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Occupational Hazard

          On Monday afternoons I begin to drift.  My mind spies the classroom door, the one that does not completely close, and at the first opportunity it slips through the crack between the door and the jamb and scurries down the hallway.  My eyes, realizing my mind has left, take their leave as well and wander.  They scan the clock, hung behind the long conference table, strategically placed so the professor can tell when you are checking the time.  They rest, in the lower left hand corners of their sockets, taking in the view of the Hudson River- today, draped in a veil of grey vapor- framed on either side by the two brick buildings across the quad.  My fingers grow restless and seek the comforting feel of my cell phone; careful their actions remain hidden underneath the table.  My notebook is open, but blank.  My pen is uncapped, but still.

            Then, an unexpected turn occurs.  The class laughs, and I automatically laugh with them.  It is a controlled laughter, lasting, like all the other purposeful laughs, for a very specific amount of time.  Did my professor say something funny?  I do not know.  My laugh is a mask that lies, “Yes, I heard everything you said and therefore, I am participating.”

            My professor is no longer discussing the book we were assigned.  She is talking about being a writer.  She is talking about how writers are misunderstood, living in a “dark hole” for the majority of their careers.  If they are lucky, they are pulled from their holes, up, into the light where they bask in the golden praise of readers and critics.  But then, more often then not, they are cast down again, and must watch, from the familiar depths, as other writers rise around them.

            She goes on to explain how writers experience the world in a certain “closeness”.  They are attune to observations so minute others never notice.  The pores of the world seem large to a writer, and within each pore lie a billion untold stories.  To live in this way, to unconsciously and continuously seek, to twist the real into the imaginary and pretend it is real again, this is what it means to be a writer.

            My classmates nodded their heads.  All had heard, but few had listened.  Those that had listened understood the professor completely, and dreamed of dark holes and bright skies, their minds slipping away once more.

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The BumBlur- 'Turk'-ish Delight- It Just Makes Cents

    Every so often this Blog will take a moment to revel in the delight that comes from being a perpetually broke college student.  The sacrifices, the savings, the steals, all will be accounted for in this post, and those to inevitably follow. 

    I report to you, now, from inside a very ordinary dorm room, at a very ordinary desk, where, upon the third rung of a built in shelf sits a ceramic plate in the shape of a leaf.  There, nestled in the midst of its retoussé, burnt orange edges are a handful of coins, which have come to be called, the Emergency MetroCard Fund (no, not EMF, it is far more fun to say the phrase in its anti-abbreviated entirety).  To be honest, the collection of coins was, at first, simply that, an ever-growing mound of loose change, pried from the zip pocket of a dangerously bulging wallet.  The change was removed, placed in the plate, and the wallet was thin once more. 

     The plate’s transition from dual functioning paper weight/ change purse… change leaf… whatever, made the transition to the Emergecy MetroCard Fund in the Summer of 2010, when, low on funds, I borrowed from it several quarters and bought myself four rides on my “insufficient fare” MetroCard- two to work and two from work.  Now, when I say “work” I mean internship and when I say “internship” I mean unpaid.  The little MTA charges on my bank statement, highlighted in ice blue, were slowly beginning to add up during those summer months, and so, I rode the rails with a new sense of freedom that morning and the morning after, delighted to avoid another transportation induced charge on my credit card.  To me, loose change wasn’t real money, and when I collected, saved and spent the coins on MetroCards it began to feel as if I never paid to take the subway. 

    “Wouldn’t it be nice,” I thought, “to never have to pay for my MetroCard with my own money ever again?”

    Then, I discovered Mechanical Turk, a website run by Amazon, which allows anyone to log on with their Amazon username and password, perform various online tasks (i.e. surveys) and get paid for it.  The reward for completing said tasks can range in value anywhere from a penny to even as high as twenty dollars.  When completed tasks are approved the money is put into the user’s Amazon account, and from there the user can either spend the money on Amazon products or transfer it to an outside account after reaching a minimum of ten earned dollars.

    While, as an MTurk worker I knew the program would never bring me copious amounts of cash, the sums were large enough to continue to front my transportation needs and then some.  When I found myself with time to spare and an Internet full of pointless distraction at my finger tips, I turned to MTurk and got paid for my procrastination and general boredom with the day.  Instead of youtube videos I took surveys and instead of facebooking I answered questions about consumer products, all the while, not only earning money, but saving money.  I bought an inexpensive dress at forever twenty-one and having just transferred some MTurk rewards into my bank account it felt like I bought the dress at a fifty percent off discount. 

