F#@! You and Your Vintage T-Shirt

After an impromptu dinner in Greenwich Village on Saturday night, Jim and I stepped into a vintage clothing shop just to look around. I was flipping through the t-shirt rack and found a specimen that read, "Harley Davidson, Elyria, Ohio." The price tag for this faded, misshapen, ancient wonder? $25. I just laughed and put it back.

Then I started to think...the idea that someone would pay $25 to pretend they're slumming it by wearing an authentic, blue-collar t-shirt from "Middle America" is entirely offensive to me. Just buy a fake vintage t-shirt from Urban Outfitters, OK?

When Winter Doesn't Happen

It's the end of my second January in the mid-Atlantic and I've got a strange complaint, one that will make every Clevelander pick up the world's smallest violin.

Winter doesn't happen here.

I've never been a big fan of winter; in fact, I distinctly recall my last winter in Cleveland, standing in a foot of wet snow, brushing more than a foot off my car for about the third time that day, then having to chip off a layer of ice. My pants cuffs and shoes, of course, filled with snow too at this point. I recall thinking, "Never, never again."

But there's something about a harsh winter that makes life feel real, and normal. When they say New Yorkers are out of touch with that nebulous "rest" of Amurrica, I have to wonder if, at least in this regard, they might be right.

Winter in the Great Lakes is like the alcoholic's rock bottom; full of misery and despair, while on the other hand there's nowhere to go but up. When you're driving through four feet of lake effect snow every day, you can't help being (even just a little bit) tough. Despite its posturing, there isn't anything about New York City life that can toughen one up like winter driving.

Winter in the Great Lakes is like death, with spring (which sometimes doesn't really come until, ummm, May) being like rebirth. If you'll bear with me to the end of this cliche, nobody dies here. Nobody just stays inside for a week, alone with forced solitude and other introspective pursuits, because it just doesn't stop snowing. It's like one of those terrifying sci fi worlds where everyone lives forever, the kind that's supposed to show you that you really don't want immortality.

The thing is, spring happens here, and summer and fall happen here, but a true winter is missing. That feels unbalanced to me. And I'm very suspicious of all things unbalanced.

Ten Reasons Why I Want to Buy a House by Christine Borne

I actually can't tell you off the top of my head how many times I've moved since becoming an adult. It might be 12. (I'll be 28 in 3 months; you do the math.) Since my friend Ruth bought her first house (she's now living in her second house), I've lived in 4 different states and...let's see...7 different apartments. There's a big part of me that feels like this is getting old. Here's why:

1. I cook. I'm sick of only having one large saucepan because I don't want to haul around 4 every time I move.

2. I drink. But not to the extent that I could drain a bottle of Grand Marnier, Stoli Vanilla, Triple Sec and butterscotch schnapps in the average lifespan of one of my residences. There is NOTHING worse to move than a dozen or more half full bottles of hard liquor. Except...

3. Books. I'm tired of not buying books that I would use pretty often simply because I don't want to move them again.

4. I need a space to work, a private, secluded, quiet space, like the tiny, slant-walled third floor in many Victorian-style houses in Pittsburgh or Lakewood. If I had one, I'd paint it - ceiling and all - a deep amethyst and lay down a room-sized sisal rug. It would be my place of stone, amid which my mad fingers could play upon that laughing string.

5. I'm f#@!ing tired of not having a dog, and I'm not talking about one of these prissy, yappy, apartment dogs. Those, in my opinion, are nothing more than cats gone horribly wrong.

6. I want a hobby, something to work on. I hate that I'm saying this, because it's exactly what Jim's brother said when he bought his first house. But I'm remembering that while I lived in my first apartment, I kept bringing home gardening books from the library (not that I could have a garden, I just wanted to torture myself with envy, I suppose). This has been a recurring theme throughout my adult life. I like plants. OK, World? I like plants. I want to like plants more by having a lot of them to mess around with. No can do here.

7. I'm tired of feeling like I'm just flushing my rent money down the toilet. This is the point at which my parents would say, oh, if you feel like buying a house will cure that, you're out of your mind. But at some point in the last year or so, and maybe I have New Jersey to thank for this, it suddenly clicked for me why people buy real estate. Is that the mark that I've become a grownup? Real estate makes sense to me?

8. My current apartment has taught me especially the importance of having one's own four walls. This is by far the most poorly put together apartment I've ever been in, though surprisingly the noise doesn't throw me into as much of a rage as you'd expect. I think that's because most of the noises here are things people can't help doing. People can't help peeing, sneezing, coughing, talking on the phone, or walking around. Gordon Leadfoot upstairs could listen to more Pink Floyd than he does. It's not the lady downstairs' fault that there's no insulation between my floor and her ceiling and I can hear her talking in what is probably a normal volume. I'm sick of living in a human holding tank, someplace that people live only because it's cheap. When we went to the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side I thought it pretty ironic that those 19th century immigrants lived in slums that were better made than our building.

