negativeneve

Since I started running, I’ve found that one of the stretches I have always done is aggravating my hip joints, mostly on the inner side. It’s always been my favorite stretch so I’m a little concerned about this. It’s become very painful to do. It doesn’t really hurt when I’m not stretching. Does anyone know what that is?

2) Part of running means I have also been incorporating breakfast into my morning routine. I never ate breakfast before! I have been eating Fage 2% yogurt with honey and homemade granola all week. I haven’t decided what I think of this morning thing, but breakfast is a plus.

3) My hair is driving me nuts. It’s gotten pretty long– below my shoulder blades– and I am using crazy amounts of conditioner to detangle it. Parts of it are matted pretty much every morning and I have to go in and pick the mats apart. I remember the last time this happened was when I was a freshman in college– the last time my hair was this long. So! I am thinking maybe my hair has reached critical mass and I should cut it back a bit. The question is whether to just cut three inches or do something short again.

4) I just bought two new dresses from eShakti. I have had several of you recommend them, so I finally was un-lazy enough to get out the measuring tape. I didn’t exactly fit any of their standard sizes, but I was closest to an 8, so I bought those. I am hoping they’ll see the big bra size and know what to do about it. If anyone’s wondering, my measurements are 38-27-38.

5) Remember a week or two ago when I told you all to read boxbrown‘s comics? Well, he has a new one, and it is called Everything Dies, and you should read it! It is about religion and humanism and stuff. There are three stories up for you to try. You should try them!

6) I am going to go meet rosefox shortly! I am very excited! So excited that I perhaps mistook the time I was supposed to meet her and almost jumped the gun by an hour and a half. Oops!

7) I like lemonade and have been drinking it a lot lately.

8) On the recent LJ thing: I have screencapped all of your locked posts, recorded video of myself reading them, and posted it on youtube. Just so y’all know. No, I wouldn’t share comments from anyone else’s posts with a link to a locked post in it; in fact, the idea to do that had never occurred to me before last night. However, whatever y’all want to do with comments on my posts is all good either way, as long as you don’t send anything I’ve ever locked into the world of public web stuffs. Even then, I will probably forgive you as long as it’s not personal information that implicates another person. If I even find out about it. But that’s just how I roll. I heart you all!

But here are drinks from this weekend.

On Friday, I did something I almost never do, and mixed a drink from a magazine. It was a drink from this month’s Food & Wine, made with Hendricks, arugula, lime, and agave. I mixed it for two reasons: one, because it had arugula in it; and two, because it accompanied an article that reflected a lot of my own thoughts about bartending (and particularly my thoughts on the pretentiousness of the term “mixologist” and the unsettling trend of people putting things in drinks purely as a type of liquid oneupmanship as opposed to making something that tastes good. I wasn’t fond of the agave, and think it’s just not really the right sweetener for gin, but the arugula was really nice.

On Saturday, I made this:

Basil Negroni

This isn’t quite a negroni with basil in it; it’s a little bit off a traditional negroni recipe and has a sort of duskier flavor.

Ingredients for two drinks
6 oz gin
1 oz Campari
1 oz port wine
1/2 oz Grapefruit bitters
About 20 leaves basil, plus two pretty sprigs with blossoms

Instructions
Put everything in a shaker with ice, except basil flowers
Muddle until basil is bruised
Shake
Strain into two chilled cocktail glasses, add flowers for garnish

On Sunday, I started out my day by infusing a bottle of gin I wasn’t too thrilled with with lavender. We’ll see how it comes along next week.

Then I made this:

Elderfields Road

Elderfields Road is the name of the street my father grew up on. This drink is a variation on a Manhattan, and since he grew up right outside the city, I thought that was appropriate, considering the major ingredient here.

Ingredients for 2 cocktails
6 oz bourbon
Juice of 1 lime
2 oz elderberry syrup (homemade)
1 oz red vermouth
2 splashes blood orange bitters

Instructions:
Mix everything but the bitters together in a shaker with ice and shake
Pour into two chilled cocktail glasses, add bitters

Then last week, beatonna asked for folks who would join her in a Run For Congo Women. It’s a 5k run to raise money for women in the Congo.

