goes back to work on Friday.  I, meanwhile, will be doing my required reading for orientation, which starts on Wednesday.  We’ll be doing all of this from a suite at a grotty little motor inn within walking distance of school.  When we booked the room, I was so thrilled to be in a place that didn’t involve Rollerball-like levels of travel stress that I didn’t care much about amenities, at least until our landlord said “gee, are you sure you want to stay there?” (I nearly answered, “well, no, but since we can’t move in until the end of the month, we aren’t exactly spoiled for choice.” But like our old landlord, our new landlord is a likeable guy, and I don’t want to piss hime off with my snarktastic tongue.)

All of this laundry-listing is to say that dear friends, I am so hungry to land in a place of our own that I can feel actual hunger pangs.  I don’t want to live indefinitely off of Trader Joe’s food, coffeebar sandwiches and Big Bags of Frozen Meat from Costco.  (Yes, we ponied up for a Costco membership.  I live for the day when I can bring home entire pallets of Fat Tire and economy boxes of Cheez-Its.) I want to unpack my pots and pans and cookbooks and baking sheets.  I want to bake a goddamned loaf of bread.  I want to go to the Capitol Flea Market and buy 30 pounds of apricots for jam.  I want to go to smaller, shaggier flea markets and buy butter lettuces and banana shallots.  Until we can get our hands on our own orange tree, I want to buy four pounds of oranges for a dollar and suck them all dry.  I want to make bright, beautiful food for our friends, but especially for Lloyd, to whom New York City was not especially kind, from a physical-health perspective.  Most of all, I just want to sit still for a while, in our living room or on the deck in our backyard, knowing that no matter how busy the coming weeks and months will be—and, make no mistake, they will be busy—we won’t have to plan the logistics of how we’re going to come or go.  We’ll just sit still, even as we’re also moving into something truly amazing.

I have to admit, I oversimplified a bit.  It hasn’t all been filling out forms and driving out to Fremont.  We’ve had a chance to eat some terrific food (although I think I picked up a little food poisoning at a taqueria, but I hope I’m wrong because I really want to go back and try their tamales), from machaca in San Jose to pho in Fremont.  On ‘mouse’s recommendation, we took a drive out to his flea market of choice, which was noisy and raucous and every bit as much fun as he promised it would be.  To the surprise of no one, I found the yarn store in San Jose, a short bike ride from our house and a short walk from my upcoming part-time job.  (Confidential to Momerina:  Come now.  No, really, right now.  Are you on the plane yet?) And, of course, as soon as we felt solid earth under our feet, we took a walk to the Municipal Rose Garden after all.  Those showy beauties are just too damn irresistible to not visit.

Happy start of the working week, dear friends.  With any luck, I will be considerably less truculent, and more voluble, once I have some interesting school tales to tell.

It will all be shared in due time, dear friends, from the pure joy of discovering what is considered “humid” in San Jose to the pure whimsy of stopping at a dollar store in Fremont to get some paper plates and plastic utensils following our Trader Joe’s run, and finding dollar packets of curry leaves at the register.  In the meantime, I can say that it’s quite something to consider:  in less than a week, we have gone from this:

to this:

Okay, in fairness, we don’t actually live there yet.  We are living in a hotel in Fremont until Sunday, and then moving to another hotel in Santa Clara for two more weeks.  But at least now we know we have a safe place to land, and that, to crib shamelessly from Robert Frost, has made all the difference.

As my boyfriend Gordon once sang, I’ll tell you what’s what, I’ll tell you what’s what.  Two weeks ago, life chez PTMYB was not happy.  My severance from LuthorCorp was just about gone and my unemployment was about to dry up.  I had no word whether or not my student loans had been approved, much less when (if) they would be disbursed.  Lloyd had had a series of job interviews for possible transfers to his company’s San Jose office, but none of them led anywhere.  Our apartment hunting had yielded nothing.  I began to wonder if maybe I had made a catastrophic mistake, if we should have stayed put, if I should have gone to Boston and just taken an additional loan to cover both my living expenses in Boston and my share of the rent in New York.

I am well aware that the best way to suffer a reversal of fortune is to crow about it too loudly, so I will not.  I’ll just say that the unemployment benefits have been extended.  The loans came through and will be disbursed at just about the time we need them most.  Lloyd had another interview on Friday, and this one looks good.  And—oh, mercy, oh, luck, O Time, Strength, Cash and Patience—we have an apartment.  Specifically, it’s a house, one half of a duplex.  It’s one bedroom, and not quite as big as some of the other places at which we looked, but it’s twice the size of our current apartment, it has plenty of space for us (even more space since the landlord agreed to lease us half of the garage for a shockingly competitive price), it’s close to all of Lloyd’s mass transit commuting options (both bus lines and Caltrain).  It’s three blocks from school and eight blocks from my part-time job.  It has spectacular amenities (which will be meticulously documented once we’re moved in).  It has been checked by my legal advisor and deemed good.  The landlord is friendly, outgoing, and willing to answer our zillion questions.  For the life of me, I don’t know what we did to deserve this apartment, but once I find out, I’ll be sure to keep doing it.

