Things I never want in my garden June 15, 2010

1. Flowers that landscapers use for Exciting Seasonal Color, like celosia and petunias and dusty miller and most wretched of all, ornamental kale, which always makes me wish I had a 7-iron with me.

2. Eggplant. How can something that looks so pretty be so revolting? I tried here to think of a celebrity to which I could equate it, but revoltingness is so anathema to prettiness in humans.

3. Cilantro. I don’t like eating it and I’m not growing it. Ditto cumin, which I’ve always felt had kind of a dirty-gym-clothes aroma.

4. Pumpkins. What would I possibly do with more than one pumpkin a year? For that matter–what would I possibly do with ANY pumpkins, given that I’m too scared of klutzily filleting myself to carve a Jack-o’-lantern?

5. Ornamental gourds. Right up there with crocheted Thanksgiving-turkey throw pillows and dish towels depicting Santa Claus in long red underwear in terms of seasonal decorative objects having no intersection whatsoever with any stylistic theme in my house.

Durian May 31, 2010

So I engaged in one of my favorite federal-holiday activities today, which is going to the Asian grocery and buying a bunch of intriguing junk food. (Of course I could go to the Asian grocery any day, but for some reason I generally end up doing this only on Memorial Day or Veterans’ Day.) One of my acquisitions was a package of durian-flavored wafer cookies. Durian is, of course, the famously awful-smelling Southeast Asian fruit that, like, airlines won’t let you bring on board planes because the smell is so nauseous, but which is nonetheless beloved by Southeast Asian people the way people of many cultures love their own repellent foods, like Scots and haggis, or Louisianans and crawfish. I thought artificially-flavored cookies might be a relatively safe way to find out what all the fuss is about.

If these cookies are to be believed, durian tastes like my parents’ garage smelled after my dad used it to whip up a couple of gallons of insecticide. I had to wrap the opened package in a plastic bag and take it out to the garbage can, and then light a bunch of candles, to get the stink out of my house. I don’t even want to think about the potential lethality of a real, true-to-life, non-artificial durian, but I’m sure it’s potentially a felony in many states to force fraternity pledges to eat one.

Now, off to taste my appealingly-packaged “basil seed beverage”….

Five points for Friday May 28, 2010

1. I had a Marcel Proust moment tonight at dinner with the G.s. We were at an Italian restaurant that made its own gelato, and so for dessert I had a sundae that came topped with a perfectly thin, crispy Italian wafer, and it was just like the wafers that came with sundaes at Swensen’s where my dad and I went faithfully every Sunday afternoon for most of my adolescence. If I were writing this two years ago I would be launching here into some rhapsodic about all the people I knew in high school who worked there and how I wish I knew what became of them, but now I’m friends with pretty much all those people on Facebook and there is no mystery left.

2. My cat Lily’s life prior to living with me was notable for slipping out of her old family’s house one day when nobody thought she was even old enough to safely be neutered and giving birth to three kittens two months later. Tonight I learned that the three kittens–who are now almost a year old–are all boys, named Pierre, Rigoletto, and Dandelion. I want there to be a Disney movie, like maybe a contemporary retelling of “The Aristocats,” about a mama cat named Lily and her kittens Pierre, Rigoletto, and Dandelion. (Note: “The Aristocats” is pretty much the only Disney movie I can stand, except maybe the “Under the Sea” and “Kiss the Girl” sequences from “The Little Mermaid.”)

3. I watched “30 Rock” last night for maybe the third time ever and it was funnier than either of the other two episodes I’d watched. But now I’m foreseeing that the second time in my life is approaching for shame-facedly asking my hairdresser to cut my hair like that of a character in an NBC Thursday-night situation comedy. That third-
season-of-“Friends” Jennifer Aniston haircut was actually weirdly perfect for my facial shape!

4. Gary Coleman died. Allegedly he was 42, but I thought he was 42 in, like, 1991.

5. I wish I liked film festivals. They’re just too crowded to be enjoyable–I like seeing movies on Wednesday nights at 9:40 when I can have an entire row in the theater to myself and spread out, and having to hold my purse in my lap the whole time almost ruins the movie altogether. It’s not a prima-donna thing so much as it’s an ADD/OCD thing–having something in my lap for the duration of a movie is like having to go to the bathroom for the duration of a movie in terms of skull-pounding distraction.