food woes

I'm really craving something fried right now.

Not in a pan, either. Something from a deep fryer, with sunflower oil. Something rolled in raw egg and then flour (or cornmeal)and salt and pepper, dropped into boiling oil, turning golden-brown and crispy and delicious. I want--hmm. Chicken fingers, the ones that turn deep tan and the edges flake off. Or God, chicken, still with skin, soaked in egg and milk, rolled in flour and salt and spices, resoaked, re-rolled, then dropped in and made golden-brown perfection. Eggrolls. Deep fried potatoes. Fajitas sealed with hot cheese and grilled onions on homemade tortills.

God, I am hungry, and no one around here serves anything in the overly greased family. Dammit.

Yes, yes, yes, arteries, but God, food.

blah

I'm feeling somewhat sullen today and can't quite figure out why. I mean, other than the inexplicable craving for fried goods and a really good fried cherry pie. I changed one of my passwords to an expletive to relieve my feelings, and strangely, it did. Now I kind of want to do all my passwords that way, randomly interspersed with special characters and numbers in indecent combinations. I just can't quite imagine later wanting to retrieve my password and getting the email with whatever I come up with on it. Or I can. And it would be funny. To me, anyway.

And by the way, I mean work passwords. Because it's far too tame to do it to my personal email.

I am using my rarely used Moody Cow icon. You know, I am tempted to go jogging. This is never a sign of mental health.

For those who like to fantasize over fried food. Thanks to margeauxmay for the link.

http://www.thestranger.com/blog/2007/03/post_135

I have no idea whether to say OMGBACON or OMGCHEEZ or OMGLOOKATITFRY! When I experiment with this? I will post a narrative. Of pictures.

Maybe dust it with powdered sugar and serve with a side of raspberry preserves. Or peach, since I'm in Texas.

insta!rec - always should be someone you really love

always should be someone you really love by thingswithwings, SGA, Sheppard/McKay, which totally restored my faith in genderfuck. Very awesome. And *fascinating* for that matter. It's hot, yes, but interesting as well above and beyond that. I really, really like what she's done with this.

In celebration of being good with labels, I am goign to try *really really hard* and remember that not everyone is psychically attuned to my brain and cannot guess by random squeeing what a story is about or, hell, what *fandom* it is.

musical musings

svmadelyn, from the goodness of her heart, overloaded me with fifteen of the most depressing songs in the history of civilization. Well, twelve of them, one with one murdering her husband, and one with memphis involved. Which honestly, I feel that the second you mention Memphis in any country song, it's autojerk to assume it's about someone drinking themselves to death in a bar somewhere while listening to Hank Williams.

Part of this is that I grew up around a bar. Not the nightclub kind--the rural kind, where everyone and their families went after work with their kids and their parents and their grandparents, where all the kids learned pool early on and played outside during summer. Good times. It was farmers, third, fourth, fifth generation. My dad, a painter. Landscapers, construction, name it and have it live in rural Central Texas, represent. Unfortunately, the jukebox was stuck in the late seventies even when the nineties happened, so my early music tastes were formed by Willie Nelson and Waylan Jennings and God help us all, Patsy Cline. I don't remember now--but a song can come on the radio and suddenly I'm singing without any clear idea what I'm singing. If I don't catch myself, I can make it through the entire song. If I realize what I'm doing, I forget immediately. It took me until my very early teens to discover rock and pop, and I made my first mix tapes with my first stereo with nothing but pop--sadly, I just missed falling for New Kids on the Block (my sister wanted to marry them all, and I melted the hair of Donnie Walburg once). I remember Madonna and Paula Abdul and the first time I saw a music video.

I love music, in a very non-discrimatory way. I like it dramatic and quiet and painful, and I'd prefer to cry through it. I remember my first crush was set to Oceans Apart and the first time I was hurt it was to Madonna's I Remember. The last time I fell in love didn't have a soundtrack, but the last time my heart broke, I spent six months with Alanis Morisette. I still have that entire CD memorized. I was twenty, so that has to excuse most of it. I remember feeling with music--play the right time, and for a few seconds, I'm there, and it's all brand new.

I played clarinet and still remember Nimrod: Enigma Variations, haunting and beautiful and deceptively simple, rippling through every instrument. Flute and clarinets trading melody, countermelody like running water beneath it, silky and rising, a crescendo like a shock and hurting when it ended.

College the first time around was Sheryl Crowe and Live and the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. I made out to the Cranberries Zombie my freshman year and I learned to dance the waltz to Bryan Adams Tell Me Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman and how to two step to Clint Black. I don't listen to dance music unless I'm dancing, and then I don't care what it is--something with a hard beat I can feel up my calves and in my back that melts me like wax, where my body's mine and moves the way I always thought it should. I sing to Phantom of the Opera and wrote my first novel to Drops of Jupiter. When I was seventeen, I fell in love with Roxette and Pet Shop Boys playing in teh background. I still have those tapes, hidden in a box, hand labeled by the first person I ever loved.

I look for my life in almost forgotten lyrics, sets of four beats, snatches of melody in a grocery store playing in tinny speakers. I heard a snatch of Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes in HEB and I felt a start of recognition--I know that, this feeling, this second, this moment--but I don't know why. My mother is Aerosmith and George Michael and Wham and The Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Nadia's theme, Christmas caroles she taught herself to play on our old piano when I was growing up. My dad's Hank Williams Jr and classic country music on the radio in the jeep. My sisters are rap and R&B and Eminem. Friends are hung around with lyrics and drip slow beats, play in inaudible memories in my head. Katie, long gone but not forgotten, is VH-1 and Gin Blossoms and Collective Soul, stroking my hair and pulling herself to pieces while I watched. Loni's Depeche Mode and Erasure played on repeat when I fell in love the way I never have since, and the way I broke myself when it ended, when she held me while I cried. Vannezsa's industrial rock, German and Russian bands with thick beats and Metallica, The Matrix soundtrack.

I don't understand it, music--why simple melody can break me or inspire me, why the right playlist can keep me up for days and the wrong one reduce me to tears. I don't understand teh combination of notes that makes Appalacian Spring shiver through me and Bolero wake me up. Don't Let It Go to Your Head I'll sing outside at work with my ipod playing in my ears, a twirling in the parking lot under trees and wondering if anyone can see me out the windows, feeling alive and fresh and like everything's new all over again. The Boys of Summer makes me want the beach like I want air, and What About Everything makes me stare at the sky in wonder at how much is left for me to see.

I'm always surprised when I find something new, always amazed how it can reduce me to silence inside my head, flattening thought and tuning the world out, everything turned inward to absorb what I hear, like all of life is captured in three minutes, thirty seconds, everything I am and was and everything I'll ever be. It's breathtaking, every time.