Hi and bye

So.

It's been a while. I have a bunch of excuses, and some of them are even legitimate, but the truth of the matter is, I gave up. Somewhere around Thanksgiving I just lost my motivation. Lucky for me, however, the Captain came up with a great new idea so I have yet another - yes ANOTHER - blog to write in. Lucky for you, I've already introduced the url before, so you don't have to go anywhere new.

Here's the deal: I'm moving to San Diego after the New Year, the Captain is not, and that is general downer. As a way of an upper, we're making a joint blog at http://fortunesfeast.wordpress.com, where we'll blog about books and recipes that we would have shared with each other were we, you know, still living together. Since I'll be spending the holidays with him I don't expect the updates to be all that frequent in the next couple days, but once the new year rolls around, expect of lot of word and food. We've already selected our first "book club" selection, but for that, you'll have to go on over.

And with that, I bid you farewell.

Yuletide Carol

Now that the turkey's been eaten, I've been singing nonstop to get ready for Christmas. The Captain and I are hosting a Christmas party so I've been learning some very basic carols on the guitar for everyone to sing. I know only four chords, but apparently that's all I need to know.

As I was "practicing" this evening the Captain said to me he was surprised he hadn't heard me sing more often in law school. I gave him a knowing look and laughed at the thought. He replied, "So you're saying law school took the song in your soul and stomped on it?"

Precisely.

Thinking too much

Today at church I had a revelation. Not the kind you're thinking of.

No, my revelation was much more mundane than the kind of epiphany you'd expect during Advent. It came as I was listening to the choir and thinking for 199th time that I ought to join the choir. Midway through that 199th thought it occurred to me: if I join the choir, then I have to go to worship every single Sunday. That could be a problem. As much as I love church, I can't make that commitment.

So that got me thinking even further: I should have just signed up and been done with it. Everything I have done of which I am proud I have done without thinking. At age six I signed up for violin lessons because I wanted to be like my cousin. At age sixteen I applied to Brown because, well, it was there. At age nineteen I founded a campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity because I felt like it. Also at age nineteen I volunteered to be a resident counselor, which any former resident advisor knows is definitely not a rational decision. And at age twenty-five I matriculated at Boston College Law School because there was just something about it that made it different from anywhere else. So I got to meet the Captain and all my other cherished lawyer friends, as well as pass the bar. I did all these without too much thinking, and there's got to be something to that. All my thinking today just led to my not doing something, rather than forging ahead.

Maybe I'm just getting old.

Honest living

A few short hours from now, the Captain and I will be enjoying Bizet at the Kennedy Center. We're going to Carmen at the National Opera and I cannot wait. I bought the tickets months ago and the performance is finally here.

But this is not another post about how I am so very much a liberal cliche.

It is, instead, a reflection on my experiences at the bakery. It is a composite sketch of how I have begun to understand what Sarah Palin getting at when she was jeering us in the fake America. Seriously. I've been wanting to write this post for a while, ever since I served coffee to a classmate of mine from Brown a few weeks ago, but I haven't been able to because, well, I was working.

So yes, several weeks ago a woman from my class at Brown walked into the bakery and ordered a coffee. She recognized me immediately so I reintroduced myself and said hello. We then had a painfully polite exchange about what we had been up to since college. I told her I'd just graduated from law school and she, perhaps with a bit of relief, mentioned she was a lawyer, too. I wanted to elaborate that the bakery gig was just a temporary thing but other customers were waiting so I couldn't explain why I was serving cupcakes rather than billing hours. She was left to assume whatever she wanted, and I'm slightly ashamed I even wanted to explain myself. Yes, I am about to head out to a cushy job in a lovely place, but what if I weren't? What if I hadn't done as well as I had in law school and talked my way into biglaw? What if I'd had to take a part-time job to pay the bills until I'd found a "real" job? There would have been nothing wrong with that. That I felt the need to remind myself there's nothing wrong with that, however, smacks of intense elitism.

Because if there is one thing I have learned from working with my co-workers, then it is that I am supremely privileged to work alongside them. They struggle to get ahead, but they still keep going. They scrimp and they save and they ride their bikes from Virginia so they can open at 6:30; they hustle for tips so they can pay tuition. They work the holidays because they want to, and they refrain from visiting family until they can afford to. I am honored to be near their motivation because it makes me just a little bit better. It reminds me of just how hungry everyone is for success, and that I have been very lucky to land where I have. My co-workers have fires in their bellies, and so do I.

