Productivity/avoidance

I have some very real things I need to do - write an article for a local blog, do my taxes, deal with some legal documentation around a shady rental car damage claim - which means I am being super productive in all other ways. For example, last weekend consisted of getting some shit DONE around the house. 

First, we installed a new light fixture in the kitchen so that I no longer feel that I'm cooking or eating under an interrogator's lamp. This was a big step for me, since electricity is scary and dangerous. Nobody got electrocuted, though, so cheers to the Brecki household. I also took on the dumb but satisfying task of corralling all my extension cords and either taping them to the wall with white duct tape or tucking them into a rubber cord protector a la this. This is the most boring thing to talk about on a blog, I am sure, but I'll tell you what: it made a difference in my quality of life. That is probably because something is very wrong with me, but at least I'm dealing with it.

I weeded the garden, which was completely taken over by nasturtium, clover, dandelions, crabgrass, and something I haven't yet identified that has yellow flowers and is, thank god, very easy to pull up by the roots. The work went quickly, and I was able to put in tulips (too late, I know, but I had the damn bulbs) and zinnia seeds that Mike's mother gave us - the seeds' grandparents were from Mike's grandma's garden. There's a lot more work to do, but it felt nice to start. And also to be in the sun in my backyard with the smell of the pine trees in the next yard.

We gave the new mixer its first go-round with dough: Smitten Kitchen's cinnamon buns, which Mike pulled off quite nicely. 

Lest other appliances feel neglected, I juiced a ton of fruits and vegetables from the farmer's market and mixed them with sparkling water (thanks to our much-loved SodaStream) for spritzers. If you alternate cinnamon buns and fresh juice, that's kind of like a cleanse, right? Sure.

I also went to Beth's dance competition, which was absolutely delightful. Beth is a master tapper, and seeing her dressed up as a genie/flirty teenager/sassy old lady was a sight.

Isn't she adorable with her jazz hands, even in her normal people clothes? Anyway, another weekend is rolling around, and my to do list hasn't gotten shorter. Which means I'm going to get a ton done. Just none of the right things.

Oh well.

It is possible

That tonight I went to a pilates-type class where everyone (else) was skinny, strong, and wearing a giant diamond engagement ring, then I called in some sushi, rode the subway, picked up the sushi, and ate it at home, still in my yoga pants, while sipping a dirty martini.

Hey, these are the last months of my 20s. I can be a cliche all that I want.

Stingy tech

This East Bay Express article on the tech economy is a really worthwhile read. It has its flaws, but I think it gets to the heart of the things that make me most uncomfortable about Bay Area culture. In my mind, it buries the lede by having this passage two thirds of the way through:

But the thing about this particular brand of low-key wealth is that it can lead to a false sense of self, on both a micro and a macro level. Consumption is still consumption even if it's less conspicuous. Class may be harder to see here, but that doesn't make it any less real. Mark Zuckerberg's still a billionaire, even if he's wearing a hoodie and jeans. And if you don't feel or look rich, you don't necessarily feel the same sense of obligation that a traditional rich person does or should: Noblesse oblige is, after all, dependent on a classical idea of who is and is not the nobility. As that starts to fall away, obligation — to culture, to the future, to each other — begins to disappear, too.

That really sums it up for me. Even the older tech guys - Bill Gates etc - took a more old school approach to charity. The newbies are not so into it, the cheap bastards.

As much as I can get het up about Ayn Randian dudebro billionaires, though, I also know that I'm not nearly as generous as I should be. Why? Because I don't feel rich. And that's because I'm not rich! But I'm also making a good living, and I need to be much more rigorous about giving it away. Working on it.

The class aspect of it is most interesting to me. The article is saying - and I, in my limited knowledge, think it seems correct - that if you were born into the upper class, and were raised to believe you deserved to be there, then you also thought it was your duty to help your lessers. It's a weird inversion of how I normally think about class, but an interesting one.

Anyway, it seems like this is something the maker/tech culture should be able to solve. Start some education campaigns, build some apps, let Kickstarter do its thing, and there you go. Boom! Instant generosity.

