Fragment o' the Day

Seen in the Bergen Street F/G subway station:

Taped to a pole, a notice about late-night service changes on the G line: no trains at this station 11pm-6am, Saturday and Sunday, etc. Lots of service changes. On the blank area at the bottom of the sign, someone has written in wobbly pencilled letters: FUCK YOU!

Phew.

Please admire the best headline I have read today:

"Newfound Book of Psalms Doesn't Predict Doom, Experts Say"

Story here.

Stars...They're Just Like Us (Indie Rock Edition)

They drink their coffee...



I don't have much of an opinion about Devendra Banhart's music one way or another, but yesterday I was treated to an airing of a twenty-minute-long b-side, or something, of his, called "White Reggae Troll." So grood!

And I do like that he appreciates a fine cup of coffee.

"I'm Surprised,"

said Meg, "how much 'too much katherine' there is on the Internet."

• I think you will feel a lot better if you don't think about it too much, Katherine
• She became combative, irritable, and was sleeping way too much. Katherine found strange drawings...
• It was too much. Katherine was ok.
• I don't think I missed too much. Katherine was a real treat.
• way, way too much Katherine. :rolleyes:.
• You can never have too much Katherine
• Otherwise, way too much Katherine vocal in the song.

I prefer the second to last one, natch.

(:rolleyes:)

Outed!

Oh, hello, Seed. You have found my little thing. Yeah. This was going to be a personal blog of sorts, but hey...maybe it's not smart, when one works at a new media company, to start a blog, not try that hard to make it anonymous, and then be like, "hmh, well, maybe no one will find it!"

Anway though, welcome. Why not? I just have to warn you that it's still going to be a personal blog, and moreover it's probably going to be REALLY BORING. I do this for myself. That said, knock yerselves out.

I still think it is hilarious that I was outed via my mom.

Sorry, guys...

I didn't realize I had to approve comments. I also didn't think anyone was commenting. There they are! Sweet. Maybe I'll try a more lenient comments setting, too, and roll with that until this site gets clogged up with spams about online poker and erectile-dysfunction remedies...

Yes, But How Frenetic Are You?

Quote of the day (not overheard this time, but related):

"You have to be frenetically ambitious to make it in New York."

Taking Stock

Consider this some sort of 'State of the Katherine Address,' I guess.

Wednesday night again. We've picked up the house, kind of. I made a good dinner to counteract the foods of the past couple nights (French bistro fare, then a Peking duck feast, both delicious in fact, but you know), scrubbed down the counters, did the dishes in the sink, and even cleaned some paper debris off the surface of my home desk.

(No, this isn't going to be one of those fascinating kinds of blogs. Sorry. I started this bad dude for myself, and you're essentially being exploited to provide the illusion of audience, 'cause I had this idea that direct address would be, somehow, helpful...to me.)

Anyway, right, so I cleaned my desk and made up this spinach/grape tomatoes/pasta/lemon juice/feta/olive oil thing. I drank some of that really strong cranberry juice that Meg and I are liking so much. And I had this feeling of needing or wanting to get organized...

I had a little to-do list for tonight. It said:

1) Write to Eric (done)
2) Blog something for Larry Smith (not, but I have an idea now)
3) Blog something for tmk (I guess that's this)
4) Work on 400 Words site (whatever)

Is that really all? OK. I went to the Greenmarket and bought two small houseplants for my desk at work. I'll re-pot them first. I got two heirloom tomatoes and a cucumber. The sign at the stall said "Revolutionary Tomato" and "Revolutionary Cucumber." Revolutionary! Nothing's ever going to be the same. I also bought a head of romaine lettuce. It isn't revolutionary, but it is enormous and it only cost a dollar.

Then I went by Gimme! Coffee on Lorimer, and bought a pound of Mexico and a pound of Platinum Blonde. Meg is mourning the fact that she can't get Stumptown without paying overnight-mail prices or something every time. We're auditioning new coffees. The lack of good coffee in NYC is really pretty remarkable to me. In this day and age.