Savvy marketing

A children's clothing store in Georgetown.

Vive le capitalisme.

Part of the neighborhood

The bakery customers are starting to remember me!

Today I noticed a customer wearing a BAA 2007 Boston Marathon jacket. I asked her about it, she started to answer, but then she interrupted herself and said, "Wait, you're a marathoner, too! The Marine Corps. You have that really cool hat." Indeed, I do!

And later, an older gentlemen took a look at my plain white tee and remarked, "You're not wearing one of your funny t-shirts." To his buddy, "She has all these funny t-shirts." Like the sexy one below.

So great.

Loving President Bush

At church yesterday, we prayed for President Bush. I should mention that I was at my home church, a bastion of liberalism that didn't support Al Gore in the 2000 primaries because he wasn't liberal enough. (We wanted Bill Bradley.) Lest you think I was raised in a commune of impractical hippies, I wasn't. I grew up in lovely, academic Princeton, NJ where my Sunday school teachers were professors at the seminary and where my friends' parents were professors at the university. So, yeah, maybe I was raised in a commune of impractical hippies.

Anyway, I was surprised to hear the prayer for President Bush. Maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised because, you know, we're supposed to love everyone, but I was. The liturgist prayed that the President would have wisdom and courage in the last days of his administration and that he would be able to effect positive change for the country. A reasonable prayer, I thought, but still I was surprised.

Then she started praying for President-elect Obama, and suddenly I understood. She'd just wanted to say those words out loud in church. "President-elect Obama." Crazy liberals - so predictable.

Caramel apples and a new food blog

Behold, caramel apples. Last week I saw this recipe at 101 Cookbooks, and since there were only three ingredients on it, I gave it a try. It's super easy, but the one catch is that the caramel needs to be heated to just the right temperature. Since I don't have a candy thermometer, it turned out kinda soupy, so I will have to keep trying. In the meantime there is nothing wrong with scooping up melted caramel and eating it off the silpat. Yum.

Which reminds me: I have a new blog. Well, semi-new. It's at Fortune's Feast, and describes my attempts to teach myself Chinese cooking. As some of you know, I've long been conflicted about how "Chinese" I am, if identity even is something quantifiable. I speak Chinese, I lived in Taipei, but I have very few Chinese friends. I had all sorts of friends as a child, but somewhere around middle school is when all the Asian kids started hanging out with each other - and nobody else. This bothered me. It bothered me because I thought the practice exclusive and discriminatory. Maybe they weren't actively segregating themselves, but at one point one of my Chinese American classmates came over to my lunch table and asked, "Why don't you sit with the Asian kids?"

That bothered me. I didn't want to be exclusionary, but it seemed to be the only way to be "Asian" where I grew up.[FN1] So my response was to be not "Asian" and to befriend people of all ethnicities. Somewhere along the line, though, I think I overcompensated, because soon I had no Asian friends. That also bothered me. So I was conflicted.

Anyway, this is all a long way of saying that I have a new food blog, where I try to reconnect with a heritage I once dismissed because I didn't want to be exclusive. I write about recipes, challenges, identity, and family. Mostly it's an excuse to eat more.

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FN1. Looking back I realize the absurdity of this all, even the very idea of "Asian." It's a wholly American concept - nobody in China actually wants to hang out with anybody in Korea. So really the attempt to be more "Asian" was something inauthentic to begin with.

What to wear

Like some of my friends, I don't know how to dress for work. Unlike these friends, I work at an indie, hippie coffee shop/bakery where I am the only one without body art. In other words, I work at a place completely opposite of what I've been preparing for the last three years. My closet is full to bursting with business casual; if my firm hadn't deferred me I wouldn't even be writing this post.

Defer me they did, however, so now I have to find something that's cupcake-appropriate. I can't wear my office stuff because, well, coffee spills and I am clumsy. Nor can I wear my work-out stuff because I have a bad habit of cutting my t-shirts too short. (And really, I can do better than my five hundred GoldmanSachs CommunityTeamWorks t-shirts.) So lately I've been perusing some fantastically hipster t-shirt vendors.

I like best the one below.

Respect

After a long day on my feet, all I can say is...tip your servers. Serving coffee and cupcakes, while fun and enjoyable, is nonetheless hard work.

Yeesh.

Boston, you're my home

Yeah, yeah, the Sox lost, but whatever. I still love that dirty water and I always will.