     Even if you don’t really need to scrounge for nickels and dimes, who among us doesn’t love to get an extra ten dollars every now and then?  Who doesn’t rejoice when a forgotten few bucks are found in the pockets of a coat worn last season?   Or when a one-dollar bill just happens to blow across our path while walking down the sidewalk?  It’s quick, it’s easy and, for the cheap college kid out there, it just makes cents.

Kt No Phone Home: Blackberry Blackout, Coping with the Consequences of Cell Phone Casualties

    It went by many names, Blackberry, Crackberry, Burberry Crackberry, “That thing”, as in, “Are you actually sleeping with that thing?” and “Did you drop that thing again?”  In layman’s terms it was simply, a phone, and yet it is amazing how heavy the loss of a mere object can weigh on a person’s, read my, life.  My phone met with its long awaited end Saturday night due to injuries sustained in a piggyback race along 43rd street.  No, it had not been drinking.  The already frayed strap of my black clutch snapped, and the bag and phone hurtled some five feet, ten inches towards the pavement landing with a sound that is often placed in the “Well, that’s not good” category.  After several attempts at revitalization- putting the battery in, taking the battery out, charging it, not charging it, yelling at it, yelling at others, fierce spells of pushing the red power button, phone shopping online to show the Blackberry what cooler models it would be replaced with, forever, if it refused to cooperate- the truth sunk in, never again would I update my facebook status on this, my first Blackberry. I brought the phone to the AT&T store for a second opinion where a salesman in a blue stripped shirt, and solid blue tie told me, “Yeah, it’s dead, and you might want to think about updating that Cingular SIM card, because that company is old”.

    I peeled off the Blackberry’s black protective, read useless, cover one last time.  The phone looked so thin without its plastic cradle.  A black oval on the back cover marked where I had worn away at the finish by spinning the phone round and round on various tables and countertops.  The mysterious crack on the upper right hand side of the screen, absent one day, there the next.  The dirty track ball, a replacement acquired last summer when its predecessor came loose and rolled off the deck of a boat, doomed to forever flounder between the violent crests and troughs of the Atlantic Ocean.  All of these markings, byproducts of a four-year bond between my phone and myself, rendered as meaningless and useless as the shattered Nike stopwatch from 1996 kept in a plastic bag in the back of my desk drawer.

    But just as that watch was replaced, so too will a new Blackberry find a home in the back pocket of my jeans or deep in the pits of my bags, a new Blackberry I hope to call mine within three to five business days.  For now I am a slave to my computer.  Facebook and email windows are strategically scattered about my desktop, last resort lifelines called into action in a time of grave social need.  In the misquoted words of David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Blackberry”, and pray the SIM card was not damaged and it remembers my address book.

            In lieu of flowers, please send phone numbers when the new phone is activated.

Why Try Elsewhere?