So...right. Taking stock and all that.

Here's how things are right now.

When my mother was here visiting a couple of weeks ago, she said this thing to me. She said, "I can see your masters' degree slipping through your fingers!" I promised her that I would go back and get it. I said, out loud, "I'm never going back to Cornell as a student," which doesn't maybe sound like such a radical statement, but is actually kind of a big deal to me.

In theory, it shouldn't be too hard. I was at Cornell for two years, did plenty of coursework, and wrote a handful of seminar papers, at least one of which is theoretically long and stong enough to be defensible as a maters' thesis. In theory, I can make an appointment with my committee, go back there, orally defend the thesis, and the idea is that then they'd bestow on me the masters' degree that I eminently deserve.

In theory. In practice, even thinking about graduate school has been, since I left -- a year ago next month -- a colossal source of mental resistance. I can't do it. I can refer to it flippantly, or sometimes even seriously, in conversation, but actually sitting down and being with the reality of it and the reality of leaving it has been just a failsafe recipe for a lot of unpleasant anxiety effects.

So one of the things on my big to-do list is email my committee and tell them I want my degree now, and I'm ready to burn the possibility-of-coming-back bridge that that would accomplish, and work out with them the best way to do it. It shouldn't be that hard. It won't be that hard. They're probably not actually going to tell me that I'm the worst graduate student ever and that I am a disgrace and a blot on the whole institution of grad-studentdom. But there's part of me that's still really afraid they will. So, right, the concomitant idea is to use this blog as a place to talk about the weirdness, and also to take advantage of the at least theoretical public-ness of this blog to sort of prod myself into actually doing what I need to do.

Right. So that's pretty much item one on the to-do list, or at least it should be.

What else is going on in life right now?

Today actually marks three weeks since I've had a drink. Or, right, "went straightedge," as I took to calling it right before my birthday. Or "purity," as Meg and I took to calling it after it began (and she decided to join up too). It's an experiment, and I've been meaning to blog about it some. Soon.

I've been enjoying my job this week. Another thing I've been meaning to write about, having a job and what that's like.

I'd really like to get back to yoga or something. All of the sitting I do appalls me. But my greatest health and/or lifestyle complaint these days is the effects of looking at a computer screen most of the day (and yes, I realize it's ironic and maybe kind of stupid that I'm here, at home, in my time off...looking at a computer screen). My eyes burn a lot, the little muscles around them get weird and sore, and coming off a long day at work it takes me some time to even feel as though I can focus, both literally and figuratively, on the three-dimensional world again. I don't like that at all. I have ordered a fancy antiglare/anti-radiation screen for my comp. at work, and I'm hoping that will help. Aside from the physical stuff (and it even has a name, "Computer Vision Syndrome" -- thank you, internets!), I am guessing that my concern and annoyance at all the computer-looking is kind of a microcosm or symbol of my feelings about enforced activities in general. Which reminds me that I still want to write that essay or something about my mother telling me about how she "hates being told what to do." It was such a revelation and I still think about it almost every day, a few months later.

400 Words continues apace. I'd like to have a launch party in late August, but at this rate...yeah. Time goes by so fast these days. I guess that's a feature of getting older, right?

I was reading something not long ago; I can't remember what but I think it might be semi-famous. The author was talking about boredom, and how the idea of boredom has become an anathema in modern America, which he finds sad. Boredom, he wrote, is the state in which all creative endeavors begin; in fact, without boredom, we cannot create. I think about that a lot lately, too. Not long ago a high school student, a senior, wrote to me; she wanted to know if I'd swap a copy of her poetry chapbook for a copy of 400 Words. I said yes, and I got her work in the mail earlier this week ("My Word For You Is Light Bulb," by Theodora Ranelli, if you want to know), and not only is it really quite good, but also it reminded me of how amazing high school is and was. It's an incredibly creatively fecund time, and I think that has a lot to do with the intimacy that it allows with boredom. I don't know. You hear a lot about "the institution kid" and stuff, these days, and how kids today are overscheduled, but how they have to be to get ahead, and blah blah blah. Looking back, I'm very glad that my parents don't seem to have felt a need to push in any way. And that my school offered gobs of unstructured-ness. If anything, my life veered a little too much towards the unstructured at times, but I think that was so much better for me than the opposite would have been. Recently, since moving to New York, I find ample occasion (when I can make the time for it, natch) to be nostalgic for a life that included boredom.

