It isn't even a unique or interesting feature of my brain that it promotes attitudes toward myself which I would reject as maliciously unfair if applied to any other person and constructs interpretations of my relationships to other people that would objectively require everyone I know to be a dick, so I wish it would knock it off. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
julian set me that five questions meme which comes around periodically, so I have given it a shot.
1. What's a treasured memory?
In 2005, in mid-December, having spent the night on a makeshift bed on the floor of a dorm room and carrying a backpack whose contents were not limited to three books and a laptop and a pair of boots, I walked thirty-seven blocks down Broadway in Manhattan at such speed as to get street-complimented by construction workers for stripping off all my outer layers without slowing because I had to catch my train back to New Haven and I had gotten up without knowing that there was a transit strike on. Excluding the five minutes I spent in a drugstore and the five minutes I got lost, it took me an hour and five minutes almost exactly. It was bright and freezing and my hands were so numb by the time I reached Times Square that I had trouble with my wallet. I had been visiting my partner at the time; I had come down the previous night for Die Fledermaus at the Met. Bill Irwin played Frosch and I have never forgotten him complaining across the fourth wall about the use of Met Titles: "It's not an opera house—it's a multiplex!" The next day was the solstice. I was on another train to Boston by that afternoon. I had enormous difficulty with this question because my head is not really in a place for treasuring rather than gritting at memories, but I cherish the memory of that fast, swinging, literally blistering walk through crowded pavements and absolute gridlock. I made my train.
2. D'you have a food you really enjoy cooking?
Yes, to the point where I had decision freeze trying to single out a few contenders for purposes of this meme. I am good at steaks and find them satisfying to experiment with. I like peeling and slicing and baking apples, not necessarily as part of a pie. I have always enjoyed rolling my family's traditional fudge for Christmas and baking our honeycakes for Rosh Hashanah. My first meal in this apartment was a grilled cheese with ham made in the small frying pan because we hadn't yet moved the toaster oven over and I was not prepared to grapple immediately with the electric stove; the grilled cheese of my childhood is technically cheese on toast no matter its designation, but the diner-style kind has been in my life long enough to possess the virtues of convenience and comfort food and it was a good thing to claim a kitchen with. I also really enjoy cooking foods I have never attempted before. It has rarely produced disasters and often ranks memorably regardless of repetition. I am never again going to make a Zwiebelkuchen, but it was incredibly fun.
3. If you could teleport anywhere in the world for an afternoon, where would you go?
Since teleportation would skip the necessity of interacting with airports and/or a future that can get its act together on teleportation might conceivably have alleviated a plague, I would like to collect my husbands and the mother of my godchild and spend the afternoon either around Xirokambi, where I have a local connection; on Crete, where my mother once threw silver to the sea for Poseidon and the waves washed a watermelon up at her feet; or at Akrotiri, because I wrote a poem about it. I was supposed to visit Greece in the fall of 2020 with a friend of the family when she made one of her annual trips to catch up with relatives and check on the olive groves. Far worse things were lost that year and ever since, but I had been looking forward.
4. Tea, coffee, hot chocolate, or white Russian?
None! All contain caffeine which gives me migraines and has done so since I was in high school. Adolescence probably brought it on. I can remember the taste of coffee ice cream from my childhood and the treat of a packet of sugar poured into a spoon and filled in with cream and coffee, along with the kinds of tea favored by my mother and my grandparents, from whom I learned about drinking tea through a cube of sugar; they are delicious in memory, in the present day even the smell is a warning sign. Chocolate was less of an issue until I was medically forbidden it in the fall of 2019, at which point I discovered just how many desserts automatically include it. These days I am permitted to eat very small amounts and have done so this year without ill effect, but an actual cup of hot chocolate would be pushing my luck. When it was an option, I used to make it myself with goat's milk, very dark. In terms of mixed drinks, I have had several kinds of milk punch and really liked them.
5. Winter sunlight, or summer sunlight? Can you capture a difference?
Winter: knife-light, sharp-striking, clear as emptiness; the westering stretch-shadow of bronze; the sun firing the horizon, deer-red and dying out in the burn of windows or the smolder of trees. I like how late into the evening summer swims and the thick sea-haze of its skies, but I love autumn's ghost-light best and winter next, clarifying toward the frost-snap of the year. Even dry winters, I love the edges on the shadows. I am hoping to unpack my camera here soon.
julian set me that five questions meme which comes around periodically, so I have given it a shot.1. What's a treasured memory?
