first dinner with friends at 133.

first dinner party at my new home. with jed & melissa, pesto (my basil) & linguine & heirloom cherry tomatoes & a side of sauted chicken apple sausage & shallots & swiss chard.

what I picked from my porch garden for this meal.

oh, & cape cod blueberries picked by my family as dessert. served over coconut milk ice cream.

I should have taken more pictures of the food, but I was having too much fun, here's to more gorgeous dinner parties in this new house.

two symbolic meals

first, my first meal cooked in my new apartment, the first new home I've felt really good about in a long time. patty pan squash, vidalia onions, my thai basil, local baby arugula, wild yam buckwheat soba noodles. Simple, but your first meal eaten in a new kitchen is a test. & this kitchen is beautiful. with flowers from ali & katie. 

Second, leftovers at mum's house in brewster after driving here tonight. interesting day, accomplished a lot of practical things (new goal: not hide under the covers when faced with practical tasks) drank pbr with jed in the late afternoon at his house discussing album covers while mark slept in my bed at home, went to whole foods because for some reason I decided I couldn't manage the drive with sushi (sushi/road trip emergency) & realized that rin is my only real friend left in that whole store. weird, cause the store was once my whole life. anyway, cold macaroni, peas, mashed potatoes & roasted veggies at mum's, after a very contemplative drive, considering life & death & love & friendship. 

I really miss my gorgeous new apartment & can't wait to unpack, but it's kind of nice to take the night off from noho. 

last night, 273 south

moving for reals tomorrow. still not ready, but yet still posting on my various blogs.

why why why

I'm currently eating this sandwich. cuz it's almost 1am & I've moved four times in less than six months because my life is insane. damn, have to fix that. later. (back burner, large stove, ali). anyway, the sandwich was sriracha, swiss cheese, mayonaise, & roasted red pepper hummous. a feel good classic. with jalapeno kettle chips.

what my desk looks like, roughly eight hours before moving, not good.

& my dresser. oh dear lord, help.

dustry rose tries to help.

but isn't really helping.
although still adorable.

well, here's to to my life being more stable at the end of tomorrow. & let's hope jed & jono have some patience with the chaos of my objects.

It finally feels like summer, so I'm using the oven.

What happens when I'm really broke, moving AGAIN in three days & I haven't really packed, & it suddenly becomes really & delightfully hot out. & I'M HUNGRY.

free sunflowers from work are cool. I should so totally pack that vase, but whatever. beauty means something too. also cool is a shit ton of free summer squash. roasted in my beloved le cresuet baking dish with free shitake mushrooms, & thai basil & banana peppers & thyme from my garden. in olive oil & garlic & salt & pepper, of course.

dr taking advantage of the now empty record shelf. yeah I'm packing a little between drinking & cooking & blogging, etc.

even though having the oven on at 400 degrees was insane right now, it all smelled really good roasting & if DnD is really taking a road trip to new orleans in late august, I need to work on my heat tolerance. So far, after crap freezing rainy summer 2009, I'm really liking being sweaty & drinking chilled white wine in short shorts. over angel hair pasta. I think inspired by this post.

me, cooking & sweating & packing, july 2009.

dusty rose is also hot.

anyway, I think it's neat to cook yourself a really nice dinner in the middle of chaos. & last night I didn't pack at all but had an awesome time with a really good friend. & I'm about to embark on a road trip that I totally can't afford just for AWESOMENESS SAKE. & I'm going dancing right this minute.
Balance it's all about balance. & cooking & painting & adventure. That's it. oh, & dancing & friends & not killing yourself.

eating "exotic" squash & ignoring sadness

First, & most importantly, here's DR, helping me pack. thank jesus for kittens.



