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Good Lord, Kill Me Now

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

It’s Saturday morning. It’s cool outside (54 degrees! — 12 if you speak Celsius), and I am relaxing with a cup of Cafe Yaucono that I brought back from Puerto Rico and ran through the French press this morning. (Does anyone know if they make automated / programmable French presses? Cos I could totally get into that…)

Ray commented last night that I am neglecting my blog (I wouldn’t say I’ve been neglecting it: it’s been hacked twice in the past two weeks and I spent a good chunk of Tuesday locking it down to prevent a third occurrence).

But here’s why: there’s a big conference coming up at work at the end of next week, in honor of a professor who passed away last year. Since the summer, I’ve been wrangling an organizing committee (a bit tantamount to standing up cooked spaghetti) consisting of dear colleagues who want to honor said professor. Read another way: the organizing committee consists of people who have massive personalities and are capable of causing all sorts of massive drama.

Professor A, one of the two co-chairs, is a sweet guy, but bizarrely capable of getting his feelings hurt very easily. He also displays an innate tendency to bring an issue before the committee, which is discussed and agreed upon in a meeting where he takes no notes, and then goes back and reports something different to the people involved. For example: “How long should the Thursday keynote speak?” We decided that the talk should go no longer than 30 minutes as we don’t want the event to go longer than two hours. He then reported to the keynote speaker that she should be prepared to speak for 30-40 minutes, and would have 20 minutes for questions.

Seriously.

Professor B, who is the professor who sent the nasty message that put a sour spin on my last few hours in Cairo over the summer, has since then actually been very easy to work with.

Professor C is a handful. I believe my facebook status earlier this week read, in reference to her, “She’s such a pill that if I could bottle and market her, I’d be a millionaire.” She’s written one book that won tons of awards–as well it should: she spent TWENTY YEARS writing it. Her main goal in life is to make sure that people know that she’s in the room.

How this all plays out is as follows:

Thursday morning.

A drafts the program for the conference and sends it around. It’s formatted wildly, so I spend a good chunk of time reformatting it and pass it around. It takes two hours for someone to notice that all of the panel chairs are wrong and another hour for someone to notice that half of them are at the wrong times. When this is expressed, Professor A responds that, “Well, I didn’t have my notes in front of me, so I just made things up and figured that someone would catch the error.”

I choose, for political expediency, not to respond by pointing out that it might have been more useful for him to make a notation to that effect, or, heaven forbid, actually say, “Hey, I don’t have this information on hand, can someone fill it in?”

B asks if the program and poster can be sent around electronically so that everyone can send it out on their listservs. The program and poster are online, so I send out a message containing the links to the files.

B then responds that … well, never mind. It’s too much work for her to download the files (also, she wants to know if the 11X17 poster and the 8.5 x 11 program can be put in the same document), so, as I’m getting ready to go to a meeting, I quickly send off the poster and the program to everyone as an attachment.

In my haste, I send a slightly older version of the poster. The only difference between this version and the new version is that one speaker isn’t included on the list of presenters. Unfortunately, said speaker happens to be …

Professor C. Who writes me exactly 30 seconds later complaining about this, and then asks me, “Shall I just plan not to speak, then?”

Allow me to say it here: !!!!!!FUCKING BITCH!!!!!!

I feel better now.

When I get back to my office, I send out the “new” poster (which Professor C has already found online, because there were approximately 47 new messages waiting for me detailing every moment of her exhaustive search for a document whose location I had already sent out, but let’s give Madame Indiana Jones credit here because she wants it).

And so, we’re set. Right up until we discover that A has scheduled someone for a panel on Friday morning who was originally told he’d be talking on Saturday, and isn’t arriving until Friday afternoon.

I know that Thou Shall Not Kill is one of the big 10, but … surely there are exceptions, aren’t there?

Tags: blog, cairo, cat, colleagues, conference, fes, french, Friday, ice, india, indiana jones, life, me, men, press, questions, Ray, SHE, summer, work, writing
Posted in Sometimes I don't want to be the bigger person | 3 Comments »

Borricua

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

“Horse,” Ray said.