In 2005, in mid-December, having spent the night on a makeshift bed on the floor of a dorm room and carrying a backpack whose contents were not limited to three books and a laptop and a pair of boots, I walked thirty-seven blocks down Broadway in Manhattan at such speed as to get street-complimented by construction workers for stripping off all my outer layers without slowing because I had to catch my train back to New Haven and I had gotten up without knowing that there was a transit strike on. Excluding the five minutes I spent in a drugstore and the five minutes I got lost, it took me an hour and five minutes almost exactly. It was bright and freezing and my hands were so numb by the time I reached Times Square that I had trouble with my wallet. I had been visiting my partner at the time; I had come down the previous night for Die Fledermaus at the Met. Bill Irwin played Frosch and I have never forgotten him complaining across the fourth wall about the use of Met Titles: "It's not an opera house—it's a multiplex!" The next day was the solstice. I was on another train to Boston by that afternoon. I had enormous difficulty with this question because my head is not really in a place for treasuring rather than gritting at memories, but I cherish the memory of that fast, swinging, literally blistering walk through crowded pavements and absolute gridlock. I made my train.
2. D'you have a food you really enjoy cooking?
Yes, to the point where I had decision freeze trying to single out a few contenders for purposes of this meme. I am good at steaks and find them satisfying to experiment with. I like peeling and slicing and baking apples, not necessarily as part of a pie. I have always enjoyed rolling my family's traditional fudge for Christmas and baking our honeycakes for Rosh Hashanah. My first meal in this apartment was a grilled cheese with ham made in the small frying pan because we hadn't yet moved the toaster oven over and I was not prepared to grapple immediately with the electric stove; the grilled cheese of my childhood is technically cheese on toast no matter its designation, but the diner-style kind has been in my life long enough to possess the virtues of convenience and comfort food and it was a good thing to claim a kitchen with. I also really enjoy cooking foods I have never attempted before. It has rarely produced disasters and often ranks memorably regardless of repetition. I am never again going to make a Zwiebelkuchen, but it was incredibly fun.
3. If you could teleport anywhere in the world for an afternoon, where would you go?
Since teleportation would skip the necessity of interacting with airports and/or a future that can get its act together on teleportation might conceivably have alleviated a plague, I would like to collect my husbands and the mother of my godchild and spend the afternoon either around Xirokambi, where I have a local connection; on Crete, where my mother once threw silver to the sea for Poseidon and the waves washed a watermelon up at her feet; or at Akrotiri, because I wrote a poem about it. I was supposed to visit Greece in the fall of 2020 with a friend of the family when she made one of her annual trips to catch up with relatives and check on the olive groves. Far worse things were lost that year and ever since, but I had been looking forward.
4. Tea, coffee, hot chocolate, or white Russian?
None! All contain caffeine which gives me migraines and has done so since I was in high school. Adolescence probably brought it on. I can remember the taste of coffee ice cream from my childhood and the treat of a packet of sugar poured into a spoon and filled in with cream and coffee, along with the kinds of tea favored by my mother and my grandparents, from whom I learned about drinking tea through a cube of sugar; they are delicious in memory, in the present day even the smell is a warning sign. Chocolate was less of an issue until I was medically forbidden it in the fall of 2019, at which point I discovered just how many desserts automatically include it. These days I am permitted to eat very small amounts and have done so this year without ill effect, but an actual cup of hot chocolate would be pushing my luck. When it was an option, I used to make it myself with goat's milk, very dark. In terms of mixed drinks, I have had several kinds of milk punch and really liked them.
5. Winter sunlight, or summer sunlight? Can you capture a difference?
Winter: knife-light, sharp-striking, clear as emptiness; the westering stretch-shadow of bronze; the sun firing the horizon, deer-red and dying out in the burn of windows or the smolder of trees. I like how late into the evening summer swims and the thick sea-haze of its skies, but I love autumn's ghost-light best and winter next, clarifying toward the frost-snap of the year. Even dry winters, I love the edges on the shadows. I am hoping to unpack my camera here soon.
