Following up on an excellent vodka-pasta made yesterday by one of my house mates, I decided that in my unemployed state there is enough time in the day that I could actually cook something for dinner. I was thinking of an mandarin orange, walnut, chicken and greens salad that my mom would make a lot in the summer. But it's not really what I'd call a meal. It's good, but it's not enough. And if you've seen the weather the last month, you'll know that it's just too hot on the mid-Atlantic seaboard to have a meat-and-potatoes dinner. That's where my good friend epicurious.com comes in.
In 2 minutes or less I had tracked down a lettuce-wrapped mango chicken recipe that with about an hour turned into a dinner that I think I'd be willing to eat again. 2 people could probably have pulled it together in the time it takes to boil rice, but I was doing it solo and for the first time. The result? A minimally delayed dinner for 4. If all of my roommates come down with food poisoning in the next 24 hours, I'm going to blame it on whatever they had for lunch.
On other fronts, I've been spending some time this afternoon and evening wandering the byways of cyberspace. The way it used to be done on gopher, or the earliest days of the web: pages that lead to other pages in a bizarre--get this--WEB!
I haven't ever really read blogs with a critical eye before. I haven't paid attention to the types of things people write about, or who the apparent audience is. It's a much scarier act than I would have originally envisioned. Almost immediately, a line from a friend's page came to mind. She's spending some time in Turkey and was writing about how young boys are revered in its history.
"Sitting at the cafe on Sunday afternoon is like watching a parade. Boys walk arm-in-arm to the Bosphorus, where they fish, swim and play. Then they walk back with ice cream or balloons or fish. They have this amazing brown skin and they are utterly unselfconscious."
My first thoughts on blogging parallel her last comment on Turkish boys. They are utterly unselfconscious.
It is something I am not, and can not, be. Why should you care about all this seemingly extraneous information, dear reader? It's because if you read this blog, and think it doesn't sound like the me you know, it's very possibly because when I talk to someone the words leave my mouth and disappear into the ether. When I send you an email it's a message targeted one person within a context of all of our previous communications. BUT, when I write something for this space, those luxuries are gone.
If you think I'm holding back, call me on it. Maybe I am, maybe not. Regardless, there will be pieces that come up here that will be provocative, strident, and maybe occasionally even impudent. Like Thom Paine, Dorothy Day and Andy Borowitz, I just claimed my soapbox.
Coming Tomorrow: Who's Liberal?
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