About the only less-than-perfect thing about our new place is that we won’t be able to move into it until the end of August.  That’s allright, though.  We have a room at a hotel in Fremont for a week, long enough for us to find our feet and go take our driving tests (for unlike New York, California won’t just let you turn in your license and get a new one).  At about the time that Lloyd will need to be commuting and I’ll need to be closer to campus, we’ll be moving to another hotel in San Jose for two weeks.  That’s three weeks in hotels.  We can handle three weeks of hotel living.  I guarantee, though, that on the day we move in, I’ll be unpacking my cookbooks and pots so fast that little trails of flame will litter my wake.  Then, dear friends, the fun really starts.

First, though, we have to pack up the kitchen.

In the end, the NYPL host quoted Milan Kundera as saying, “A European is someone who longs for Europe.” To which I will add the implied: A New Yorker is someone who longs for New York.

“Nostalgia” is made of two Greek words: Nostos, to return home, and algos, which means pain or suffering. It is literally homesickness. Maybe this is how you know if you’re a New Yorker or not. It’s not where you were born, or how many generations precede you, or how you make a living, but do you long painfully for New York? Are you homesick for this vanishing city?

-- Jeremiah Moss, “Discussing Eminent Domain,” Vanishing New York

In just under three weeks, the movers will arrive at our storage space in Woodside.  Lloyd and I will pack the truck—we’re moving on the cheap—and the movers will begin their 8-to-15-day trip across the country with nearly everything we own.  On Monday, August 4, we will fly out of JFK.  From that moment, we will resume our Just Visiting status in New York for the first time since January 1993.  At one time, the thought that we would leave was as remote as Omicron Persei 8; the idea that we would move 3,100 miles away to a place where neither of us had ever lived was beyond consideration.  Now we are here, packing boxes every night, sorting what comes with us and what gets tossed or donated or given away, living on the verge of the next moment.

We have been asked often if we’re excited about relocating, and while the answer is still an unequivocal “yes,” right now we are in a place where contemplating the future brings not excitement, but trepidation, if not outright fear.  We don’t have a new apartment yet; my student loan money has not yet been disbursed (although I’ve been told by heads cooler and wiser than mine that the money is on the way); my unemployment benefits end next week (although apparently the feds have extended benefits for 13 more weeks, but I’m not sure of my eligibility) and my savings are running out; and, most troubling, Lloyd’s company may not approve a transfer for him after all—which means that he may have to take an unpaid leave and temp for a while until they figure out whether there is still a place for him in the organization after all.  Through all this uncertainty, he has been a rock, an optimist and a dreamboat, but this kind of uncertainty takes its toll, and this week it’s taking its toll on both of us.  We know that this is a temporary state, and once we’re all settled in, optimism and good cheer will rule the day.  Right now, though, contemplating our future is nervewracking business, so I am turning away from the future for a few hours to consider the past, and to think about what brought us to this point, the point where we decided to leave New York.

I could say that the decision to leave came with the decision to attend law school, but that isn’t really true.  The school shortlist included two New York City schools, Cardozo and Brooklyn Law, both of which waitlisted me.  Or I could say that the decision came on the day I was laid off from LuthorCorp.  Even as I’d said that I had no idea what the future held, I knew exactly what a future in New York would hold:  either I could maintain our tenuous standard of living by taking another hideous cubicle-farm job, or else I could try to find more creative, satisfying work that wouldn’t begin to cover my half of the rent, to say nothing of groceries or health insurance deductibles.  (This is one reason why, to use a vile old phrase, I’ve never “done anything” with my culinary school diploma.  I just couldn’t afford it, especially after Lloyd was laid off from his job with a now-defunct DSL provider.  Even after he found another job, we just couldn’t afford to live on one full salary plus one entry-level pastry monkey salary.) I do remember thinking “it’s not a question of if, but when” on the day that I yelled at a Republican for hassling a mentally-ill woman on an escalator at Grand Central Station.  Ultimately, though, I knew long ago that our time was up.  I knew it five years ago, the first time I saw the DeBeers Christmas ads at Grand Central.  I knew it then; I knew it every Christmas after that, every time I saw the new set of ads; I knew it, and continue to know it, every time I walk by a construction site for a new luxury apartment building.  I know it every time a specialty bookshop closes and a Banana Republic opens up in its place—or when a 30-year-old bakery closes and an Ann Taylor store becomes a bigger Ann Taylor store.  I know it every time a supermarket turns into a drugstore, or a bank branch.  (There was a time when I considered it a point of pride to not have to rely on supermarkets, and, in truth, I still prefer to buy my fruit and vegetables and poultry and eggs at the farmer’s markets, and restrict my supermarket usage for cleaning and paper products.  But I also know that my experience is not universal, and that supermarket access is critical for people on fixed incomes and for the working poor, and that the loss of a supermarket can have a devastating impact on a neighborhood.)