By the way, I really disagree with the article's argument that Kickstarter is a sign of a culture of consumption, as opposed to cultural philanthropy like the opera or symphony. Relevant passage:

The self-described "world's largest funding platform for creative projects" has, in its three-year existence, raised more than half a billion dollars for more than 90,000 projects and is getting more popular by the day; at this point, it metes out roughly twice as much money as the National Endowment for the Arts...Kickstarter is entirely in and of the web, and possibly for that reason, it tends to attract people who are interested in starting and funding projects that are oriented toward DIY and nerd culture..."A lot of this is about the difference between consuming culture and supporting culture," a startup-world refugee told me a few weeks ago: If Old Money is investing in season tickets to the symphony and writing checks to the Legion of Honor, New Money is buying ultra-limited-edition indie-rock LPs and contributing to art projects on IndieGoGo in exchange for early prints. And if the old conception of art and philanthropy was about, essentially, building a civilization — about funding institutions without expecting anything in return, simply because they present an inherent, sometimes ineffable, sometimes free market-defying value to society, present and future, because they help us understand ourselves and our world in a way that can occasionally transcend popular opinion— the new one is, for better or for worse, about voting with your dollars.

I think that's ass backwards. Rich people don't get anything out of donating to the ballet? Bullshit! They get to go to the ballet, for one, which is something I'd do more often if it wasn't so damn expensive. They get to feel like they're fancy shmancy, and they get to develop a community around other people that are hoity toity like them (hoity toity and fancy shmancy in the same sentence, lucky you, reader). Um, hello, glossy photos in the society pages.

My generation's love of Kickstarter isn't a result of getting to show off our generosity while swanning around in a ballgown in a symphony hall. It's quite a bit more humble than that; it's you, a computer, and maybe a Facebook post about the worthy project. For most of the Kickstarters I've funded I've been driven by a sense of charity (and I mean that in the sense of wanting to help, not of pity), not because I'm going to get some shiny new toy. Also! By contributing to a Kickstarter project, you can be contributing to the broader culture - I've funded some of my friends' extremely worthy arts ventures that many people besides the supporters will get to enjoy. Example 1 and Example 2.

In short (ha!): it's a thought-provoking article, and adds another facet to the dialogue around what the tech community's totally insane wealth means for us all, other than cultural apocalypse and selling our organs to make rent.

Colossal

Do you know This Is Colossal? You should. It's an arts site, but one that covers more than just pretty things. What Buzzfeed is for dumb lists that make you go "Awww," (Ten Cutest Cats etc), Colossal is for things that make you go "Damn. Cool." 

Today's example (via my brother): Prince Rupert's drop. Plop molten glass into cold water and it creates a teardrop shape. The drop can't be shattered with force, but nick the skinny end, and the thing explodes outward with force. It looks like it's shattering, but it's actual the mechanical equivalent of the chemical reaction that causes an explosion. Glass go boom. Watch the video; it's rad. And bookmark Colossal.

Fiddlehead!

I have been shamefully neglectful in posting about our March 11 dinner/reading event at Brick & Mortar, mostly because there's so much to say. I finally got a post up on the Fiddlehead Supper Club site, and so there's no longer any excuse. I'm crossposting from Fiddlehead, with some added color since this is my personal blog.

I should also give a quick overview of what Fiddlehead is; you can read more on the Fiddlehead site here and here. I'm aiming to start a dinner party event series that combines a sitdown meal with art, be it literature, performance art, film, music etc. If it works - and I hope it does - we'll be doing this every few months. Maybe even more, if others step up to help. Feedback welcome!

FIDDLEHEAD LAUNCHES!

Two Mondays ago was Fiddlehead's inaugural event: a Middle Eastern-inspired dinner and sci-fi reading at Brick & Mortar in San Francisco for the new ebook company FreemadeSF. It was exciting, exhausting, and a success by our measures. We maxed out on guests, delivered on tasty food and drink, and got to ease people into an event of interesting, fun writing. The bartender at the venue, witness to it all, said he thought it was wonderful. Always trust the bartender.

