Lawn Guy Land & LoHo

The theme of the weekend was Decadence.

One of the great things about living at 209 was that my flatmates shared the same joie de vivre for food. Sure, lots of people say they like to eat, but with us, it was more like we lived to eat. (See: driving an hour to Binghamton just to get pumpkin pancakes at IHOP.) Megan has been reading 1001 Things to Eat Before You Diet, so armed with recommendations from that, we descended upon Long Island and the Lower East Side.

Long Island is renowned for its pizza and bagels, so our first stop was at a pizza place listed in the book. It wasn't the best pizza I've ever had (that honor goes to fried calamari pizza from Jersey), but my cheese slice, crisp and eaten folded in half, was still a refreshing change of pace from the deep-dish pervasive in Chicago eateries. Later that night, we grabbed ice cream from Magic Fountain in Mattituck. The guy behind the counter loved us, and kept offering more samples before we finally committed to carrot cake, cranberry, gingerbread and apple pie.

At this point, we were disgustingly full, but that didn't stop us from driving to the American Legion bar...to hang out with Megan's dad. See, Megan's dad was (is) definitely quite the popular guy back in his day, and just because he's not in his 20s any more doesn't mean he doesn't know how to have a good time, no sirree. In the span of an hour that afternoon, he was hopping to about 3 holiday parties. Sheesh, I don't think I've ever had 3 competing parties to attend. Megan is understandably not so keen on hearing her dad's tales of bar brawls with the boys, but hey, Tommy's not going to let a wife and kids get him down, right?

At the American Legion, we were greeted by Megan's dad, and his chums at the bar were thrilled to meet Tommy's daughter and Tom's daughter's friend (me). Seriously, if we'd wanted to get schwasted for free, we could have easily gotten free drinks from everyone at the bar. Many back thumps and group hugs later, we extricated ourselves from the bunch of rowdy 40-year-olds. It's funny to think we were basically at a frat party, except with people who have kids our age. (Fear not, T-Fizz opted to walk home instead of drive.)

For the rest of the weekend, we explored the Lower East Side, which is filled with neat ethnic eateries, tenements, and hipsters. (All the better for avoiding tourist hordes in midtown Manhattan.) The area loosely encompasses everything from Chinatown and Little Italy to the East Village. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum offers tours of the neighborhood, so we stopped by for a crash course and to see an old tenement. Historically, the area began as a center for German and Irish immigrants, with more Irish than the city of Dublin in the 19th century. Then, as these immigrants became wealthier, they moved out and were replaced by Italians and Eastern Europeans. In turn, these populations have largely been supplanted by Chinese immigrants, and today, the historic heart of Little Italy is filled with bustling Chinese shops. It's funny to think that perhaps a century from now Chinatown will be gone, and will be replaced with Little Ghana, or something to that effect. Will Chinese food stop being cheaply ubiquitous, and become more upper-crust, like Italian cuisine?

Though most of the Jews have since moved away, there are still a number of historic Jewish establishments in the area. In short order, I tried hard salami and roast beef at Katz's Deli (there was a sign indicating "This is where Harry met Sally."), a sweet potato knish from Yonah Schimmel's (simultaneously rich & savory yet light), chocolate babka, fruity rugelach, halvah (mm, sesame-flavored chalk), a full-sour pickle (pickled string beans & celery, anyone?), a chestnut donut (technically not Jewish but still amazing), a bialy from Kossar's (similar to a bagel, but not boiled), and a bagel with lox, capers, red onion and tomato from Russ & Daughters ($8.50 and 45 min in line later, it was worth every cent/min). I found myself humming "Hava Nagila," as shop workers shouted Yiddish over the telephone. My stomach was working at ludicrous speed.

The highlight of the trip came when we randomly strolled into a Tibetan restaurant for dinner. Dinner was good, albeit not terribly exciting, but on a lark, we ordered dessert and this turned out to be the best thing since sliced bread. Tsampa is a traditional Tibetan staple, made of ground roasted barley, somewhat similar to rice pudding. This version came flavored with honey and dried cranberries, and it was LIFE. With the hope of recreating the dish at home, I looked up tsampa recipes, but they require esoteric ingredients like yak butter. Bummer.

