Rehashed for your pleasure!

I'd actually started keeping a blog on myspace, but decided to become more ambitious and try blogger out. Since I'm still proud of my former myspace posts, I've combined them all here for this, my first, official blog entry. Enjoy!


Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Quite the gourmet!
Current mood: content

For the first few years after moving down to DC, I never did any cooking. My first place was, how should I put it... teeming with critters courtesy of my filthpot of a downstairs neighbor. Stuff with more than four legs freaks me out, and I basically stopped cooking for myself only a few weeks after moving into my first apartment. Also at this time, I became hooked on Popeye's Chicken. For those of you who don't know what Popeye's is, I truly pity you. Thou must go and procureth a box three spans wide and one cubit high, and feast upon the crunchy goodness and walk through the valley of the shadow of arteriosclerosis for ever and ever, so sayeth me.

But really, Popeye's tastes like your mouth threw a party and everyone you know was invited. So I'd trudge there once every Saturday to get my fix on, and follow it up on Sunday with a Meat Lover's pizza. So after a few years, my body showed what appreciation it had for all this food by making me look absolutely disgusting. I once had a dream where I was wandering about, and someone handed me a Gold's Gym membership like it was a tablet from Moses (no joke). I decided that this was probably a premonition, so I did two things: join the gym, and cut back on fatty foods.

Now, the first part is easy. Get your butt over to the gym and start sweating Crisco. But for someone who was essentially a culinary virgin, the second part was a little more tough. I started out with boneless spare ribs. A few of them are filling, nowhere near the size of a steak, and cook very easily. But I realized I couldn't subside on just that, delicious as it was. But then I thought: hey, I looove fried chicken. If I were to cook it myself, in the oven, I'd still get great-tasting food, but nowhere near the amount of grease, fat, and calories as the takeout stuff.

What I'm finally getting at is that after cutting my teeth on relatively easy to cook, good-tasting food, I found myself ready to tackle newer, harder to cook foods. I tried lamb, but that didn't come out so good, and with it being fairly expensive, it isn't the food that encourages me to try and try again until I get it right. Then, St. Patrick's Day came around, and I thought I'd try to cook up some Celtic soul food (I'm part Irish) in the form of corned beef.

Do you remember hearing about that soccer league in Massachusetts years back? The one where they had no goalies, they didn't keep score, and everyone got a trophy? Corned beef is the Massachusetts soccer league of food. If you know how to boil water, and keep it boiled for three hours, you're golden. And hey, it's not like you need to keep tabs on it once it's cooking. Go pay your taxes, do some laundry, plow your wife, whatever. You've got time.

So a few weeks ago, I finally realize that fish is the one thing I have left to master. Now, I used to hate fish. I mean HATE fish. Shrimp? Cool. Scallops? Cool. Calimari? Most cool. But fish? No way! But during the last year, my unit at work would get together once every so often and do lunch at a pub called Mackey's in DC. Eventually I decided to try the fish and chips, and really liked it. A quickie lunch buffet by my office, before it switched owners and screwed with the menu, sold fried whiting, and it wasn't bad either.

So now I knew that fish was the Final Frontier. It isn't the easiest thing to cook. I first tried it two weeks ago (catfish), and I think I undercooked it. I didn't get sick or anything, and it tasted okay, but it just didn't seem right. So I went out and bought some frozen pollack. The first time, I noticed a definite improvement, but it still wasn't firing on all cylinders. But the third time, tonight, was the charm! Got the temperature and time down pat, and it honestly tasted like something I'd get in a restaurant!

Now, at some point, I gotta make at least one more attempt at the lamb. The Trader Joe's by me sells decent cuts of lamb, so I might as well suck it up and try it one last time (but I'll keep an emergency batch of chorizo on hand as a backup). I always say you can't beat TJ's meat!

Wait a minute...

Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Summer doldrums
Current mood: listless

I can't put my finger on it, but it doesn't really feel like summer right now. Okay, some of you purists will argue that summer doesn't technically start for a few more weeks. School's over, therefore it must be summer, now shoo!

You know how sometimes when you have a Monday holiday, you feel off-kilter for the rest of the week 'cause your brain still thinks it's a day behind the work week? I feel like I'm a whole month off. Maybe it's because we've been having so much overcast, fairly cool weather in DC right now, and it just seems more like early May.

Plus, work's been kind of slow, too. The past few months were all kinds of busy here at work, but now it's easing up. I'm tentatively scheduled to go on three site visits this summer--basically, I'd be going to various police agencies and analyzing use of force data. Basically, I'll be spending my summer in a records room sifting through old police reports. But hey, it'll at least be air conditioned!

The healing process seems to be mostly complete, or at least that's how I feel right now. I managed to get out of bed only modestly late today, and I haven't been trying to replay the events of the past few weeks over and over again. Yet, for some reason, my apartment still feels "empty," even though I'm the only person living there and she wasn't over at my place for weeks. Maybe it's symbolic. But my Paul Verhoeven collection came in the mail yesterday, so I spent the last hours of the night watching "Soldier of Orange."

Things seriously need to pick up around here...


Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Onwards and upwards!
Current mood: contemplative

Ohhh, those words used to piss me off royally. Every time I'd meet with some sort of disapointment in my life, someone would inevitably say "oh well, it's onwards and upwards. Gotta get back on that horse!" I didn't always want to get back on that horse. Sometimes I wanted the horse to trample me like a demented rodeo clown. Not that I had a death wish, far from it. But I figure hey, if it tramples me, I might go into a coma. I like sleeping. They feed you through a tube. I like eating. You're totally blanked out from the world. I like not having to hear cutesy trite expressions.

Okay, so the two of you reading this know from the previous post that I've broken up with my girlfriend. But I can either sit on my butt and mope about it, which does no one any good, or I can get back on the frikken horse. So I reactivated my match.com profile yesterday (surprise, surprise, the former GF was active within 24 hours, so I guess she's trying to rinse me from her system too. Thought she was too busy for a relationship. I won't dwell on it. Whatever helps us heal). I dusted off my profile, freshened it up a bit, added a line towards the end about needing to find people who have the work/personal life thang goin' on, that kind of stuff (that's what I think doomed the former relationship). Then, I took the rest of the day off, called up a former coworker friend of mine, and she agreed to have a photo shoot this weekend. I have several pictures posted, but they're all pretty much the same picture, and at the office. So I'll try on a few different outfits, take some indoor and outdoor shoots, and get those posted.

In any event, I've actually heard back from two people in less than a day! So that was a real morale booster! Things might work out, they might not, but it was a nice little rush to come into work and have a few emails waiting for me.

The thing about falling off the horse is that (so I've been told) there's a real risk of getting gunshy the next time you get back on the horse. You know, you got thrown once, so you're so wound up about not getting thrown from the horse that the only thing you're doing is making sure you don't get thrown again. I need to make sure I'm not gunshy from here on in. Bringing up the old relationship, overly-reading into what a date tells me, paranoia when she doesn't return my phone call right this minute.

It's a learning experience...

Tuesday, June 12, 2007
My crappy birthday :(
Current mood: sad

As I get older, I find my birthdays to have less and less meaning. I mean, who didn't love birthdays as a kid? I'd get a crazy pile of loot (GI Joes RULED!), cake and ice cream, and all my friends would come over. But as I entered my teens, I made less of a fuss over my birthday, and now, it's just another day gone by. I don't get out and celebrate it. I just can't get excited over it.
I felt almost completely numb on this year's birthday. I ended up going to work (I think I've taken the day off only once), and it was just the most pointless thing ever. I wasn't very busy, and was in a really crappy mood all day, partly because I thought my girlfriend and I were through (more on that in a moment). I just kind of zonked out in front of my screen, time passing by in a haze. I finally went home and didn't even do anything special... I think I had a chicken cutlet and a salad for dinner. Nothing special at all.

And a few days after my birthday, I decided to call things off with my girlfriend. She hadn't been returning my messages for a few weeks, and when she reestablished contact, she kept on saying vague things like "needing some space" but not defining her terms clearly. After several missed attempts at communication, I get an email on Sunday saying she wanted to remain friends, but was moving on with her career and personal life (the woman was something of a workaholic), as that was what was important to her at the moment. I got upset, not because she said this (I had a suspicion this was in the works), but that she never made the effort to call me and talk about her concerns, as maybe we could have worked something out. I was also upset because after going out with someone for so long, I thought I at least deserved the courtesy of her decision in person, or at least over the phone. So I told her the reason I was using match.com (that's how we met) was to find a girlfriend. I already have regular friends. I told her I respected her decision, wasn't mad at her, but this was the point she and I needed to take our bows and say our goodbyes. I tried calling her to tell her this, but got her voicemail. And, I tried calling her one last time just to see if we were able to clear the air so there were no hard feelings. She eventually emailed me late that night and told me there was nothing left to discuss and to please not call or email her any more.

To be honest, I was getting more and more upset over these developments as the night wore on, but when she finally responded to me, as stark as the tone of her email was, I felt strangely at peace. Oh, I was still a little upset, but I was much more collected. So I sent her one, last email. Yeah, I know she told me not to, but I was in the process of drafting it before I got her last email. So I was a bit more clear, said I didn't appreciate her lack of communication, the fact that after going out for so long, she decides (all of a sudden) she wants to be "just friends" and doesn't even have the guts to tell me this in person. But I also told her that I had some great times with her, and there were several memories I had of her that I'd always remember.

And no, I never heard back from her...


Monday, May 28, 2007
Cooking with beer
Current mood: lazy

I like to cook. I also like beer. But for some reason, I've never combined the two. Well, not until this weekend. You see, I had a few extra bottles of beer (Sam Adams Black Lager and Boston Ale), and I finally decided to use them to marinate some boneless beef short ribs and some hamburger patties. If you've never cooked with beer, let me tell you...the smell is, well, bizarre to say the least. I had let the ribs soak overnight, and I had just put them in the oven. So while I'm starting to do a load of laundry, I begin to notice, this, well, odd aroma. Like burnt paste. It honestly started to take me back to kindergarten (not that I actually burned paste back then, just that the smell of paste conjured up vivid images from over 25 years ago). Since I live in an apartment, my first thought was that someone was burning some particularly nasty incense, most likely my next door neighbor who thinks he's really slick trying to mask the smell of weed, but isn't fooling anyone. At any rate, I went to check on the food, and the scent was absolutely overwhelming. So I guess the moral of the story is that if you cook with beer, make sure to crack a window :)