9. More nobly, I want to actually be part of an urban renewal effort. When I recently expressed hesitation at the idea of moving into a Cleveland friend's neighborhood because of all the "interesting" stories he tells about his neighbors, he said, "if you moved here, you would be one of my neighbors."

10. I'm not saying I'd want to buy a house in Cleveland. Jim is still dreaming that Pittsburgh dream, and so am I to an extent - you can get a lot more house for a lot less in a better neighborhood than in Cleveland. But we're not really making many friends here...and I think there's a reason why. We have friends. They're just not here, and maybe it would make sense if we weren't here either.

The trouble with buying a house is that it requires a willingness to give up my transitory lifestyle, the mere thought of which stokes my flee instinct even more. Just one more place, one more move, one more perspective, and I'll get it.

Get what? Will somebody please tell me?

30 Beautiful Things

My friend Clare, who writes Three Beautiful Things, is off on a ten-week beautiful trip to Africa. In her absence, and in keeping with my current practice with The Artist's Way, I've decided to compile a weekly list (there's no way I'd be disciplined enough to do this every day, like Clare does) of things I've noticed or experienced that have given me pleasure, which I shall put on on Fridays, as sort of a counterpoint to Monday Moaning (which is actually one of my pleasures, because no one can complain like Clevelanders -- except maybe New Yorkers when it goes below 40 degrees. Pansies!)

Here's my list for the week of January 22:

1. old folks laughing out loud at a screening of The Foreign Correspondent
2. the way the Aleutians trail off the Alaskan peninsula in a graceful arc
3. spontaneously picking up a dinner of fresh empanadas after a day out and about, then eating them with a nice arugula-and-apple salad, spiced up yogurt sauce, and bananas foster ice cream for dessert
4. the hilarious ways in which making caramelized bananas can turn spectacularly disastrous
5. water buffalo yogurt - it's rich and creamy like the filling of a cheesecake and comes in flavors like chai and blackcurrant
6. scrubbing the stove until it's gleaming white
7. a very "financial district" couple got on the train after work - the man was holding a Ben and Jerry's milkshake. every time he'd take a sip from the straw, he'd say "yum" in very childlike way, and then offer it to his companion
8. eating nothing but a bowl of very delicate, creamy herbed mashed potatoes for dinner
9. the smell of vanilla almond coffee; it smells better than it tastes, but the smell is worth it
10. taking a long, hot shower late in the evening, putting on pajamas, and then settling in for my weekly hour of "family guy"
11. a woman on the subway had a bag with a b. kliban cat on it that was wearing a crown of psychedelic flowers
12. stringy bright red veins running through the pure white flesh of a macintosh apple
13. eating a tiny dinner of half an egg salad sandwich and homemade soup; I didn't want a lot, so I ate the soup out of an elegant ceramic custard cup and served the whole thing on a salad plate
14. the conductor on the train i take has an old timey, world-weary brooklyn accent; he announces my stop as "dirty forf street, transfeh heah f'yeh B train, yeh Q train, yeh PATH trains to New Joisey"
15. there's something uplifting about wearing bright green pants even though you know the color doesn't look that good on you
16. dramatic clouds hanging over the midtown skyline
17. homemade fresh egg salad with tons of fresh dill and parsley, eaten on fresh bread that i grated tons of asiago cheese into. even though the bread didn't rise like it ought to have, it was still fresh bread
18. spying a guy talking very animatedly on the phone on a fire escape several floor below me...you could tell he didn't think anyone could see him
19. i found that someone had left half a krispy kreme doughnut in the kitchen right when i needed a little something sweet late in the afternoon
20. sauteed red and yellow peppers sprinkled liberally with fresh cilantro
21. a surprisingly ripe out of season avocado
22. Jim made a pan of off the cuff brownies for us on a weeknight
23. the little grocery near us leaves a lot to be desired, but they do carry imported horchata, which I'm drinking out of the cup I normally reserve for that rare fancy coffee drink
24. this morning I used a hair conditioner I first used on a fun trip to Portland; the smell of it reminded me all day of farmers markets, microbrew, and well-made lattes
25. sometimes it feels good to realize that everything you're wearing is something you've bought within the last six months
    
26. watching a rat dart in and out from under the subway tracks; there's not much beautiful about rats, but sometimes it's nice just to see an unexpected living creature. it was funny too that a lady waiting for the train saw it and shrieked, then she and her friend laughed and laughed about it
27. seeing a man who was at least 75 listening to an iPod
28. being given a proofreading project at work that let my inner grammarian go wild
29. i had my hair up in a bun all day and when i let it down, it looked like i'd had it in rollers
30. having a tiny goya malta soda with my lunch, a small pleasure i first discovered at Lelolai
    

Well, That Was Embarrassing (or, Truffles Lives!)

The Superbarista just emailed me to tell me that Truffles did not close after all. So I did what I should have done in the first place, after hearing that rumor: I called them. Nope, not closed. Nope, not closing.