I can't wait to do it again in Boston.

On Chicago Nightlife

In general, I don't frequent areas of Chicago which are considered dangerous, unless you count trips to Hyde Park. As with living in any urban area though, it's sort of intuitive that you need a little extra vigilance as you go about the city, particularly at night. On the other hand, I've always been pretty laissez-faire about safety precautions. This is probably a product of having lived in suburbia most of my life, and combined with equal parts omnipotence and hubris, I have no qualms about say, running at night along the Lake Shore path.

This morning, for the first time, I felt a little nervous about being a single female in the city. To explain, I had a 6:30 am flight out of O'Hare, heading to JFK for a weekend in NY before trekking home for Christmas. When I booked this flight, my decision was based mostly on price, plus I figured I could make the most of Friday if I landed at 9:30. Now, it takes about an hour and a half on the train to get to O'Hare, plus time to check in and be bored at the gate...I ended up setting my alarm for 2:45 am.

At 3:30 am, I had gotten to the entrance of the station, just as a train screeched away. I silently swore to myself. (If only I hadn't stopped to brush my teeth, if only I'd packed my computer the night before...) This turned out to be a rather costly error. The red line only runs every 20-30 minutes at this time of night, and more irritating, there were 3-4 girls at the other end of the platform screaming and arguing vociferously. One of the girls seemed to be circling another around a bench. I glanced around nervously, eyeing the security guard in the ticket booth.

As the din increased, the security guard ambled over to the other end of the platform to investigate. A train pulled up, but much to my dismay, it was traveling in the wrong direction. A few people got off, craning their necks at the commotion, and one guy exclaimed, "Damn bitches, this silliness has got to stop!" and strolled over to the other end to "help." Shouts of "Bitch!" and "You ain't no sista of mine!" Good god, I thought, it is far too early in the morning for this, and if someone pulls out a gun or something...The clamor was now growing louder, as the group moved up the platform toward me. The Mediator Guy had his arms wrapped around one girl, to pin her arms back, and he was telling her to calm down and go home. Meanwhile, her taunter was yelling "Fuck you! You can suck my titties!" and as she rounded the bend, it was quite clear that you could indeed do this, because she had taken off her shirt and bra. Have I mentioned that it was far too early in the morning for me to handle this?

Luckily, a north-bound train pulled up, and I hastily clambered on. The squabbling sisters got on as well, and the train sat there for another 5 or 10 minutes as the fight continued on the train. Christ. I'm not sure what the end result was, but we finally got going and the fight was definitely a popular subject for the CTA workers on board.

All in all, it was a little more excitement than I'd bargained for. Let's see how the Orange line fares when I fly back through Midway.

We've got that oppressed minority bond going on...

Pastrami egg rolls and Chinese hot dogs from Eden Wok on 34th Street

As Christmas approaches in less than a week, I want to take a moment to celebrate the culinary kinship between the Chinese and the Jew.

What do any of these elements have in common? Well, for starters, Chinese and Jews are two of the largest ethnic enclaves in America which do not traditionally celebrate Christmas. Secondly, Chinese cuisine, with its heavy use of garlic and onion seasonings, and pronounced lack of dairy products, tends to be inadvertently Kosher and friendly to Jewish palates. Throw in the usual stereotypes about model minorities and aptitude in mathematics, and you've got a match made in heaven.

Ergo, since nearly everything else is closed, if you're a Jew, your only option on Christmas is to go out for Chinese food and see a movie. This relationship has been explored in quite a few academic papers and parodied in many a song. Up till now though, I haven't seen any evidence of cross-pollination between the culinary regimes.

Enter the pastrami egg roll and Chinese hot dog, profiled today in the NYT. I'm not sure if the new hybrids would be superior to the original versions, but it's worth a shot. What'll they come up with next? Gefilte fish wontons? Red bean challah?

If Chinese food has become such a staple of American Jewish diets, why is the converse not true? I'll be in New York this weekend, eating my way through the Lower East side and keeping an eye out for Asians in Katz's Deli.

