Not a Maxim model ...

This past week our city was over run with hundreds of thousands of tourists, including my parents. I made a friendly prediction: I wouldn't see one person I knew. I was right. Meanwhile, they spied their local weather man.

Have you ever noticed how people always really feel like they know their weather man? That's creepy.

The following is what happened to me today in incomplete sentences shaped like a poem, but NOT a poem:

Legs crossed.
Circulation cut off.
Phone rings.
Jump out of chair to run across
the room.

Right foot numb.
Leg crumples.
The kind of wipe out
that is all the rage in chick flicks
lets you know your protagonist
is a real woman.
Not a Maxim model.


Picture the scene
from Frenchy's perspective.
A scream
Then a cloud of hair
falling behind a partition.



In other news, this is what I read, ate, and watched this past week.

FOODS

Louisiana "Sausage" and greens: I made this one, but first I unwrapped the sausage from those pesky quotation marks. For as much as I like some meat alternatives -- tempeh, tofu -- and even think that some soy-meats taste good I just can't get excited about them enough to put them into my shopping cart. They're always vaguely cat-food-esque in texture or something. Plus, there are these andouille sausages that I love and I'm always looking for an excuse to cram them in my face hole.

Okay. This was amazing. I was stunned. I used collard greens. But it's the sauce that really makes it: A mix of veggie broth, white wine, red wine vinegar and tomato sauce. Holy smokes. It was a little spicy, but not enough to require dipping my tongue in blue cheese or anything.

The best part was all of a sudden realizing that I should have made corn bread to accompany it and then realizing that I could totally whip some up because we had all of the ingredients. Free corn bread! This was so so so yum.

Bahn Mi: My God I'm madly in love with these sandwiches. I've tried a different mix before, but Chuck thought the slaw reeked (Apple vinegar). I made some modifications to this one: I bought pulled pork for the Mister's sandwich, and tofu for my own. And I added some smiley faces made out of Sriracha to mine, too. This was awesome. Now I wish I could find a place in town that would make one for me in exchange for a few of my crumpled bills.

MOVIES
Hot Tub Time Machine: Holy shit a lot of bodily fluids were lost in the making of this film. Blood, barf, there always seemed to be something oozing out of someone. I gagged a lot. But this was exactly the right movie for when we were watching it. You know, I love John Cusack. But nothing makes me more keenly aware of my own aging process than his aging process. Not cool, Lloyd Dobler. Not cool at all.

Inception Gah. Tell me about it. This is like the story of my life. 

BOOKS
The Surf Guru by Doug Dorst: Well. Now Doug Dorst is just showing off. The relative newbie to the world of book glue's new collection of short stories "The Surf Guru," is so fun, so clever and so so exciting that it will make people who play with words drool. Reading his series of 12 tales is like watching a contortionist bend and shape shift, and thinking: "Holy crap. Do you even have a human rib cage?" 

Full review will be on Minnesota Reads. 

How Did You Get This Number by Sloane Crosley:
I am going to write something here that applies to Sloane Crosley and only Sloane Crosley, and God help us all — please don’t let anyone else take this bit of advice and apply it:
Sloane, you need to write more about your personal life. Dates and dudes. Relationships that lean horizontal. Getting dumped and squeezing the living shit out of a bunch of oranges. I know this is problematic: You live in New York, and when a young woman lives in New York and writes essays she gets Carrie Bradshaw’ed into a little pink box. Even if the writer spends 200-plus pages riffing on everything but shoes. But I believe in you, Sloane. I think you can do it in a respectable way, and never have to say the words: “Hm … I guess we should go with the lipstick font for this book. Is there any way to make it look like I’m lounging in a martini glass?”

Full review here.