We were driving down an expressway in the middle of San Juan on our last afternoon in Puerto Rico. Instinctively, I slammed on the brakes.

“Why are you stopping?” Ray asked.

“You said ‘horse,’” I said. “I thought you meant there was a horse in the road.”
“When have we ever seen … never mind, I withdraw the question.”
Frankly, by that point, a horse in the middle of an expressway in downtown San Juan wouldn’t have surprised me at all. Not one bit.

I went to Puerto Rico for a conference, held at one of the glitzy five star hotels near San Juan Aiport in the Isla Verde area. Puerto Rico is, officially, part of the United States of America. It’s a Free Associated State (Estado Libre Asociado), which is emblazoned on a number of license plates and bumper stickers.

Culturally, however, Puerto Rico is quite distinct from the US. To begin with, the primary language on the island is a weird language that kind of sounds like Spanish, except that they use interesting words for things that I’ve never heard before. A naranja (orange) is a china. A frijol (bean) is either a gandule or an habichuela. The letter j is pronounced as … well, as a kind of “zh” sound instead of the usual “h”, so the stickers on all of the doors say “hale” (pull) instead of “jale.” Anything good is “chevere.” (On the flip side, batteries are baterías, instead of pastillas, which is what they call them in Spain. Pastilla also means “pill.” I’m a little uncomfortable with the analogy.)

I’d heard that Caribbean Spanish is kind of the worst-case scenario for speakers of Spanish as a second language — now I know why.

I had a rental car. This may have been a mistake–it’s hard to tell. Taxis are expensive (one could literally walk from the airport to our hotel in about 30 minutes–a taxi is $12, flat rate), but free parking is both risky and hard to find.

The road signs are made to the American standard, but they’re all in Spanish. Given that Spanish is the primary language of the island, that’s understandable. What’s less understandable is this: speed limit signs are in miles per hour. (Apparently just as a suggestion: I tried to slow down in a school zone once and … well, when the sign says “15 mph,” it apparently really means “40 mph.”) However, distances are measured in kilometers, and gas is sold by the liter. I gave up trying to figure that one out, and am much happier for it.

Traffic lights are hard to figure out, so when the light turns green, all of the drivers waiting for the light start honking immediately, to helpfully let the driver in front of them know that the light has turned green in case he’s fallen asleep or decided to get out and walk or something.

Cars in Puerto Rico are equipped with an archane lighting system. There are four lights on the car: one at each corner. They are connected to a lever on the steering column. When you push the lever up, the two lights on the right side of the car light up and blink. When you push the lever down, the two lights on the left side of the car light up and blink. Archaeologists are uncertain as to the original purpose of this lighting system. Modern drivers simply ignore them.

The night we arrived, I woke up with a splitting headache at about 2 am. It was the kind of headache that has physical presence: it was a third body in bed with us. I tried to ignore it for a bit, but when I heard Ray stirring a little later on, I asked it he’d brought any aspirin with him.

“No,” he mumbled. “Go ask at the front desk.”
I threw on shorts and a T-shirt (and no contacts, having left my glasses at home, naturally), and trudged down to the empty lobby where “The Girl From Ipanema” was clinking over the speaker system (of course it was “The Girl From Ipanema.” Why wouldn’t it be?).

The concierge had no medical supplies, but I was helpfully informed of the existence of a Walgreens “5 minutes away.”

I’m supposed to walk to Walgreens at 3 am along a deserted street in San Juan? Does this sound like a good idea to anyone?

I went up to the room and tried to go to sleep, but now my head was throbbing on a level that had me quesitoning whether I could remove my eyes temporarily to reduce the pressure. Ray finally insisted that we go to Walgreens, and so, at 3:30 in the morning on our first night in San Juan, we strolled up the street filled only by us, the frequent passing by of the tourist police, and the bouncers at the clubs that never close.

Back to the horse comment.