Of course, every time someone mentions that the city is changing, and that little treasures of the city are being replaced with charmless alternatives, there is always a chorus close at hand to remind us that everything changes, that nothing remains static, and do we really want to live in the bad old days of fiscal crisis and escalating crime rates and grafittied subways and crack and AIDS and Gerald Ford inviting us to drop dead?  Of course I know that nothing remains static, and it shouldn’t.  The problem I have is not with change per se, but rather the nature of it.  I could just be projecting a romantic view of the past, but I don’t think I am.  Businesses have fallen and risen, neighborhoods have shifted and changed, for as long as this city has existed, but at least in the past it felt as if there were a place for all of us, not just the richest or luckiest of us.  There were places for the very wealthy, both of the old money and self-made varieties; for the middle class; for service workers and artists and public safety workers; for grocers and milliners and clerk-typists and photographers.  Now Manhattan and Brooklyn are being gobbled up by one luxury building after another and one high-end retailer after another, and Queens isn’t far behind.  I think of a story I’ve told here before, probably once too often, about the time Lloyd worked as a temp for a nonprofit that aimed to bring business investment into Lower Manhattan after the 9/11/2001 attacks, and how the head of the organization told a journalist that she was after serious money, and didn’t have time to talk to locksmiths.  I think of a conversation I’ve had with Julie more than once:  Is it really a sign of progress that hedge fund managers and designers and real estate moguls can live here, but their support staff can’t?

I am aware that I haven’t even begun to discuss the effect of this sort of hypertactic money-chasing on the arts-and-letters community in New York.  Of course high rents and lack of amenities are perilous for artists, musicians, photographers and writers, and New York certainly isn’t doing itself any favors by pricing them out of the area, but from where I sit, I can see the disappearance of more than artists.  One of my favorite short stories is Patricia Highsmith’s “Where the Door is Always Open and the Welcome Mat is Out” (anthologized in both a Highsmith collection, Nothing That Meets the Eye, and an anthology edited by David Sedaris, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules), about a middle-aged secretary who spends a strained evening hosting her sister from Cleveland.  Mildred Stratton lives on Third Avenue in the 20s and rides the bus to her job in a small office; she keeps a small, neat apartment, shops regularly at the delicatessen below her apartment, loves her quiet life in a noisy city and feels bound to protect it from her sister’s unsympathetic scrutiny.  It is a funny, quiet story about a hardworking, kind woman who doesn’t necessarily want to set the world on fire.  In the coming New York, there is no room for people like Millie Stratton, and, I fear, no room for people like me and Lloyd, either.

(Dear friends, I am aware that this is a scattershot, disorganized, unfinished essay, what my teachers used to call “not your best effort, Jen,” but I felt keenly that I needed to write this.  I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what I could say here, but I do need to take a break for some exercise and some lunch, and maybe a little packing.  By all means, though, this will be continued.  Thank you in advance for your patience.)

Credit for the return of cake must be given to Ragnvaeig, who triumphed over jet lag and a bad cold to meet me in the city on the stickiest, swampiest Saturday in years.  Once upon a time, I promised her a cardamom-lime cake to call her own, and on Saturday she finally got one.  Long-time PTMYB readers may remember that cardamom-lime cake was going to be the signature cake of my bakery, the one I spent years trying to open, but didn’t due to insufficient financing.  I’ve written about it for years in this space, but I didn’t realize until now that I never, ever posted the recipe for it.  Until I made Ragnvaeig’s cake, I hadn’t baked one for a long time, and I wondered whether my memory was burnishing this cake, imbuing it with virtues it didn’t necessarily have, making it better than it really was.  You could have heard me exhale for miles when Ragnvaeig deemed it good.  (Thank you, dearest.) In short order, two friends requested the recipe.  The cake, dear friends, is back.

For all that I like to pat myself on the back for this cake, it’s not like I slaved over three hundred variations, testing crumb variables with different amounts of eggs or baking powder; nope, for this cake, I stood on the shoulders of giants.  The “base” cake is a basic buttermilk pound cake, flavored with citrus juice and peel, baked in a tube pan and soaked, post-bake, with a citrus juice/sugar syrup.  Maida Heatter uses this basic formula for her Lemon Buttermilk Cake, as does Gale Gand’s tangerine cake in Butter Sugar Flour Eggs.  My version of this cake, as the name might indicate, involves subbing lime zest and juice for those of the other fruit; I also add cardamom, and lots of it, about a tablespoon and a half of cardamom pods.  (I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I’ve never measured the cardamom post-grind.  If you prefer to use pre-ground cardamom, I’d go with a scant tablespoon, but I promise that if you have something interesting to watch on tv while you shell the cardamom pods, the work goes quickly, and the resulting cake tastes amazing.) Whenever I confess to abundant use of spices, I receive counsel that sometimes there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.  Sometimes, the advisor is right, but in this case, I don’t want to hear it.  When it comes to cardamom, particularly in this cake, less is not more.

