This just cracks me up

My friend Polly just sent this as a Myspace bulletin, and I just felt like sharing:

If you had purchased $1,000 of shares of Delta Airlines one year ago, you will have $49.00 today.

If you had purchased $1,000 of shares of AIG one year ago, you will have $33.00 today.

If you had purchased $1,000 of shares of Lehman Brothers one year ago, you will have $0.00 today.


But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer,
then turned in the aluminum cans for recycling refund, you will have received $214.00.

Based on the above, the best current investment plan is to drink heavily & recycle.

It is called the 401-Keg.


A recent study found that the average American walks about 900 miles a year.

Another study found that Americans drink, on average, 22 gallons of alcohol a year.

That means that, on average, Americans get about 41 miles to the gallon!

Makes you proud to be an American!

Fried eggs and demonic furniture

I know, I know, I'm going to have to change the name of my blog to "I like to take pictures of my food." But yesterday I made hash browns with the leftover potatoes from Friday's potato salad. The hashbrowns turned out more like a giant latke,

(no, not that Latka), and today I ate the leftover latke with a fried egg on top:

which was insanely delicious. I doused it with Tapatio, but I'll spare you that image, because Tapatio-sprinkled food looks kinda gross.

On Saturday I had lunch with the wonderful A. Wolfe at Cafe Ole, which has surprisingly good fish tacos. After lunch, I wandered down to Renewal, where I beheld an amazing sight:

This may seem like a very mundane chair--and it is, except that it's upholstered in the same fabric as a couch my very old roommate Gloria brought into my apartment with Kelly in the year 2000. Several years ago, I met someone who had a love seat from this same furniture set. I'm pretty sure this was once all a single room set and the separate pieces are trying to find their way back to each other through me. I mean, seriously, it looks pretty demonic if you ask me, like the chair in the book version of The Amityville Horror that comes alive and tries to bite George Lutz, (I think it's a chair, though it may be some other piece of furniture). Real or no, that is the scariest fucking book I've ever read.

Renewal also had this gorgeous pumpkin-colored mid-century couch for a mere $229:

That's a steal! Oh, if only I weren't so broke!

After Renewal, I went to Hastings to rent Smart People and The Lives of Others. Netflix be damned! On my way out, I saw the following book, which I just had to share because it looks pretty amazing:

Yes, that's right; it's called "God's Concubine." Amazingly, according to Amazon, it is not about any strange religious sects, but rather, "In the long, complex second installment of her Troy Game quartet (after 2003's Hades' Daughter), Australian author Douglass moves her teeming cast of mythic heroes from ancient Greece to 11th-century England (aka Albion)." Okay, then.

I watched Smart People yesterday, and I really liked it. Thomas Hayden Church and Ellen Page were wonderful as always, and Sarah Jessica Parker didn't annoy me in the least since she wasn't playing that grating Carrie Bradshaw character. I have yet to watch The Lives of Others, of which I'm apprehensive because I'm afraid it'll have a heartbreaking ending and color my moods for days like Children of Men.

Finally, here is the photo Polly's husband took of me with my giant beer. Look how good my eyebrows look!

Potatoes, Beer, and Six Degrees of Separation

Yesterday it snowed like crazy. Here is my attempt to photograph my snowy deck:

(Since it's only 33 degrees right now, that snow is all still there!) My friend Mikela came over and we made steaks and French potato salad. The French potato salad came from the Barefoot Contessa's recipe, which can be found here. It is one of the most delicious things I have ever tasted. Here is a photo:

I was first inspired to make French potato salad last winter when we read Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast in my senior seminar, where the theme was Food in Literature. Here's the passage that made me hanker for some vinegar and olive oil marinated potatoes:

Eating is wonderful too and do you know where you are going to eat right now?
Lipp's is where you are going to eat and drink too.
It was a quick walk to Lipp's and every place I passed that my stomach noticed as quickly as my eyes or my nose made the walk an added pleasure. There were few people in the brasserie and when I sat down on the bench against the wall with the mirror in back and a table in front and the waiter asked if I wanted beer I asked for a distingue, the big glass mug that held a liter, and for potato salad.
The beer was very cold and wonderful to drink. The pommes a l'huile were firm and marinated and the olive oil delicious. I ground black pepper over the potatoes and moistened the bread in the olive oil. After the first heavy draft of beer I drank and ate very slowly.

