first attempt at recording a recipe

Auntie Bee's Butternut Squash Soup Foray

1 medium-large butternut squash
1 can vegetable stock
a few dollops of heavy cream
a little bit each of butter, majoram, nutmeg, cinnamon, salt, & black pepper

Cut the squash into chunks. I can't tell you how small or large they should be, because this first part didn't work out real well for me. Suffice to say, they should be small enough to roast soft in 45 minutes, or else you need to roast them for a great deal longer, and good luck with the fire alarm in that case.

Once the roasting is complete, peel the skins off the flesh. The recipe I used said to scrape the flesh from the skin, but if it doesn't work out for you, you'll only feel angry and frustrated and maybe you'll cuss loudly several times until your roommate yells from the living room sofa to ask whether you're okay in there. So save everyone some trouble, get yourself a paring knife, and do it the cumbersome way.

Next, stuff some of them roasted, pared chunks in a blender with a little vegetable stock. Push buttons, bang, hit, and cuss some more until the squash is something resembling smooth. Transfer into a big ole sauce pot. Then repeat until all the chunks have been "blended." Maybe instead of roasting, try paring the squash, chunking and boiling it, and then drain and use a masher or a hand mixer instead, like you're making mashed potatoes or Thanksgiving yams. Me I had to blend my squash in three shifts, thereby covering the counter area between the blender and the sauce pot in a thick orange coat of goop. Either way is fine, I should think, so long as you end up with a pot of liquid squash.

Finally, add the heavy cream and all the other stuff. Stir while simmering. If you feel like you'd like to, transfer the mixture back into the blender and puree it for a little while longer. That's what I did. But if not, that's cool too. Cook until you feel like it's probably done.

Serve hot with Bombay and lime seltzer on ice and a leftover sandwich from the afternoon's meeting with the printer. And viola!!! Best butternut squash soup south of the Italian Market.

on hiding

I've been thinking about taking up drinking, and then I realized that I do that already. So I'm thinking about taking up serious drinking, like alcoholism, but I don't think I could handle that level of mood alteration or chemical addiction. So maybe instead I could fall in love with an alcoholic, or some kind of drug addict, a mild varity, not the dangerous kind, not like a junkie or a meth-head or anything. I don't know, maybe I could get pregnant by a stranger and take up single motherhood, but actually that's no good either because I'm about fifteen years too old for that to be spectacularly or even just especially challenging.

What I'm looking for is something really remarkable, dramatic, something somebody would make a movie about, a sometimes funny and sometimes touching movie, in which I am the central character struggling with some kind of deep-rooted inhibition which turns out to be a metaphor for the human condition. Because, you know, at the end of these movies, there's always a patient, sweet, offbeat but attractive member of the opposite sex waiting to begin a tender and wonderfully strange romance. Like in Benny and Joon. Or Drop Dead Fred. Or the new Ryan Gosling flick.


Important PS:
Please don't assume by my flippant tone that I'm poking fun at these movies. I'm not. Drop Dead Fred is one of my top five favorite movies, and I've been all over town singing the praises of Lars and the Real Girl. I'm just terribly curious as to where my sweet, quirky romance is, and how great of a challenge I might have to overcome to earn it.

on porn. or not porn.

My roommate walked in the front door last night while I was watching Bad Education, right in the middle of a particularly racy scene in the beginning where Gael García Bernal is dressed in drag and giving the other character a blow job. Although he's an actor, my roommate somehow doesn't know who Pedro Almodóvar is, and jumped to the next logical conclusion: that I was watching gay porn on the living room sofa, which I made no effort to conceal as I heard him negotiating our set of rather cantankerous—that is to say, loud—front doors.

For those of you who aren't familiar, I should explain that Almodóvar's films are often very sexual, but rarely erotic. Which is to say that although his sex scenes are both graphic and frequent, they are no more sensual than any of the other scenes. His sensuality is often more familial than erotic. His films are rich in human emotion, but he allows for more raw emotion between sisters or between a mother and son than he does between lovers, transmitting tenderness and vulnerability through a laugh or a look instead of some sexy intimacy. I think this is why they call him a woman's director, because men seldom view relationships this way. And often I think so much the shame for them.