An ace team came early to help with setup. We had to get the food ready and transform a rock club into a space worthy of a sitdown dinner. Up went tables, down went tablecloths, candles, flowers and place settings. We didn't want to go overboard on the sci fi theme, but we worked it into the table runners, menus and cool glowing flower arrangements. When attendees started arriving, we set out the hors d'ouevres: grilled halloumi toasts with butternut squash puree with honey from my parents' bees, and cheddar gougeres made with our own homebrewed porter. Both went quickly, but the gougeres absolutely flew - I'll be doubling the number I make next time.

A touch I'm glad we incorporated - thanks to Brick & Mortar's bartender Terry - were two signature cocktails to complement the meal, the brainchild of our friends at Spiritworks Distillery. The Buck (named after the first story read out loud that evening) was made with rye, vermouth, lemon juice, grenadine and orange bitters. Served on ice, I saw it getting sipped down all over the room. The Barbarella was also popular - gin, grapefruit juice, Campari, honey and mint. It was smooth and strong, and my personal favorite.

After an hour or so of cocktail hour, we brought out dinner. Sides included shaved asparagus and fennel salad with carrot and sliced almonds, sweet potato fritters with harissa cream, and burnt eggplant with garlic and lemon on cabbage leaves. The main event was a chickpea phyllo pie. We did beef, vegetarian and vegan versions, as well as a gluten-free option. Based on the fact that many people went up for seconds, I'm judging the meal a hit.

The piece de resistance was a tray of chocolate cupcakes with salted caramel icing, on top of which perched edible logos for FreemadeSF.

With a room of full and happy guests, our emcee Kat took us through the rest of the evening: four readings, all set to live music. One writer even played the sitar!

A huge thanks goes out to those who helped with the evening, and to those who attended as well. We can't wait for the next one!

South By roundup

I am sitting at my kitchen table sipping my friends' newly distilled vodka, because you can't stop drinking when you come home from an epic bender or your liver will fall out. Or at least that's my understanding. (Quick note on the vodka: it is absolutely delicious, so good that they hadn't planned on making it for sale - their focus is gin and whiskey - but they feel compelled to. More on that another time.)

That epic bender went by the name South by Southwest, and each year it leaves Mike and I wrung out and exhausted, several pounds fatter, and pretty sure we'll never do it again. But then we do. Why? I can only answer for myself, but for me South By is 1/3 about the music, 1/3 about the food, and 1/3 about the company. We make it down to Austin 2 to 3 times a year, and the beauty of South By is that everyone is out and about. Trying to meet up with them may be hell on earth (text: where are you? text: at liberty, you? text: that [insert name of website, magazine, or snack food company here] party text: ok, maybe see you at mohawk later...), but it all works out, and it's magic. By day your are sunburned, by night you are soundburned, and at all times you have a Lone Star in your hand. Except for the times I was smart and had a Topo Chico instead. But mostly it was a Lone Star, or, later at night, a sugar free Red Bull and vodka, for strategery. And maximum body poisoning.

So let's break it down.

THE COMPANY
Our friends in Austin are numerous and dear. Many are Mike's best friends from everandever, and others are newer friends who are social butterflies on a scale unheard of outside of social media. It's an impressive crew, and we got to spend time with most of them. We stayed with very generous friends who not only put us up for a week but also hooked us up with special passes that get us VIP access into certain venues, as they do every year. Saints. A good number of our friends have kids, and I realized that our Texas visits are pretty much the only time I interact with children. Luckily, the joy of bouncing on a trampoline spans generations.

Bouncing Luca

Skipping the line at Red 7

Catching up with Wellesley ladies

Your intertubes for today

It's almost March 11, which means it's almost time for me to cook dinner for 40 paying people! Mostly friends, but still. Monday is the FreemadeSF launch party, which is also the first event of my Fiddlehead Supper Club. Hopefully it will go well enough that there will be many more to come. More info here, and tickets here.

