Little Bucket Update #3

The Serbian plucked a bouquet of bold pink azalea clusters from its parent shrub and handed it to me.

“There you go, happy birthday!”

I stuck it in my hair and we walked on home in evening shadows, skirting the perimeter of the park to avoid the poopy stench of freshly applied mulch, and speaking of pizza and things. We always talk about food on the walk home because we’re always starving after work. On the other hand, we’re always too fatigued to cook anything exotic, and so we just dream of exotic dinners, then go home and eat convenience store food or worse.

This time, however, I stir-fried spears of asparagus. The azaleas went into the bucket of whims. Birthdays are wonderful. Everyone made me feel so strangely special. As much as I want to say that I don’t need that...

Dear Year 27

What is a year in the twenties without drive and dreams? A set of guidelines for the 3^3 year of this individual's life:

-read more; don't buy any books
-cook more
-become a better spy (keep this one secret)
-invest in a sewing machine for my apron & bow tie biz
-build a dollhouse
-buy a ticket to Moscow (round trip)
-draw more unicorns
-play more music 
-call umma more
-be a ballerina 24/7
-be proud and don't feel stupid
-live outside the box

Little Bucket Update

I woke up this morning and found my bucket filled with jellybeans.

Little Bucket of Whims

Candide is the story of the failures of Optimism (the philosophy, not the attitude). It is the detailing of one character’s miseries after another to demonstrate the invalidity of the claim that everything is for the best, and that this world is the best of all possible worlds. In the end, the posse of main characters happen upon a Turk farmer who is unlike all the other personalities they have thus far encountered in the story in that he is not royalty, not of the noble cast, and not a distinguished member of the Church. The farmer does not lead a lavish life, he is not a man of means-- but he does have enough means. He has some acreage of land, and he has a wife and children who work with him to maintain this “garden”. This plot he sees as his lot in life-- not riches and gold, nor titles nor fame, nor a quest for answers to the great philosophical questions of morality and the existence of evil, of the existence and purpose of God; only to keep at bay the three known evils-- boredom, vice, and necessity- by spending his days cultivating his garden.

The last line of Candide (spoken by Candide),

“All that is well and good, but we must go and cultivate our garden.”

may be interpreted from either an optimistic point-of-view or a pessimistic one. Perhaps tilling the earth in the literal fashion, leading an organic life and maintaining our attachment to the earth that begets life is truly the way to happiness, satisfaction, or purpose. Or perhaps the last line can be viewed as an extremely banal and trite conclusion to a sweeping exploration of an influential philosophical paradigm. In this pessimistic interpretation, the banality of the last line mirrors the banality of life itself, that after all this searching and questing for truth, for purpose, for meaning, it turns out that the joke is on us for (a) thinking there was more to life than survival or (b) thinking that even if there was a grand design or purpose, that we were part of the elite, privileged crowd who could or would be allowed to comprehend such a design or purpose, when in truth, we are no better than mice on a ship, for whom the captain doesn’t give a damn.

All this talk of purpose and design and gardening brings me to a bar in West Philadelphia, where one night I went with some friends for a breast cancer awareness benefit (or something). I ordered sweet potato fries from the menu and it came in this cheap silver tin bucket along with a ramekin of sweet and spicy mustard and another ramekin filled with barbeque sauce. As the dinner coursed on, gardening came up and I chatted on to my friends for a while about the book Candide as I did above. As time ticked on and the sweet potato fries dwindled, a strange attachment began to form between me and the cheap tin bucket. Suddenly, I found that I wanted nothing more than to take that bucket home and plant a little garden in it of my own. Would that be stealing?

“You can get the same thing from Target for under a dollar!”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t be my bucket. It didn’t hold my sweet potato fries.”

Sure I was being irrational and saying stupid things just to say things-- as I often do-- but as also often happens, my words began to take hold, and by the end of the dinner, I really did love that little bucket more than anything. I dreamed at the table of what sort of flora I could plant into it-- flowers or herbs? I took a sheet of “Where the Wild Things Are” stickers that my friend had on hand for the event and plastered my bucket with childish images of monsters on swings and children pretending to be monsters. Already, it was like a child to me. How quickly and easily meaning and attachments are formed!

I stashed my tin baby in a plastic sack along with my leftovers and brought it home with me that night. It spent the night on the kitchen counter unwashed, still reeking of the oils from the deep-fried potato cuts.

Two days later, I gave my bucket its first cleaning with orange-scented Dawn dish soap. It maintained its tarnished image and its stickers, but was relieved of the grease. I set it upside down on a paper towel to dry.

Two nights later, as I ambled through the city streets, on my way home from work, I felt myself seized by the balmy night air so unusual for the month of April, and by the beautiful blooms that hung heavily from the branches that not a month ago and for months before that had stood stripped of life, barren, skinny and wanting. I passed under the eaves of a large cherry blossom tree bursting with miniature pale pink bouquets and thought of my bucket. Half a block later, I doubled back to the tree, reached up and plucked one of the miniature bouquets from one of the thick stems branching out of the mother trunk.

“Don’t kill the flowers!”

I whipped my head around and caught a glimpse of the soothsayer in the dark as he flashed by on his bike. His words trailed behind him. I looked down at the flowers I had just plucked. Already a flurry of petals had been shaken from their fragile attachments and laid a-scattered on the sidewalk.