Saturday morning the Captain and I arose at an ungodly hour for our flight to Boston. As we made our descent into New England, I saw the fiery treescape beneath me and I started to cry. Really. I was that happy to be back. And it was good thing, too, because our trip was so tightly scheduled there was no room for ambivalence.

Our first stop was flour bakery because, well, just follow the link. And because Joanne Chang is my hero. She quit management consulting so she could open up a bakery, and now everyone is better off because of it. She forsake a steady paycheck in a lucrative field just so she could do what she loved, and she's excelled. In this gloomy and uncertain climate, I find that nothing short of heroic, even revolutionary. And yes, the sticky buns mean that much to me.

Next we went to the Head of the Charles, where we did our best to walk off the eight million calories we’d just ingested. (We got close.) The Captain’s former rowers had just purchased a new boat and named one of its seats in his honor, so they invited him to the boat’s dedication. When we showed up they were absolutely. thrilled. to see him again - hugs and smiles all around. Even though he coached the kids for only a season, the impact he had was real. He'd been their coach, their disciplinarian, and their friend, and they loved him because of it. It was a pleasure to watch.

Later that evening we went to a potluck held in our honor by First Friend and her husband, Dr. First Friend. First Friend was the first friend I ever made in law school and I am so lucky to count her as one of my friends still. She’d assembled a great group of former classmates to eat together and to watch the ALCS on a beautifully large flat-screen TV, but what truly stood out was the fellowship and the affection. It was a delight to be back with our friends from BC, and all night I kept saying, “This is the best weekend ever!”

And it was true. There was a whole second day to go, full of more friends and more reuning and more caloric intake. But that would make too long a post, and I think you get the picture.

Really, really cliche

Upon reading my last post, the Captain remarked, "You didn't mention the Obama stickers I put on the windows."

Sorry, honey.

Liberal cliche

Most of the time, I like to think I am a nice, normal, Main Street type of gal.

The fact that I can hear you laughing is indication enough I am nowhere near Main Street. But at least I try. I bake my own cookies, I watch football, I take the bus. And I like it.

But every so often I'll find myself in a situation where there's no use pretending. To wit, I noticed last night as I was reading myself to sleep, in a Georgetown townhouse, where I live with my boyfriend, whom I met in private school, where I got the second of my advanced degrees, that we both were reading...Murakami.

Time to go break out the pearls.

Grad student redux

I am sitting in a cafe and I am blogging.

How cliched is that?

In truth I am surprised it has taken this long for me to do this. The sweltering heat probably has something to do with that; I was a prisoner of central air-conditioning until about a week ago. Now that I don't need to bring a handkerchief wherever I go, though, I've found the neighborhood to be pleasant indeed. At the moment I am sitting beneath a bookcase stocked with back-issues of Bon Appetit, Food&Wine, and Gourmet Magazine. More importantly, a collection of delicious cupcakes sits on the other side of the wall. It could be a long time before I head back to P St...

As an aside, I note that I am only one of many people sitting with a laptop. There must be seven or eight of us; there are definitely more laptop-users than plain old coffee drinkers. When it comes to computer make, however, I am definitely in the minority. That's right, almost everyone else has a Mac.

It's a brand new world.

Smarty pants

Tonight we celebrated Dr. Caro's birthday. She was my roommate in college and is now a rocket scientist.[FN1] Sixteen of her friends assembled for the festivities, and at some point over dinner, someone noticed that of us sixteen, six had PhDs.

I thought this tremendous. Having been questioned over and over again for getting not one but two advanced degrees, I found it absolutely. refreshing. to be one of the less-educated people at dinner.

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FN1. More or less. Her card doesn't say "Rocket Scientist," but her department is Space Exploration, so good enough.

Smile and wave

Today I crossed a street.

I mention this because any Bostonian knows that pedestrians have the right of way when crossing the street. It could be rush hour in Harvard Square with cars bumper to bumper behind innumerable red lights, but if an uppity little undergraduate wants to cross the street, then everything must - and will - stop for her. Any Bostonian knows this. Any guest of a Bostonian knows this as well. When I took a group of friends around Boston this spring, one of them marveled, "You're just gonna walk into traffic?!" Well, yeah.