Moving on: other plans and items for the future...if I get really brave, maybe soonish I'll do some Zoloft blogging.

For a while there I was getting up and writing and/or exercising before work. Nowadays I seem to prefer to stay up later and sleep in later tangled in the very thin white cotton blanket and the cool, crumply off-white sheets, blown on by the fan, chasing the last little scraps of dreams.

I often feel like I'm running out of time and/or money, or that I would do very well with a bit more of these things.

I'm talking to Eric a lot in the form of long emails. I don't know what is happening. In a way, it's nice; we're talking more and more fankly than ever. In another way...never mind, I had enough of thinking about the other way late last week, and it had this feeling of being both sad and unavoidable. But this is different, this is some kind of limbo. I honestly have no idea what is going to happen. If I had to make a bet. I'd stand there paralyzed. I'd put a chip down on every square. Something.

I spend a lot of time thinking, or doing that thing that is between daydreaming and thinking, about my future here in New York. And that is nice.

Last night after coming home from the Chinatown thing I became very engrossed in something that had come in the mail: a little booklet giving the history of the founding and growth of Microcosm Publishing, written by Joe Biel. Because it was enclosed with a check for the most recent 30 copies of 400 Words I sent him, it made me feel good and buoyant and practically part of something already. 'People do good and unusual things,' it made me think. 'I could do good and unusual things.' And maybe I just will. Not in such a way that I have to feel all antsy about it and like I'm not living up to my potential or something. On days like these, when I'm enjoying my job and thinking how fine and odd it is, how lucky I am to have found it, how the work I do will always bear the imprint of who I am and what I'm about no matter what, I feel like I already am.

Take It to the Bridge

On Sunday in the early evening I ran across the Brooklyn Bridge. I had never been to the bridge before. I realized it is not such a far run; the approach up Clinton Street through Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights is lovely, past all those brownstones. The approach to the bridge itself is less nice; downtown Brooklyn is as bombed-out and desolate on the weekends, besides being pedestrian-unfriendly in general, as any other ratty urban American downtown.

But the bridge!

Notes to self about the Brooklyn Bridge:

1. Glad I did not take my mother there (is not for the afraid-of-heights, un-fond-of-crowds/cars-rushing-below kind of scene).

2. Must return next time it is snowing, I bet it's magical.

3. The bridge looks medieval. It resembles a cathedral, with its arches and keystones and its magnificent heights and dips. Down below, but above the car traffic, there is a wooden pedestrian walkway that also reminds me of the middle ages, but in another way; as I was running across I was thinking about London Bridge and how when I was little I read somewhere that there were houses on it. I was taken with that, and developed a vision of medieval or early-modern urban life as a sublime teeming anarchy, with religion and commerce and tradition and the very beginnings of mass-society craziness all jumbled together. As I ran I remembered London Bridge, and I thought that the Brooklyn Bridge reminded me of it (I could almost imagine it with houses on it, even, if they got rid of the cars), and then I continuted to think about history. It's funny for me, having grown up near Washington, D.C., where everything is built to look and feel like classical Greece -- well-spaced, orderly, monumental, lots of smooth white stone -- to arrive in New York, where things are so the opposite. If Washington is America's version of Athenian-Classical, then I like to think of New York as our, I dunno, crazy early-modern London or...Antwerp, or something. Like down there you have government, law and order, smooth marble surfaces; and up here you have capitalism, crowds, extremely jagged and intricate skylines. This schizo combination of high-minded systematic (even kind of utopian in its origins) government, and balls-out mercantile free-for-all, I was thinking, pretty much sums up American as well as anything else does, right?