Road Trip to IOWA

Last weekend, Katherine and I decided to take a road trip to Iowa to visit Warren, since he took the time to visit Chicago a couple times over the summer. Besides, doesn't everyone aspire to travel to Iowa one day? Right.

As we drove to Cedar Rapids, we passed a Hummer dealership (there were actually very few non-American cars on the road) and the world's largest truck stop. Seriously, we're talking about a big mother-trucker, 2 1/2 times the size of Disneyland. I started to worry about the fact that this state has a caucus, and that it matters. Is Iowa a representative slice of the country, a swing state? I've been living in blue areas for so long that I can't remember what America's "heartland" is like.

Cedar Rapids is an industrial town in eastern Iowa, home to a number of manufacturing plants, agricultural warehouses, and a Super Walmart and a Super Target (whoa!). The town slogan is "the City of 5 Seasons," where the 5th season is the time you spend appreciating the other four. (No joke.) Outside of Cedar Rapids, the town is also popularly known as Cedar Crapids, or the City of 5 Smells. After driving past the Quaker Oats factory and through Warren's corn processing plant, I have now smelled two of the five smells, and hope to never experience the other three. Despite the questionable odor, driving around the corn processing plant was kind of neat. Have you ever wondered where high fructose corn syrup comes from? Glucose? Maltodextrin? All the ingredients in tiny print that go into every processed food you buy, well they start percolating right here.

For the most part though, the town had all the chain restaurants and shopping malls you could want, the usual assemblage of IHOPs, Applebees' and Olive Gardens. Then there were local oddities, like the Kum & Go gas stations and Culver's, which featured "frozen custard butterburgers." Ironically, the latter was located next to an emergency healthcare clinic. For dinner, I decided to veto going to Pei's Mandarin, advertising the "best oriental food in east Iowa," and opted for a Mexican place instead.

Speaking of Asians, we were browsing the Wikipedia article on Cedar Rapids and came across the demographics section. The town's population includes 0.06% people of Asian descent, so with a population of around 120,000, this comes out to...72 Asians. That would mean my presence in Cedar Rapids handily increased the Asian population by over 1%.

Since the Wikipedia article was sadly devoid of appealing attractions in Cedar Rapids (Czech & Slovak Museum, anyone?), I jokingly suggested that we go to the Planet X Fun Center. After all, how can you possibly go wrong with a place that has space bikes, bowlingo, and laser tag? The answer is: many, many ways. Perhaps this is why beer buckets were on sale, with 5 beers for $10. After surveying the turtle-slow bumper cars and the light-up alien whacking game with half of its lights burnt out, we decided to spring for a round of mini-golf. The course was actually fairly difficult, but I miraculously came away with 3 hole-in-ones and won by one point!

Later that night, we drove to Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, to meet up with Andrew, Warren's new boyfriend. Andrew was super nice, and also super tall. At 6'9", he towered over my 5'1" self, and we bonded over how it was difficult for both of us to find clothing that fit. In the meantime, Iowa City was much cuter than Cedar Rapids, with a nice pedestrian mall, ample bars, and a Pita Pit! I never frequented Pita Pit much as an undergrad, but it was still refreshing to see one of the late night food joints (DP Dough, Wings Over) you typically see in college towns. Unfortunately, the gay bar was kind of dead on this particular night, so we dropped into another bar, packed with screaming sorostitutes, frat boys, and girls wearing ugly Christmas sweaters and mini-skirts. Even my jello shot could not stave off my irritation with this bar; this is why I never went to anything but Stella's while at Cornell. And, I don't know if I've aged that much in the last 5 months, but somehow everyone seemed to look really young. Maybe this is one more step along the road to becoming an old fogey.

Back at Andrew's house, his housemate Marta had offered to let us sleep in her bed, since she was in Madison for the weekend. I never thought I'd be sleeping in the bed of the lesbian roommate of the boyfriend of my friend's gay friend in Iowa. Also, Marta had a Moosewood cookbook on her bookshelf, which meant my respect for her automatically doubled.

