Rachel Lynn Brody's Blog, page 19

Letting the Cables Sleep

For years, I’ve had the habit of keeping the old cables from my past. Wires and wires, quarter-inch jacks and mini-jacks and parallel cables and VGA connectors. Later, HDMI and wifi connections replaced those early, fussily-pinned male-and-female connections with something more universal.

I’m cleaning the apartment, which seems less daunting when you hear that the space involved in the apartment is probably under 300 square feet than it does when you’re trying to clean it out. The light in here isn’t great. Most of it comes from dim bulbs in age-yellowed fixtures. I’ve lived here four years and am just beginning to feel enough ownership to start putting pieces of myself into the place.

In trying to use a piece of furniture-slash-storage to its most efficient…use…I uncover a pile of old cables and it’s when I see the one from an old video capture card that I realize: how absurd, the thought that these physical connectors would make their way into use in the future. Exactly once, I found myself in need of a cable I didn’t own and the price I paid for a replacement seemed extortionate. Earlier this year, I took a perfectly functional CD player to Goodwill because I didn’t have any use for a CD player. My computer houses a DVD-R recorder; I strip everything I listen to to MP3 if I buy it in physical form at all, which I haven’t since I trudged the streets of Camden in search of the last wave of music I bought on CD.

Letting go of these cables seems impossible. But I compare their usefulness to the space they take up and think of my roommate coming home earlier, as I was in the grip of a cleaning frenzy, asking her if I could use her hair dryer on the regular so I could throw out mine. “I’m so proud of you,” she said, because we encourage one another to be our best selves and she knows I hold on to things for way too long sometimes.

Can I let go of these old, physical connections to a past that involves a 486 on Windows 3.5; WP5.1 run in DOS, floppy disks and videotape-to-digital conversions? I used to joke that a BA in Media Studies (Video Concentration) meant I was qualified to hook up connections from one piece of equipment to another, but this physical education was quickly outpaced by the progress of ensuing years, and only part of the theory held true.

Knotted up in lengths of cables and noting the absurdity of this specialized cable [PIC], I think, this is ridiculous. This is a moment of clarity. Stop holding on to things that no longer serve you.

Pare down. Don’t tuck them in a bag, zipped up, smothered under fabric. Put them away, let them go.

Let the cables sleep.

music: bush – letting the cables sleep [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPelsDKEtLQ]

 

Congratulations to the Hot Mess/Earth Day 2013 Giveaway Winner!

 

 

Steve was the winner of the Hot Mess/Earth Day 2013 Giveaway, where my mailing list members were entered in a competition for an Earth Day prize pack. I’ll be making my way to the post office this week to get your winnings in the mail, Steve! To everyone else on the mailing list – I hope you enjoyed your sneak-preview reading, and want to thank you, so much, for letting me into your inbox.

If you haven’t subscribed yet, now is a great opportunity to do so.

Here’s looking forward to Earth Day 2014!

[Subject Redacted] [See: CISPA]

I’m sorry. Today, I was supposed to be announcing the winner of the Hot Mess/Earth Day 2013 Giveaway. While I’ll be contacting the winner privately today, the announcement has been put off till tomorrow, due to CISPA’s passing in the Senate last week.

For more information on the idea of a general blackout, consider reading this PC Mag article.

Last year, it was SOPA and PIPA that threatened freedoms affecting web communications.

This year, CISPA has reared its head. This legislation has already passed a vote in the Senate last week.

In the simplest terms, CISPA will make it legal for the federal government to access information about what you do online without a warrant.

If you’re a US citizen, please contact your representative in congress and let them know you want them to vote CISPA down.

And just in case that doesn’t work, contact President Obama and let him know that even if the bill passes through congress, you expect him to veto it and protect our privacy and security.

For those of you waiting on the Earth Day Giveaway results – they’ll be up first thing on the 23rd. Thank you for your patience.

 

More reading:

CISPA amendment banning employers from requiring you to give your social network passwords, blocked. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/21/cispa-amendment-facebook-passwords-blocked_n_3128507.html

 

Butchery, Part I: I’ve Got A Bad Feeling About This…

A few weeks ago, I went to Boston and had a lesson in how to butcher a pig. Not exactly what you’d expect from this city girl, right?