     The light is fading fast.  The cloudless sky that often accompanies a fresh, cold day is melting into dark blue.  Candles, in clear, glass cups, wait on the tables that fill the dining rooms at the restaurant, Elsewhere (403 W. 43rd St.).  They pool their strength, poised to light the way of the Friday night crowd, who will soon gather here to enjoy Chef Megan Johnson’s creations.  A hostess leads us to the Garden Room at the back of the restaurant after we present her with our vouchers from a certain website good for a six course food tasting.  The exposed brick walls of the Garden Room, in shades of red, white and blue, the potted plants that line the space cradling some of the very herbs used in the dishes we have yet to enjoy, the wooden tables, the wooden chairs and the roughly thirty year old tree stretching towards the vaulted skylight make you feel as if you have entered a world balancing on a fulcrum somewhere between the Secret Garden and a scene from a Smith and Hawken catalogue.
     Elsewhere, which opened on December 14, 2010, lays claim to a menu that offers fare “inspired by seasonal produce and farms with great integrity” (read here).  Chris, our waiter and our tour guide on this culinary adventure greets us with a smile and a knowledgeable explanation about what we can expect, from the restaurant in general, and the courses to come.  He tells us about Elsewhere’s unique wine collection, boasting bottles from places like the Canary Islands, and asks if we would like to take part in the restaurant’s special wine pairing, which they have prepared especially for those indulging in the tasting.  We browse the extensive wine list, taking note of its many sections- “Blow your bonus on these…” “All up in your grill,” “Do you feel lucky?  Well, do ya Punk?”- and we settle on a glass of La Posta Malbec from Argentina and another red named Campogrande Cinqueterre.
    Holding the stems of our full wine glasses we are armed and ready for the first course, smoked caviar with puffed rice, crème fraîche and bee pollen. This was my very first time having caviar, and I thought it was, for lack of a more eloquent term, amazing.  The second course is chicken liver pâté spread over a toasted baguette with sides of pear butter (yes, it is as incredible as you imagine it to be) and crème fraîche.  Chris suggests we eat this, one of his favorite dishes, by slathering the baguette with both the pear butter and the crème fraîche and then “going for it”.  We do, and the outcome is a crunchy, sweet sensation that seems impossible to top.
    The third course, my favorite, is sausage stuffed Forelle pears with tomato jelly on the side.  I am on automatic pilot after the first taste, cutting ferociously into the squat, brown pear, dipping sausage, fruit or both at once into the tomato jelly that tastes like a sweet tomato sauce.  The juices from the foods melt together and I marvel at how two seemingly different things can compliment each other so well. Next, we are presented with grapefruit glazed cod with escarole and chorizo, the top of the cod lightly crisped and the chorizo sneaking onto my fork, offering a pleasant surprise of flavor.  Then, sliced hanger steak over spätzle and brussels sprouts and for desert, a jazzed up take on the French “floating island”, rose snow adrift on a sea of custard, surrounded by thin slices of kumquat and sprinkled with pistachio, a cool and refreshing finish to the masticating marathon.
    I settle into my chair, full, take the last few sips of wine and pause to taste Elsewhere’s specialty hot chocolate, mixed with sambuca and served with a buoyant, chocolate glazed marshmallow.  A table over, I hear the waiter discuss Elsewhere’s famous biscuits with two women, “made with brown butter and crushed black pepper”.  As we leave the restaurant I glance back at the wooden sign that bears the restaurants name hanging in spotlight over the sidewalk.  “Elsewhere.  Why go anywhere else?” I think and amble happily home.

Smoked Caviar

Chicken Liver Pâté

Sausage Stuffed Pears

Grapefruit Glazed Cod

Sliced Hanger Steak

Rose Snow

           

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Dangerous Chip Confession

My first blog post is about tortilla chips:

            You may wonder, “Why?”

            You may say, aloud, “Well, that’s random!”

            The truth is, I started the day with a bag full of golden, crunchy chips and now they are missing, really, I mean eaten, but let’s just stick with missing. 

            I have often claimed aloud that tortilla chips, whether shaped like little wrinkled bowls, squiggly circles or wedges are one of the most addicting foods in the world.  Salsa or no salsa, it, personally, takes a great amount of restraint to keep my hand from diving, over and over again, into the bag, grabbing more chips and chanting, “Yummmmm…Last one, I swear… Yummmmm”.

            I see the shriveled bag, now lying on the floor, and I try to convince myself, “Ok, so, you ate a bag of chips… they are tortilla chips… they are made from corn… corn, vegetable, healthy, good for you!”  As I continue to stare, however, I catch my image reflected in the crinkled, silver insides of the bag, further distorted by a light film of grease.  I remember one chip, already broken in half, whose jagged edge pierced my gums while I sat snacking earlier in the day.  I remember the tiny kernel I tossed in the air, aiming to coolly catch it in my mouth, but missed and subsequently stepped on it, driving the crumbs into the fibers of the rug.  This forced me to go and get the mini-vac, only to discover the mini-vac was full and had to be emptied, only to discover the trash was full and had to be emptied, only to realize I had to take out the trash. 

            Still, I snack.  Still, I volunteer to bring the chips and dip to parties.  Still, I am powerless before this corny culprit.  I don’t think I will ever know why I am so addicted to tortilla chips, and, perhaps, I will live my whole life writing it off as “one of those things”, one of those love/hate relationships you can’t quite let go.  Now that the bag is gone, I could simply avoid buying another one, but the words “tortilla chips” have already been added to the shopping list because I didn’t finish the jar of salsa, and it seems almost wrong to leave something half done, right?