Yup, another late night dinner. this time "exotic" squash free from work (no idea why it's so exotic, it appears to be a round version of zucchini) & onions (also free from work) & avocado & thai basil & a banana pepper from my garden & whole grain udon noodles. no time to be doing this, this cooking meals & then contemplating them. really need to pack. but something else besides the general life chaos of me/financial crisis/moving/uncetainty about housemates/ thing that's been going on with me lately also happened & so there an undercurrent of sadness to everything I do. A very dear & trusted friend told me, "just give it some time & don't think about it for a couple of days" & that's right. but now it's been more than a couple of days & I find I still can't think about it or deal with it. it still hurts too much. & so now I find myself not packing but at least I am cooking mjyself a beautiful dinner & not sit on the floor crying. & I packed one box of vintage juice glasses & fabulous shot glasses that's gonna have to be enough for now.

noodles plus green things.

& then eaten over the rest of yesterday's lettuce. for freshness. five different green tastes: squash in butter (warm), avocado (meaty), lettuce (crisp), thai basil (sharp), banana pepper (hot).

I dealt with a lot of practical shit this week while ignoring my current emotional landscape. I'm doing the best I can. I still believe that people should try to communicate better, but they never ever do. Still I really learned this week that even though I feel kind of out of place a lot of the time, I do have some real true friends, even here, & they all came from unlikely places.

So I'm just gonna eat my green things & noodles & drink more wine at 1am & keep listening to all of the silver jews albums mixed on itunes shuffle & maybe pack another box or two. doing the best I can. that's all I've got. & if my heart is breaking under the surface, well, I find that it matters less & less.

& I'm gonna end on one of my favorite lyric quotes ever, "& if cars could run on teardrops I'd be long long gone. " thanks david berman. also, Drinking & Drawing road trip 09 to the deep south in august to look forward to. If we don't die, it will be awesome.

3am Dinners?

One element of the weird lifestyle I've been living lately is that my meal schedule (& my sleep schedule) are way way off. For instance, yesterday I worked, ate these things, went to the 11's for a night of "official" Drinking & Drawing, went to hugo's for more drinks & more drawing, & then we all went to the 11's to dance our asses off. Then I walked home all sweaty & realized I was starving & despite the late hour needed some real food. this has been my pattern lately, coming home from the bar to an extremely late night dinner, & finding myself really inspired to take pictures from my sketchbook & blog rather than sleep. Many of my finest blog posts are completed 2am or later, usually while I'm eating dinner.

last night I reheated cold ravioli from the previous night with tons of hot sauce & tomato sauce (I like food really spicy late at night).

& I had this beautiful head of lettuce that I brought home free from work hanging out in my fridge next to the banana peppers.

so I ate this, near dawn, while writing. that's goddess dressing on the lettuce.

then based on some late night text messages I left the house again, got to sleep as the sun was rising & the birds were going crazy (damn those birds), slept until around noon, got up in time to aquire my large iced coffee at the haymarket & some 3/$10 cds (stereolab, pavement, the smiths) at turn it up (my shopping contribution to the incredibly annoying noho tag sale), & head to work, where I just left, to come home, drink some wine, listen to the silver jews, & write on more blogs. & possible go out again to a party. & all I've had to eat all day is a bowl of soup at work, & I brought home a ton of free squash, so probably there's a late night dinner in my future. a typical day for me lately.
I worry that I'm turning into my dad with all my strange habits, I really do. He did, still does, the late night meal thing. I know this isn't normal, dinner at 3am, sleep at 5am, work at 1:30pm, I don't know.
I'm just so happy lately hanging out by myself, eating these crazy meals, & writing on the internet. although right now I REALLY need to be packing, since I am moving once again in six days. Having reasonable priorities has never been my strong point.

greens & wine & breathing

It's been the kind of week where on several occasions I've woken up with the panic attacks that used to hit me every morning this winter, i.e. winter 2009, greenfield, when whole foods & some people in my life caused me to have a nervous breakdown. I don't like it. This morning I woke up that way, managed to calm myself the fuck down, drove to shelbourne falls (coffee roasters on king street, not the town) (although going to the town would have been nice) for coffee & juice, & sat in the breakfast nook & proceeded to deal with the internal list of all the stuff I need to take care of that's making my head feel all crazy. lots of life transitions, of which moving in a week is maybe not the least. considering that at 10am this morning I really couldn't see getting out from under the covers, a lot was really accomplished today. as a reward for not dying of panic, after meeting a potential new roommate in town tonight I took myself to state street & bought a bottle of very cheap red wine & a giant bundle of local swiss chard.
& made this.