But we’ll begin at the beginning, and it started because of pernil.

A friend shared some of her mother-in-law’s with me the week after a major holiday, several years ago. It was melt-in-your-mouth awesome. A while after that, I ran into a recipe on reddit, and a few months after that I made my own low-sodium version with pork shoulder from that great foodie mecca of Western New York, Wegman’s.

Flash forward to mid-January, 2013. Walking through a nearby grocery store, I spotted pork shoulder for the first time in a Manhattan supermarket. (Trader Joe’s doesn’t seem to carry this particular cut of meat.) Unlike the pork shoulder at Wegman’s, though, this was the real deal: bone in, skin on – the shoulder of a pig. Six pounds of pig shoulder.

Thinking back to the pernil, I got excited, and paid eight bucks for a lump of meat the size of my head. Headed home, tried to fit the thing in the crock pot – ready to try making BBQ’d pulled pork, this time…and it wouldn’t fit.

I had to cut it in half, first.

I’ve never cut through pig skin before, and it says something about me that this may have been the first time I’ve ever had such a, erm, close relationship with a piece of meat that wasn’t poultry. By the time I got half the pork shoulder severed and the other half back in the fridge, I was starting to wonder whether I’d ever be able to eat bacon again.

But I kept going. The pork stewed in the crock pot for a couple hours. I took occasional pictures. My roommate and I made uneasy jokes about pig skin, humans, eating meat, and the zombie apocalypse.

When the cooking was over, the trouble started.

If you’ve ever cooked extremely fatty meat in a crock pot, you’ll understand when I say I probably shouldn’t have added the BBQ sauce to the mix before cooking the meat. Because I didn’t, the result was a watery mixture of sauce, meat and fatty oils – from both components. That was okay. I got out a couple of forks and started shredding the meat. (Also a bad idea; in retrospect, I should have drained the sauce off first.)

Things were basically cool, up until the moment the fork dragged up a piece of half-melted pig skin, strung together with a couple inches of meat. And maybe a tendon. Or something.

My stomach rolled.

But I kept thinking about the original reddit pernil recipe, specifically the part where he talks about honoring the animal that gave its life so you could eat, and I kept going. Picking out chunks of half-liquified pig skin, trying to scrape the shredded pork off the skin and back into the sauce. I tasted some.

I had not picked a good BBQ sauce. Also, there was still WAY too much fat in the sauce.

I managed to eat a spoonful before I realized this – unlike my famous steak tartar incident by the seine (remind me to blog about that, some time) – was not a culinary battle I could win.

With three pounds of frozen pork shoulder in the freezer, this was going to be a problem.

Luckily, a work friend was talking about making pork tacos the next day, and happy to take the rest of the pork shoulder off my hands. Guilt somewhat alleviated.

But now I had an ethical quandry on my hands, of the low-grade variety prone to plaguing the dietarily privileged: how could I justify eating a meat I couldn’t even prepare myself? It sounds nuts, I know. But it tickled at the back of my head for days following the pork shoulder incident. I’d spent time, recently, talking to hunters. My cousin and his wife (cousin-in-law) ran a free range organic farm back before they got married, and mine is the kind of family where, while we’re all omnivores, we have been known to trade emails asking “Is it ethical to eat meat?”

So when a friend posted on Twitter about a Boston restaurant and the pig-butchery-lesson they were giving away as a contest prize…I entered.

And won.

Which was when I realized: in March, I’d be butchering a pig.

And I had no idea if I was ready for it.

To Be Continued…

Which car.

Years and years ago, my first time in Edinburgh, I was visiting an older friend of the family and we were discussing the time she and her late husband had spent in England during the time when IRA bombings were regular occurrences.

We were at a restaurant or a museum. We’d already discussed 9/11 – that had taken place just the year before – and we were walking by a parking lot as she elaborated.

“The thing you have to remember,” she said, telling me about the situations she and her husband had encountered, “is that if you were looking at a car park” – and she gestured to the one nearby aspect of the scenery I remember, the car-filled parking lot – “it  wasn’t a question of whether there was a bomb under one of the cars. It was a question of which car the bomb was under.

“Because you knew – you knew – that one of the cars had a bomb under it.”