I know, I know, I already posted about this, but for those of you who missed it or may have just been breezing by at the time, we would be mighty happy if anyone could give our team a donation at our team donation page right there.

Anyway, it’s a 5k race. And as most of you know, I am miserably out of shape. So, when I heard about the race, I started running.

I didn’t own sneakers or any running gear, so starting the first night, I did the running exercise on the Wii Fit, which I don’t even know if that counts as real running, but I figured it was something. I started with the “long” jog on the distance run and then worked up to the 20 minute jog on the timed run. I decided that one mile on Wii Fit is probably equivalent to about one kilometer of real running. I decided that each week, I’d increase by 1K. I have until September 25, so I think this is a doable timeframe to get ready in.

On Monday, I went out and bought myself my first pair of running sneakers. They were bright pink. And then I bought running socks! But I didn’t have any appropriate running clothes, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. Then, yesterday, I was taking a walk to where Rina told me there was a Michael’s craft store, and, lo and behold, I saw it like a beacon in a storm: a big Sports Authority sign. So I trekked over to the Sports Authority, and when I got there, they were having a MASSIVE TENT SALE in the parking lot. Hooray! Unfortunately, the tent was not for sale.

I went into the mysterious tent, and when I emerged, I had bought two sets of running clothes and it had all cost me under $50. It was like a message from the universe, telling me that I should run! I was very excited! So I was telling Brendan about it at work today and he told me where there is a public track a few blocks from my apartment. So! I went to the track today.

It was a little weird, running in front of people, but I think it was a good experience, because it wasn’t as uncomfortable as I expected once I just sucked it up and did it. It is a big park with a lot of activities in it, and so there were a lot of people of all ages, and kids using the track to ride their bikes or skate as well as joggers. In fact, for most of the time, I was the only person really jogging.

I did five laps, or 1.25 miles, which is just a touch over 2k, and then I walked a bit to cool down. It was definitely hard work, but I also felt at the end like I could have done more. And unlike high school, I wasn’t winded after one lap of running, which tells me that the exercising I’ve done all summer helped a lot. So I felt like it was doable. Next week, I’ll try to work up to 3k, which is a little under 2 miles.

I’m still not sure about some things. Like, where do people put their keys when they’re running? I carried a little purse but it wasn’t the most practical.

All in all, though, this is a very exciting development for me!

karnythia

When I was twelve, I went on a school-sponsored camping trip. We went away for a week, and stayed in cabins for all but one night. On the last night, some of us were selected by lottery to go on a tent overnight.

I was one of the lucky kids who was chosen to go. I’m not sure how it happened, being the social outcast I was in middle school, but I wound up in a tent with a group of the more popular girls in my grade. These girls were usually very nice to me, but why they chose me for their tent is still beyond me. But they were friendly and inclusive, and for that night, I actually felt like I belonged in their group.

We pitched our tent fairly close to a tent belonging to a group of boys in our grade, one of whom I had a massive (and I thought, undying) crush on. I thought nothing of it.

Then it was time for bed, and in hushed whispers, the girls in my tent arranged a game of Truth or Dare with the boys across the way. I remember feeling apprehensive– I was thrilled, in part, to be permitted, even if just for one night, to be included in a game that was one of those secret realms of the popular, a game to be played at parties that boys came to. But I was also afraid. What if someone asked me to do something I didn’t want?

I decided the easiest way to deal with the situation was to just answer “Truth.”

We played without leaving our tents, whispering our demands and our responses between the two. It made it difficult to come up with good dares, but somehow, they came anyway. It was strange, though, this lack of association that the boundaries of the tents created.

When my first turn came around, they asked me, if I had to date any boy in the school, who would it be?

Of course, the boy it would have been was in the next tent. I was mortified, I didn’t want to say his name and have them all laugh. He already had a girlfriend, as much as any twelve-year-old could have a girlfriend, and it was one of the more popular girls, that these girls were friends with. I said I didn’t know, I didn’t like any of the boys.

They said I had to pick one. One of them suggested a name, a boy who was nice enough but probably someone they thought was socially acceptable for me to date– not too cute, not too popular.

And I named a completely different boy, one whom I thought was very conventionally attractive but not someone they were friends with, who I thought wouldn’t be an asshole about it if he found out.