This isn't supposed to be a review of or a valentine to Almodóvar, though. This is a funny story.

So my roommate walked in right in the middle of a graphic sex scene. Now my roommate is not only a man, but my brother's best friend, despite that he's usually a stereotypical "guy" and my brother is the nerdy, artistic type. I think he actually staggered backward a bit in an exaggerated physical reaction at catching me watching this graphic sex scene. "Oh my god you're watching porn! And you yell at me!" So I tried to explain that it wasn't porn, and afterall, look, you can see that the woman sucking that guy's dick is actually a man in a wig.

"Oh. So you're watching gay porn."

And after a few attempts at trying to discern exactly what variety of porn I was watching, he walked off into the kitchen. He fixed himself a snack and ate it, and a few minutes later found his way back into the living room again.

"I told your brother you're watching porn," he said, waggling his thumb in a text-messaging charade, and then turned and walked up the steps to his room. Exasperated, I pulled my phone from my bag and texted my brother: "it's not porn. it's almodovar."

Ten minutes later my brother texted me back: "nice! is that a quote or are you randomly defending his films?"

"Matthew?" I called up the steps, confused. "Matthew why would my brother text me this? I tried to tell him I wasn't watching porn and he said—"

Oh dear. As he ran down the steps laughing his most special laugh reserved only for racist jokes and dumb women, I realized what had happened. He'd never texted my brother at all. He only told me that he told my brother I was watching porn just to get me in a tizzy. But he hadn't actually done it. So what happened in reality was my poor brother got a random text at ten o'clock on a weeknight from his older and sometimes somewhat flighty sister: "it's not porn."

fairmount weekend

This weekend I ran into both of my most recent disasters in attempted dating. I didn't say boo to either one, nor they to me. And honestly, I'm not sure the first one even saw me pass by him (though the second most assuredly saw me, saw me hide my face indelicately behind my hand, and later, smiled knowingly to himself when he walked past me). I don't know what it is about men that terrifies me. I just know they make me into some other person who is much smaller than I am, quieter, less certain.

In other news, I went to the new Perelman Building at the art museum today, easily one of the most ornate buildings in Philadelphia. It was originally built in 1927 to house the headquarters of the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company as an adornment to the then-new Benjamin Franklin Parkway, with an art deco facade littered with sculptures and reliefs. When I used to live in Fairmount, it was one of my favorite places to ride past, and each time I saw it I was startled by its overwhelming presence and garish detail. I was also then in love with the Eastern State Penitentiary, another looming structure that never ceased to delight and amaze me with its towering walls of massive stone. These heavy old structures seem like they were not so much erected by man as they were planted in the earth to grow on their own power. They sprawl across the land unapologetically, spire at will, and age with a grace I can only pray to someday find. Standing before them makes me feel strong by proxy, solid and safe. And Fairmount is rife with these: Saint Francis Xavier Church, that old cloister convent at 22nd & Green, Girard College, the Free Library, the rows on rows of brownstones with their tidy stoops and wrought-iron gates.

So today, standing in a very open, sunlit gallery of abstract sculptures at the Perelman, Jes and I looked up at a heavy wooden tower consisting of precariously piled old beams and a dangling wooden chair. She said she loved it and I agreed. I thought it a warm testament to craftsmanship, the American pastoral, family, religion, tradition. I thought perhaps of a one-room schoolhouse in a small village in the foothills of northern Appalachia, turn of the century, pigtails and inkwells and long mid-day breaks for supper. And then Jes shocked me from my reverie. "It's creepy," she said, "It reminds me of an old haunted barn or something."

And somewhere buried between these first and second observations, there must be a foundation or a supporting beam, some grandfather I never had, some ancient tradition alight in me, some unique warmth, and it probably smells like aged cedar wood and mildewed books, and it's probably moth-eaten and damp in the corners and so it provides the comfort of hot tea and a large hearth and a favorite quilt some grandmother made with her two hands of scraps collected over years, and it's probably a seasonable and welcome reminder that my love comes from someplace deeper and more unbroken than where I have looked, and yet, some source less constant still.