Mikela and I had wine with our steak and potatoes, but last week I went out with some friends for giant Oktoberfest liter beers at a great beer and pizza place called The Front Door. Here's Polly with her distingue, (though I didn't know the formal name for it until just now; we were calling them Hobbit beers because you look like a Hobbit when you're drinking one):

Polly told me about a book she'd read that proved the theory that there are only six degrees of separation between any 2 people on earth. Wikipedia has just informed me that much of this theory was developed by a Hungarian. Of course it was; we Hungarians are smart. The whole six degrees of separation thing is sort of how I approach a lot of things in life. For example, look how easily I connected two seemingly disparate events: drinking giant beers last Saturday, and cooking steaks and potato salad yesterday, with a random paragraph from Hemingway, (whom I have a sketchy relationship with). I didn't even think about any connections until I started writing this post. Awesome!

If only I could find a job utilizing this connecting skill...

Anyway, Mikela and I ate our steak and potatoes with some roasted broccoli, like this:

Mmmm, steak and French potato salad. Tyler joked that we are all old now, since we were all spending our Friday night doing wholesome kitchen activities (he was making cookies with another friend). Yup, being old is fun!

Cry Baby

For lunch today I went to Hugo's Deli and had a yummy Santana sandwich: pastrami, coleslaw, and thousand island dressing on light rye, yum! However, no pickle like in this random internet photo :(

The people at the next table had a really cute baby boy, who was perched looking over his dad's shoulder at me. I made faces at the baby as I ate and he smiled at me and watched me eat. When I got up to leave, he started to fuss. I went to throw away my napkin and return my tray and he let out an audible cry. I returned to the table to gather my purse and sweater, and he calmed down. When I left, he broke into all-out bawling.

Yup, that's me: still making the boys cry!

Squash Soup: A Pictorial Essay

On Friday, my coworker gave me the last of her summer squash:

It took me awhile to decide what to do with them, but recipe searches convinced me that the best thing to make would be soup since my only other option was casserole. I prefer soup infinitely over casserole. However, what I discovered in my search was that--just as with butternut squash--crazy people tend to make spicy-sweet soups out of summer squash. I will never be able to hang out with sweet soup, so I decided to make a bastardized version of an Epicurious recipe combined with Kelly S's very delicious butternut squash soup.

I chopped the squash into little pieces:

and roasted it with olive oil, salt, pepper, and cumin (cumin is the roasted vegetable's best friend). And about 4-5 cloves of garlic, chopped up and spread around.

In the meantime, I rendered the fat of 1 piece of bacon, removed and ate the bacon (yay!), melted 3 tbsp butter and sauteed a chopped onion for 8 minutes. After that, I added 4 cups of chicken broth and one russet potato, thinly sliced, and simmered for 15 minutes:

I added the roasted summer squash, which had actually been in the refrigerator overnight because I roasted it on Sunday before attending a movie called The Last Mistress--basically a costume drama-cum-soft core porn in which a woman literally turns a man into her fuck stick. Bet you didn't think you'd see that when you started reading this! But seriously, it had many unnecessarily graphic (yet hilarious) sex scenes that did little to further the plot. Anyway, here's how the squash looked after roasting:

and after being added to the soup:

(my kitchen has terrible lighting). I cooked that until the squash was heated and the potatoes were tender, about 10 more minutes. Then I added salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, and the tiniest amount of turmeric--really, I did little more than show the bottle of turmeric to the pot of soup. Then I blended the shit out of it with a hand mixer and added about 1/3 cup of heavy whipping cream:

and ate it with a dollop of pesto (pesto makes everything better!) and garlic loaf:

Muy delicioso!

The squirrels are going to be mad...

Here's what I did today.

I made my storage space go from this:

to this:

and my deck go from this:

to this:

The squirrels will be mad they don't have pots to bury peanuts in and knock over. While cleaning, I found poop that was way too big to be squirrel poop. I'm scared to know what's been hanging around out there; I suspect it's raccoons:

Not So Smart

As anyone knows who has iTunes, every few months a new version of iTunes is available and you must update your iTunes with each new version or else you can't very well sync iTunes with your iPod.

I updated iTunes today to version 8.0 like my computer suggested. Version 8.0 has a new feature called the Genius Sidebar. It claims to "make playlists from songs in your library that go great together." I've only been running it for an hour, so I don't think it's had enough songs run through it to make playlists. What I have noticed about it is this: it puts a link to the iTunes Music Store in your iTunes window. Then it oh-so-helpfully "recommends" songs and albums that you are "missing" from your ultimate playlist, providing a convenient button so you can purchase them without having to take the pesky extra step of clicking on the Music Store icon.

I don't want to sound like the whiny beatnik on Mad Men telling Don Draper that ad men are swine because they create want, but I've had enough with Apple's aggressive marketing. I can't update iTunes unless I download their internet navigation program, Safari, which I don't use.

So, Apple, quit trying to force things on me that I don't need. I don't have a Mac, and all of your aggressive marketing is only turning me off. Oh, yeah, I'm also tired of your Mac vs. PC commercials.

