Hungry Like the Wolf

(Dateline: Moscow, U.S.S.R.)

We are like villagers with pitchforks and torches, and she answers our knock holding an open tin of tuna and a fork. Eyes wide, I am suddenly a Seinfeld impression:

“What are you EATING? I mean WHAT are you eating? I mean… what are YOU eating? Because WE? We are not eating.”

My fellow exchange students nod hungrily, “we found some bread.”

“It took three days!”

“It’s been a week. We can’t just eat bread.”

“There’s a open-air market,” says our program head, fork still poised over tuna, “every Saturday out near the ring road.” There’s a brief discussion of subway stops, and the semi-legal nature of the market. A villager good at directions nods in understanding, and thus satisfied we stow our pitchforks and trek back to our dorm rooms, optimistic enough to double the ration of Chunky Skippy allotted for tonight’s bread.

In the Soviet Union in 1991, whether shopping for souvenirs or for lunch, the American student bought in bulk. The exchange rate (roughly 35 rubles to the dollar that summer) meant that money was never an issue. We joked that everything was “free if you can find it.” (sung to the tune of Madonna’s “Vogue” – often while hunting from store to store for food.)

The problem, of course, was finding it. Sure, we’d heard about long lines, empty store shelves and widespread stealing from state-run businesses (though perhaps we imagined the Capitalists exaggerated). We’d packed toilet paper and peanut butter as instructed, and came prepared for hardships. We carried rope or canvas bags suitable for carting home rare finds. But I walked into a store labeled “supermarket” to find little more than a dozen eggs (some of them bloody inside) and some sad jarred tomatoes. The real food – the real economy – was elsewhere.

Apparently shortages make me a panic shopper – a habit I retain even today, despite the obvious truth that buying in bulk is not a viable strategy for Manhattan apartment dwellers. The day we first encountered a Moscow bakery actually selling bread, I bought three large loaves and rode the subway home hugging them (note: this behavior will make the natives stare). We discovered bottled Pepsi at a tiny stall at the back of Gorkii Park and I bought as many as I could fit in my bag – about 30 clinking glass flagons of tooth-rot, it turns out, if you carry them VERY slowly. I bought toilet paper wherever I found it, though it was the one staple we ran into regularly and it was less effective at its purpose than the writing paper. I also bought 3 copies of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot from a street vendor – I’m still not sure why; let’s imagine the answer is “affinity with the title.”

Real shortage also creates instant community. We were all in this food search together, including the Russian university students who gave us some of their hard-won butter. A great find was cause for a dinner party, and friends arrived bearing whatever they could offer to the cause. It takes a village to make a meal. Perhaps this is Communism’s greatest lesson, because I found this kind of collective spirit rare back home – about as rare as butter in Moscow, which is to say it required a fair bit of luck and a reliable circle of friends.

The Saturday market was horrific and wonderful at the same time. Seeing food in some quantity was such a relief! But I’m a suburban girl, and this market was awfully close to nature for me. The carrots looked like roots, for example, the mushrooms still smelled like shit, and the dead animals were not yet meat. These were, to make things more challenging – my vegetarian years. Veggie students would warn each other about the gruesomeness hanging in stalls ahead, “dead antlered thing around the corner; don’t look left!”

The market was doing a brisk business, as the city’s primary food supply outside of restaurants might expect to do. Being college students, my cohorts and I had been drunk the night before and woke late on Saturday. Being American, we underestimated the lines. It was mid-afternoon by the time we arrived at the outskirts of town. There was a lot of ground to cover and little time left. We split up.

My first errand, for carrots, was a success, even if it left me in awe of the American equivalent – all the same size, free of dirt and covered in plastic. Feeling exuberant, I did the truly Soviet thing: I waited in line for potatoes. They were offered for sale piled high in a recycled sandbox filled with loose soil.

I waited and waited.

But they sold the last potatoes and most of the truly convincing potato-shaped balls of dirt to a kerchief-wearing housewife about five people in front of me. I had to report this failure to my classmates, who had mixed results of their own. Nevertheless, we would cobble a few meals together from our haul. Plus, potatoes are good motivation to get out of bed early next Saturday.

Now if only we could find something to cook in…

A Mind Is a Terrible Thing

Want to guess what percentage of cells in your body are you, rather than bacteria or other life forms? Give it some thought; we’ll come back to this.

Meanwhile, I’m obsessed with TED Talks.

