4.25.03 – stone soup

that’s it. albertson’s grocery chain is being sued because they neglected to tell consumers that they dye their salmon pink. as i learned this morning, only wild salmon come in that nice fishy-pink color; fish-farm salmon are grey. only, people don’t like to eat grey salmon, because they’ve only seen pink salmon in the stores, and so fish hatcheries feed dye to the live fish or dye the flesh after death so that they’ll be a more attractive color. apparently, this happens with most meat in the US – bacon, steak, hamburger – it’s all injected with red dyes so that it looks more fresh and bloody. the thought of eating grey flesh dyed pink for my consumer satisfaction grosses me out even more. there’s a fish farm in Hagerman, ID, that offers wholesaler buyers a color chart with varying shades of pink, so that the buyer can decide what color the fish should be dyed before they buy them. ugg.

turning the subject to recent vegetarian culinary discoveries, i found this tomato soup recipe that rocks my world because 1) it doesn’t taste like ketchup, and 2) it’s about as expensive as stone soup. looking at the grocery receipt, the breakdown goes:

soup:

1 carrot – $0.11

1 stalk celery – $0.05

2 cans diced tomatoes w/ basil – 2 @ $0.89 = $1.78

1 yellow onion – $0.24

1 can vegetable broth – $0.88

2 cloves garlic ~ $0.20

2 TBS olive oil – 1 liter @ 7.99; 2 TBS = $0.24

biscuits:

2/3 c milk – 2 quarts @ 1.09; 2/3 c = $0.09

2 ¼ c bisquick – 1 box @ 2.78; 2 ¼ c = $0.45

total cost (figuring in 5% sales tax): $4.24. total cost/meal (makes 4 servings): $1.06. yay, poverty food! even better, if my garden experiment works, i’ll be able to pick nearly all of the ingredients out of the garden and make an organic version of this soup, for the cost of the olive oil and veggie broth ($0.29 /serving).

4.21.03 – village fighter

easter consisted of brunch at my grandparents’ house, a matinee performance of Stop Kiss, dinner at andy’s parents’ house, and an evening birthday party at our friend matt’s. this necessitated changing clothes four times, and we ate like hobbits all day – by the time we got to matt’s house, we were sitting down to Second Desserts. we came home to our cluttered hobbit hole and passed out before midnight.

some people turn to comfort food in times of turmoil; others use it as a crutch, looking to mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese or ice cream on a daily basis to provide comfort. for me, i’m not so into comfort food as i am a slave to comfort clothing. i’m totally addicted to worn-out levis, polar fleece tops, old sneakers, and ponytails. i don’t just put on sweats when i’m having a fat day, i need comfort clothing all the time. my skirt-wearing tolerance is about three hours, after that i get cranky and don’t want to do anything but come home and put on pants. i’m convinced that pantyhose were developed to subjugate women – i mean, how can one possibly think clearly when one’s legs are being squeezed by sweaty tubes of nylon? its not natural. my legs need full freedom of motion. no pencil skirts, no high heels, no un-breathable fabrics. no fringy bangs in my eyes or lipstick to be smeared and touched up again. i can’t even wear nail polish – the weight of the polish on my fingers is unpleasantly distracting, my fingers feel thick and clumsy.

this isn’t a body image thing. i don’t hide in over-sized t-shirts and baggy sweatpants. i’m still a slave to fashion. if anything, getting dressed is even more challenging for me – i want to look nice, but my body needs to wear the same jeans i wore the last three days in a row. thank god i’m in a business where no one really cares what the hell i wear to work.

andy and our friend duane are in the living room rehearsing a comedy routine for this charity event tomorrow night. i don’t know what the skit is, but it has a theme song that goes, “village fighter, village fighter, fighting for your village!” lots of guitar strumming. then cut to a series of musical farts (or elephant calls, i’m not sure what the difference is).

4.18.03

my grass germinated! this might seem like a little thing, but i nearly broke my back a month ago cleaning up the yard and then it snowed and nothing grew and i was thoroughly discouraged. anyway, it feels pointless to turn on the sprinkler when it’s like 50 degrees out there, but my mother swears that the grass seedlings will curl up and die if they aren’t watered daily, and my water bill is included in the rent, so…

new assignment from the Weekly: 20 questions with Dar Williams. her publicist called offering to set up an interview, and none of the staff writers were interested, so it got tossed to me. must look cool in front of dar, must look cool… what do you want to know about dar williams? andy got hired at the Flying M this morning, which means that there’d be the potential, if we weren’t such geeks, to be a pretty darn hip couple: he works for the independent-est coffeehouse in downtown Boise, i work for the Boise Weekly (independent media source and something of a liberal stronghold) and nights we work with the only two professional theatres in town. the good: free coffee, free tickets, free press passes. the bad: between the two of us, we have five jobs. our latch-key cat is being raised by the tv.