If you create a Google spreadsheet and type "lager" into the first cell, "ipa" into the one below it, highlight them, and then drag the corner of the cell down the whole column while holding down the Option key, it autofills hundreds of beer types. Bravo, Techcrunch, for covering this fantastic hidden feature. I am pleased to have coworkers who love beer that damn much.

Oh, The Onion, you hit the Boston nail right on the head: Pretty Cute Watching Boston Residents Play Daily Game of 'Big City'. I love Boston, I really do. But unlike every other smaller city (I say that as a diehard resident of one), Boston really does seem like the little dog that thinks it's a big dog. Which is not a bad thing - it's adorable. But really, any city with bars that close at 1 a.m. is just not in the big city leagues. (Cue virtual snowballs from my Boston friends.)

I'm starting to collect tips and recommendations for our trip to Turkey in April, and a coworker sent me this pin. I've never gotten into Pinterest - I don't even know where to start, and I lose interest quickly - but I like the concept of using it for travel. I've been plugging in "Istanbul hotel" and getting very excited.

My friend Nat has an article in The New York Times on the artist Ernestine Ruben.

Mike loves portmanteaus, deeply. This Slate writer hates portmanteaus. This does not help my impression of Slate as a place where writers go to bitch, moan, and be contrary just because they feel like it.

D'Ohnut

Look at what I made! Baked mini donuts!

I've had this stupid mini donut pan for years, in anticipation of my much-delayed Wonderland party (as in, Alice in). To complement it, I also have a cake pan that looks like a giant cupcake, as well as several plastic flamingos still in their boxes in the pantry. This party will happen soon, I promise.

I finally put this pan to use tonight, as a result of a post on one of my guilty pleasure blogs. Don't worry, that link is safe for work, it's just a site that features a lot of pink frilly things. The recipe is actually here, and I followed it in a very vague way. In a very I-don't-have-any-of-the-ingredients way. I winged it, and I winged it hard.

The first substitute was for the baking soda, which I currently only have in the form of an ancient box, open and full of stale smells, in the back of my fridge. A quick internet search told me I could use baking powder if I tripled the amount, and lo and behold, it worked. One day the Internet is going to lie to me and I'm going to feel so so used.

Second substitute was for the brown sugar. No brown sugar in this house. So I took regular hippie sugar (not super white, but more white than brown) and mixed in some molasses. Boom.

The final substitue was for the vanilla, which I can't believe I'm out of since vanilla is one of my single favorite substances. Instead I went with almond extract. The end product? Lovely light moist molasses-and-almondy teensy donuts. I was going to have them for breakfast tomorrow, but they may not survive that long.

Nota bene: I'm listening to the BBC while puttering around the kitchen, and they're reporting about today, Thursday, as the past. On Thursday the Pope left the papacy...On Thursday Kenyans prepared to go to the polls in the wake of widespread violence during the last election cycle...On Thursday Dennis Rodman met with Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang. (Yes, all those things actually happened. And yes, Dennis Rodman is apparently still a thing.) Anyway, it feels like I'm in a British time machine, and like the moment I am living already happened. MAYBE THESE DONUTS ARE A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION.

If so, my imagination is having a very good Thursday.

Beloved

Today was exciting! A project that's been in the works for a while - a Google Hangout with Toni Morrison - not only went smoothly, but she answered a question I had submitted. SHE KNOWS MY NAME. Well, she heard it, anyway.

I helped organize the event, along with Toni Morrison's publisher, others on the Books team, and the Black Googler Network. It was a capstone event for Google's Black History Month activities, and I'm so very glad it came together. The event happened in New York, so I didn't get to be there, but I loved being part of the planning. Toni did an internal event for Googlers then sat down for the Hangout, where she answered questions from fans live and also took questions posted on Google+. I submitted mine there with the aim of getting others to post questions as well. I didn't expect my question would actually be read aloud.

