You should never read the PD before going to bed...

...because you will have dreams like this:

I'd just bought a house. For whatever reason, I had to go over to visit the neighbor to my right. He was busy lighting up a crack pipe while he opened the door. Small children spilled out and started grabbing at my legs - "you got anything to eat? you got anything to eat?" The man appeared to be the kids' grandfather; the parents were MIA. Behind the wildness and desperation in his eyes, you could see shadows of his former self. He frightened and fascinated me. I felt pity for him, but also wanted to be away from him.

I went home and thought about this for a while.

Then my doorbell rang. It was my neighbors to the left. They looked like they'd walked out of a J.Crew catalog. I think they might have been holding martini glasses.

"Hi, we just wanted to see what you looked like. Are you that girl with the blog? Yeah, we've read it. It's not very good. Those are really ugly shoes, by the way."

Then they tittered and the whole world dissolved into fog.

I'm interpreting this dream to mean that I feel stuck in the middle between the forces of poverty and drugs on one hand, and too-much gentrification on the other.

Found It!

You'll recall a few months ago I asked for suggestions on the best Indian food in town.

Yesterday afternoon I woke up from a nap with an insatiable craving for Indian food, so we found an excuse to run some errands down Parma way and headed to Udupi Cafe.

My love affair with Indian food has the same ignoble roots as my fascination with kippers: Red Dwarf. (Remember the episode where all the curry-making supplies got accidentally ejected into space?) And I still maintain that I stayed away from drugs as a teenager because who the hell needs drugs when you've got that state of curry bliss induced by onion chutney and "Indian hot" bhindi masala?

Now - be prepared. Udupi Cafe is all vegetarian, so don't come here looking for lamb vindaloo. This is also South Indian cuisine, which isn't as common round these parts -- Jim was asking me questions like, "what's uthappam? what's sambar?" and I was embarrassed to realize that I didn't really know....

[South Indian cuisine is mainly characterized by masala dosai -- large, thin rice-flour crepes with stuff inside (in Jim's case, potato and onion) and served with sambar (a type of savory coconut chutney) and red chutney.]

Udupi is located in an unprepossessing strip mall on Olde Yorke Road in Parma Heights; Yorktown Lanes is right across on the other side of Pearl. (Hey, why not combine some curry bliss with a round of bowling?) The large dining room was full of Indian families -- always an encouraging sign because you know the food is going to be (dare I say it?) authentic and best of all, cheap: our tab, which included masala dosai, malai kofta, rice, two sweet lassis, poori, samosas, various chutneys and lime pickle (my new favorite curry bliss accessory) came in at under $30.

(Your entree cost $5.99? I asked Jim incredulously. In New York, a glass of water costs $5.99).

Don't forget to stop by Laxmi grocery right next door -- you'll want to take home some of those Indian sweets that you were too stuffed to order. One of the most comprehensive Indian groceries I've seen outside of Queens, they've got a good selection of British foods, as well as a variety of those breath-freshening mixes you get at finer Indian establishments (you know, candy-coated fennel, rock sugar, rose petals, served in a little silver dish at the exit door).

Despite the spotty service (be prepared to have to ask for your check), Udupi Cafe is highly recommended.

The Problem with Full Time Work

For the past month I've been working full time, something I haven't done since 2005.

Although I really like my job and all the people I work with -- I'm hoping something permanent will open up before the job ends in June -- here's a list of things that suffer with the 40-hour workweek:

1. Culinary experimentation. Notice that I haven't been doing my weekly West Side Market updates? Yeah. When you get home at 6, you've got less time or inclination to experiment. So I've been relying on easy standbys: chicken with black beans and rice, pasta with tomatoes, olives, spinach and chickpeas, cabbage and noodles. Some days I do a considerable amount of heavy lifting at work and I'm exhausted when I get home, so we go out. This is starting to worry me -- I've always made nearly everything from scratch, which costs nothing. Going out? It adds up really fast.

2. Trips to the West Side Market, period. Even though it's right there, I can't manage to run over there at 7 AM because it's hard enough for me to get up against my natural rhythms (this is the first time in my entire life I've ever had to use an alarm clock), and I hate trying to actually shop at the market on Saturdays when everyone from the suburbs decides that Cleveland isn't too scary for a few pounds of blood sausage. (And my frequent insomnia always seems to strike on Tuesdays and Thursdays, hmmm....) I really, really miss my MWF afternoon trips.

3. Volunteer work. Right before I got my job, I signed up through VolunteerMatch.org to help out with grant writing for a boys-and-girls group in Florida. I wanted to be able to devote the copious amounts of free time I had as a result of not working to building up my grant writing portfolio. I'd also wanted to seek out some hands-on volunteer work here in NEO.