Conversely, any non-Bostonian knows that pedestrians don't have the right of way. Maybe the statutes say otherwise, but the reality is that cars rarely, if ever, yield to crossing pedestrians. This can spell trouble for former Bostonians. Georgetown is riddled with four-way stop signs but cars rarely ever stop. So far, I have not been deterred. My Bostonian feet just walk into traffic. I'm sure this will result in some sort of honk-and-scream, and today I thought it had come.

With no cars in sight, I stepped into the crosswalk. An SUV pulled up right as I reached the middle. It honked. I looked up and expected to see a red-faced shirt type furious with my audacity (even though, when I looked, I hadn't seen anybody). Instead I saw four young and very handsome Georgetown students, each smiling and waving. Not knowing what to do, I smiled and waved back.

Later I asked the Captain, a Georgetown graduate himself, was that just a custom? Some sort of south-of-the-Mason-Dixon courtesy everyone learns at orientation? Or had I somehow crossed the line into cougar-ville and those fine young men had taken notice?

He said cougar. Thanks, honey.

Feeling at home

Right now, the Captain and the Genius are downstairs in the living room and watching a movie together. I am upstairs in my bed and thinking about how much fun I had today and how much more at home at feel in my new environs.

It probably helped my mood that today was a rest day on my marathon training regimen.

Even if I'd had to do a training run, though, today couldn't be beat. To start, and as I said before, the Captain and the Genius are downstairs watching a movie together. I find this adorable. The Captain might be fixing up a beat-up house and trying to find a job, but he still takes time to take care of his little brother. Reason #49810 I am glad I went to that bar review two years ago.

Second, I found a fantastic, delicious, affordable sushi place in DuPont circle. Ms. J dreams of someday eating sushi with impunity, and I definitely resonate with that dream. Today, however, I needn't have worried about cost because the lunch special I had was so fresh and so expertly executed I thought I had died and gone to gustatory heaven. Even better than the food itself, though, was the discovery of the restaurant. It was packed...with locals. Scarcely a tourist in the joint; it was filled to the gills with professionals on their lunch hours. I felt so proud to have found a place claimed by the locals. It's only been two weeks for me, but I'm trying to learn as quickly as I can.

Things you don't think about

After living by myself for three years, I was apprehensive about moving into a place with two, soon to be three, new roommates. I was worried about all the usual roommate worries: dishes in the sink, leaving on the lights, late rent payments.

So far, it's been all right. (It's also only been one week.) But there is at least one thing I didn't think about, when moving from a studio apartment to a three-story townhouse: having to lock the door when I'm in the bathroom. That's a habit I'll have to revive.

Church

Today I went to church, and it was great. As some of you know, one of the only disappointments I had with Boston was that I never found a suitable church. I more or less grew up Presbyterian, and Boston is so Catholic a town that few people even know what a Presbyterian is. Week after week I would try various Protestant churches, some as far as Wellesley, in hopes that I’d find a new church home. I never did, and I gave up somewhere around final exams 1L year.

Imagine my delight, then, when I found online a Presbyterian church near Metro Center that described itself as all-inclusive and outlined its homeless ministries right on its home page. I found that incredibly telling, that the church’s mission to the needy was so important it appeared front and center, rather than behind a link. To Metro Center I went.

I loved it. It was a small, [FN1] but robust congregation. A man with a beautiful tenor voice sat down next to me and sang the hymns with such sincerity I thought his singing another form of prayer. An elderly woman on the other side of me asked me if I ever had been to that church before, and whether I had met any of their “young people.” The Associate Pastor was a young woman, perhaps even younger than I, whose updates about the life of the church were so thorough and so earnest I was inspired. The only downside was that the preaching was mediocre, and had any of my mentors from Princeton been there with me, they probably would have turned up their noses. Thankfully, I am not so exacting after three years without a church home.

To Metro Center I’ll return.

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FN1. My idea of small is probably skewed. My church in New York had 3,400 members.

Only in Washington

The Captain and I went to dinner the other night with the Coxswains, two of his friends from college and now two of my friends as well. As we were making our way to the Tombs (I put that in for the Hoyas), we saw a young man wearing a bright red hat walking towards us. We paid him no mind as we passed him by, but he immediately recognized Mr. Cox and wanted to catch up. By now I was close enough to see that the friendly young man was wearing no ordinary hat, but... a hat for McCain.

I think it shows how thoroughly flawed the Republican nominee is this year that my Captain, a gun-toting, Bronze star veteran who voted for the President - both times - said to me later, "At first I thought that hat was ironic, because surely, no one would have actually worn that in public."