Weekend Update

BIKING
I am really getting into this biking thing! On Sunday Eric & I took a ride around the lower perimeter of Manhattan, up to Chelsea Market (my previous haunting place). There, we stuffed our backpack full of Manhattan Fruit Exchange goodies. I was very excited to get my fix of unpasteurized juice—I bought grape and, to try something new, Spinach Orange. I have always been intrigued/afraid of veggie juices, but this juice was wonderful—sweet from the oranges with a mild, pleasant spinach flavor.

They opened an Anthropologie in Chelsea Market. Of course. Two months after I move away, they open my favorite store ONE BLOCK AWAY. We briefly went in there, and I went to the hardware section and ended up buying a cute discounted hook to hang on the back of a door. I have been buying a lot of those lately. Gotta love hooks.

We went back through Manhattan (I think the total was about 10 miles round trip). My friend Rita had biked over from Brooklyn, but instead of riding more we went up to the apartment and had some dinner. The heirloom tomato we bought from Chelsea Market sadly turned out to be bust, but we grilled it and had a warm caprese salad, which was still enjoyable, especially with warm mozzarella. Fresh mozzarella pretty much makes everything better. We also finished the ravioli I bought in Little Italy. I had also made Molasses cookies the other day, which were wonderful, and still had 2/3 of the batter left in the fridge. I put them in the oven, but because our usual kitchen timer was outside, we just thought we would remember…but we didn’t. I remembered over FORTY minutes later. Miraculously, the cookies were fine. They’re crisp, and I prefer chewy, but they didn’t burn or anything. I suspect it’s because they were made with (trans fat-free) shortening, which probably has a higher burn point than butter. Crazy.

THE WIRE
Later that night, Eric & I watched the last episode of “The Wire.” I am very sad to finish this series. It’s just so, so, so incredibly good and thoughtful and deep and intense. Eric and I had great conversations about this show and I actually feel like I’ve learned things about how police, gangs, politics, public schools, and how unions work. The show has a pretty depressing theme overall, with the idea that institutions hold you back and nothing will ever change and the same cycles repeat themselves over and over again. The last episode brought that all back, setting it up for the cycles to continue and repeating some of the scenes from the first episodes. I can’t wait to go through the blogosphere and read more about the show now that I don’t have to worry about spoilers. I miss you, Omar and McNulty!!

Now that we’re done with “The Wire,” I think we’re going to move on to Damages and Treme. We saw the first episode of Damages, and it was pretty good, with lots of information about high-powered lawyers, and Treme is the next work from The Wire creators. But now that it’s warmer out not sure if we’ll be watching as much of the tube.

...AND THE WORRYWART STRIKES AGAIN
My Mom and Aunt are visiting this weekend. I am very excited but also nervous because I want them to have a perfect visit with all good weather and events and nothing bad happening. But I am trying to be less anxious/people pleaser/perfectionist so instead I have been telling myself to throw all those expectations away and just have an adventure. An adventure!!! I am sick of worrying myself sick…literally.

Today I have some discomfort in the back of my throat and sneezed once and started freaking out. It’s like, calm down Sarah, it will be fine. My worrying is something I want to address. I know I’m being irrational about a lot of my worries, especially when I freak out about my health or think I have some sickness or random disease, but it’s really hard to find a way to stop and get out of that thought cycle. I wish I were a cool, tortured neurotic. Maybe I should work on shifting my anxieties over to brooding, existential things instead of thinking I need a root canal.

So that’s a good example: My dentist did a filling, which turned out to be much deeper than he thought because it was partly a replacement filling and there was more decay than he anticipated. As I left the office, he told me to beware of shooting pains, because there was a small chance the tooth wouldn’t calm down and I would need a root canal. Enter me: beleaguered with tooth pain for two weeks until I went in and he told me everything was fine.

It’s really the power of suggestion. If you focus on an area of your body, you can make yourself experience pain or sensation and your brain can twist that however you want. I guess on the bright side, my mind has the ability to control how I experience my body in a more active way than most people (I suspect). I just need to figure out how to use this power for good (i.e. calming) rather than bad. Or maybe I need to not try to control my body at all, and just acknowledge how my body feels and move on. This makes me feel New Age-y….although speaking of it, I need to do more yoga. Yoga is a lot about experiencing your body and not trying to control it. There are points where you try to do things like breathe away stress and relax your whole body, which can unconsciously be tense. But it’s also about not forcing your body and allowing it to do as it wishes. I need to get back into that. I think it makes me feel better (which in my case, means virtually nothing, because I can make my body feel anything), but at least I get that sense of well-being. So that's it for me worrying about how much I worry, the main worry in my life right now...