Everybody Needs to Read this Book Now!

What are you doing right now? If you answered anything other than reading Learned Optimism, you should maybe reconsider and decide to read it instead of whatever you were doing.

This book is so good that the Department of Health and Welfare should issue a copy of it to every household in America.

Learned Optimism deals with the impact pessimism has on a person's life, especially the influence pessimism has on depression. Dr. Martin Seligman has spent over 40 years studying the link between pessimism and depression, concluding that pessimism negatively reinforces and prolongs depression and causes people to become helpless and inactive in their lives. So, what your mother always told you about thinking positive has been clinically proven to be true.

This all sounds like, "duh" stuff, especially if you are familiar with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but the book has tests you can take to find out how optimistic/pessimistic you are and how prone to depression you are. Seligman also includes tests he gives to kids to find out how optimistic/pessimistic/prone to depression they are. If you have or work with kids, you should seriously check this out, because Dr. Seligman discusses how easily children (and adults) can change the habit of rationalizing/explaining bad experiences from a pessimistic style to an optimistic style, making it easier to bounce back from hardship or failure and keep trying.

I'm only half way through this book, but I already feel like it's helped me immensely. As Dr. Seligman has found, there are certain people (many of whom are women) who ruminate over and over again on things in their life, which I've also heard of as repetitive destructive thinking. Rumination can be a very destructive force for pessimistic thinkers because it causes you to analyze and re-analyze and reinforce negative thoughts, causing you to become depressed and unable to do...well, anything, really.

I am a ruminator. This is why I had so much trouble working at the call center, because there were many MANY negative encounters at that place--at least half of all conversations or interactions involved complaining, yelling, put-downs, etc. I would end up going over and over them again in my mind until I just didn't want to do anything except think about those things constantly, like women who would scream from the beginning of a phone call to the end that they were going to sue our company or get people fired or kill their delivery driver--all because delivery was running late on some nonessential item like eyeshadow. (Even non-customer interactions at that place were negative. Between the bad feelings caused by negative phone encounters and the bad feelings caused by management-union power struggles, that place was a nightmare. I always felt like I was in prison while I worked there. Let me reiterate how glad I am that I don't work there anymore. I am sorry that place is being closed down because I don't want people to lose their jobs, but I hope they can find somewhere happier to work. I'm pretty sure "Call Center" is one of Dante's nine levels of hell).

I think I see some unfortunate souls with headphones in the bottom third here:

That was quite a digression, but I really want to stress how awful and destructive it is to ruminate over negative thoughts. It is stupid. If you find you think constantly about bad things that have happened or worry about bad things that might happen, you should definitely take a look at Learned Optimism. You also may want to look at the website called MoodGym, which has exercises to help rid you of those negative repetitive thoughts.

Missed

Yesterday, I attended a memorial service for the first time in my life. It was very sad and very sweet, and a lot of people showed up to remember Dr. Ryder, including the mayor and several local news crews.

Dr. Ryder's friends shared funny stories about her and there was a slideshow with photos of her in some of the most hideous glasses I have ever seen. There was also a short video of her playing the Jabberwocky song, which I missed in class for some reason.

Several times during the service, a minister got up and spoke to the audience about religious stuff and said some things that seemed sort of out of place to me. She talked for a long time about not being mad at God for causing the freak fire that took Dr. Ryder's life, because God doesn't do that sort of thing. She then said something like "the human body isn't made to withstand smoke and high heat." She then reiterated that God doesn't create freak accidents to kill people.

I think those particular lines made more people uncomfortable than just me , because Mikela asked me later, "What did you think about all that 'don't be mad at God' stuff? I thought she was going to rehash the entire autopsy." Yeah, it was weird. The minister seemed oddly defensive. It reminded me of the time I was at a wedding and the minister started droning on about divorce after the vows and after lecturing about how the man is the master of the household and the wife must obey him...just because someone is a minister, it doesn't mean that he or she is the best orator.

There was music throughout the service, and I don't know how the musicians who sang kept it together, especially at the end, when they asked everyone to do a sing-along to Joni Mitchell's "Circle Game." I couldn't even get through one line, but the woman next to me made up for it by singing very loudly. She had a gorgeous voice, too.

It sucks. Mikela said when we first got there, that it would be different if Dr. Ryder had been some curmudgeon who hated life and was indifferent to her profession and to other people. I'm sorry for all the future students who won't get to be taught Linguistics by Dr. Ryder. I only had her for one 5-week summer course and there are several time per day that I think about things I learned in her class. Someday when I get serious about learning Hungarian or Russian, I'll know how to pronounce the words correctly because she taught me the IPA chart, though I wish I had remembered to ask her how to pronounce the Russian letter Щ.

Dr. Ryder, you will be missed.