Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Another case of Titleus Interruptus. In August, none of us who foolishly preoccupy ourselves with the Buckeyes’ football fortunes thought that a team rebuilding from losing 8 players to the 2007 NFL draft would be sitting at 10-0 on November 9th. Once we were, however, we saw no reason that we wouldn’t be 12-0 on November 18th. We simply got outplayed, at the Horseshoe, by a team that inexplicably wanted it more than we did.

This period of mourning will last about 4 more hours. Then it’s time to start thinking about Saturday and the possibility of heaping more disappointment on this benighted household.  The Rose Bowl’s a pretty good consolation prize to play for.

I can’t do it any more. I’ve been supporting the writer’s strike by not posting this week, but I’ve become disenchanted with the Guild’s advocacy vis a vis this blog, and I’m going scab.

Plenty happened this week. We had kind of a strange election in Seattle on Tuesday. The biggest deal was a massive transportation plan that coupled a wish list of highway construction with an ambitious mass transit construction project. You couldn’t choose one without the other, and the gamble was that commuters were so fed up with the status quo that they’d calibrate or arbitrage their fear of the unknown (mass transit) in order to ameliorate their immediate pain (highway gridlock). That gamble failed, as the haters of both roads and the haters of mass transit formed an unholy alliance to scuttle the whole thing.

Otherwise, I don’t think this election, in Washington at least, was much of a bellwether for where we’re going in 2008. I really think that, with the economy in flux and with the payback to Democratic voters from the 2006 election in serious doubt, it’s really hard to predict what’s coming up for 2008.

In other news, our member presale for the Ashland Shakespeare Festival started on Monday, and I rushed to buy our tickets for the last week in June. We’re in the front row for every performance, and we’re going to see:

• Our Town by Thornton Wilder. The last time I visited this play was when I was a senior and it was performed at our high school. I think it might have more resonance for me as an adult
• Midsummer’s Night Dream - seen this a lot, but never tire of it.
• Coriolanus - we saw this in Ashland about 10 years ago. It was a swashbuckling, all-out extravaganza in the outdoor theater. This production is going to be in the minimalist New Theater, and I’m not sure how well it will scale, or whether I’ll like it nearly as well. The delight will be in figuring it out.
• Fences - by August Wilson, another in his Pittsburgh Cycle. Looks to be 10 or 20 years after Gem of the Ocean, which we saw last year.
• The Clay Cart - a 2000-year-old Indian play that they claim is “utterly Shakespearean in spirit”. “Jewels are stolen. A Brahmin faces execution. A beautiful courtesan is at the mercy of the King’s bad-boy brother. Journey through a world where gamblers, holy men, political fugitives and royal scoundrels intersect and good people triumph.” Enough to elicit my ticket.
• Othello - we saw a performance of this play at Ashland several years ago. It’s hard to disassociate from the Olivier black-and-white film where Iago was by far the most riveting character. Gonna give it another try.
• The Further Adventures of Hedda Gabler - Hedda Gabler (from the Ibsen play, which OSF staged a few years ago) and various other dramatic characters, including Medea, and Mammy from Gone With The Wind, populate a fitful post-last-act purgatory. Sounds like it might be fun, if a bit fluffy. From a review ,
  • Tragic heroine par excellence Medea (Kate A. Mulligan), who at one point shows up blood-soaked from murdering her children for the umpteenth time. “I did it again,” she says, “and I feel rotten about it.”

So, we’ve got that to look forward to. I actually get really jazzed by just buying the tickets and making the reservations for lodging. It’s almost better than Christmas.

And Thursday night, once again, I was invited to my Jordanian/Palestinian project partner for an Arabic dinner, this time featuring two lamb dishes. One was kibbeh, a sort-of lamb meatball served with tabouleh. Another was made from chunks of lamb cooked in a yogurt sauce. I believe it’s called mansaf, and was served with white rice and pine nuts. Dinner was again followed by Turkish coffee. We again made it through the whole evening without somehow mentioning work, although it was a lot harder than last time, when we were getting acquainted.

I realize that it was cruel to leave that last post at the top for so long. Let’s see how far down we can push it.

