Old Timey New Fangled Gastro Disaster Plans

Last night my friend Mike M. invited me and Jen, who is staying with me for the holidays to go see The Can Kickers play in Allston.

"I love music with a washboard," I exclaimed to Jen who, typically, was not as excited about punk rooted Appalachian jam bands as I am. In just a few hours we found ourselves crammed into a house party with about fifty other people, hopping up and down to the folk based, punk tinged, drum backed sound of the band. I danced small in the front row. I ran into two former students of mine in the impossibly tight crowd, and made friends with a girl who let me stand in front of her because "you're so short, you should go up close!"
"It's a perk," Jen commented to Mike.
"I don't take up a lot of space," I explained to our newest friends, "but I do bring two normal sized people with me wherever I go."
After the set, we inched our way out the door through the clouds of smoke and between bottles Two Buck Chuck being passed from hand to hand.

Later the evening found us in Boston's South End toasting a dear friend for his birthday. We found Quinn drinking at Aquitaine but he soon hustled us one street over to Boston's newest trattoria, Coppa.
"I can't believe we went from that to this," whispered Jen as Quinn ordered us a bottle of champagne and we browsed a menu of dishes such as fried risotto balls and chicken livers.
Inside the cozy restaurant people chatted quietly. There were no amps, no smoke, and certainly no PBRs to be found.
Our waitress was attentive and thrilled to find out that our plan as a table was to eat the most exotic things we could find. We let Quinn order, in honor of his birthday.
He chose an octopus salad with onions, a pizza topped with oxtail and bone marrow, sea urchin carbonara, and calves' brains ravioli.

"Those are baby cow brains."
"Think of it as using the whole animal."
"Thank you, Pocahontas."

WARNING: If you do not like strange and exotic foods you may want to skip the descriptions that follow.

I'm no stranger to octopus or to sea urchin and Mike seemed especially excited about the brain ravioli so I reported I was game. I was nervous about the bone marrow, due to some fairly unique personal experience in the OR.

The octopus came out first, and was impressively tender for how cold it was. I'm guessing it was pre-grilled, which explains that.
Next came the brain ravioli. I was able to fake myself out by not looking at the ravioli as I cut into it. The texture was similar to cheese ravioli. It was one of the saltiest things I have ever eaten, but I wasn't a huge fan of it overall. I'd rather try to make cheese ravioli with a beef sauce than put something so rich in my stomach again.
Then came the pizza. I regarded the pizza coolly, trying to figure out which part was the marrow. As I took my first bite, my stomach shifted. It was salty, earthy tasting. Not bad. But it also managed to taste just a little too much the way human bone marrow smells.
After getting it down I sipped champagne frantically trying to keep my composure.
"Not bad, right?"
"No, not at all," I smoothed my napkin, anxiously. I had come out with an empty stomach ready for pasta or a cheeseburger. Bone marrow was anything but filling, and we had one dish left to try.
The waitress took a second round of drink orders (water for me, thanks), and set the sea urchin carbonara on the table. We divided it up and went to work.
But as soon as the pasta hit my mouth I felt that I could go no further. Something about the eggs, cheese and butter immediately disagreed with me. I politely put my fork down.

"Are you going to finish that?" Mike was looking at my plate, and I gladly handed it over to him.
I continued to sip on water as the night came to a close.

Later I returned to my apartment with Jen and with Brennan, another friend and house guest for the week. As we prepared to turn in for the night, the tiny creatures in my stomach began to fight.

Embarrassed, I got into the bathroom and proceeded to free all the animals*.
Jen and Brennan were very gracious about their sick hostess, convincing me to put on my pajamas, call out of work and go to bed.

As we were falling asleep Jen whispered, "I'm still in disbelief of tonight's events."
"You mean how we went from listening to a folk band play music in a hippie commune to eating - (I gagged a little bit thinking about what we had been eating) in the South End?"
"Yeah."
"It figures, though."
"Yeah. It figures."

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* puke my (literal) brains out

i believe in everything, nothing is sacred; i believe in nothing, everything is sacred

Forgive me. I meant to write about Advent tonight while my stew simmered away. But like the Magi showing up unexpectedly at Bethlehem, my dear old college roommate found her way to my doorstep. She arrived just in time to help me wash the mushrooms and share the wine. So allow me to cheat this post with a story I wrote a while ago to explain our relationship.

It was early on in our freshman year that Jen's family had come to visit and dropped off two huge pallets of FlavorSplash water along with a ton of other "care package" items. Jen and I were random assignment roommates - friendly but not friends. Yet.

I decided the water was taking up too much room on the floor. Being a Social Thought and Political Economy student, (mainly enrolled in creative writing courses) I had some free time. I began to tie string around the bottles and hang them from anywhere I could get them to stay. The top of the windows, the posts of our bunk beds, attached to wire hangers and suspended from the ceiling...

Jen looked up from her Organic Chemistry book to ask for an explanation.
"It's like we have water-trees," I said, brushing my electric pink hair out of my face. "We can just reach up and pluck them down."

She was silent. Then, to my surprise my sensible, pre-med roommate put down the heavy text and began helping me string the bottles up.

Once we got all the bottles hung we went back to our homework. Jen began inventing a vaccine to prevent HIV transmission, while I wrote a poem about a bird I saw once.

It was not long before a bottle fell, BONK, narrowly missing Jen's head.

"Misch," Jen took her glasses off, "this is not going to work."

I had a different reaction to the crash. "Jen, this is great! It's like the Clock People in this book I'm reading."
"MichELLE. What on earth are you talking about?"

I was talking about a fictional pile of trash in a fictional underground tunnel. The Clock People in Tom Robbin's novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues tend to this giant trash pile that functions as their clock. When something falls off the trash pile, that's the clock striking. There is no set interval to the striking of this clock. It can go days without a sound, or toll several times in one hour. The noise reminds them that the time is NOW. There is no past or future. 1 o'clock; 2 o'clock ... means nothing. Just NOW.

I explained this to Jen. She looked like she was sorry she asked. She went back to her work.

BONKCRASH. A bottle fell onto the dresser between our work areas, upsetting some spare change.

"The time is NOW!" I yelled gleefully. Jen began to laugh. "The time IS now," she answered.

We picked up the water that had fallen and re attached it to the walls. As we were doing so Jen's boyfriend knocked on the door.

"What are you two doing?"
Jen smiled widely, "fixing our water-clock!" Mike looked extremely unhappy.
But I was very happy. And guess which one of us she spends her time with now?

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me...

...a fir tree full of sharks....



David and I went to Ikea last week to find a new carpet. We failed in our mission but managed to secure a bag of frozen meatballs as well as some nice place mats, and a series of photos of this rare shark conifer.

I wrote every single day last week but posted very little of what I worked on because I hated it.
Updating may be similarly spotty this week because as you are reading this I am picking my (original)* college roommate up at Logan airport for a week of shenanigans.

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* Once I moved off campus I roomed with many, many different people, friends and ferrets. I need to specify that Jen and I lived together in the dorms for two years because it is just more accurate that way.