The only question was which car.

Hot Mess/Earth Day 2013 Giveaway – Join My Mailing List To Win!

In advance of Earth Day 2013, I’ve put together a prize package including a copy of the anthology I published last year, Hot Mess: speculative fiction about climate change. The book features work by me, RJ Astruc, Miranda Doerfler, Sare Liz Gordy and Eric Sipple.

In addition, the prize package will include two ADDITIONAL books about environmentalism, climate change and the planet: Global Warming Survival Handbook and Generation Green (images below) – and maybe some other goodies!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How do you enter? It’s easy: just subscribe to my mailing list by clicking here. (I will not share or sell your email address, and you can unsubscribe at  any time.)

If you’re already subscribed by the time this entry is posted, you’ll get *two* chances to win.

The winner will be drawn on Earth Day 2013 (April 21st), from among mailing list subscribers, and I’ll get in touch after that as far as sending your prize.

Don’t miss out – subscribe today!

A Friend Says Goodbye To Her Cat

A friend’s cat died the other day and she wrote this very moving (and funny) tribute to him. She said it was OK to share. So I’m sharing.

AJ  (1996? – April 3, 2013)

Aka  Abraham Joseph or Abraham Jacob (I’m not really sure ) and the Velveteen Pussycat (that I’m sure of because I named him that) is chatting his way to heaven now.

AJ was a wonderful buddy, always up for a conversation  even if the other party was sleeping .

He was extremely helpful. Several years ago he graciously offered to remove his own abdominal stitches earlier than was planned.

In his elder years he enjoyed cleaning the bathtub after every shower. Of course the fact that he did it with his tongue makes one question how clean it got but he tried.

He allowed himself to be a photographer’s model, a dance partner and a hot water bottle when I was sick.

He was welcoming to all friends and family.  And in retrospect his aloofness to male suitors said a lot about his innate ability to spot an idiot from 10 feet away.

This Siamese pussycat was one tough cat. He looked delicate. Actually he looked like a she.

But he survived the loss of his entire first family, several moves and a bunch of neighbor dogs.

As long as he had a plastic bag to chew on and then vomit he was a happy kitty.

 

Yet in his wisdom he knew that another spring was not to be his.

And I quote:

” To everything  meow, meow.

There is a season meow, meow.

And a time for every purpose under heaven”



AJ helped me through dark times, was with me for good times and always gave me  joy.

I will miss him terribly.

Giveaway, you say? STUCK UP A TREE, for free!

 

[image error]

The original cast of “Stuck Up A Tree,” from top (clockwise): Ceri Mill, Andreas Vaehi, Cameron Mowat, Hazel Darwin-Edwards and Scott Hoatson.

If you’re on my mailing list, you should have gotten an email yesterday around 5pm, giving you the heads-up ahead of time for my Spring Giveaway over on Amazon. If not:

From now until Thursday, my play STUCK UP A TREE, currently available exclusively on Amazon Kindle, is free to download.

If you’re going to be around kids over the spring holidays, reading this play aloud with them is a great way to spend time together without going nuts from over-the-top cartoons and video games.

Not convinced yet? Check out some of what’s been said about the play:

Customer reviews on Amazon
Edinburgh Guide production review, 2005
Theatre Guide London production review, 2005
British Theatre Guide production review, 2005

Then download and enjoy!

STUCK UP A TREE will be free until Thursday, April 4th, (2013, EST, Earth, Sol, The Milky Way, The Universe…) so if you and your kids want to spread the word, please send it on to anyone you think might get a kick out of a whimsical children’s play!

Related Posts:

* Plays of Place: Edinburgh Fringe Plays

(Note: Next month, in honor of Earth Day, there will be a list-subscribers-only giveaway based around my short story anthology Hot Mess: speculative fiction about climate change (which is not a children’s book but has some great reviews over on Amazon), with awesome prizes for the winner – so be sure to subscribe now so as not to miss anything.)

7:06am:  Photo caption now corrected.

Ask A Local: Coming to NYC With The Family

One of the reasons I moved to NYC – aside from it being a great place for writers – was that I knew it was the kind of  place my friends might be likely to visit. I’ve gotten into the habit of fielding questions from those making trips, and a recent email from a friend made me think: maybe it would be useful to post this and other travel-related discussions online.