I was giving a training during the live event, alas, but I watched the recording (you can see it on YouTube here, and I'm embedding it below), and dang, is that woman amazing. I'm a longtime Toni Morisson fan, and while I don't follow her as closely as I did in high school - when I completed a year-long project on her works, wrote her letters, and kept an eye out for her in Princeton like a lazy stalker - she has a very special place in my literary heart, which also happens to be my real actual heart.

If you're looking for my question, it comes at about the 15 minute mark. I asked what she would cite as the major theme or themes in her work. It took her a little while to come up with the answer - and high school me would have loved to jump in with all the themes that I pulled out and obsessed over - but she did answer, and mentioned Dostoevsky, and made me very happy. 

The author seemed really happy with the event at the time, and I heard from her publisher afterward that Toni absolutely loved it. Yay for technology, yay for a job that lets me do these kinds of things, and yay for Toni Morrison!

Vive la France

Today's happy thoughts are brought to you by my photos from France, where everything was beautiful and coated in wine and cheese.

The day I landed, two weeks ago now, Ms. Hartz generously picked me up at the Geneva airport and whisked me back to Annecy for a breakfast of crepes with Beth and Goof. We then strolled the Tuesday market for some delicious things for the dinner we planned to cook that night. Primarily cheese.

Hartzy drove us to the top of the mountains that ring Annecy, where we snowshoed our way through a winter wonderland.

Back in town we hit a wine bar for some vin and a snack, then picked up a few things at the Monoprix. Let me tell you something about French grocery stores: they are a yogurt goldmine. Aisles upon aisles of yogurt, and they don't skimp on the packaged pudding either. I got giddy and bought over a dozen lovely pudding cups that put Jello's to SHAME. As an aside, Annecy is drop dead gorgeous.

We made dinner at Hartzy's apartment - a lovely traditional tartiflette, basically potatoes and bacon with melted cheese. I also roasted cabbage, because I have a problem. We did blind tastings of the wines we had picked out at the Monoprix, scoring each one on a spreadsheet because we are nerds. A Bordeaux won. Actually, we won, because then we got to eat all the puddings.

Our first ski adventure was the next day at Les Houches, a mountain that is pronounced completely differently than I would have expected (laze hoosh). French, I give up on you. I spent most of the day being absolutely terrified at how fast I was going, except for on a few kiddie slopes that proved a delight. We ate lunch in a restaurant on the side of the mountain, warming up our snow-frozen bodies with the ever-present vin chaud (hot wine). Given how much glog I have made and ingested over the past few months, I took to vin chaud like a fish to water, or an alcoholic fish to vodka.

For dinner, back in Annecy, we ate all the meats.

The next day Hartz and I went for a run along Lake Annecy, which has a waterslide for summer fun. Given my passionate love of waterslides, I now know I'll be back to visit in the summer.

Beth, Goof and I hopped a bus to Lyon for the afternoon, determined to have dinner at a bouchon, which is apparently a special Lyon restaurant thing that, like a leprechaun in Ireland, is also very hard to track down. Luckily Lyon is absolutely charming, and wandering its streets was no chore at all. It's like a small Paris, but one where everyone is 20 and is discussing what I assume to be esoteric philosophy while drinking wine and smoking cigarettes. My kind of town. Dinner was a stunning steak tartare, which may be my favorite food. I don't know if that makes me highbrow or a caveman. I was apparently too busy being charmed in Lyon to take any pictures. Here's a Google image search in case you're just dying to know what it looks like.

The next day we headed to the Italian side of Mont Blanc for a day of skiing at Courmayeur. Gorgeous gorgeous. And Italian, oh Italian! I can understand Italian! I can almost communicate in Italian! After a few days of humiliating myself with my 10 poorly-pronounced words of French, Italian was a delight. As Hartz proved when we were in Rome last year, you can basically just speak Spanish with a slightly offensive Italian accent and get your point across. Also, we drank beer on the side of a mountain. There was pizza. I was so happy.

