Last Valentine's Day, I had bronchitis and fell on black ice and sprained my knee. I spent the succeeding week-plus coughing myself mute, limping around with a cane, and generally feeling like the world's worst WWI cosplay.
This Valentine's Day, I worked until the late afternoon when![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I went out for dinner at Mamaleh's, where he got his traditional 50/50 (pastrami and corned beef) and I got my less traditional 50/50 (chopped liver and tongue) and we tried the kreplach for the first time and can recommend so long as they stay filled with that savory, melting brisket. The weather was just cold enough that I felt justified ordering the house toddy, because there is nothing about hot apple brandy with saffron and ginger and pomegranate that I don't want to drink; Rob stuck to house-made sodas for the meal but accompanied dessert with a malted Brandy Alexander, otherwise known as a very fancy booze milkshake. I have a soft spot for Mamaleh's ice cream sandwiches, especially when the ice cream is Meyer lemon with inclusions of poppy seed and the sandwich is a pair of hardly sweet tahini cookies. And because everything connected with money is nightmarish right now, it was especially nice that we had built up enough points as frequent customers to make the meal possible. Then we went to the MFA and stared off the food coma in front of revival jewelry and M. C. Escher and monuments to the marginalized and a terrific installation by Daniela Rivera called "The Andes Inverted" (2017), which reproduces in vertiginously stacked earth and oils the broken, sky-tilting rake of a perspective I have seen only in dreams. I loved and will return to "(un)expected families," a double gallery's worth of photographs of affectionate relationships, chosen and born into, queer and not, of color and not, all kinds of mixed. There is a small and extraordinarily moving set of candid pictures of women in the early twentieth century who identified themselves in "Boston marriages." Two look to me as though they could be platonic. The rest are visibly, physically couples, kissing, embracing, in one case captioning themselves with the romantic popular song "Peg o' My Heart." I am not necessarily surprised, but hadn't known until tonight that I could recognize Nan Goldin's style from across a room. There was also a photo of James Agee and Mia Fritsch taken sometime in the mid-'40's which I felt very friendly toward. When the museum closed and kicked us out, we walked up Huntington Avenue into Copley Square and for once did not get hammered by public transit; we took the Green Line to Lechmere and the 80 home. We fed the cats and refastened Autolycus' collar, which had done exactly what it was supposed to do earlier by breaking away when he dived unwisely for the tub; now we have port cat and starboard cat once again and starboard cat is crouching in my bookshelves, watching me write about him. I will get some more work done and finish watching Kathryn Bigelow's K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), since the original plan of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) requires Rob with whom I saw the first movie to be awake.
Definitely an improvement.
This Valentine's Day, I worked until the late afternoon when
spatch and I went out for dinner at Mamaleh's, where he got his traditional 50/50 (pastrami and corned beef) and I got my less traditional 50/50 (chopped liver and tongue) and we tried the kreplach for the first time and can recommend so long as they stay filled with that savory, melting brisket. The weather was just cold enough that I felt justified ordering the house toddy, because there is nothing about hot apple brandy with saffron and ginger and pomegranate that I don't want to drink; Rob stuck to house-made sodas for the meal but accompanied dessert with a malted Brandy Alexander, otherwise known as a very fancy booze milkshake. I have a soft spot for Mamaleh's ice cream sandwiches, especially when the ice cream is Meyer lemon with inclusions of poppy seed and the sandwich is a pair of hardly sweet tahini cookies. And because everything connected with money is nightmarish right now, it was especially nice that we had built up enough points as frequent customers to make the meal possible. Then we went to the MFA and stared off the food coma in front of revival jewelry and M. C. Escher and monuments to the marginalized and a terrific installation by Daniela Rivera called "The Andes Inverted" (2017), which reproduces in vertiginously stacked earth and oils the broken, sky-tilting rake of a perspective I have seen only in dreams. I loved and will return to "(un)expected families," a double gallery's worth of photographs of affectionate relationships, chosen and born into, queer and not, of color and not, all kinds of mixed. There is a small and extraordinarily moving set of candid pictures of women in the early twentieth century who identified themselves in "Boston marriages." Two look to me as though they could be platonic. The rest are visibly, physically couples, kissing, embracing, in one case captioning themselves with the romantic popular song "Peg o' My Heart." I am not necessarily surprised, but hadn't known until tonight that I could recognize Nan Goldin's style from across a room. There was also a photo of James Agee and Mia Fritsch taken sometime in the mid-'40's which I felt very friendly toward. When the museum closed and kicked us out, we walked up Huntington Avenue into Copley Square and for once did not get hammered by public transit; we took the Green Line to Lechmere and the 80 home. We fed the cats and refastened Autolycus' collar, which had done exactly what it was supposed to do earlier by breaking away when he dived unwisely for the tub; now we have port cat and starboard cat once again and starboard cat is crouching in my bookshelves, watching me write about him. I will get some more work done and finish watching Kathryn Bigelow's K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), since the original plan of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) requires Rob with whom I saw the first movie to be awake.Definitely an improvement.