Thoughts from a runner's high on the Brooklyn Bridge. It really was beautiful, the East River and the sun going down, Statue of Liberty to the left, Manhattan Bridge and DUMBO to the right, warehouses far down below on both shores. I got two-thirds of the way across, and then looped back for home.

Classic Blunders

In The Princess Bride, Wallace Shawn's character tells Cary Elwes:

"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia.' But only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"

Then he laughs his head off until he drops dead of the poison that he thinks he's just tricked Elwes into swallowing.

The point, aside from how thinking about Wallace Shawn usually makes me smile, is that I keep thinking of the most famous classic blunder in the same breath as yet another, only slightly less well-known blunder, which is this: 'Never get involved in a bi-coastal long-distance relationship.'

And then I think of Stephen Merritt's voice in the song "A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off," where he says, "it ain't pretty."

Sigh.

I feel a little sad today, you know.

Yesterday it was all sniffing-back-tears all day in front of my computer screen, in plain view of all the interns. Today it's staying in my pajamas till 4pm and diving nosefirst into some coding work that drives the time away like dust before a broom. I can tell it's not gone, though. It's just waiting for a lull, for the next time I have to slow down.

Overheard #3

Semi-trendy girl in her '20s, walking down Union Street in Park Slope, speaking into her cell phone:

"You ruin everything!"

Overheard #2

Two women sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park, by the Shake Shack, mid-afternoon. It's HOT out.

The more dominant woman in the conversation is from New Orleans. She is explaining how the postal service isn't completely back to normal operations there, yet. The second woman has just tried to mail something to Louisiana.

Woman #1: Where's it going?

Woman #2: A place called Butternut.

Woman #1: Butternut?

Woman #2: Yeah, I think that's what she said.

Woman #1: It's a town?

Woman #2: (inaudible)

Woman #1: So the place is called Butternut, Louisiana?

Woman #2: (inaudible)

Woman #1: Butternut...are you sure?

Woman #2: Or maybe it was a street name.

Woman #1: There's no street in New Orleans called Butternut.

Overheard

"You go to a café or a bar to talk about life. If you don't have a life, there's no point going to a café or bar."

-College-aged boy to college-aged girl, crossing 23rd Street at Madison Avenue, July 18, afternoon

New York Stories, #1: The Coffee Incident

One of the most charming things about living in New York City is the number of strange human appearances and behaviors it allows one to witness every single day. Even during my half-hour commute to work in the morning, and back in the evening, I regularly see a figure so odd, or overhear a snatch of conversation so perfect, that I feel I have to tell my roommate about it, or tuck it away in my mind for later.

For people like me, who tend to get stuck in their own heads a little, the stimulation afforded by the streets of New York can be a gift. Watching keeps our clanging minds safely busy.

Although I know that many if not most New Yorkers have an appreciation for the city’s human spectacle, it is easy to feel as though I’m the only one on the street at a given time who’s having an aesthetic experience. I often feel invisible, as though I am walking around the city behind a one-way mirror. On that side of the glass: the frieze of people I call New York City. On this side of the glass: me, a kind of disembodied seeing eyeball.

A few weeks back, though, something happened to shatter the glass, and remind me that not only is Weird New York a thing that I watch; it’s also something that I’m part of. The watched are watchers, too.

But how far to back up for explanation? Let me set it up by explaining something: I love coffee. I drink coffee every morning. When I gave up caffeine for several months, I brewed myself a mug of decaf every morning and called it my “coffee.”

Another thing: I habitually run late. Not catastrophically late, just late enough to feel a little pressured. These two factors together often mean that I am forced to enjoy my coffee on the go.