there's the swiss chard sauting with olive oil, butter, garlic, a banana pepper from my porch garden, & some dried chili peppers (from the free bulk stuff at work that I've been carrying around in my purse all week). just like me to have dried chili peppers in my giant orange vinyl purse with all the pens & glue. food & art, food & art.

then I added some jarred tomato sauce (cheating but I'm moving very soon so am using up my staples plus not really buying much new food) & sriracha. I really like my tomato/pasta things to be spicy. my homemade red sauce contains sriracha, & usually some sort of spicy sausage, & fuck it's delicious. tomatoes lend themselves really well to spiciness. so does cheese.

there it is, over pasta (sadly kind of crappy trader joes ravioli things that I inherited from a friend who moved, but whatever, I'm pretty broke) with sliced cherry tomatoes from the porch garden on top. The cherries are very fresh & sweet & lend something very delightful to the spicy greens & tomatoey mess underneath. (I ALSO have to add that because I'm moving & in the process of packing, that that is not my dish. I know I know, I'm an aesthetic snob, but I cannot bear for the internet to not know that MY dishes are vintage & pretty & NOT Pier One CRAP. Thank you.)(I know: liz, stop apologizing in parenthesis.)

so making myself good dinners in the midst of pure chaos helps, & so does when I have an impromptu dinner party with two of my favorite people on earth, one of whom I never ever get to see. having good people in my life & realizing it makes me want to pull myself together & deserve it, & also a few simple moments of pure joy sliding down a playground slide at 2am with people you love after sharing an amazing meal together is why we put up with crap jobs & tricky living situations & being broke & scared & confused & still keep getting up in the morning.
I was not mostly responsible for the brilliance of this meal, so all I'll say is, it was delicious & the company was better. & all the flowers were grown by me.
I sometimes lately think that I just went from one nervous breakdown to another, from total unemployed isolation in snowy greenfield to out very single freaking night social butterfly in summertime northampton, but I'm still trying to pull it together. having the person who saved my life by writing to me this winter randomly show up for 24 hours this week...well, these are the things I am reminding myself of when I slow down & breathe through it. there are wonderful people on this earth, & I can count at least five of them as my true friends. ok.
I hear thunder. & now it's pouring. winter of ice, summer of downpours. I was going to go out dancing tonight but maybe I'll just get into bed & read instead. I need words. maybe cooking myself dinner alone in my party dress with dustyrose is enough.

Art Project

I had a really, really nice weekend, but ended with a rather ambivalent sunday night. I got melancholy for a while, for no reason at all...just starting to come out of it. through art. weirdly.
Thank jesus for this collaborative art project with r. (more on the details of this later), I really do need more concrete things to do.
And I hadn't realized how much I miss just painting, with actual brushes and paint, etc.
I really like all the parts this project has...my regular journal/sketchbook, my new food journal, my food porn facebook album, my daily paintings of everything I eat, my facebook album of those pictures, my notes in my regular journal about the project, my official journal of the project, this blog of course I think there will be more,
I wish it was tomorrow so I can eat and draw more things.
I like carrying around all these various notebooks. I feel busy and important. And it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks about what I'm doing as long as it feels that way to me. I like having my bag full of pens and glue and words and images.
But I was not in a good mood at all. Just sitting around and staring at things and tormenting myself with my thoughts.
I was really kind of frozen into inactivity, but then r. called, and reminded me about the project, and a tiny part of my brain woke up.
I HAVE to do this one food painting everyday, so I did it, and I liked what I did, and now I'm not in such as bad place. Hmm.
In terms of things in my life I am grateful for, this is way up there.