It’s 6 am and, due to the time change, it already seems like a long day. I allowed myself to be sweet-talked into returning to Milwaukee this week, and I’m at Seatac waiting to board my plane. I’ll be time’s plaything today, a temporal yo-yo. It started, of course, with the “fall-back” early this morning. I’ll fly first to Detroit and spend an hour or less in EST, then hop back across Lake Michigan to spend the week in the equivocal climes of the Central time zone. When you do the math, I guess it ends up only being an hour’s dislocation.  I posit, in any event, that I really am my own time zone anyway, and I claim something like diplomatic immunity from the petty jurisdictions imposed by geography.

I hate to let my mom know that I flew through Detroit without popping down I-75 to see her in Perrysburg. We’ll see each other in a couple weeks, though, when she, my brothers and I gather in Charleston, SC for our annual oyster roast and OSU-Michigan gamewatch.

Meantime, she called me Friday with a problem with her computer, but I was at a client’s and couldn’t get back to her until Saturday (after, of course, the OSU game was over). Her screen was frozen with strange stuff all over it that she tried to describe and I tried to visualize. I finally just had her power down & back up and, as with 99% of all computer problems, that resolved the issue. Turned out she had been turning the computer and peripherals off by simply pulling the plug instead of doing the Windows shutdown. While it’s arguable that today’s vacuum cleaners are both more complicated and more useful than a PC, a PC’s operating system is more finicky and less bullet-proof, and you can’t operate them the same way.

One amusing thing, that I wish I had video of: she said that she struggled for over an hour with the computer on Friday night, then gave up & went to bed. Once in bed, though, she became so angry that she couldn’t sleep, and got up and struggled with it for a couple more hours. I think I’d really enjoy the video if it came with sound.

Sorry to use you for a prop, Mom.  It was the best material I could come up with.

We’re not doing anything tonight except handing out candy and trying not to think of ourselves as the scary old people of the block whose house the kids are daring each other to patronize. Just to show that we’ve been sports in the past, here are some shots of us dressed up to go to parties or music clubs:

That night I was wearing the red wig, leather miniskirt and fishnet stockings, we went to a club on Capitol Hill where a couple bands were playing. While I was standing in line at the bar to buy a drink, a young lady standing behind me bit me on the shoulder. That’s never happened to me before or since.

Possibly, however, the best costumes are those we throw together impromptu. One Halloween a few years ago, I came home from work to find that some neighbors wanted to dress up and head down to a local lounge. I had nuthin’ in the closet. I went out to the car and liberated the sheepskin seat cover from the driver’s seat. It pulled over my head perfectly where there was an opening for the headrest. I made up some huge fake boobs, donned one of Mrs. Perils’ skirts, made some sorta metaphorical blonde hair and went as the Dolly (Parton) Llama.

I can’t believe it’s going to be November.

After that dramatic lead-in, sorry if this sounds mundane. I had a wonderful time at dinner Thursday night. My friend’s wife, also a Jordanian/Palestinian, had worked much of the day preparing what amounted to a feast, consisting of:

• Adas - a soup of pureed lentils, lemon, rice and spices
• Kufta - savory meatballs served over white rice in a stew-like sauce of tomatoes, potatoes and carrots. The meat was ground beef. They said that they had pretty much switched a lot of their cooking from lamb to beef because more of their American guests prefer it to lamb.
• Kapsa - a rice concoction laced with spices, raisins, nuts, etc baked, and then topped with grilled chickens
• Dessert was Qatayef - dainty crepe-like pancakes filled with goat cheese and folded into a crescent, then served drizzled with a honey-like syrup
• Arabic or Turkish coffee - finely ground beans boiled with cardamom and a bit of sugar, served in small porcelain cups.

My friend’s two daughters from his previous marriage were spending the night, and helped set the table and serve the food, and were model children. (When I said as much to their mother the next day, she was moderately incredulous). The girls did say that they were happy that we were speaking English at the table. Apparently, when their father and stepmother have Arab guests for dinner, everyone speaks Arabic, and they’re left to fend for themselves.