They all laughed at me, incredulous, because he was shorter than me. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, but it wasn’t really that big a deal. I was a little embarrassed for a moment, but we moved on.

Another girl asked for a dare, and the boys told her to hand her bra across to their tent.

Things went quiet in our tent for a moment. The girl in question looked at all of us and whispered, quiet enough that the boys couldn’t hear, that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

One of the girls told her to just tell them, but she was too embarrassed to let the boys know she wasn’t wearing one. Finally, I asked her what size bra she wore.

“34A,” she said.

I said that was my size.

The girls looked at me with disbelief. “But your boobs are so huge!” one of them whispered.

The boys didn’t seem to catch on that this was taking so long. I suspect maybe they just thought that’s how long it took to get a bra off. I, meanwhile, started taking off mine, and handed it to her. She gave it to the boys, claiming it was her own.

The boys passed the bra back a couple of minutes later, and it didn’t look like they’d done anything weird to it. Knowing the boys in question fairly well, I think the dare was largely spurred by a combination of genuine curiosity and the fact that that’s what they thought they were supposed to be doing. None of them laughed or made any lewd comments. It wasn’t creepy in the way it might have been, and I didn’t feel pressured to hand over my bra.

The other girl was spared humiliation, and the game went one, but I don’t remember anything else about it.

It was the first time anyone told me I had big breasts. Uncertain, I went to my mom and told her an edited version of this story (leaving out the fact that it had come up during a game of truth or dare). She took me bra shopping shortly after that, and I was re-fitted with a 34C. In eighth grade, I was wearing a D, and then a DD.

By the time I was in ninth grade, I was having to special-order my bras.

But that night was the first moment in my life when I was even aware that I had breasts that were even a little larger than average. Somehow, looking in the mirror every day, the way preteen girls do, I never noticed the difference between the shape of my body and the shapes of other girls’ bodies. It took another girl to point it out to me, in the dark, in a tent. Until that moment, my breasts had never been part of my identity, and after that moment, it became increasingly difficult for them not to be.

I am going to celebrate it by quoting one of my ancestors, Ms. Lydia Jane Pierson.

“We sometimes hear men, advocating the cause of woman, talk of elevating and educating her, as if she must receive all things at his hand. We only ask to be allowed to enjoy the common gifts of Heaven. We have no patience with the phrenologist, who attempts to establish woman’s inferiority by pretending a difference of formation in the heads of males and females. — That such teaching is libelous, any person can convince himself by noticing the heads of those around him; especially let him go into a school of young children. We know that he will find no one distinguishing, general characteristic. This assumption of phrenology has made the whole science false and contemptible in my estimation. Women have heads as large, in proportion to the size of their persons, as men have; and until it shall be proved that the ox is more intelligent than a dog, because he is larger, we will never believe that man is wiser than woman because he has more bulk of flesh, blood and bones.”

–Letter to the Ohio Women’s Convention, April 19th, 1850

I am a woman and I like to vote.

Well, it’s been one month since I moved in, and while I could use a little more furniture, things are shaping up to be pretty swell:

(clicky the link to see photos on my blog!)

Last night, when Rina came over, I offered to make her a drink. She said she liked Manhattans and drinks of that ilk, so I pulled out some bourbon and vermouth (Punt E Mes is my red vermouth of choice).

While I was doing this, I opened up a bottle of Fernet-Branca and asked her to smell it, toying with the idea of mixing it into the drink. But Fernet-Branca is one of those things that people either love or hate, so I didn’t want to put it in the drink if she wasn’t going to like it.

She took a sniff, and said “that smells like my childhood!”

Rina went on to talk about her Italian family and their cakes, which, and I agree from my experience with my Italian family, are always covered in delicious icing, but when you get to the cake part, it’s always drenched in liquor to the point that for a child who is craving sugary sweetness, it’s inedible.

So I made her a drink. Tonight, I remade the drink for my mother, who said it was “a better Manhattan.” It’s not as sweet, and the Fernet-Branca is a much more sophisticated flavor than, oh, maraschino cherries.