On Friday morning, the day after my marathon four presentations at the conference, Ray and I decided to take a cue from the Lonely Planet guide I’d brought with me and drive to Loíza, the next town over. According to LP, one could not wander around the town square without stumbling over makers of the vejigante masks. We have a small collection of masks that we’ve bought on trips, and we’re always looking to add, so we got in the car and drove along the rambling road to Loíza.

There were, in fact, several horses along the way–although, to be fair, none of them were actually in the road.

To make a story that seemed longer at the time rather short, LP was an epic fail. The town square was not where the guidebook said it was. There were no mask makers. We found a (singular) establishment — Centro de Cultura, Inc. — that had some (pretty ugly) examples on display, but when I asked the nice lady if one could find the artisans, she shrugged. “Maybe on Sunday,” she said.

At some point, while driving around, we noticed that some of the expressways through San Juan were labeled with little icons. There was one of a tree, one of a parrot, one of a coquí frog, and one of a horse. We never found out what the icons stood for — they weren’t in the copious amounts of tourist literature in the hotel room (directed at the sort of tourist for whom money is not an issue, natch), nor was there ever any explanation in writing on the signs themselves. At one point–possibly on the drive back from the Bacardi distillery in Caguas–we got giddy and started calling out “parrot!” “Tree!”

And, the next afternoon, Ray called out, “Horse!”

As I said, by that time … the presence of a real horse in the road would have failed to surprise me on every level.

Would I go back to Puerto Rico? Sure. Just not sure I’d plan to drive there again …

Tags: art, bla, cars, china, class, conference, driving, Friday, Home, horses, hotels, ice, khowaga, literature, me, media, men, money, Photos, police, press, Ray, SHE, spain, taxis, tea, traffic, weird, words, writing
Posted in Travel | 5 Comments »

Food Porn

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Changing tactics from my liberal ranting of the past 48 hours (I’ve lost two friends on Facebook … can’t figure out which ones, though. It’s entirely possible that it’s the notoriously unreliable friend counter, but I prefer to think I’ve annoyed people), I’ve decided to go the food porn route.

I had a dinner party on Sunday.* At the request of my guests, it was the long-promised Greek dinner party (that is, a dinner party where Greek food is served, not … well, whatever your mind came up with).

And so, let’s do some food porn!

Here was the menu:

Mezze course:

feta cheese
Greek and California olives
Greek pepperoncini
pita crisps
bissara (Egyptian fava bean dip)
hummus
grape leaves
tzatziki

Main course:

Pastitsio
Spanakopita

Dessert:

Baklava

As usual for me, I tend to wayyy over plan dinner parties, so I decided to cut out the soup course (it would have been lentil soup) because, well, there was too much food as it was.

So. Food porn.

Thursday night I rolled the grape leaves. The recipe that I used is from this book: Little Foods of the Mediterranean: 500 Fabulous Recipes for Antipasti, Tapas, Hors d’Oeuvres, Meze, and More. I didn’t take any photos, you see, because it was a repetitive boring task, and the best way to deal with those is to drink while doing it. Which means that I was a little … um, my hands were wet, and I didn’t want to hold the camera with wet slimy hands.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Friday night, I soaked the fava beans and garbanzo beans for the various dips, and made the baklava. (If you need to see how that worked, just check out my last 12 of 12).

Saturday morning it was time to make the bissara and hummus.

Bissara is an Egyptian fava bean dip. Egyptians use fava beans — fuul in the local parlance — in the same way that the people of “Greater Syria” use the chick pea (also: garbanzo bean, in Arabic both the legume and the dip that’s made from it are called hummus). You find hummus, and its eggplant-based cousin (known more popularly as baba gannouj, although in Greek it’s melitzanosalata) in Greek food. Oddly, although fava beans are all over Greek food, bissara is not found on the Greek table. It is, however, one of the few parts of Egyptian food that I like (I love Egypt, but Egyptian food is never … ever … going to be the next great thing on the world foodie scene). The recipe came out of the above book.

