Pumpkin Samosas

A Sushi Feast

It's fun and delicious to butcher the fine art of sushi making by neatly rolling your maki with a respectful disregard for sushi's minimalism and stuffing it with whatever you happen to have cut up and placed at arm's length. Proceed to do this in large quantities, display on different shaped plates, and eat on Sunday nights. I'm finding the weekly sushi feasts to be a sort of Havdalah for the week - maybe next time I'll light candles?

Something Goes Right

My pits are a mess - elbow pits, knee pits.

My elbows harbor the tragi-comically stubborn ringworm, persisting on and off since that fateful October ('07) when the Dark Commander was my roommate and mortal foe. He was a ringworm-ridden kitten quarantined in the room I was subletting and I was bemoaning my return to the country and already insomnia-ridden. At night he kept me awake pilfering the room, climbing dressers and curtains, breaking glass, knocking over every possible thing on every conceivable surface. He climbed on my head and tried to spoon with my face. Every morning I straightened the room up as if from a nightly bombing. When a man friend slept over, Dark Commander made himself a known and undesirable presence. The words, "I will always remember this," were not exhaled with cigarette smoke and a smile, but rather through gritted teeth, like one sputters to a nemesis as he insults your mother and walks away into the sunset. Dark Commander also had to be bathed in sulfur every Wednesday afternoon, and until late Thursday the room, too, carried a pungent, yet soft, altogether enveloping aroma of gunpowder. Before the sulfur baths finally cured him of his ringworm, he gifted some of it to me. When Commander's mama returned and learned of my condition she asked that I please not touch her cat.

My knee pit fell prey to its own tragedy just five days ago. An angry rash showed up, made itself comfortable and me very uncomfortable. I tried to test out its seriousness on my housemates. I'd lift my skirt to just above me knee, rotate my body slightly to reveal the beast, and ask, "You don't think it's serious, do you?" To this they, unanimously, made horrified faces and recoiled. I decided to listen to my Ma and see a doctor.

I showed up at Philadelphia Health Care Center #3 at 6:12am, this morning. There was a man that looked like Samwell, oiled up and glistening in the morning sun, jogging in Clark Park in very short shorts. There were few other morning stragglers and I felt positively heroic when I realized that I was first in line. The Center opened at 7 and slowly put its gears into action as the head nurse barked at us to line up in single file and goose-step from one waiting area to another to get processed by three different people. One of the nurses got bitten by a dog outside and we watched the proceedings in the silence of the glass box seating area. I got a yellow card with my name on it and sat.

First, a nurse looked at me. He measured my blood pressure twice before he started fiddling with the wires and plugged a couple more cables in before he finally recorded. He looked at my rash, and said someone else would come talk to me about it. It sounded as though I was going to be educated about my reckless behavior. I got called again, this time by a doctor. She seemed unimpressed and uninterested. She poked at it, gave me a prescription for antibiotics and a steroid cream and sent me on my way. At the Center's pharmacy, I was told to return at 11:30. I came up to the receptionist and told her I was all done, and did I need to pay anything? She laughed me out of the building and as I left, yelled, "It's nice, isn't it?!" It was a little before 9.

It is nice. While I doubt I would choose this clinic for more serious analysis or problems, because the doctors seemed so overworked and distracted, I am pleased. I came home ebullient that I actually got health services I could afford, but I realize there is very limited charm to this. It took 3 hours to get an antibiotic prescription, and I'm not sure I would trust them with too much else. In addition, people were turned away and afternoon walk-in appointments were canceled. What if the antibiotics don't work and I have to get intravenous medicine and/or further, more complicated treatment? Where do I go then?

Plastic Waterfalls

Pilfered and Poached

edit: phone was not stolen, rather it was drunkenly and mistakenly taken and returned this afternoon. all other items remain at large.

Things I have had stolen:

- nice stereo: from my bedroom, by a carny who was living there, while I was in Argentina.
- mp3 player and speakers: from shady hotel room, through the window bars, in Buenos Aires.
- bag of toiletries, including toothbrush: from my shady hotel room, while I was sleeping, in Buenos Aires.
- digital camera: from my bag, in a discoteque, I think by someone named Shark?, in Cusco.
- 2 thermoses: from the kitchen, probably by the next door restaurant's employees, in Cusco.
- some years off my life: ongoing, by eclectic forces all around me, which refuse to cease.
- my phone: from my living room, by a mean man, while I was jogging, after he crashed on the couch.
- 100 nuevos soles: in Iquitos.


Things I have stolen:

- poofy sticker of a lion: from my cousin, who realized I was the culprit when I wore the sticker in front of her, when I was 6.
- various books, CDs, clothes, etc.: in my youth, mostly for excitement, or boredom while cutting classes.
- blueberries: not sure if this counts, because was guilted into paying up for the blueberries in the end, in the Pine Barrens.
- various entrances to beaches, museums, movies, etc.

Do these two lists even out? Am I doing something wrong? Should I start stealing everything I can carry, and quick?

New Growth

It used to look like this:


Some time too late in the season I decided it was time to plant things and, with some help, dug around, picking out tons of glass, a few bricks, and a dense forest of undesirables. I remember the neighbors were barbecuing and I could smell their burgers and beer through the iron curtain of weeds that separates our small yards. One of them came over, beer in hand. "Girl can hoe," he said to my roommate, and went back without offering cold beers.

I had fresh, illicitly acquired seeds and a bag of expired-back-in-'03 seeds. I decided to plant the new stuff, but was still so impatient and so paranoid that nothing would come up that I planted as if I were a little, seed vomiting smurf. Instead of sensibly spacing everything out and dropping one seed, maybe even two, into each carefully hollowed soil pocket, I walked along the rows and dropped air raids of seedlings here and there. I planted squash, zucchini, cucumbers, sweet peas, carrots, brussel sprouts. I was shocked when things started growing; keeping things alive is not my forte. I was a little embarrassed at how patchy said things were growing; instead of rows of plants, I have clumps.

This is what it looks like now:


I'm thinking I should thin the plants out and make it a little more livable for them, so that they are not sitting on top of each other and competing for nutrients and room when there's so much to go around. But I am a little afraid to spend too much time out there, because every time I do I get attacked by mosquitoes.

This is what that looks like:

New Arrangements, 1000 Times Across the Sky