Highlights List

1. I am now the proud owner of a bike. I have gone on two biking adventures since I purchased it three weeks ago. It just transforms the way you experience the city. The first week we took this 5 hour trip that involved Central Park, Soul Food in Harlem, and just the prettiest water sights from bluffs you have ever seen. Last weekend involved the Manhattan Bridge, Prospect Park, meeting up with a Brooklyn friend and brunchin', then over the (massively crowded) Brooklyn Bridge, the three of us, home to some Easter dinner. Biking is so much faster. I am still nervous about traffic but thankfully there are areas with good bike lanes so that makes things easier. Eric & I are thinking of going on a bike trip over Memorial Day weekend because renting a car costs $500 for that weekend and hotels are apparently expensive too...we'll see how that pans out.

2. Amazing weather! It got almost to 90 degrees this Wednesday. I kind of regretted my wish for a hot summer. The best part of this is living somewhere with a balcony. This week Eric & I have been having our morning coffee out there, as well as our evening meals. Pre-Sunset, it's pretty awful out there because the sun is shining right in your face, but that's the price you pay for some great overall exposure. Usually we eat post-Sunset so it's been more of a problem when I got out there for some happy hour or post-work relaxing.

3. Gardening! I have one hanging plant indoors (that was a drama to hang, since there is a lot of steel near the windows that you, um, can't drill through) and bought some mint last weekend (MOJITOS!!!). Eric has killed every tree-like plant that he has ever put on the balcony, so I hope to fix that this summer and make the mint survive. Since it's lower down than a tree, hopefully it won't tip over the pot, since we do get high winds that can pose a problem. All of the plants sold at delis are kind of questionable or expensive, but on Wednesday I went to the Union Square Greenmarket and saw tons of indoor/outdoor plants for sale. I am going on a shopping spree!!! Hoping for an aloe vera plant, some basil, and maybe one other herb.

4. CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture). Eric & I joined. It will be for 22 weeks, I think, which comes out to $15 or so a week, for organic fresh veggies that we have to pick up on Thursdays from 5-8. Neither of us is crazy about having to be free at a specific time once a week, but hopefully it will work out and we can make friends who can pick up the produce for us in a jam. I am looking forward to GOOD tomatoes, and not those awful pink ones. Hopefully this will make us eat more veggies, too, and be more healthy. Last night I improv'ed this awesome veggie dish (1 zucchini + 1 tomato + 3 cloves of garlic in the last minute + fresh basil, wilted in the pan for a little less than a minute after that) and it was sooo good and made me get excited about vegetables. I liked the mix, so much more interesting to the palate than sauteed broccoli. Amazing accompaniment to salmon.

This weekend we plan to take the ferry to IKEA in Red Hook, and hopefully we can cart out the awful dresser we replaced a couple weeks ago. Hurray for the weekend!

Weekend re-cap: cookin' and decoratin'

This past weekend was great. Terrible weather kept us inside except for some hair-drenching trips to the market (E had to force me to go both times), leaving us with time for some home improvement, relaxing, and cooking.

Friday night we made these awesome burgers, seriously some of the best ones I have had in my life. I used to dislike burgers--I would always order a grilled cheese off the kids menu or the chicken mcnuggets at mikey d's--but I've come around. They're far better for you than baked goods, my main vice, so I feel free to indulge now and then. E had me buy a pound and a half of meat, claiming he would make three half-pound burgers, so I bought two hamurger buns and one brioche bun from this new place in Essex Market, Pain D'Avignon. That made the difference. This place is also a restaurant supplier, and the final burger (also thanks to Eric's superb cooking) had a real restaurant taste. But anyway, he ended up making two twelve-ounce burgers, and I ate the whole thing. I felt fine, since I had a small lunch, but three hours later the foods was still sitting in my stomach and I started making some groaning noises. toooo mucccchhh fattttt. I also drank red wine with the burger, which I would have anyway, but I heard there is something in red wine that neutralizes a bad thing released when you digest red meat. So doubly awesome.

Our next big cooking adventures are going to be in bread, so that night we started on a yeasted coffee cake that we had for breakfast the next day. It was a little dry and possibly overcooked, and the cinnamon-pecan crumbles on top kept on falling off, so they probably should have been tucked into the dough, but it was a good start. Yeasted things are also less sweet than chemically leavened cakes, so I look forward to developing a more adult, less sweet palate when it comes to baking. I found this recipe for St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake that we plan to try next, for a more decadent takeb. I also attempted the much-talked-about no-knead bread. I used the recipe in my copy of "How to Cook Everything" by Mark Bittman (also where we got the coffee cake recipe from), and it called for 2 cups of water, when a lot of the other online recipes called for less. This turned out to be a problem when I got to the baking time and the dough was wayyy too wet to shape into a ball. I had to add more flour and let it rise more, and then I had to disrupt the dough once more to try to plop it into a pan (it cooks in a covered cast iron to produce steam similar to steam-injected. I think the latter part disrupted the air bubbles and created the dense loaf that popped out of the oven. It did have an awesome look to it and great crust, so, again, good start. This isn't as easy as making chocolate chip cookies.