((tiny related thoughts))

I thought for a split second in the exhibit tonight that what I should be doing is being an eating disorder counselor for teenaged girls. I think I could do that.
Very well.
And maybe even help someone who might otherwise die. Like I almost did.
How do I even go about doing that?
(plus all this train of thought has huge relevance to my visual artwork that I can't even begin to deal with right now...but I'm aware of the connections...
...body image, celebrities, porn, britney, food, yeah I get it...or am trying too)

valentines eve & other weird painful shit: Part #2: Shame

Tonight I was confronted with a lot of weird painfully deeply difficult to process things that take me back to my deepest darkest parts, the stuff that keeps me up at night. All night.
So I saw emerson tonight. That happened.
Earlier, I met b. at the Smith Art Museum, because it was Northampton Arts Night Out, and when the Smith Museum is free (as it should always be, of course) and Lauren Greenfield's Thin & Girl Culture was at the Smith Museum
That was really good, but weird and hard for me, because it was a lot of photos of women with eating disorders, and eating disorder stuff is still oh so indescribably hard for me to deal with, and I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to write about it tonight. Still the hardest thing for me to talk about/deal with/acknowledge in anyway/think about.
Even though the year when I regularly weighed under 100 pounds was when I was 14, so 16 years ago now.
I've been living pretty much as normal and appearing normal for 16 years. weird.
To be clear, I can talk about it, in a very specific way, a way that I've created, a language I've created, where I can mention certain controlled truths, and act like I'm dealing with it, but that actually never really even scratches the surface. Of what I've done. Of what I've felt. Of how I still live.
I certainly don't talk about it in the present tense. It's 10:50pm and all I've eaten all day is a single yogurt. I'm fighting with myself with what I'll eat next. Since I've been fired, I can at least on some level see that I'm exercising compulsively (now 205 situps a day plus all this other stuff) but I can't stop. I love when people buy me dinner, because then I'm allowed to eat whatever I want without following my rules.
I eat plenty, and I maintain a normal weight, mostly, but the amount of rules, involved, I know it's not normal, whatever that is, because I can't find the words to talk about. I would never, ever tell anyone what I really think when it comes to eating.
I eroticize it, I play games, I deny myself things...I think this why I want to just go live on a farm because I figure if I was really in touch with food and the sources of my food than all this nonsense my intellectual mind knows is silly and ridiculous would go away.
Gardening helps. That's why I do it. Inpatient eating disorder units should have gardens. And animals. Really.
The show we saw tonight had all these photos of girls being forced to eat cookies, but what if they had to raise chickens and then kill and eat them? Or just gather eggs? That seems like something that would have shaken me out of my self obsession as a teenager. In a good way. And eating disorders are always a self obsession. not that you can stop it just because you know this.
Send all anorexics to sustainable farms and see what happens. seriously.
Food I create myself has less guilt. Food I cook myself does too.
Something about labor, hands, work, touch....
So seeing those photographs...I was almost in tears by the time I left that exhibit. I was choking in my throat.
Not in a bad way. I was really glad I saw it. But it wasn't easy. I think a lot of the point of my own work is that I'm trying so hard to conceive of a language in which to talk about these things.
I need to talk about them. It's part of why I am an artist.
Someone should. And that show tonight, that all from an observer's perspective, because most of those girls photographed are too fucked up to make their own art.
I want to be the voice from the inside, the one who was just that bad, but survived anyway. And I will survive what is happening to me now.
So it was an intense evening in my soul already...
And then I was walking alone down main street in the cold back to my car and standing at the light at the main intersection waiting to cross, and I look over my shoulder behind me for some reason I still can't figure out (ali says I was looking for him) and I see first one member of his band, then the next, and I knew what was coming but it happened so fast, then him, come around the corner, and I didn't know what to do, so I looked away, but I'm pretty sure he saw me, and looked away too, and walked past me.
And then I felt like crying again and I still do.
Both of these are things I'm ashamed of.
That I've treated and still treat my body this way. That I loved him and trusted him and that he treated me this way.
Shame.
That ties this whole night together.
And a lot of my recent life.
In the recent past I've been on my knees in front of one person while someone who likes me sincerely called me on the phone to make plans with me. And have been at the computer at 1am eating leftover homemade curry and dirty instant messaging two different people with the same first same name at the same time.
Shame.
What's going on here?
Starving myself/loving the wrong people. A lot to think about.
And it's almost valentines day...and I take holidays, even stupid ones seriously, because I love ceremony.
It's gonna be a long night.
Thanks sweet jesus that K. made me a 21 love songs mix for valentines day that arrived unexpectedly in the mail this morning, along with this month's cosmo (An Orgasm Almost Killed Her: we are not kidding)(actual headline).
and I'm gonna listened to that truly excellent mix and write my heart out and drink cheap white wine and eat a chicken sandwich from the food the guy who doesn't eat much left behind.
good for me. I am embracing having an appetite. I think I'll make curried chicken salad.
Fuck shame. So what I loved him and I was wrong. He should be ashamed, and he is, cause he can't even look me in the face. Fuck that.
I've got a lot more to write on this subject, I think. Stay tuned.