Here it is for you:

Ingredients:
3 oz bourbon (I used Eagle Rare last night, Buffalo Trace tonight)
1 oz red vermouth (Punt E Mes)
1/2 oz Fernet-Branca

Instructions:
–Pour all ingredients into a shaker with ice, shake
–Serve in a chilled martini glass
(easy!)

In other proportions, served on the rocks or shaved ice, this is called a Fanciulli Cocktail, but I use a lot more bourbon here. And no ice.

When I was a little kid, my favorite game would be to sit with my friends and both draw the same thing at the same time.

None of my friends liked this game. They would usually get bored after the first one. I have a sketchbook from when I was a kid, where I used to have “theme pages.” There was a clown page and a cheerleader page and some other pages, but those are the ones I remember. I would ask my friends to add their doodles of clowns or cheerleaders or whatever to the appropriate page. Some of them humored me. Some of them didn’t even go that far.

But tonight, Rina came over and we drew things!

Rina has been doing this neato series of comic versions of tweets, and she worked on some of those. Then I did some, too, but mostly, I drew pictures of Rina drawing! And here I will reveal the secret, centuries-old process by which her comic tweets are made! It has been passed down for generations and protected by a secret order of sworn guardians.

Rina is freaking awesome, y’all. It’s so cool to be able to draw with someone who has so much talent and skill and is willing to talk about her art and pass on advice and knowledge so openly. Plus, she is just generally fabulous. Go check out our comic tweets on her blog!

Here they are!

Sharp set the truck on fire, igniting ammunition inside the vehicle in what police believe was a tactic to draw people out of the building, Kowalski said. Sharp also attempted to set fire to the truck’s trailer, which was carrying wood chips, road flares, gasoline and ammonium nitrate fertilizer, but it failed to ignite, Kowalski said.

“It looks like it was possibly an improvised explosive device,” he said.”

I need to say something, here.

The “debate” (which would be more appropriately referred to as “vitriol”) surrounding the Cordoba House community center planned for Lower Manhattan has kept me on the edge of tears on and off for days now.

I have heard people refer to Imam Rauf, founder of the Cordoba Initiative, as a terrorist, simply because he has, time and time again, tried in the name of a spirit of tolerance and understanding, to explain why some people feel the way they do about the United States, and why people might be incited into violence against the US and our political allies.

People, saying “hey, they’re pissed off because you have armies in their countries and side with Israel” ain’t terrorism. And he has said repeatedly that he doesn’t feel that this places blame on the US for making those decisions. He’s explaining the line of rationale, not excusing it.

This man is not a terrorist:

This man is a terrorist:

I am a New Yorker. Our city still has wounds that desperately need to be fixed. You, people spewing your hate at people who live in our city, work in our city, lost loved ones in our city, simply because they are of the same faith as the people who caused that dreadful event, maybe because they don’t look like you or share the same cultural habits as you, you are the ones tearing the scabs off our wounds. You are the ones who will not let us heal. Every time you rationalize, claim some more and more preposterous excuse for why people should not be able to practice their faith, teach other people about their faith, improve their community and help contribute to the healing process, you, you are compromising the values of the American ethos, but the values of nearly every major world religion. Every time you call a man who has dedicated his life to spreading tolerance between faiths “a terrorist,” you are failing to open your eyes to the most basic kind of love we can feel for each other as human beings.

And I want to be able to remember what happened at the World Trade Center with a spirit of love, with the beautiful and bittersweet memories of the way New Yorkers came together to help each other and mourn together in the days that followed, not with the horror, fear, and confusion of those life-altering hours. I want to be able to say that what happened that day made me a stronger and better person, made me more compassionate and just, and that it made all of us stronger and better people, more compassionate and just.

You are making that impossible. You are destroying my memories. You are demanding that I feel misery for something I already felt too much misery over. And I will not stand for that.

I would urge you all to think on the message that Imam Rauf is trying to spread, and not the message Patrick Gray Sharp tried to spread. I don’t know if I agree with everything Rauf says in his Ted speech, and we don’t know what Sharp was saying when he tried to hurt those police officers, but I certainly approve messages of tolerance, compassion and love over messages of terror, hate and fear.

beatonna

We are going to be running! Please consider giving even a small amount on our team page.

Secondarily, this is a good way to keep me on track to getting in shape! Since I have been faily at it since I moved.*

*More on that later!