Sunday Eric made omelettes (new for him) and we made another Bittman recipe, Chicken with Chickpeas and Lentils. I am so used to eating really rich food with Eric that it tasted kind of healthy and bland. I added some yogurt and mango chutney, however, and that fixed the whole thing. It was yummy. Since we were so healthy and had some processed peanut butter left in the fridge that neither of us will eat plain, we made peanut butter cookies that night. Seriously, so much cooking!

HOME DECORATING!!!
Last week I bought this cute lampshade at KMart to go with the vintage lamp I got in Michigan that it beaded white milk glass. Now we have more lighting in the bedroom, woo! It also matches the bedspread pattern so I am excited about that. I also bought a side-hanging plant bracked that we were able to install, after our failed attempts to drill into our steel beams near the window. I couldn't hang up this cute shadowbox in the bedroom for the same reason (so annoying), but I did hang up the photo calendar Eric made that has a lot of pictures of us in Costa Rica. But, my most exciting DIY project was the handkerchief one!!

My grandma sent me this beautiful handkerchief from the 1940's (she's an antique dealer, so she knows) with a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge in the middle and four other tourist attractions on the side. I thought it was cute and was going to hang it up with tape where the shadowbox couldn't be hung up, when I had a flash of inspiration.

I've been carrying around this picture frame I found in my old apartment's "take it" section for over two years. It said $39.99 on the back and was from Bed Bath & Beyond, but it has a thick mat and I could never think of anything to go in it. Still, I was happy to have it because I've discovered that framing shit is expensive but makes your walls look really, really good. Also, the saw hanging thing on the back was missing. I bought an additional saw hook from Home Depot a few weeks ago, but still had no picture.

I fitted the handkerchief into the frame and voila! It was a little too big so I did some artful adjusting. It's not perfectly straight and it has a little wave in it so you can tell it's fabric, but I like the overall effect. We hung it above the bed and it looks really, really good, with the black matching the black bed frame. I had planned on getting New York City-themed prints anyway, but this is totally unique and a nice way to remember my Grandma. Plus, you can look at the picture then look out the window and see the Brooklyn Bridge! I LOVE IT!

Last night we watched the Season Finale of Season 4 of The Wire. SO AMAZING. I love this show, but it can be so depressing. Boiled down, the theme of the show is "anytime you try to fix something the system/society will prevent you from making any meaningful change." This season

Apartment Update

I moved into my new apartment the last weekend in February. I stressed so much about the move, while E was chill the whole time (figures). The total cost of the move ended up being little more than one cab fare on the very last day with a few extra bags, so I was very, very happy with how that worked out. I didn't really have any furniture, except for my bed, which I sold, but I still had a nightstand and mounds of clothes to move. The move ended up happening in three parts. A couple weeks before the move, E had borrowed a friend’s car since he was going to multiple Trey concerts. We moved a bunch of stuff after work, which was great.

Then, the second-to-last week in February, E had to rent a car for work. The only car they had at the time was a huge plumbing van, like the kind serial killers use. He decided to take it, even though it was a pain to drive, since it would be convenient for the move. It was so big I had to help navigate. Anyway, that was fabulous. We were able to load up my nightstand, side table, mirror, and my millions of bags. I didn’t really have boxes, so a lot of stuff I just piled into random large purses and garbage bags. The next day, I scoured craigslist for cheap furniture and we ended up buying two bookcases for the apartment (for under $100!) that fit quite easily into the van. I was also very happy because when E bought a bed a few months ago the security guy yelled at us because it’s a co-op and you have to use special moving passes whenever you’re moving stuff, so they can pad the elevators. You’re also not allowed to use luggage carts to move furniture. We disobeyed both of those rules but didn’t get yelled at again, for which I was grateful.

The weekend after moving in my stuff, we went to Home Depot and bought everything you could possibly need for home improvement...well, almost everything. A drill, drill bits, screws, superglue, picture hanging things, extra hooks. A really nice worker helped us, and he told us to fill out this customer service thing online, which I did. I hope he gets recognized for his good work!

E turned out to be a whiz with the drill and it feels so nice to have hooks and, thus far, one picture hung. The only problem is my plant hook. In my last apartment, my philodendron hung from my window, but I think by our windows it’s steel, because even our masonry (aka concrete) bit wouldn’t go through the wall. It’s now hanging precariously in the middle of the living room because it seems to need to have all its leaves hanging to survive. I just bought a side-mount plant hook at Kmart during my lunch break so I hope that that will do the trick.