I have been a to-go coffee drinker since before latté culture was hegemonic. In high school, I used to take my morning cup to school in a tall plastic Caribou Coffee travel mug with a lid. Then, one sunny spring morning, lounging in a car parked in the back lot behind the school, I panicked and dropped a burning cigarette into the Caribou Coffee mug when I glimpsed a police officer making her rounds of the area. The mug was ruined, and maybe that’s when it started, the drinking coffee out of anything handy.

In college, I used to save the nice Atlas mason jars that ‘Classico’ brand pasta sauce came in. I’d rinse them out, carefully sponge off the label, and pour my AM coffee into them. I liked sitting around the table at my morning classes with a big jar of brown water in front of me. It made me feel tough, and serious.

These days, in the Brooklyn apartment, Meg and I brew coffee one cup at a time using a cone filter and one of those plastic cone contraptions. The filter apparatus sits on the lip of a mug. My current favorite mug is white café-wear, larger at the top than the bottom, like an oversized teacup.

The coffee we make is, if I say so myself, sublime. I’m not much better at leaving the house with time to spare than I have ever been. I have a five-minute walk to the subway down Smith Street, and how could I leave a sublime cup of coffee behind? More days than now, I carry it with. I hold it out from my body as I walk down the sidewalk, marveling at the powers of balance that allow me to adjust my wrist so not to spill any. I perch it in the crook of my arm as I fumble for the MetroCard in my wallet, and continue drinking, on the train, as I ride. Sometimes my fellow passengers shoot me a glance, and sometimes they give me a wider berth, which I don’t mind. Still, I hadn’t considered my coffee-drinking patterns eccentric until the morning I passed the two men resting outside the Met supermarket on Smith.

The Met is our local large grocery store. Meg won’t shop there because she claims that it smells like corpses inside. I agree that it smells like corpses, but I am stingier and lazier than she is. Every morning, workers open the metal hatch on the sidewalk outside the Met, a truck full of food pulls up, and a team of laborers tosses cardboard boxes down from the truck; the boxes shoot down a metal ramp, through the hatch and into the corpse-smelling bowels of the store. I often look at the ramp, and the foam of dairy or maybe vegetable matter on it, and tell myself not to shop at the Met anymore. But by evening they are gone.

So one morning, I was walking by the Met, leaning forward from the neck to get a sip from my mug of sublime coffee without slowing down, and I caught the eye of two men, employees of the store, who were lounging, maybe having a cigarette, in the shade of the overhang of the store.

I sensed the first one smile, and I thought: ‘Oh no, street harassment?,’ but he just looked at me and said, in the most bemused tone of voice:

“A cup of COFFEE?”

I smiled, taken aback and also relieved, and said the first words that came into my head. “Why not?” I raised the mug to them, slightly, as I said it.

The two men paused. Then the other one raised a beefy hand as if in blessing, and exclaimed: “Enjoy!”

As I walked away I imagined the men, coming home from work, pulling out a chair at the table at home, sitting down heavily on it, and then cracking open a brew and in the relaxing, winding-down minutes at the end of the day, saying to his wife or girlfriend or whomever he debriefs with usually, “I saw the damndest thing this morning…”

Too Hot

I wonder what workplace productivity was like in the age before air-conditioning. There's a hot that's insistent, a hot that's pretty much too hot to do anything.

Like right now.

When you're standing around at home, minding your own business, and a big, spherical bead of sweat just pretty much does the luge down the back of your thigh and onto the floor, THAT'S TOO HOT!

Seriously, I mind heat less than most people I know. I'm just saying that there are only two possible settings right now: languid, and cranky.

The Joy of Finishing

I am procrastinating going out for a run, because it's intensely hot outside. If I don't go, though, I'll get the fidgets. More about fidgeting later. In the meanwhile, I'll continue to procrastinate by telling you about how I just finally finished reading this book, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain--And How It Changed the World, by Carl Zimmer, frequent NYT contrib, and ScienceBlogger.