(valentines)(food)(the inbetween bit)

(one other thing: my ideal valentines date, and which I've had with various partners for at least most of the last eleven years, is to cook a really special gorgeous romantic dinner at home with my love...I think the guy tomorrow wouldn't understand the food/sex/love/touch thing that matters to me so much...that's part of the problem...when I cooked him dinner for the first time this week, he didn't finish his plate and I was the only one eating butter...that sort of thing doesn't make me want to fuck you)
(I don't want to go to a restaurant, I want my valentines date to lick butter off my fingers and fuck me up against the kitchen wall while we are still cooking, pots and pans all on the stove and knives and cutting boards everywhere, everything smelling delicious)
(at least I know this)
(Iwrote this about myself the other day)
(You should message me if:
If you are open to adventure.
If you are by nature a sensual person, and the way life tastes, sounds, smells, sounds, and feels matters to you.
If you think food is incredibly sexy, and you agree that cooking an elaborate, messy, and indulgent meal is an excellent form of foreplay. And if you like to eat, because I like to cook, and I like people who truly appreciate food.
If you like dancing and getting sweaty.
If you want to go a dive bar for a bunch of hours and play the jukebox and act ridiculous.
If you smell and taste good, because I always notice that about a person.
If doing whiskey shots and eating cake in bed sounds like fun to you.
and you should like music, doesn't matter what kind because I like a lot.)
(of course, I know who all things are true about)

more from my apartment tonight

I don't why, but ani's really nice tonight.
Two quotes from "knuckle Down" which I generally think is just a terrible album, and I've never really listened to, I can't stop playing over and over again. Again, it's probably been ten years since I seriously listened to ani difranco. But I guess I made the correct random choice tonight.
"come home and my guitar
has nothin to say to me
i recoil from all my friends
and then i'm in misery
been so long since i've been held
really since i was his
probably just need to be held
that's probably all it is"
-ani, "recoil"
"but you can't will yourself happy
you can't will your cunt wet
you can't keep standing at the station
pretending you're being met
you can't wear a sign that says 'yours'
when that ain't what you get"
-ani, "callous"
....other little things about tonight...I've been reading Julia Child's memoir, "My Life In France, " and that's making me incredibly happy. And she didn't learn to cook at all until she was 36, so maybe there is serious hope for me. Maybe I will have my restaurant someday. And she found the love of her life in her late 30's, and they lived happily ever after, complete with delicious food, so again, hope...
...I found a completely brand new "clear head" candle from whole foods in the bathroom that I had forgotten I had and that's making the apartment much better...
...last night I stayed up late reading and working in my sketchbook, not messing around pointlessly on the internet and I think it might happen again tonight...(except then why am I writing in this blog?)
...even though it's late I just did some yoga, and now I feel bendy and calmer...
...my tarot card for tonight was the Hawk, Messenger, "do not let your emotions cloud your perceptions. Examine your life from a higher perspective." When don't I let my emotions cloud my perceptions...hmmm.