I chose to make it anyway (food porn above). It’s fava beans cooked onions, garlic, cilantro, dill, mint, parsley, pureed, and then cooked again with coriander, cumin, and cayenne. It was a decent hit.

I also made the hummus on Saturday. I’d never made it with dried beans before (instead of cans). I kind of liked the way it turned out. The recipe came from Anne-Marie Weiss Armush’s classic The Arabian Delights Cookbook: Mediterranean Cuisines from Mecca to Marrakesh. It has attracted praise from actual Middle Eastern people, so I hold it in high esteem.

Spanakopita. Classic Greek mezze: spinach and various salty cheeses (feta, kefalotyri, and myzitra) in phyllo. I made it Saturday evening. This is my yia yia’s recipe, and it’s extremely variable — she wasn’t particularly the kind of cook who measured as she went.

And now, for the piece de resistance: Pastitsio. It’s a sort of Greek lasagne. Yia yia enjoyed the pastitsio, but she never made it, so I had to find another recipe to use (other than the one in the 1960s era cookbook I inherited, the one written before health care professionals started recommending against using lard and butter in copious amounts).

I used (and adapted) this recipe right here. The taste is spot-on, however the white sauce that the recipe links to never actually set during the cooking process. My guests didn’t notice, but I did.

Pastitsio (Greek Lasagne)

Here’s what you need:

1 1/2 pounds of tubular pasta (in this case, I used Pastitsio #2, acquired from the local Mediterranean market. You can also use ziti or straight macaroni. Do not use elbow macaroni. I will come find you and beat you with a wooden spoon.)
1 cup of olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, finely minced
1 1/4 cup of chopped onion
1 pound lean ground beef
1 pound ground lamb
2 cans diced tomatoes, drained
1 1/2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon
6 whole cloves
salt
pepper
1 1/2 cups of grated kefalotyri cheese
béchamel sauce with cheese or basic béchamel

Sauté the onions until translucent in 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large heavy-bottomed frying pan.

Add meat. Cook until lightly brown, stirring to break it up.

Add the tomatoes, cinnamon, cloves, garlic, salt, and pepper and stir well to combine. Reduce heat and simmer until liquid has been absorbed, about 30-35 minutes. This is very important–the meat mixture should be as dry as possible without sticking to the bottom of the pan. Set meat mixture aside, uncovered, and allow to cool.

Preheat oven to 350F. Lightly grease a baking or roasting pan approximately 11 X 14 X 3 inches high. The height of the pan is actually very important–the sauce has to go on thickly. It turned out that I didn’t have a pan high enough and so … well, I had to throw half of the white sauce out (although it wasn’t a major loss).

Boil the pasta, drain, toss with olive oil to keep from sticking together.

Now, your Greek mother who has nothing else to do … or your gay Greek dude throwing a fabulous dinner party to impress his friends with his cooking ability (which, given his inability to dance, dress particularly well, fix up his single straight friends with his other single straight friends, and his complete intolerance for shopping excursions longer than 30 minutes in length is pretty much ALL HE HAS LEFT) … will line up half of the pasta in nice, neat rows, and sprinkle it with 1/2 cup of kefalotyri.

Layer on the meat sauce. Sprinkle with another 1/2 cup of the kefalotyri. Line up the remaining pasta.

Make the white sauce … just not the one attached to the about.com recipe. Find a recipe for bechamel and make it.

Pour the bechamel on top — this is why you need the pan to be 3 inches tall. You’ll wind up with 1/2 inch or so of sauce that will puff up as it cooks.

Bake for 30 minutes. Then rotate the pan 180 degrees, sprinkle on the remaining 1/2 cup of cheese, and bake for 15-30 minutes more until the top is golden brown.

Pastitsio is served warm, not hot — you don’t want to serve it right out of the oven.

The final food porn: the set table:

My Turkish mezze platter:

Grape leaves and tzatziki. I love garlic, but … well, I may have finally met my match on garlic. 10 cloves of garlic is a bit much for 17.5 ounces of Greek yogurt (also: 2 tablespoons of minced fresh dill and one cucumber, seeded, peeled, grated, and drained).