Cardamom-lime cake
serves 12-16

For the cake:

After the cake has rested in the pan for five minutes, turn the cake out onto a cooling rack.  Place the rack over a large piece of foil, large enough for you to fold up the edges around the rack.  While the cake is still hot, brush the syrup all over the top, sides and center hole of cake.  Pay special attention to the sides near the cake bottom, which will be dryer than the sides near the top.  Let cool completely before eating.  No, really.  You’ll want to cut into it while it’s still hot, but doing so will leave you with a gummy, fragile crumb.  Wait until it’s cool.  You’ll be glad you did.

Now that we have cake, more can be told.  And it will, too.

In defense of both my lackluster performance and my never-ending dog-eyed apology, I blame both on the Sudafed, on which I’ve been living all week thanks to the fourth headcold I have caught in six months.  You would think that since all of my subway riding happens mostly during off-peak riding hours, I would not be so susceptible to the lurgies and virii that float about the city, but it would seem that this is not the case.  I choose to blame it on the flu shot I did not get back in November.  I know that colds and influenzae do not originate from the same bugs, and one shouldn’t have anything to do with the other, but I’ve noticed that in the years I do get flu shots, I catch cold maybe once a year, twice, tops.  There’s a mistake I won’t be making again.  That said, if you’re going to catch your death of cold, you might as well have your death of fun in catching it, and that I did.  On what might have been the last really nice day for walking around until autumn (the heat and humidity are on their way to NYC, and they’re going to kick us hard, say the weatherweasels), I went to one of my favorite walking-around spots in the city, Flushing Meadows and Corona Park, where I walked over Robert Moses’s face with great relish (and I don’t mean the stuff on my hot dog [rimshot]) and took about eleven zillion pictures of the Unisphere and the Rocket Thrower before heading into Corona proper for the best ice in the city.  I’d say it was worth sneezing for a week.

But I do not come here to discuss the hideous workings of my sinuses.  I come here because many of you have not yet thrown your hands up in disgust at my slacktacular posting regimen, but rather have asked what our summer looks like.  It’s not boring, I’ll grant you that. 

Our original plan for summer—and beyond—was that I would pack only what I needed to sustain myself for ten months of student living in a 330-square-foot apartment, while Lloyd would stay in New York through April, when he would be fully vested in his pension.  We had planned to rent a Matrix and drive it across the country, staying in cheapish hotels and taking regular driving breaks, documenting neat stuff along the way.  It would be our long-awaited Grand Vacation, the kind of road trip we’ve talked about since before we were married, something to give me memories that would bring warmth and solace when I’m ready to drop out of law school and my sweetheart and helpmeet is over 3,000 miles away.  Once Lloyd was vested and I was finished with my first year of school, I would start looking for bigger apartments, sign a lease, fly back to New York and spend the summer of 2009 helping Lloyd close up the apartment and move for good.

Three days later, Lloyd announced that there were several job openings at his level at the company’s office in San Jose.  He might be able to come with me after all.  I spent about a day whooping out of pure euphoria, followed by a day of creeping realization that, should a job come through, we would have less than three months to close up the apartment.  Lloyd suggested that we plan as if he would be moving with me, so that we’d be prepared for any eventuality.  If it turned out that he wouldn’t be able to transfer, he could still keep our stuff in storage and move to a cheaper apartment share for the duration of his time in New York.  He started interviewing, we started packing, and then we waited.  And waited.  And waited.

It’s been a month since Lloyd’s last interview, and while all signs look good for a transfer, we probably won’t know for sure until the middle of July.  Lloyd has decided that regardless of whether or not the transfer comes through, he wants to move with me this summer.  No matter how carefully we plan and how frugally we live, there’s just no getting around the fact that the cost of separate housing in two expensive cities will hurt us economically at a time when I’ll already be socked with student loan debt.  There’s also the small matter of our wanting to be together.  So the die is cast.  The moving company picks up our stuff on July 31; it should take them about 10 days to deliver it to us.  Lloyd and I fly to San Jose August 4.  Until then, I pack, I blow my nose, I try not to worry too much, I tell Lloyd, in soothing tones, not to worry so much.