What remained of the bouquet ended up in my bucket shortly thereafter. I decided the following that evening as I stood back and admired my bucket now dressed to the nines in princess pink: the contents of my little bucket would change perpetually and unexpectedly, depending on nothing in particular and with no particular timeline. It would be a bucket of whims; it would not be your average potted plant.

…..................................................

Gazpacho!

I made the most interesting gazpacho today. Truth be told, it was less a gazpacho and more a hybrid of gazpacho, pico de gallo, and chickpea salad. To further elaborate, it was

(a) like gazpacho, but more spiced like a pico de gallo salsa due to an overdose of onion and peppers, and chunkier due to the addition of chickpeas into both the blended and unblended parts

(b) like pico de gallo, but soupier like gazpacho due to the partial blending, and chunkier/more mediterranean salad-like due to the addition of chickpeas

(c) like chickpea salad, but soupier like gazpacho due to the partial blending, and more spiced like salsa due to the overdose of onion and peppers

-as is, it would taste best as a dip
-next time, I would chop in less onion and peppers to make it less dippy and more edible as a main dish
-I <3 chickpeas very much; gonna make more chickpea dishes in the future

To Did List 4/26/11

-ballet warm-up focusing on slow, exact tendus
-wish Jess a Happy Royal Wedding Eve Eve Eve
-pick up a huge dying beetle, thinking that it is a dead flower; keep 70% of the resulting scream inside so as not to scare away the customers
-make a curving leaf + heart in a cappuccino cup
-learn that the woman who gets the slightly short extra dry double skim cappuccino to-go has a beautiful name-- Lubov (Любовь), meaning "love" in Russian; see her in a new light
-plan a dill gazpacho dinner to mark the end of a beautiful summery day

Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Last night, I watched an episode of "Glee" featuring a grilled cheese sandwich. Suddenly I had a serious craving for a real grilled cheese sandwich. This morning I woke up at 6:55 am and the first thing I thought about was a grilled cheese sandwich. I went downstairs, fired up the gas stove, threw together a couple slices of seeded rye bread, muenster cheese, and sriracha sauce, and grilled until the fire alarm went off. This note is really for my roommates, as an apology for disrupting their sleep this morning, all for the sake of satisfying a stupid craving for a stupid grilled cheese sandwich. I'm sure you understand. And the grilled cheese sandwich was to die for...just like our house.

4/20 2011

The first 80-degree day since last summer. I took my current read, Candide, up to the rooftop, but after I set up the blanket and lay down to read, all I could do for a while was stare up at the blue sky. I thought about my favorite passage in War & Peace-- the passage about the infinite blue sky that made me fall deeply in love with the book (luckily it was relatively early on in the tome). The warmth and slight humidity swept me away into days gone by. Summers spent in dirty frat houses. Those five days on the beach in Florida. My old college friends. Those five days in Oman. Good times occur in sets of five days. Birds sang and bees the size of dragonflies buzzed around me, but far enough not to scare me. I felt a world away. Eventually I picked up the book and read until near-conclusion, but a few pages before the end, I put my head down and drifted off. Woke up just in time for ballet.

To Did List 4/15/2010

-wash ballet clothes. Check.
-go to ballet. Check.
-go on a hot dog hunt after all the food carts have shut down for the day. Check.
-embarrass Hoa at the Apple Store by bringing her a birthday hot dog and wishing her an extremely loud happy birthday; make her turn an ungodly shade of red. Check.

"You do realize that up until now, no one here knew it was my birthday right?"

Of course, Hoa, that's why we came!

I might regret that last task in exactly two weeks. Will have to make sure I don't get scheduled for work that day.

To Did List

-share an Amish club sandwich at Reading Terminal
-play 20 (x10) questions with the old man from Home Alone who appears evil but turns out to be really nice and heroic
-pet an inanimate puppy statue
-get dark chocolate and toasted almond gelato with a Canadian friend
-play with a baby; she wore a furry brown hood with bear ears on her darling little head; Little Bear and I played "Up"; we went up and down the fountain step over and over again; we fell down and picked ourselves up; she dropped and picked up my Vitamin water; I hugged Little Bear goodbye and disappeared
-have a stoop chat; Radical Asteroids Never Dance On Me

Metaphoric Horseback Riding

cheval: horse

a cheval sur/entre: astride; straddling; straddled between; spanning

Tie-rrific Day

This morning, a man walked into the shop wearing a chartreuse green bow tie with tiny recycling symbols scattered all over it. It had been a gift; he worked for an environmental organization. Later, another man walked in sporting a lavender bow tie adorned with tiny white cranes in mid-flight. Yet later, another man walked in wearing a full-length burgundy red tie playfully decorated with wind and brass instruments and musical notes. By this time, I was of the opinion that the tie has became the predominant-- often the sole means of personal expression for the male professional. Someday, I decided, I too will wear a crazy tie to work. What sort of tie will I wear? I could go for irony, the abstract, the poetic, or fun and Ms. Frizzle-esque. The possibilities are endless.

Carpe Mane

Good morning world! It is 4 in the morning, and I cannot sleep so I shall be awake and do wake-y things.

Wake-y things:

-eat cheez-its to soothe gnawing guts
-read Candide and laugh at faux-logic
-listen to Chopin; hear the birds
-make a list