4.16.03 – dream no. 9

tossed and turned last night, my head filled with strange, lurking dreams, in which i’m in a house, comfortably-lived in, but not familiar to me, and empty but for myself and my younger companion, a student or sibling, someone known to me in the dream but no one i can recognize now. in the crux of the dream, this person is warning me of a negative, lurking presence that accompanies me, a sort of haunting that i carry around with me. this person has clairvoyant capabilities that make his perception of the haunting much clearer than mine, but as the dream goes on i become more aware of it as well. woke up before we got around to getting rid of the unwanted presence. obvious subconscious references to Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance, which i recently finished, but i wonder what the dream experts would have to say about say about me discovering i have a negative presence that i haul around everywhere.

4.15.03 – vampyres are more fun with a ‘y’

Stop Kiss opened last weekend, so i’m still trying to recover the parts of my life that have been put on hold for the past five weeks. which includes responding to email from almost everyone i know. i promise i’m not ignoring you, i’m just tired. stayed up too late last night watching Herzog’s Nosferatu, a film i’ve been meaning to see for ages. lots of long slow camera shots and a wonderfully measured pace, not to mention a frickin’ scary vampire. we were split 2 to 1 over the issue of lighting; i thought the highly stylized lighting was fabulous, creepy and theatrical.

4.11.03 – creepy crawlies

i’m not particularly creeped out by spiders, however i am creeped out by large quantities of spiders. working in the front garden today, i walked across the sunny patch of dirt/weeds where i’m trying to grow grass near the driveway, and noticed that wherever i put my foot down, 5 or 6 or more little black spiders would go skittering away from my foot in all directions. ew. there must have been a hatch somewhere in the front yard this week with all the sunny weather. so of course i had to come inside and type “poisonous spider idaho” into the google toolbar, and look at close-up shots of yucky hairy spiders, so now every time i move, the little threads on my cutoff jeans tickle my legs and make me jump. working in the garden just lost all its joy for me.

4.10.03 – everyone’s a critic

today we make our debut as a freelance writer with a review of Spirited Away for the Boise Weekly. Evidently three months of answering phones and stuffing envelopes has finally earned me the opportunity to write the occasional film/book review (i’d do theatre reviews too, but i already work for both of the professional theatres in this town). i have no aspirations to be a critic when i grow up, but hey, someone’s paying me to write AND force my own opinion on thousands of unsuspecting readers? how could i say no?

4.8.03

so happy birthday to me. while it can be tempting to pull the passive-aggressive trick of not mentioning one’s birthday to anyone, and then getting hurt when no one remembers, really, what’s the point of that? you get lots more lovin’ if you tell the world you have a birthday coming. no party plans, unfortunately, as my birthday falls in the middle of a tech week AGAIN this year, so i’ll be working approximately 10am – 11pm today. this is okay, really, because i’m horrible at throwing parties. that’s where andy comes in – i’m good at organizing and details, and he’s the popular one, so when we have parties, i make sure we have food, and he makes sure we have friends.

4.7.03

yesterday’s yucky snowy day perked up at the end with the appearance of a free ticket to see tori amos, courtesy of nick. the evening was wholly thrown over to nostalgia once we discovered that we were sitting in the exact same (front row) seats that we’d sat in about eight years ago when i dragged a reluctant nick to see her boys for pele tour back in high school. the show featured a nice mix of her music from various albums all the way back to little earthquakes, so that those of us who’ve been too poor to buy a CD in recent years could enjoy new versions of old favorites. but god damn that woman can play a piano.

being in the technical half of the business myself, tho, i’m easily distracted by production details – noting the stripe of glow tape on the side of the Roadside Cafe sign that flew in mid show, watching the moving lights for their color-changing tricks, irked that the backdrop didn’t match up exactly at the seam in the middle and looked like cheap plywood, watching the stage hands moving about backstage, turning around to see if the stage manager was in the booth in the back of the house. i’m probably a pretty annoying person to go to a show with.

4.6.03 – front yard, 11:15am

no wonder i can’t get anything to grow in my yard. these april snowstorms are fun in a freakish sort of way, but the accompanying seasonal affective disorder is starting to get old.