Now, my former lament still rings true, though perhaps I should go back and change all my tenses and put them into the conditional (if Truffles should ever close, this is how I would feel....) But I'm terribly embarrassed that I did exactly what, as a librarian, I would never have done: I relied on a source that was inaccurate and I didn't check out the facts. If I'd been at home and I'd heard that Truffles was closing, I would've immediately gone there. But I'm in New York, and for some reason - perhaps because I don't really use the telephone anymore - I didn't think to just call and ask.

This whole thing really did illuminate one point, though: I like New York but I don't care about it so there's no reason for me to be here. I knew I felt that way but I was waffling about it. After I thought another of my beloved Cleveland institutions was on the chopping block I found myself telling Jim I wanted to go home, and I meant it.

Shopping Local and the Death of Truffles

Part One in the Death of Truffles Series

In a way, my lamenting the demise of Truffles coffee shop in Edgewater would seem a bizarre case of reverse NIMBYism, since I haven't lived in Edgewater since June of 2000. It's a big regret of mine that in the 3 post-Montana years that I was living in Northeast Ohio I didn't just move back to Edgewater: it was always clearly the place I wanted to be. The fact that I lived in Ravenna, and then Cleveland Heights, and then Shaker Heights, was really a measure of how willing I am to torture myself into not having what I really want.

The comment directly under mine in George's post set me to thinking: shopping local really isn't the magic panacea that its proponents - and that includes myself - wish that it was.

While I was in library school at Kent State, the venerable and historic Brady's coffee shop shut down amidst rumors that the building was going to be torn down and a gas station built on its ruins. (This never happened; a Starbucks moved in instead.) Brady's was never empty. My Generation, that old record store of choice for grungy hipsters, was never empty. Danny Boy's farm market was never empty (granted, I know the owner just wanted to do something else with his life, but when I was home last month I didn't see a new independent vegetable market in its place). And, even though I wasn't around for its last days so maybe I should shut up, I don't remember Truffles ever being empty. The last time I went there was last July and I had to just take my coffee to go because there was nowhere to sit.

When I told my oldest friend, Ruth, about Truffles closing, she was completely shocked. She and her sister had worked at Truffles and never had a moment to spare for would-be distractors (i.e., me). In fact before I moved to New Jersey, Ruth and I had our final, "I'll miss you, you'd better call all the time" session at Truffles. It was filled to the gills.

This is why I never actually considered the possibility that Truffles would close. In fact, I always pictured the World's Ugliest Starbucks across the street closing before Truffles, or maybe the newer place (is it Metro Joe's?) where Sai Woo used to be, that (when I peered in last summer) looks like it's inherited all of Sai Woo's unfortunate non-ambience.

Now, I don't know what happened to Truffles, but I do know what happened to Brady's and My Generation. Despite doing a good business, the people that owned the building wanted a higher rent. Same thing happened with the Stone Oven, didn't it? The owners of that building wanted to charge a higher price for that corner spot, so the Stone Oven got squeezed down the block. When I lived in Cleveland Heights in 2002 and 2003, there were many times I had to take my piece of pizza or my tiramisu-in-a-cup and go, because there was nowhere to sit.

My point is that you can shop local all you want, but local businesses will almost never be able to pay the same kind of rent that a multinational megacorporation can. And the multinational megacorporation will, and they won't care if they have to close up shop in a few months if nobody goes there because where those people really wanted to go was the place that was there before, and then the storefront which was once a thriving community gathering place will be empty.

Is my bottom line simply "blame it on greedy landowners"? No. There's certainly a plurality of issues at work here: you'll have to watch out for Death of Truffles, part two. A big part of me simply feels like shit that all this time I've been pretending that I'd fit in better in New York, or Portland, or Pittsburgh, or wherever, and meanwhile the one tiny, tiny scrap of land that I care about most is languishing in disrepair. I guess part of my bottom line then is "blame it on me." Blame it on all the young people who run away from Cleveland and then romanticize it from afar but still don't come back for some reason.

Maybe my Saturn Return will prompt a move back to Cleveland, too.

What Becomes of the Humble Cabbage?

My gut reaction upon reading that Eastern European comfort foods are going to become trendy this year was "great. Now I can't eat kishka because the thought of the glitterati serving it with balsamic reduction and truffle oil makes me sick."

Then I realized this trend could really make Cleveland a place on the culinary map. Hordes of New Yorkers will be flying out to taste some authentic, post-industrial pierogi. University Inn will become as exclusive as Carmine's.

Wait, no, I don't like that future. Let's keep our paprikash to ourselves, shall we?

Favorites of 2005

At the end of the year, a friend of mine compiles her yearly favorites. Here's my list:

Half Blood Prince
Glastonbury
Portland
moving to New York
unbecoming a librarian
discovering my magnum opus
Joseph Campbell
saturn return
writing every day