I’m pretty happy with the new space, but I hate hate hate all the old fixtures. There is just decades of grime that won’t lift, no matter how hard you try. The enamel coating has worn off the 60s-era sink and bathtub, so it’s porous and stains quickly and leaves weird dirt streaks. Doors are broken and shredded and don't close very well and are covered with layers and layers of paint. Our kitchen cabinets don’t close. The whole apartment needs to be repainted. A lot of things are covered in paint from the previous haphazard paint job. The toilet leaks. The ceiling has water damage that we need to call maintenance about. We’re missing blinds (working on that) and are hit with blinding afternoon sun on the weekends. The areas that do have blinds have orange or blue mini blinds. I hate 60s and 70s-era color choices. The floors are a little scuffy-looking….and did I mention WE DO NOT HAVE A DISHWASHER??? This is very dire, given that we cook EVERY DAY and have all these nasty dishes in the sink. I bought some heavy-duty washing gloves at Home Depot that hopefully won’t hole up in like a week like the other ones. At least that way I can wash in hot water AND have hands that don’t feel painfully dry. However, it is really frustrating to be in an apartment that needs so much fixing up. Laura, I am jealous of your well-refurbished apartment. However, I need to keep the benefits in mind: HUGE apartment (by New York standards). 19th floor view of NYC, Brooklyn Bridge. A balcony to go outside and enjoy the view. Laundry in the basement (another only-in-New-York-it’s-a-luxury). Rent…well I think the rent is reasonable by New York standards (at least when it’s split with boyfriend), but it’s still like mortgage-level.

Oh yes, and an apartment to share with the boyfriend!! I’m actually really pleased with how far we’ve come already with the apartment, and we have a Salvation Army pick-up in a couple of weeks so we’ll have a little more space in our closets (another New York luxury). But that doesn't mean that when I'm searching for my next place I will want it to be sanded and painted and have non-vinyl, chipping countertops. Ugh. My apartment and I definitely have a love-hate relationship.

I knew America's obsession with plastic surgery would help me sometime!

So, this is how I research doctors.

I took these pills and now I'm a crybaby

I think men don’t cry because of hormones. Since going on the birth control pill a year ago, I have found that crying comes much, much easier to me. I cry reading a moving newspaper story at work, I cry at movies, I cry when I’m frustrated, I cry whenever I’m having emotional discussions with my boyfriend. When I told my gynecologist about it, she seemed worried, but I explained I don’t feel sadder than I used to, I just express my sadness with crying.

In fact, this morning I cried while having an IM conversation with my boyfriend—to be fair, we were discussing something really, really sad. Although it was awkward to blink back tears and hope no one comes over to my desk in the interim, I still like being able to cry more easily—except for the fact that crying in public has become a little too common. I didn’t appreciate the time I was sobbing in the subway uncontrollably before the Wilco concert, or the other time I ended up sobbing on public transportation after a conversation with my dentist (the truth can be harsh).

But I associate not being able to cry with being depressed. I remember feeling so sad when I was alone in LA the summer after my junior year of college, and being utterly unable to cry. Even after I got over that, my before and after still involved a lot less crying than my childhood and early teens.

But now I am a crier, and proud of it. I am 99.9% positive this is because of birth control pills, because objective things like television shows, newspaper articles, and movies don’t change. Their emotional content is pretty standard, and the only thing that’s changed is that I cry in response to them. The other possibility is that I am much happier with my boyfriend, and I can experience the full range of emotions, good and bad, because I am in such a good place. That could be true, I suppose, but I am less inclined to believe it because the crying and emotion in response to random things seems so utterly disconnected from what’s going on in our relationship. I would be more inclined to believe that if I were mostly crying when we’re having emotional conversations or fights or whatever.

So anyway, birth control pills have an unexpected side effect: making you cry more often! And some random crazy chick (that would be me) thinks this is a benefit, not a drawback.

What better way to start your day than with a constitutional

In less than one month, this will be my new walk to work!


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I am also thinking about getting a bike to make the commute a bit faster. I can store my bike in the apartment, but I will have to lock it outside of work, which I am a bit afraid of. Mayor Bloomberg passed a law last December saying that employees should be able to bring their bikes inside their workplace, but I asked the people downstairs and they said they had a "no bike" policy. Phooey. I see bikes without wheels, seats, etc. all the time, which have either been stolen or people going through the trouble of removing these things so they won't get stolen. One would hope during the day it's okay, but there are a lot of delivery people dropping off breakfast and lunch, meaning lots of bikes are going in and out (and not a lot of space to chain up). That makes me a little more hesitant to spend the $200-300 I estimate it will cost for bike, helmet, and decent lock. But the bf likes bike riding and, if not for commuting, it would be a fun weekend activity for us.