A few random pieces of take-home from the book, which focused on a 17th-century physician named Thomas Willis, who did a lot of work on brains back when their function was *extremely* poorly understood, coined the term 'neurology,' and wrote a book on the nervous system illustrated by none other than Christopher Wren, to whom there is a lot more than steeples, apparently.

1) Quakers are incredibly interesting. I want to read a whole book about Quakers next.

2) Our modern understanding of neurology is built on a heap of dead animals, particularly dead dogs. I could not help but be struck by the dog body-count in these pages.

3) Speaking of bodies, it's nothing short of amazing what they could do -- what one can do -- to bodies using really crude means. Open up a dog, change something around, see what happens. The scientists and doctors Zimmer describes work on bodies, especially animal bodies, as if they're cars or something. The surprising thing is how often their super-crude interventions work.

4) They put a bird in a vacuum, which is just cruel and gross.

5) But speaking of cruel and gross, one interesting thing that got touched on is how, in the course of doing all this research on animals, Willis and others came to appreciate how animals and humans are kind of similar, neurally. I mean, animals feel pain (der), and also have memories, feel anxiety, and other things that are familiar to us...one of the researchers in the book even had a change of heart about experimenting on dogs.

My Mom Was Here This Weekend...

...and one of the things she did was to start a blog.

It's called 'Blue Ridge Biology,' and if she keeps up with it, it will be charming.

P.S. Mom, I got a photo up in your profile for you.

Obesity As Metaphor?

The day before yesterday I was walking down 6th Avenue with an urgent rumbling in my stomach, I chanced to pass, at the same time, a McDonald's on my left, and a morbidly obese man sipping cola out of a giant-sized McDonald's cup on my right. Moments earlier, I'd been thinking about stopping into McDonald's for a quick snack, but when I saw the fat man with the soda, I immediately and involuntarily registered disgust. And that's when it hit me: Is it possible, just maybe, that fat-bashing, which has recently become acceptable (c.f. books like Fast Food Nation and films like Supersize Me) when it is couched in terms of a critique of fast-food culture/American eating habits in general, might actually be a projection by affluent Americans (the kinds of urbanites who generally strive to eat healthfully, work out, and stay slim), onto the bodies of obese people who happen to often be people of poorer means (Greg Crister's great piece in Harper's in the early '90s established the link between obesity, fast-food consumption, and poverty), of their (the affluent people's) disgust with their own patterns of conspicuous consumption???

I'm saying: Isn't it interesting that educated/affluent people spend a lot of time criticizing and being disgusted by other Americans' consumption of low-quality calories, while those same people are often plagued by an obscure sense of guilt about the amount of resources (gasoline, electricity, water, plastic, disposable diapers, you-name-it) that they themselves require? Might it not be easier to displace that vague sense of guilt about one's own behaviors and their bad consequences for the Earth by fixating instead on the unrestrained appetites -- so similar to one's own, and yet so different -- of a class of people that they can comfortably define themselves as separate from?

I'm just saying, is all. Am I the first? Or is this just, as Meg suggested it might be, a case of intellectual "overreach"?

I confess. Having thoughts like these makes me wish I were back in school again, so I could transform them into a nifty paper. Hm. I should have done American Studies.

Meg Says...

"For a really good time, check out the Ritter Sport homepage."

I recommend the chocology page, but hell, it's all good.

Meg and I are enjoying a Ritter Sport 'dark chocolate with whole hazelnuts' right now. Because, hey:

"Ritter Sport also leads the way in terms of quality and quantity when it comes to fillings. This means, for example, that there are more nuts in “Ritter Sport Milk chocolate with Whole Hazelnuts” than in other chocolates – and what is more, only the best hazelnuts will do: hand-picked and freshly roasted whole Turkish hazelnuts with precisely defined ideal dimensions – between 1.1 and 1.3 cm in diameter."