The drive back was rather a bitch. Freezing rain had been coming down all weekend, and the roads were pretty icy. I stopped for gas at a BP, which had a wretched-looking church next door, with a sign that read, "No Jesus, no peace. Know Jesus, know peace." After we properly mocked the church and its sign, I pulled away and began to turn onto the highway on-ramp. Except I kept turning, and in a slow skid, the rear end of my car fishtailed 180 degrees. It was my first major skid, and I felt oddly calm during the experience, as though I were looking down on the scene from afar. Luckily, the cars around us had stopped to stare blankly at us, and no one got hit. And hey, it wouldn't be a road trip without a near-death experience to cap it off, right?

Jersey Boys

In recent years, Broadway has seen the debut of a slew of shows based on existing musical acts. There's Mamma Mia!, based on songs from ABBA, and Movin' Out, presenting the Billy Joel catalogue. After all, baby boomers who grew listening to bands from the '60s and '70s are now in their prime earning years, and regularly frequent the theater.

Then again, though these are some of the more popular "jukebox musicals," Good Vibrations and All Shook Up (featuring songs from the Beach Boys and Elvis Presley) certainly demonstrate that having a large fan base doesn't necessarily translate to Broadway success. Personally, I have mixed feelings about writing musicals around a pre-existing band, since it seems like it would stymie the creation of original material and dumb down Broadway. Besides, isn't the point of musical theater to discover new music, not just rehash old favorites?

My misgivings aside, I still happily agreed to go see Jersey Boys with Britton last night. The musical is a fictionalized account of Frankie Vallie & the Four Seasons and their rise to stardom. Take the usual hard-knocks tale of struggling teens with a gift for music, add in some Jersey mobsters and a cameo by a young Joe Pesci, and presto, you have yourself a plot. The play is divided into four parts, or movements, if you will, each named after a different season and narrated by one of the four members. My favorite band member was Bob Gaudio, who shot to fame after writing "(Who Wears) Short Shorts" at age 15. He is considered the most cerebral of the bunch, and is responsible for writing many of the Four Seasons' hits.

Joisey Girl: So, who's the girl in the song? Your girlfriend?
Gaudio: No, it could be any girl. Every girl. It's what T.S. Eliot called the objective correlative.
Joisey Girl: You're not from around here, are you?

The true star of the night though was the Four Seasons' music itself. I've casually listened to many of their songs on the radio, but this was the first time I'd examined their discography in detail. And some of their lesser known hits are incredibly catchy. Take a listen to "Rag Doll"; supposedly it's based on the true story of Gaudio who was approached by beggar girl in Manhattan. In between an incredible falsetto from the actor playing Frankie Valli and the cute doo-wop choreography, I was pining for the good ol' days of boy bands wearing suits. By the end of the night, we were all singing and clapping along to the encore of "December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)." I've never seen an auditorium so full of smiles.

________________

One more aside: I needed to fix a bike flat before the show, so I trekked to the nearest bike shop looking for help. They were closed for the day, but luckily, a cop was around and offered to help me fix my flat. (Brings new meaning to the phrase "to serve and protect.") In the midst of this, who strolls out of the shop?! Joe, whose last 4-5 messages I've been ignoring. Cue awkward conversation...Go figure, a city of 8 million people, and I manage to run into the one person I'm actively trying to avoid. After he left, my friend Britton (and the cop) were gut-busting laughing at me. Now that, was the clutch part of the evening.

Blog Reading Level

Typically I find quiz results on blogs quite irritating, but I thought I'd cave on this occasion because the results actually pertain to the blog itself. (It's meta, no?) It looks like all that time in college paid off, because my writing is on par with someone with an undergraduate education.

Since I'm uber competitive about such matters, I did a quick survey of some of the other sites I frequent (and competing blogs). Here's how the results stacked up:

Random sample of 4 friends' blogs: 2 elementary school, 2 junior high
The New York Times: junior high (this surprised me a bit, but it's likely due to only headlines being posted on the main page)
Slate: high school
Marginal Revolution: high school
Chronicle of Higher Education: college (undergrad)
Greg Mankiw's blog: college (post grad)
The Becker-Posner blog: genius
The Economist: genius (woo, best publication ever!)
Ars Technica: genius

Conclusion: it helps to write about a specialized topic (you use more obscure terminology), longer posts tend to be more complex, and the Brits are amazing.

