One Beautiful Thing

Sorry, Clare, but yesterday I was confronted with one thing so beautiful that it completely blinded me from searching for another two. And that beautiful thing was....

Dutch coffee.

I had this at a tiny coffee shop in Ocean Grove, which is a 1-square mile seaside Methodist resort, complete with tent houses, a Great Auditorium, and 4-story pastel gingerbread houses galore. If you've ever been to Lakeside, you get Ocean Grove. Except there's probably a larger gay and artist community in OG.

Here's the gist of Dutch coffee: you take espresso, unsweetened chocolate, cinnamon, and (here's my favorite part) a generous pat of butter, mix them into a sludge, and add not steamed milk but steamed cream. Which imparts a very dense foam cap - no disappointing soap bubbles there. And serve it in a giant bowl for that extra special continental feel.

This is not for the faint-hearted!

I Quit

I quit my job and am moving to New York, where I don't have to spend money on gas and car insurance. This may come as a surprise to those who remember me ranting about how much I hate New York, but since then New York and I have made an uneasy peace.

Very Very Stupid

Let me just start out by saying that I'm not trying to castigate anyone for living a lifestyle that I personally find abhorrent.

But it strikes me as very, very stupid and inefficient to arrange one's lifestyle such that you can live 20+ miles from where you work and not have the option to take public transportation. Like, this shouldn't even be possible. Or at least should be looked upon as a very foolish thing to do. We should be encouraging people to live in little superefficient mixed-use pods and not driving all over creation.

I had a better life when I was able to arrange it around what I would consider a smaller daily sphere of activity. When I was able to say, OK, I'll live in this neighborhood because I can get to a wider array of significant destinations - the bank, the post office, the library, the store, work, the dentist, my parents' house, etc. - via bus/train/light rail. I will step further up on my soapbox by saying that neighborhoods with these decent public transportation options are also just better.

Some people - even some people who purport to be my closest friends - would say that not owning a car deprives one of independence, of the freedom to choose where to live. Well, if having a car means I'm granted the glorious freedom to live in the sticks, to live in a sea of suburban sprawl that epitomizes everything we've done to make America ugly, well, then the terrorists win! Because if that's freedom, then f#@! freedom - I don't want it.

How d'ya like them apples?

Out of the Mouths of Babes, or, Bye Bye Brakes!

A few weeks back I was taking a nap and heard, from out on the street where my car was parked, a small child say in a horrified voice, "Mommy, that car is BROKEN!" to which the mother replied, "No, honey, that's just a little rust. I'm sure it runs fine." I felt a wave of bemused despair that I lived in a place where a child has never seen a rusty car.

Ahh, but the child's indignant cry proved more prescient than I could've dreamed.

Last Monday night I was driving home from work and the brakes failed. All out failed. Went to stop at a yellow light and my foot plowed all the way down to the floor. Managed to negotiate my way through a traffic circle before I found a safe place to pull over. You always wonder how you're going to react in that kind of crisis; when it happens to you, then you know.

I had it towed to a local mechanic and in the morning they called me. Uhhh, you gotta come look at this. We were wondering, they said, if this car had perhaps once been underwater? I'm from Cleveland, I said, and they nodded knowingly. Then they proceeded to show me exactly how part X had crumbled apart from rust, and how if they removed part X, part Y would fall apart, and if part Y fell apart, part Z would surely fall apart.

Indeed, the underside of my car looked like the Titanic, minus the barnacles and Leonardo DiCaprio's frozen ghost. It had ridden its last ride.

And then I got sick. And then New Jersey flooded. I've had quite an atypically unlucky week. And I'm doubly unlucky because I've managed to put myself in a situation where public transportation isn't an option, which wasn't smart. I think it may be time I started living for my values, and not living for marginally decent benefits.

If my honey said so,
I'd railroad no more.
I'd sidetrack my engine and go home.

What Freedom?

It's hard for me to get back into the swing of things, electronicalwise, after having been disconnected from the online world for so long. I just moved, and I'm even contemplating not having the broadband reconnected. My life has just seemed so much quieter.

Now that I've had a couple of weeks to settle back into my daily life, I feel much less indignant about the fact that I don't live in England...I always come back with a heavy-hearted "I can't believe I live here and not there" kind of feeling.

Though I'm not naive enough to think that life is perfect in Europe, things seem more civilized over there. For example, I can't help feeling cheated when I recall my English friend telling me about an extended trip she'd like to take next year, and how if she couldn't get the time off from her job, she'd just quit and find a new job when she got back.

I could, of course, do that too, but I would lose my health insurance. How does this make me free? If we had universal health care, would that mean the terrorists win?