And yes … there are leftovers. And man … it was yummy

* OK, let’s get this out of the way: given my current record of promising and then delivering dinner parties, you need to have known me for at least eight years before you can expect to actually be invited to one. So, no, you weren’t invited, and it’s not because I don’t like you. It’s just because I haven’t known you for eight years yet.

Tags: 12 of 12, art, baklava, bla, blog, california, cheese, class, cooking, dinner, easter, egypt, fes, feta, food, Friday, friends, gay, greek, health, heat, ice, intolerance, khowaga, lost, love, me, men, parties, party, Photos, press, rain, ranting, recipes, SHE, shopping, tea, Will, work
Posted in Home | 4 Comments »

Summer’s End

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

Summer officially ends today here on this esteemed campus of higher learning. Never mind that today will likely be the 66th consecutive day of 100+ degree temperatures, and that we’re still in a massive drought. Summer’s over when classes start.

Most years, it seems that I always have something to say about the massive influx of students. There is something disarming about the arrival of 40,000 students on campus all at once (and believe you me, they all showed up over the weekend). Our summer school numbers are pretty low here, something I’ve never quite understood since it’s an easy way to relieve that crowding over the rest of the year, but what do I know?

The Bible pushers weren’t out yet this morning when I came in. You may recall them from a post several years ago in which I lamented my inability to throw out holy scripture that I didn’t want. I’m sure I’ll see them this afternoon, unless their precious saved souls can’t quite deal with the heat. That’d be funny.

When I got to my department this morning, I was surprised to find new fliers up everywhere.

We have this professor–I won’t name him because he actually googles himself on a daily basis (and given his narcissism, there’s at least three or four entendres at work in that statement)–who has declared himself the only expert in the bizarre dialect of a language that he teaches. He’s declared his office the World Headquarters of studies in this particular language.

So, this morning, there are fliers up all over the place. He’s running some bizarre contest, and god alone knows what the prize will be. A copy of his most recent biography, I suppose. (Seriously: he publishes these random books consisting of his journals through one of those “publish it yourself” vanity presses, like we all need to know what his opinion of the canapes at a restaurant that no longer exists is … )

I saw another professor on my way out yesterday. We joke around the office that he taught Hebrew to Moses — seriously, the guy is almost 90 and still teaching. I’ve thought to myself that I suppose that I’d like to be that active at his age. (The other running joke is that he’s still teaching because he’s afraid that if he retires he’ll discover that, after all these years, he really doesn’t like his wife.) We have come in on Monday mornings and noticed on the switchboard phone that the receiver in his office is off the hook and wondered to ourselves if he failed to hang up properly again, or if this is going to be the time that we key into his office and find him still in there …

He’s also massively grumpy at times, when it comes to things like only four students registered for his class and it’s going to be cancelled due to low enrollment. This was yesterday’s drama, and he was complaining about it to everyone. The problem there is that the person he needed to complain to wasn’t in the office, so the rest of it had to hear about it at some length. He doesn’t talk very loudly or quickly, you see.

The kicker to all of the pre-semester faculty drama is that I had a meeting yesterday that included the faculty member who sent a particularly nasty message at the end of my trip to Cairo. She was very nice and sweet and pretended like nothing ever happened. I suppose that’s one way to deal with it, but … for god’s sake, if you’re going to be that bitchy, own it! Don’t brush it under the rug. Seriously, does no one understand the finer points of bitchcraft?

At any rate. I need to go see how we’re doing on the office pool: the first day of classes we always have a pool to guess what time the first panicked student will arrive freaking out because he/she couldn’t get into the class he/she wanted. Never mind that registration is over and that we’ve been here all summer long — there’s always a handful of them. I picked 8:45.