It's a mad world. The diameter of my hazelnuts is the last thing I want to worry about. Good looking out, Ritter Sport!

Sultry!

I went for a walk after dinner with Stephanie. Outside it's so humid that the streetlamps have steamy halos around them.

We walk down a classic Brooklyn block between Smith and Court. Outside of a row-house, at the gate, a father and his two small children are saying goodbye to another father and his child. The little girl who belongs to the house swings from the wrought-iron gate. "Thanks, and bye," she croons.

On the next block the brownstones are even taller. Three adults sit at the top of a steep staircase, in the frame of an open front door. In front of them is an empty wine glass, a pack of cigarettes laid on its side. They seem happy.

No relief in the apartment, though, where the air's still thick and sticky. I learned a word at work today that reminds me of this air. The word is "biofilm."

New, Improved Wednesdays

I love the New Wednesday Afternoons. I really hope I get to keep them.

See, work decided that they definitely needed someone to update the website on Sunday nights, so there will be fresh content for the Monday-morning blog rush. Agreed. So now I work at home for three hours on Sunday nights, and leave work three hours early on Wednesday afternoon.

This afternoon was the first time, and I felt a little criminal just walking out the door with everyone else still in there, banging away at their keyboards...

But once outside I realized, the New Wednesday Afternoon just might save me.

Nothing major. It was threatening rain. I walked into Sephora with no intention of buying anything. A tanned woman with a reassuring basso who kept calling me "girlfriend" and "sister" demonstrated expensive skin creams on my hand for a while. The sky was threatening rain in a serious way.

I went to the Union Square greenmarket. I felt like a hummingbird, flitting from stall to stall, plucking up vegetables. I'm on a radical budget (umm...about $20) till the 15th, when I get paid again, so I felt the thrill of the person who's getting something good for very little. A very "yeah, we can do this! And eat well too!" kind of feeling.

Three tiny zucchinis (fry up in olive oil, a little red pepper, lemon juice, a little parmesan, serve on pasta, yum), head of red boston lettuce from a woman who liked that I used the word "delicious," a head of arugula, a bunch of beets (actually two gigantor beets), a cucumber. A small container of blueberries.

Now that I'm not drinking, I suddenly feel justified in buying extravagant fruits. So far: two mangoes, a pound of red cherries, a small thing of raspherries, and this afternoon's Hudson Valley bleuets.

Then I went to Trader Joe's, because nothing says luxury like Trader Joe's with almost no line, for some olive oil, chevre, bread, and sardines.

And then I came home. The F at 14th Street took forever, and by the time I emerged at Bergen it had started to pour, torrentially. Luckily I had patronized an umbrella-wallah in Manhattan, but still, I made it home just before my two nested Trader Joe's paper bags gave out.

And now I am sitting here, waiting for one giant beet to cool. I'm trying to put together a homemade version of Cafe Luluc's unbelievably addictive beet salad. We'll see.

I am also making some fennel.

In conclusion, yay Wednesday. A little time with the pressure off is just the ticket. I feel more like myself when I've got no particular place to be, and nothing very pressing. (That is why there is a particular kind of cheerful relaxation that I can enjoy on a random Wednesday afternoon but not, say, a Saturday night, or even a Sunday evening. Because Saturday nights and Sunday evenings each have their telos, and we all know what it is.)

This feeling can only be enjoyed in limited doses, though, or it shades from 'pleasantly liberated' into 'aimless and disconnected.'

Three hours of work on a Sunday are a fine exchange for a three-hours' early release on a Wednesday afternoon. Now cross your fingers and hope this sweet deal doesn't get taken away from me.

...And We're Off!

I must say that starting up a blog on blogger is much easier than the obsessive tweaking I've been doing over at 400 Words, here.

I've been missing the old Too Much Katherine dot com a lot lately, and now, at three a.m. on a Sunday morning, I'm bringing it back.