Over the course of the evening, I learned a lot about the evanescent sense of domicile in the Middle East. Of course, the Palestinians have multiple layers of displacement. I also learned that other nationals there become displaced because some accept contracts to work in one of the oil-rich gulf states, and end up residing in Oman, Bahrain, UAE and Saudi Arabia for basically a 30-year career. But, at the end of their contracts, they must re-patriate to their countries of origin for their retirement, which causes a significant social dislocation. They are paid well while they are working, but they can’t really meld into the community because they will eventually have to leave.  And when they get back to “home”, they have no friends, and perhaps not many relatives left either.

So, after the dramatic build-up of last night’s post, I have to say that the evening was so convivial that I have nothing to “dish”. We talked about so many disparate things that I wasn’t at any risk of stumbling into the subject of work at all.  My friend’s wife is a physician trained in the Czech republic and working through a residency here in Milwaukee. She’s fluent in English and a delight to converse with. My sense is that there isn’t much that my pal can put over on her.

So earlier in the week, this Jordanian/Palestinian dude I’ve been working with here for a couple of months (we’re both consultants, working on several projects for this firm) invited me to his house tonight for a home-cooked Arabic dinner. He asked me if I’d ever eaten Arabic food, and, feeling all worldly, I told him about our neighborhood Afghan restaurant, and various Lebanese and Moroccan restaurants we’d patronized. He sort of scoffed and insisted that I had yet to experience real Arabic cooking, and I really couldn’t argue the point, so I gladly assented. I like the guy.

A minor complication arose today that may render the evening even more interesting. My host’s ex-wife works here at our client’s plant, a fact that I was aware of. But just a while ago we were worrying some detail about our project, I had other things to do, and I said we could resume our discussion tonight at dinner. He got kind of a funny look on his face and said, no, we couldn’t talk about work at his house, and I thought, fine, must be some kind of old-country custom or other. No, turns out his new (a couple of years?) wife doesn’t know that he’s working here in (by my observation) chilly but cordial proximity with Mrs. Ex (who is also remarried).

“So, where’d we meet?”, I asked him, since approximately 100% of our relationship is suddenly off-limits.

As I say, it might be interesting. Film at 11.

A week or so ago we saw a play by Steven Dietz called Halcyon Days at a little theater down by Greenlake, a couple miles’ walk from the house. We’d seen a play of his about 10 years ago called Lonely Planet, a two-man play about dealing with the AIDS epidemic. I remembered the snappy dialogue and droll humor, and so looked forward to seeing something else by Dietz. As an example, here’s a speech from Lonely Planet by a guy named Carl, who claims to have several occupations, each of them a total fantasy. What he really does with his days out in the community, we eventually learn, is a much more sober mission. Here he is talking about one of these fantastical occupations, a reporter for a tabloid newspaper:

Continue reading ‘Culchah’ »

58 years ago today, a pretty young woman cataclysmically complicated her life by heaving forth barely 6 lbs of quivering protoplasm in the form of Yr. Obt. Corres. (In the years to follow, the poor thing made two more attempts to balance the cosmic damage, with mixed results at best.) Thanks, mom, I’ll be thinking of you at about 11 tonight.

I got a nice early birthday present yesterday, as my Buckeyes staved off a furious comeback by the opportunistic Michigan State Spartans to remain #1 in the nation. Comcast was kind to me this time, delivering the game for free on ESPN2, although I couldn’t be sure until game time, as their menu kept saying, “Either Ohio State-Michigan State or (insert name of inconsequential ACC game here). I wasn’t about to call them to find out.

A funny thing happened during the broadcast. In recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, referees at the game sported pink whistles, and at least one announcer was wearing a pink tie. At one point in the broadcast, one of the announcers was pointing this out, and (I’m sure I heard this right) said, “in recognition of Breast Awareness Month.” What ? Suddenly, I’m supposed to ignore them for the other 11 months? In the guy’s defense, he was stuck working with Bob Griese, easily the worst color commentator now that Keith Jackson no longer soils the airwaves.

Also for my birthday, I’m off to Milwaukee this morning to work for the week. More later from Cheeseland, or points in between.