I hope your summer is ending smoothly

Tags: art, Bible, biography, Books, cairo, class, faculty, fes, flu, fun, funny, god, google, HBO, heat, ice, me, men, press, SHE, studies, summer, tea, weekend, Will, work
Posted in Home | 3 Comments »

Rest and Relaxation

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

My wanderings around the state have come to an end, and not a moment too soon. I do enjoy the traveling, but there comes a point when you’re in yet another hotel chain that looks like any other hotel chain (LaQuinta? Fairfield Inn? Hampton Inn? Is there a difference?) when you realize that you simply can’t face one more morning with Faux News blaring in the background over another styrofoam plate and plastic fork breakfast featuring KAW-FEE brand coffee bean product and individually wrapped English Muffins (which are neither English nor muffins. Discuss).

There is the occasional quirkiness to be had. Despite the fact that San Angelo–which only two years ago was proudly putting in all of its tourist literature that it had the highest murder rate west of the Mississippi between 1850 and 1870–is now trying to bill itself as the culture capitol of the Panhandle Plains (a title that is disputed by … well, no one), the town is relatively uninteresting. A tour around town on a Sunday evening revealed a frightening number of businesses with Christian names (such as: Bible Automotive. I’m not kidding.) and a dearth of business actually open to the public. After eating Mexican food from a restaurant that clearly used to be a service station (the food wasn’t bad — Bobby Flay had apparently been there at one point), Natalie and I wound up at Baskin Robbins … along with half the town because, as I may have mentioned, there was nothing else open at 7 pm on a Sunday.

Then there was the unexplained psychedelic van (above) that I stopped to photograph on the way out of town. And this place:

This place practices false advertising: there are no man’s for sale in the man’s shop.

My most recent trip ended a scant three hours ago with a flourish and flutter (literally: the woman sitting next to me apparently cramming for a medical school exam who had refused four requests to put away her book and notes for landing seemed surprised when it all flew up the aisle upon touchdown. That’ll learn her).

We were over in El Paso, the one place in the state that, it is regularly agreed upon, we must fly to. I’ve heard rumors that you can drive it in under eight hours now, with the speed limit on I-10 through west Texas now legally at 80 miles per hour, but I’m more happy to reduce it to an hour and twenty minutes on Southwest Airlines.

I have always liked going to El Paso — in fact, I’ve enjoyed all of our trips to the border area, both in West Texas and down in the Rio Grande Valley (for the uninitiated among you, even though technically El Paso is on the Rio Grande, the term “Rio Grande Valley” seems to only apply to the part between Laredo and Brownsville, on the Gulf of Mexico). We usually get groups that are really energetic and happy to learn, and this was the case with our session yesterday. One of the guys was so enthusiastic that he engaged me in conversation in the men’s room. I am not a particular fan of the conversation-while-I-pee. If you see me in the men’s room, please don’t strike up a conversation until I’m at the sink, OK?

It’s also saying something about the sort of people that Natalie and I are that we kept coming back to the five or so really negative evaluations we collected at the end of the day. There were 68 people in the room–our largest audience ever. The vibe was overwhelmingly positive, but we still kept coming back to those negative ones. I think somehow we just need to validate that the criticism isn’t valid–we’ve gotten unenthusiastic comments before, but this time the people who didn’t like us really didn’t like us, and they weren’t shy about expressing it.

At the end of the day, though, this last trip was a good note to end the late summer training sessions on. We had a new audience, and they seemed to be happy with what we were doing. The people who invited us were effervescent. And then it was off to have a nice drink in the historic Dome Bar in the lobby of our hotel, the historic Hotel Paso del Norte.

And now … I’m home. Next up is a trip to a conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico toward the end of September. Technically it’s work. I just wonder if I can put sunscreen on my expense account

Tags: advertising, airlines, art, Bible, bla, coffee, conference, eating, english, flu, food, Home, ice, khowaga, literature, me, men, mexico, murder, Natalie, news, Photos, press, rain, summer, texas, Travel, work
Posted in Home | 3 Comments »

Tag: ‘press’

Good Lord, Kill Me Now

Borricua

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