Tis the Season

It's been rather a turbulent last 24 hours. But all bad things must come to an end, so I'm going to take a moment to write about things that make me happy and for which I am grateful.

-My friends: even though most of you are in different time zones, we manage to bridge the distance with phone calls and IMs. Any time I need to talk, to share exciting news or lament a loss, I can count on a captive audience. Moreover, I take away something new from each of you, be it quantum mechanics, early education policy, or Broadway trivia, or even just how to live life. I am proud to know such an eclectic, talented bunch of people.

-My family: I don't think anyone but Chester can ever fully appreciate how insane our parents are, but that's who raised me, for better or worse. :) I credit my hyper-efficiency and resourcefulness to being the child of immigrant parents, and even though they sometimes put crazy demands on me, I can always count on them to support me, unconditionally. This is perhaps the most striking distinction I've seen with other people's relationships with their parents. Plus, my mom can be wicked funny.

-My job: after speaking with so many other recent graduates who are dissatisfied with their jobs, I am all the more grateful that I stumbled upon mine after a chance conversation with Dean L. Sure, I could be making lots more as a consultant or in finance, but the extra money wouldn't make up for the flexibility and autonomy I have at the Fed. More importantly, I'm in an intellectually stimulating environment, with the opportunity to hone research skills, take classes, and attend seminars on everything from heavy-duty econometrics to the effects of fasting during Ramadan on fetal cognitive development. It's like Cornell, without the stress of grades.

-My time in Ithaca: when people ask me whether I liked Cornell, I reply that I not only loved it, I loved the town of Ithaca. It's funny to think that 4 years ago Ithaca was barely on my map, especially with its ominous winters and rural location. But Ithaca has a way of charming its way into your heart, and although I love being in a city, I'd happily trade it in for Ithaca's waterfalls, trails and co-op groceries. And let's be serious, 4 years ago, I would not have been interested in hiking, my nose would have turned up at the idea of seitan and tempeh, and there's no way I would have considered biking to work. Ithaca has a way of changing you.

-My self: this one is harder than it looks because I tend to be pretty hard on myself. (Maybe it's that Asian instinct for self-improvement.) I've come to realize that I don't need to apologize for my quirks and oddities though, even if they sometimes hold me back from success. So, I'm going to take a quick narcissistic moment to revel in my own accomplishments. I'm smart enough, good enough, and gosh darn it, people like me!

Here's to a happy, healthy 2008.

Anterograde Amnesia

Last night was a good time. Or so they tell me. In my mind, I remember playing a round of kings, and then seeing people leave as the party ended, so a solid 2-3 hour chunk of my Sat night has gone AWOL. Luckily, after I woke up on his wet (because I spilled water on it) couch, Chris was around to fill me in on what I missed. Apparently, I was holding conversations, dancing, and helping him clean up afterwards. At one point, I paused and said, "I think I'm going to throw up." and then nonchalantly proceeded to go to the bathroom and do just that. He says my aim was pretty good, though he had to clean the toilet seat a little. Cringe*

This is the first time I've ever blacked out, and although everyone is semi-congratulating me, I'm actually pretty bothered. It's amazing to me that I was conscious and acting fairly normal, but none of this registered with my memory, as if I were on autopilot for a few hours last night. My inner control freak is flipping out about what I did and said. I guess it's a small comfort that I didn't do anything too crazy. Otherwise, I'm sure I would have heard about it by now.

After I got home and brushed my teeth for a long time, I looked up the wiki on blackouts. It looks like I had a textbook case of an en bloc blackout; as I read the article, I thought, check, check, yup did that too. It turns out that the speed at which you consume alcohol determines whether you black out, and I was downing some cranberry and vodkas at an efficient pace.

Remind me not to do that ever again.