Feel free to add to this in the comments; if you have a question about NYC or other cities I’ve lived in, get in touch and I’m glad to help out when I have the time.

So, my inaugural edition of Ask A Local…

Q: Hi Rachel! We’ll be in NYC from June 8-13. Since we’re driving we’ll need somewhere to park the car as well. I was thinking of maybe looking for somewhere in Brooklyn on airbnb. In terms of budget, we were hoping for $200-$250 per night, not sure if that is realistic? The hotels that I looked for seem to be either really cheap and really dodgy looking or really upscale and expensive! We’ll mostly be out and about so don’t need fancy just clean, safe, and somewhere to have breakfast would be good. The kids are small and can sleep in one bed together so we really just need two doubles/queens. Thanks for your tips. Excited to meet you too!

A: I had a quick look into hotels and I think Brooklyn would be an awesome option for a family trip.

Williamsburg has seen so much influx of $ the last few years that their hotels will be mostly new builds. I am slightly wary because I don’t know the bedbug situation in Brooklyn these days (i don’t say that with any alarmist intentions, it’s just a thing modern travellers must be aware of) BUT the solution to this is easy; you just look the property you’re considering up – a Google search like “[PROPERTY NAME] review bedbugs” should tell you everything you need to know, and if u aren’t sure how to interpret something, link me and I’ll give u my opinion. Williamsburg is very cool and relaxed now, lots of hip thirtysomethings and lower who can afford east villiage prices but prefer Brooklyn/the burger for whatever reasons. Cafes, meatball shop, good vegan/vegetarian, cocktail bars and beer halls. If u like video games and nouveau-retro and beer, barcade. Know where you’re going before you leave the house bc lots of blocks and poor signage generally; well-documented on yelp.

The other neighborhood I would feel confident recommending in Brooklyn is Carroll Gardens or park slope. Slightly older and more professional crowd. Kids probably in the range of 3-7 on avg? (based on math taking place in my brain, grain of salt.) A bit twee. Grocery stores (trader joes), bars, near downtown Brooklyn, excellent downtown Manhattan access.

Can you recommend other accommodation or neighborhoods for this friend, visiting the city with her family? This was all off the top of my head, so if you know the ‘hoods I’m talking about, or feel there’s something I left out…join in the discussion.

This Is Not A Movie Review Of “Safety Not Guaranteed”

“It’s about a time, and a place…do you have a favorite song? …. It’s that time and that place and that song and you remember what it was like when you were in that place and you listen to that song and you know you’re not in that place anymore and it makes you feel…hollow.”

I’m watching Safety Not Guaranteed and there’s a conversation about how people feel about memories and favorites, and I think, I don’t have the same favorites now that I used to..

Favorites are useful shorthands to have. We ask people their “favorites” as if we can divine from their personality the things that will define them, define their character. It’s convenient to have favorites.

Favorite movies, favorites bands, favorite songs, favorite television shows, favorite restaurants, favorite foods, favorite drinks, favorite beers, favorite wines, favorite actors and actresses, favorite books, favorite writers, favorite animals, favorite colors, favorite memories. Favorite jokes. Favorite achievements, favorite opportunities and lenses through which to experience the world, favorite nights lying out on the dock staring up at the Milky Way and favorite theater productions you did with your cousins when you were eight. Favorite nights up wandering the city streets, favorite mornings when you woke full of peacefulness and warmth.

Favorites are naturally transient. I used to tell people my favorite song was Mysterious Ways, by U2, and the reason I knew that was because I had never fast-forwarded past the song when it played. But shortly after this observed fact, reality changed: now conscious of the song and my proclaimed affection for it, it no longer seemed boundless and limitless and full of infinity. By framing the idea for someone else, I limited what, in expression, it could be. And Mysterious Ways by U2 was no longer my favorite song.

Life changes, inevitably, and the favorites most worth having are the ones you never anticipated in the moment. Favorite afternoon with sun on your face among the springtime flowers in Green Park.

Favorites are full-body snapshots of a singular moment in time and space; reflecting snowglobes within neurons.

Favorites are moments, precise and crystallized.

Easily shattered, growing with geological constance.