Say, Jen, you know what might take your mind off everything?  Baking, that’s what! It very well might, dear friends, but so far it hasn’t.  One of the unhappiest side effects of the whole packing/moving/contemplating the move process is that our kitchen, which was never the easiest space to navigate in the world, has become a cramped, unwieldy carnival of stress in which to work.  I never, ever, ever thought that these words would ever cross my lips, but I now find the time spent in the kitchen to be almost unbearable.  Baking, once my favorite way to spend a weekend, has now become something to get done as quickly as possible.  The thought of roasting a chicken and some potatoes to eat over salad, normally one of my favorite thoughts on a Friday afternoon, now fills me with vague dread.  A clever student of the psyche might say that I’m separating from the space where I have been cooking and baking for 14 years, pushing away from it the same way that teenagers push away from their parents as they forge new identities.  Or s/he might just say that I’m sick of bumping into things and not having a clear surface on which to put hot pans or cooling racks.  There’s truth in both answers.  I *am* sick of bumping into shit.  I’m also sick of fighting with an oven that won’t maintain a steady temperature to save its life, leaving all of my cakes half overbaked and half underbaked, no matter how carefully I rotate them.  On the other hand, that same unwieldy oven sits underneath a four-burner gas stovetop that works like a dream, and has since the day we moved in.  The odds are high that the new apartment in which we’ll live when we move west will have an electric stove, which is great for baking but not so much for stovetop cookery.  Every time I turn on the stove now, even just to boil water for a cup of tea, I think about how much I’ll miss our homely little stovetop, and the sound of the Amtrak trains bound for Boston roaring over our apartment on their way to the Hell Gate Bridge.  Then I ruin another cake, and I ask Lloyd if it’s time to move yet.

Nevertheless, I have managed to do a little baking that didn’t make me want to gnash my teeth in frustration.  Behold, the cookiepr0n!

Just when I thought I could finally stop bragging about the greatness of the cashew cookies from King Arthur Flour Whole-Grain Baking, along came these little beauties, chocolate chip cookies made from equal weights of whole wheat flour (I used white whole wheat) and barley flour, which I bought from the Union Mills Homestead in Union Mills, Maryland, the weekend that Momerina and I went to Maryland Sheep & Wool.  I have made both chocolate chip cookies and a soft, cakey sugar cookie, both from King Arthur Flour Whole-Grain Baking, using this barley flour, and I am not exaggerating when I say that the scent of barley flour-based goodies as they bake is one of the most gorgeous fragrances I’ve ever been privileged to experience.  If you’ve ever gone into a bakery, inhaled that sweet heady scent, thought “mmmmm,” and then instantly thought, “gee, I hope that isn’t the smell of Creme Bouquet or one of those other nasty artificial flavor compounds,” I’m happy to tell you that barley flour and sugar, baking together, smell just like Bakery, only without the chemical overtones that would make you suspicious.  There’s no other way to describe it:  it is simply gorgeous.  It makes you feel glad for the day you ever learned to bake cookies.

Maybe I do need to bake another batch.  After all, if there is one thing Lloyd and I have been relearning these past few weeks, it’s the lesson that good things rarely come easily, or with peace of mind.  We’re not feeling easy, or peaceful, but we are feeling good.  I sort through a stack of books.  He packs them without an inch of wasted space, the way he did when he was a shipping/receiving manager and I was a buyer at the bookstore where we met.  We eat dinner.  On bad nights we talk about what we’re going to do if he doesn’t have a job, or if my loans don’t come through, or if they do come through but the bursar’s office takes time getting money to us, or the bank sits on the funds for a month before letting us touch them.  On good nights we remember that we are not alone in this venture, that we have friends and family who will not let us fall.  One way or another, we’re on our way to something really, really good.  “We have afters,” I say to Lloyd, thinking of the cookies in the kitchen.  His face lights up.

It was pure coincidence, a choice among a plethora of Memorial Day weekend movie choices, 100% political-agenda-free, that led Lloyd and me to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad on Memorial Day.  In hindsight, though—and I know I will probably make more than a few people unhappy when I say this—I find it a perfectly appropriate, if heartbreaking, way to honor our fallen troops in Iraq, as well as to acknowledge the terrible, terrible price Iraqi civilians have paid over the past five years.  At first glance, it might seem frivolous to think about the war in the context of a documentary about Iraq’s only heavy metal band, Acrassicauda, but Heavy Metal in Baghdad is far from frivolous.  This is not to say that it isn’t fun, because at times, it is.  The music is terrific, the concert scenes are a hoot to watch, and the band members (Firas Al Lateef on vocals and rhythm guitar, Faisal Talal on bass, Marwan Reyad on drums and the lightning-fast Tony Aziz on lead guitar) are all affable, funny, smart and Very, Very Metal.  It is also, by turns, painful, sad, infuriating, suspenseful and just plain nervewracking.  Directed and shot by the creative team behind VICE magazine, Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti, Heavy Metal in Baghdad is both an exuberant fan letter and a street-level view of the most dangerous place in the world.  I am worlds beyond impressed at the movie Alvi and Moretti have made, but I’m even gladder that they made it home alive.  When you see this movie, you will understand just how remarkable a feat this is.