There were also some very scary runs at the top of the mountain, which I not only survived but REVELED in. The others did some off piste work, but I stayed firmly on the groomed runs and came upon a bunch of Scots in costume. After calling it a day, we had a wonderful dinner in the town of Courmayeur, where I once again ordered steak tartare. Because I have a cabbage-level addiction to it, apparently.

We spent the night back in France, in Chamonix (I should note that pretty much every time we got in Hartz's car I fell asleep on Beth's lap in the backseat - thanks Bethy!), and in the morning I drove the three crazies to the base of the Aguille, which would whisk them to the top of Mont Blanc for a death-defying off piste descent to the bottom. Then I went back to the hotel, took a long shower, and ate an almond croissant in bed. Score one for lazy!

Later that morning I also ventured up the Aguille, and found myself deposited 15,000 feet atop Mont Blanc, almost at the summit. I was wearing a normal outfit that would be sufficiently warm in town, but was not nearly up to the challenge of the alpine environment. I actually thought I might die, panting from the altitude and cold, surrounded by tourists in all their layers of down, clutching my camera and asking for a vin chaud. Spoiler alert: I didn't die, but I also did not feel my feet for several hours, and I did simultaneously buy all the hot beverages the cafe (a cafe! at 15,000 feet!) had to offer. The view was stunning.

Back in town I treated myself to a nice lunch (onion soup, no steak tartare quite yet), then met up with the crazies when they skied back to civilization. They managed to avoid all possible crevasses, ledges, rocks, trees and avalanches. Phew. They had also built up a big appetite, which I developed in sympathy because I'm a good friend, and so we headed back to Annecy for a nice raclette dinner.

Raclette, my friends, is insane. First you walk into the restaurant and blink in the slightly smoky acrid light. Are your eyes burning because of...cheese? Yes, yes they are. You order, and a half wheel of cheese is rolled up to your table and strapped to a device that melts the top layer steadily, enabling you to tip the wheel and scrape off the melty bits whenever you'd like. It's like the most complicated fondue in the world. You pile the cheesemelt on top of creamy little potatoes and unidentifiable meat products, and then you feel absolutely horrified by your own appetite. Horrified because you ate little but cheese as a meal, and horrified that you only got about two inches into the giant wheel of cheese. Behold: our glory and our shame.

I should note, though, that I also ordered steak tartare. For consistency's sake.

Our last day in Annecy I went for another run, because the others had engaged in extreme death-defying activity the previous day while I had gorged myself and nearly lost my toes while doing so. It was as good as the first run - fresh, clear, beautiful.

We hit the Sunday market for lunchables, and assembled a glorious lunch, complete, of course, with vin chaud.

Hartzy gave us an auto tour of the area around Annecy, including a chateau that was locked up and guarded by the world's biggest shaggy dog. He had clearly been bred to bound through snowdrifts with a beer barrel tied around his neck containing important news from the next chateau over.

We got ourselves chocolate chaud at a mountaintop restaurant that was wallpapered in plaid flannel, which was a very fine thing. We also admired the ramps that in the summer are used by paragliders to hurl themselves into the abyss, which is apparently big business in Annecy. Again: I will be returning in the summertime. In other news, Hartz, in addition to being a stellar host, is a really good photobomber.

Our last France hurrah was a shmancy meal at the only restaurant in town that served dishes based on things other than potatoes and cheese. Foie gras happened. Hartz and I made the questionable decision to flop down for snow angels in our fancyclothes outside, but it was a great photo op, so who cares if we were flashing our lady business at occasional passers by.

At 3 a.m. I was awakened by a thunderclap of nausea, the likes of which I have not felt since the first time I got shnozzled on sake and thought I had somehow been concussed. Fever, aches, all the good stuff. The flu! In the morning, with the help of the others and some homeless dudes from the food kitchen across the street from Hartz's, I dragged my pathetic self through the snow to the car. And then through the airport. And onto the plane. Where, blissfully, I had my own goddamn row and slept pretty much the whole way home.

And that was my week in the Haute-Savoie! I'll tell you what, me and France, we're friends.