4. Trips to the Cleveland Public Library downtown.

5. Full participation in the democratic process. This is the scariest thing of all - that I've suddenly got less time for writing angry letters and figuring out what the hell is going on in city council, the statehouse, Congress, the world in general -- it takes time and effort to read about and research this stuff because the TV news isn't going to tell us everything and I wouldn't trust it if it did.

6. Writing. Not so much as I'd expect, because the repetitive nature of my job tends to put me in "the zone," and I find myself coming home with 20 post-it notes and scraps of paper full of ideas, snippets of dialogue, etc. But as for full-on, roll-your-sleeves-up-and-belt-out-5,000-words? That type of writing is exhausting and I have no time for it during the day and no energy for it at night.

7. Time to ourselves. Jim and I are now on the same work schedule, which is something we've never experienced in our 5 years of living together.

8. Going to stuff that happens during the day, like City Club talks or programs at the Levin College of Urban Affairs. Or just having lunch with friends in the neighborhood.

(Now you might be asking, how could you ever work less than full time and survive? For an able-bodied adult with no family obligations, it can be done, and easily. Hey, I worked part time in New York and paid for my own health insurance! Here's my advice, for what it's worth: make all your food from scratch, don't buy clothes, don't go into debt for education, don't spend cash every day (i.e., bring your own coffee from home and skip those trips to the vending machine -- bring a plastic container filled with nuts and dried fruit to work with you if you get midday cravings) and treat your credit card like a utility bill that needs to get paid in full every month. And cut up your ATM card! Cut it up now! It should be as inconvenient as possible to get at your money.)

Meanwhile, I'm hoping I can find a way to squish these things back into my life at an acceptable level....

RTA: Safe or No?

A side-discussion on the safety and usefulness of RTA cropped up in the comments in a post about the Medical Mart on BFD.

Try as I might, I could only recall a handful of specific instances from my 30-year association with RTA which might have made me feel unsafe. So here they are, in no particular order:

1. Patchouli and sandals. I was waiting at the bus shelter on Memphis Ave for the #82 and an unmarked utility van pulled up in front of me, blocking my view of the street. I was getting ready to flee when the door opened and a crowd of young Jehovah's Witnesses dressed in hippie clothes spilled out, sat down next to me, and told me about God.

2. Speaking of Whom. Picture this: East 21st and Euclid, circa 1997. The last stop on the 55X [ed. note: sorry, it was the 75X I was taking in 1997]. I was the last person on the bus -- I paid my fare and said goodbye to the driver, as was typical. But the driver wouldn't let me off until he'd told me about God.

3. Nice doggy. It was just another morning on the #23 until a stray dog boarded the bus and started running up and down the aisle barking at the passengers. (Actually, I didn't feel at all unsafe, but someone might've.)

4. Sideswiped! I had just gotten on the 9X to Coventry, when the bus was sideswiped by a delivery van, knocking the driver's side mirror off. We sat there and waited for 15 minutes and then someone from RTA came and took all of our names and addresses, and then I got off and waited for the next bus.

If I had a lunch day rather than a lunch hour, I might treat you to a list of instances in which I've felt unsafe on I-480.....

Golf

At the risk of sounding like a real sourpuss, this doesn't do much to assuage my suspicion that CLE+ is just becoming a code for "I'm a bourgeois assh*le."

The Price of Cutting Arts Education

I was paging through a copy of Creative Expression: The Development of Children's Interest in Art, Music, Literature, and Dramatics (copyright 1926) this morning and it hit me:

When we cut elementary fine arts programs at the expense of math and science, what we're cutting is not just the budding American citizen's understanding of the First Amendment -- an understanding of the importance of free speech and originality -- but specifically, how to do it.

I don't want to use the word chilling -- I don't think this is a conspiracy -- but it's certainly depressing and dismaying.

And angry-making.

My Vote Didn't Matter - Literally

Our Kucinich for President votes don't appear to have been counted by the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections; they're not in the all-Ohio results on cleveland.com either. The handful of people in CuyCo who voted for Fred Thompson got counted, but not us.

I have probably never felt less significant in my life.

(But look! My brother-in-law's vote for "Candidate Withdrew" down in Chillicothe got counted.)

"I want the one with the Broad"

Despite the fact that the entirety of Ohio City was coated in black ice, we made it to our nearly empty polling place this morning to find Dennis! signs dotting the lawn.

(Note: we don't live in the 10th district. Was this, then, a plot to confuse those ignorant voters into casting a presidential vote for Kucitizen Number One? Well, we did. Jim's brother in Chillicothe did too, except when he went to the polls for early voting last week, they were telling voters, "some of these candidates have since dropped out of the race, so don't vote for them." The poll workers were telling people that. God Bless America!)

Perhaps the highlight of the experience, however, was the rough-and-tumble fellow in line in front of me who, when asked whether he wanted a Democratic or Republican ballot, got agitated and said, "I dunno -- I want the one with The Broad!"