I do beg your forbearance, dear friends, if I belabor the point more strongly than necessity might dictate, but I do want you to see this movie, as many of you as possible.  At the noon screening that Lloyd and I attended, there was one other person in the theatre with us.  I hope that the turnout was better at the later showings, but I’m not holding my breath, especially considering that just up the street Iron Man is playing on an IMAX screen.  (This is not a poke at Iron Man; we plan to see that, too, but we’re betting that that one will be around for a while, whereas Heavy Metal in Baghdad probably will not be.) If you are a metalhead—I know there are at least two of you out there who read PTMYB—you should see this movie.  If you are not a metalhead but you appreciate a well-made documentary produced by smart filmmakers, you should see it.  If you are a VICE reader, you should see it (and depending on where you live, you probably already have).  If you oppose the war, if you support the war, or if you’re exhausted by the very thought of the war—particularly if you’re the latter—you should see it.  If you plan to vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, it is absolutely imperative that you see it.

By the argument for invading Iraq as presented to us by the Bush administration, the four members of Acrassicauda were exactly the Iraqi-on-the-street whose hearts and minds we would win by removing Saddam Hussein from power.  Interviewed in 2003, the band recalls how, when they applied for performance permits from the Ministry of Culture, they were asked “so what do you have for Saddam?” At the time, not having at least one song proclaiming Saddam’s greatness could land your band in jail, so they dutifully included a song with “yay, Saddam!” lyrics, which Marwan acknowledges were “fucking lies,” to keep themselves out of jail.  Even with pro-regime lyrics, it was still a dangerous thing to be a metalhead in Saddam’s Iraq.  Long hair was forbidden, beards even more so.  (Faisal acknowledges, bluntly, that he is playing a dangerous game with the goatee he sports.) Wearing T-shirts silkscreened with the legends of American bands—or with any English on them—was dangerous.  Headbanging was outlawed outright, supposedly for its resemblance to the motions of Jewish prayer.  In early concert footage, you can see enthusiastic but subdued crowds, longing to cut loose and bang their heads, almost none daring to do so.  By 2005, in the midst of spiraling post-invasion chaos, Acrassicauda staged a concert at the Al Fanar Hotel.  (VICE had worked to organize this concert, but the day before the show, Eddy and Suroosh were stranded in Beirut, 500 miles from Baghdad.) Despite the power cuts, despite the logistical nightmares, the show went on.  60 Baghdad metalheads showed up, and their sheer frenzied exuberance, caught on video by their segment producer Johan, is a blast to watch.  When the band launches into their incendiary song “Massacre,” the crowd goes nuts.  The driving beat and opening power cords are thrilling, even as the lyrics, depicting civilian casualties of the war, are devastating.  I could have listened for days.

If pre-invasion Iraq was dangerous for metalheads and critics of the regime, post-invasion Iraq is lethal for everyone who lives and works there—or tries to.  VICE’s next attempt to enter Iraq, in 2006, is successful, but fraught with danger that almost defies belief:  Having hired a security detail that includes a translator, two drivers and two gunsmen (as well as flak jackets and a truck full of guns), by the end of their stay, the security company has added 13 gunsmen to their detail.  Tony and Marwan have left Iraq, crossing the border into Syria; Faisal and Firas are still in Baghdad, living 15 minutes apart from each other, but unable to see each other due to the danger inherent in just walking down the street.  To speak English on the street, or to be seen with anyone speaking English on the street, is to invite gunfire.  When Suroosh calls Faisal to arrange a meeting, Faisal’s only response is a whispered “okay;” to say any more, any louder, is unthinkable.  At night Eddy and Suroosh stand on the balcony of their room at the Al Mansour Hotel, smoking, looking out over the city as bombs explode, gunfire peppers the air and Apache helicopters fly overhead.  By day they ride down the streets of Baghdad, taking increasingly risky field trips as their translator grows visibly agitated.  One such trip is to Acrassicauda’s old rehearsal space, tiny and dimly-lit, where the band used to write and play for 12 hours a day.  A missile has destroyed the building, the rehearsal space and the band’s instruments, which are buried in the rubble.  The exuberant young men who packed their jubilant show at the Al Fanar are either dead or have fled the country.  Midway through one interview, Firas looks visibly pained.  What I took for depression, or deep sadness, was actually anxiety.  Curfew is four hours away, and the two hours before curfew are the most dangerous in Baghdad.  “Can we go now?” he asks.  This simple question is loaded with dread.

Acrassicauda’s tale is one that defies happy endings.  This may seem a facile understatement, and in fact it is, but I think it’s worth noting because the desire for happy endings, or at least a measure of satisfaction, is strong, particularly among Americans.  I’ve mentioned this story before—apologies to those of you who are tired of hearing me tell it—but about 10 years ago I read an interview with Daniel and Susan Cohen, who wrote children’s nonfiction readers until 1988, when their only child, Theodora, was killed on Pan Am 103 over Scotland.  Daniel Cohen observed that one difficulty he and his wife found in their fight for justice was that people (not exclusively but mostly Americans) need, if not a happy ending, at least some purpose to their suffering.  We want to know that someday our lost loved ones will be waiting for us over the horizon, but if we can’t know that, at least we should have something to show for our pain.  Let us be better, stronger, more resourceful, more appreciative of small pleasures.  It is enormously difficult for us to hear that sometimes there is no measure of satisfaction, that the only thing that can be found in loss and ruin is more loss and ruin.

This brings me back to Acrassicauda.  In 2007, all four members of the band have reunited in Damascus, where the only work they can find is menial, under-the-table, illegal work, as Iraqi citizens are enjoined from working in Syria.  (In an attempt to stop the flow of Iraqi refugees into the country, the Syrian government has imposed new entry requirements on new refugees, and regularly attempts to repatriate existing refugees.) There is a flash of the old Acrassicauda glory when they play a concert in a Damascus internet cafe—no mean feat when Faisal points out that there are no metalheads in Damascus—but the reality is harsh:  They are poor expatriates, unable to work legally, forced to pawn their instruments to pay bills, missing their homeland desperately but knowing that returning is lethal.  When, with VICE’s assistance, they are able to record a three-track demo, it is a psychologically rousing boost, but it is not enough of a leap forward to give their lives any stability.

Thanks to charitable donations that bought their plane tickets and covered some living expenses, Acrassicauda are now living in Istanbul.  The cost of living in Istanbul is high, however, and the band is in much the same position as they were in Damascus.  Entry visas into Europe or North America have not been forthcoming.  The band was unable to attend the screenings of Heavy Metal in Baghdad at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival or the 2008 Berlin Film Festival.  When the official film website calls Acrassicauda “literally a band on the run,” it does not exaggerate.  The possibility of an entry visa to the U.S. appears beyond remote.  (Among the appalling statistics offered in the film is that of the four million Iraqi citizens displaced by the war [two million displaced internally within Iraq, two million refugees in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon], less than 500 have been granted legal entry into the U.S.  Unfortunately, given the current rancorous debate over immigration in the U.S., I know that to mount an argument that more Iraqi emigres should be allowed in is an extremely difficult task, but I do hope that someone will pursue it.)

Yesterday morning, as I drank my coffee and perused the news, I found, via the Associated Press, a challenge issued by John McCain to Barack Obama, inviting him to join McCain on a trip to Iraq, so that he could see what has been accomplished on the ground in Iraq.  If Sen. McCain’s offer is sincere, and if Sen. Obama accepts the offer, I would recommend that they watch Heavy Metal in Baghdad before they go.  (Since I do not have a hotline to either the McCain or Obama campaigns, I suspect that my recommendation will go unheeded.) I’d be keen to know what they think of what they will see.  I’d be particularly keen to ask Sen. McCain if turning Baghdad into a surreal and ultraviolent no-man’s land is considered an accomplishment on the ground, if the liberation of Baghdad was worth the lives of over 4,000 young Americans and over 600,000 Iraqi civilians, worth the homes and health and livelihood of millions of others, worth the safety and creativity and freedom of four young men whose dearest wish is to play fast, loud music together.

Going to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad on Memorial Day was not a political statement, but this is:  If you live in New York or Los Angeles, please see this film.  If you cannot travel to New York or Los Angeles, please consider buying the DVD when it goes on sale on June 10.  If you don’t want to buy the DVD outright, please rent it from Netflix or Blockbuster or the rental outlet of your choice.  Please watch this movie, please look at what one of the oldest places in the world has become, and then ask yourself, your family and friends and neighbors, your elected officials, and your presidential candidates:  Is this why we fight?

(If you would like to make a donation to the band, or if you would like to learn more about the Iraqi refugee crisis, which the U.N. has called the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world, the Take Action link on the Heavy Metal in Baghdad website has links to various organizations, along with a PayPal button for donations to the band.  You can also access the band’s blog and MySpace pages via the HMiB website.)

Of course you know that couldn’t last. 

Credit is due to Pam the Beancounter, who, if you are not acquainted with her, is witty and wry and thoughtful and a consistent source of amusing conversation. (If you are acquainted with her, of course, then you already know this.) Last week Pam was at a supermarket in Modesto, California, where she found—oh, heaven help me for using this phrase, even in a tongue-in-cheek way—a display of value-added russet potatoes.  I am thankful that Pam has a blog, a camera and a well-honed sense of the absurd, because honestly, if she had tried to explain this to me, I would have refused to believe it.  It would have been beyond my ken to believe it.

Apparently a venerable West Coast produce concern has discovered that if you take a crop of russet potatoes, sort them by size, wash them twice, shrinkwrap them individually and slap both a heat-sensitive tear strip and a double-sided label on the shrinkwrap, you can sell the resulting potatoes at 99 cents each.  For 99 cents, you can buy one single, modestly-sized russet potato, the same modestly-sized russets that my neighborhood fruit-and-vegetable market, several thousand miles away from Idaho potato country, sells in five-pound bags for $2.50.  (If I want bigger russets, I can buy them loose for 59 cents a pound.  The big ones usually weigh around 9 or 10 ounces).  This new generation of potatoes, branded as Micro Baker, are essentially twice the price of bagged potatoes.

So what exactly is the added value in these value-added potatoes?  If you’re going to pay double the price for your spuds, particularly in an era of $4.00/gallon gasoline, certainly you should get something for your money—something, that is, besides more plastic in the supply chain/water table/landfill.  A little research revealed that the produce company in question is Melissa’s/World Variety Produce, a frequent fixture in my food magazines, well known for sourcing exotic fruits and vegetables worldwide.  Okay, Melissa’s/World Variety Produce, Inc., I thought, sell me.

Hmmm.

Apparently the main selling points of these potatoes are a) they are foolproof to cook in the microwave, b) you leave the shrinkwrap on during the microwaving process, so that your hands never have to touch the potato and c) thanks to the heatproofing on the tearstrip, you can open the shrinkwrap without burning your fingers.  They also have “consistent sizing,” “a label filled with valuable information,” and “a neat, clean appearance,” which, granted, is something the big loose dusty russets don’t have, although, really, it’s pretty quick work to scrub a potato clean.  If these selling points were underwhelming, though, the last ones were mindboggling:  In seven minutes you can have a “‘tastes just liked baked’ potato flavor!” You can have a potato just like the ones served in gourmet restaurants!

This, dear friends, is where they lost me, and where I got my lunatic, muttering food crank idiom back. 

Those last two selling points are just plain wrong.  When you microwave a potato, you are essentially steaming it, cooking it via wet heat.  When you bake, or roast, a potato, you are cooking it via dry heat.  Both are worthy cooking methods, but they are not interchangeable, and to claim that you can create a baked flavor via steaming, or a steamed texture via baking, is a pernicious fiction that does neither the produce merchant nor the cook any favors.  Baking a russet does more than cook it through:  it contributes to the fluffy, floury, mealy texture that makes it unparalleled for absorbing butter, sour cream or olive oil.  It also encourages gentle browning and caramelization of the sugars in the skin, giving it a deep, roasted flavor that contrasts so nicely with the fleshy interior of the potato.  To show off a russet at its best, it’s not enough to cook it; you need to dry it out as well.  There is something inimitable and fine about taking a nice big russet, scrubbing it clean, rubbing its skin with a little bit of salt and tossing it into a hot oven (preferably on the rack above or below the roast you’re roasting or the bread you’re baking), pulling it out of the oven an hour later and feeling how light it has become.  Wrap it in a towel so that you don’t burn your fingers, thump it once, hard, against your work surface, and unroll your steamy potato into a bowl, where it will happily soak up whatever you want to put on it, be it a quantity of butter or a little tub of cottage cheese.  It is soulful, restorative food. 

When you microwave a russet, you are not drying it out.  You are steaming it in its own juice.  This is a terrific thing if you are steaming a fish, particularly a lean fish, or vegetables:  you are keeping the food nice and moist, with pure, clear flavor, unmuddied by caramelization.  It is not terrific for a potato that derives its best flavor and texture from dry heat.  Yes, the potato will cook through evenly; you can cut it open and dress it with butter or cheese; you can even eat the skin, although it won’t taste like anything and the texture will remind you of a wet paper towel.  At best, you’ll have something nice enough to eat.  But it won’t have a “tastes just liked baked” flavor, and no amount of exclamation points will give it one.

Most likely it will, however, taste like a gourmet restaurant baked potato.  This is because, with few exceptions, gourmet restaurant baked potatoes are steamed, too.  I don’t know who first lit on the idea of wrapping russets in foil before baking them, but it was a terrible idea.  All of the moisture that would dissipate in the oven remains contained within the foil.  The result is the same as that of microwaved potatoes:  flavorless, paper-towellish skin, waterlogged flesh.  But hey, it certainly looks snappy in its little foil bunting when it sits on the plate next to your steak, and if the kitchen is lucky, you consider that potato to be an afterthought, little more than a vehicle for that little plastic tub of sour cream they give you.

Admittedly, I might be taking this whole potato methodology rant a bit too far.  I am not a martinet.  I realize that sometimes it’s a pain in the ass to run the oven for an hour, particularly on a swampy day in August.  I have also spent years working in offices where baking a potato wasn’t an option, but microwaving a potato was, and if the resulting potato wasn’t perfect, it was still tasty, filling, cheap and probably healthier than most of the takeout hot lunch options available to me.  I have done it before, and one day I might have to do it again.  I will not, however, be fooling myself into thinking that I’m getting something that tastes like the perfect potato of my dreams—and I’m sure as hell not going to pay twice the price for it.