The thinkers of great progressive thoughts about technology, education, and design get together at TED conferences; TED Talks is all that nerdy goodness packed into free, 18-minute videos. I’m ceaselessly fascinated. The shameful truth is I don’t even know who many of these people are – only that they say shocking and compelling things which, taken together, are the most hopeful and marvelous ideas I’ve ever had nightmares about. For example, the percentage of cells in your body that have your DNA:

About 9%. No, I’m not kidding. Bonnie Bessler says – in passing, mind you, on her way to the revelation that bacteria can coordinate a light show, “At best you’re 10% human. I think of you as 90-99% bacterial.” I’m still not over it – and not just because it’s gross to contemplate. Suddenly all that “baggage” I’m carrying around is alive. No wonder we’re meant to feel at one with the world. I’m starting to be philosophical about my identity crisis: “The I…” wrote Emmanuel Levinas “is the being whose existing consists in identifying itself, in recovering its identity throughout all that happens to it.” Yes, but who knew it would be a full-time job?

I’ve taken to watching the talks alphabetically by title, which is a thrilling way to get a series of unrelated but jaw-dropping ideas into one’s brain in short order, as the topics range from oceanography to architecture to particle physics to the source of happiness. Together, the TED Talks are a mile wide and an inch deep, which is a cross-section of science I love. Don’t bother me with details; I’m working on a grand unified theory…

The astounding facts that float by in this inch-deep world are one of its great joys. Deep-sea oceanographer Robert Ballard reminds us we went to the moon and played golf there before we went to the largest feature on the face of the earth – the mid-Atlantic ridge, which covers 23% of the planet. Really? We’d better get down there and look around. Meanwhile, Burt Rutan is urging entrepreneurs into the world of commercial space flight, including a cruise around the moon. David Keith warns us that science is going to deliver climate and weather control whether we want it or not. Remind me to worry about that, would you?

Back on earth, Susan Savage-Rumbaugh argues that many differences between humans and the bonobos she studies are cultural rather than biological. “We are sharing tools, technology and language with another species,” she reports. Indeed, her bonobo companions start a fire, write symbols, and drive a golf cart (albeit poorly). They also play Pac-Man, and some of them are better at it than me.

The world of biotechnology has been up to awe-inspiring things since I last paid attention, which is good because we’re in need of a new economy. Futurist Juan Enriquez talks about “reprogramming” life – a concept so far-reaching he has only a moment to mention it will cure cancer. Scientists in Japan and the US have “rebooted” skin cells to behave like stem cells, which in turn can be reprogrammed to express bone, stomach, pancreas. “We’re likely to be wandering around with re-grown body parts in a reasonable period of time,” he predicts, a bit like lizards that can re-grow a tail. This freaks me out a little.

Aimee Mullins, a pioneer in prosthetic limb design, shows off her coolest sets of legs, including ones that look like jelly fish. “A prosthetic limb doesn’t represent the need to replace loss anymore,” she says. Even better, Enriquez reports that a man who set several world records in the Paralympic games came within a second of qualifying for the regular Olympics. “Two or three Olympics from now they’ll be unbeatable,” he promises. Just as Mullins decides how tall she wants to be today, the deaf won’t merely hear – they will hear whales sing and focus their hearing directionally. The blind will see in infrared and micro-focus. How cool is that?!

Jeff Hawkins studies the nature of intelligence, and talks about progress storing memories in non-biological systems. “Attach memories to sensors and they will experience live data and they will learn about their environment,” he assures us. There is also now a Registry of Standard Biological Parts – a sort of biological Lego set. Non-biologic systems can teach themselves to move, can replicate. We’re about to cozy right up to the line between technology and life.

Kevin Kelly argues that technology evolves according to the same rules as life – that in fact it could be classified as a seventh kingdom, evolved from the animal kingdom. The difference is that technology doesn’t go extinct; it’s possible for a new technology to evolve from “dead” technology. Even this distinction won’t hold up if the Australians manage to make a wolf give birth to the currently extinct Tasmanian tiger; the current problem is not the science, but a lack of DNA samples.

And now I’m scared, and not just of wooly mammoths romping the earth and the mass production of buffalo with wings.

See, I’ve been counting on dying as a chance to catch up on my sleep, and I’m afraid scientists plan to rob me of this solace. Let’s put aside the complete inadequacy of my retirement plan to cope with such a possibility. I may not be ready to kick off today, but immortality seems so… interminable; like hell without as many fiery pits or opportunities to chat up medieval plague victims and murderers of old.

No. Instead I’m going to be part prosthetic, part robot and mostly re-grown – a bionic woman whose memories have been backed up onto a hard drive of bacteria and stored on The Hive Mind, which we used to call the Internet. My best friend will be a bonobo whose day job is flying a space saucer to hot springs on one of Saturn’s moons; I will look after his amphibious pet owlcat while he’s away.

People who study these things think there’s at LEAST a 20% chance humanity won’t make it past the 21^st century. Half the estimates give us a 50/50 chance.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

What's Cooking?

You can’t tell by looking at me, but one of my grandfathers was a French chef, born in Alsace and trained in Paris to work for the likes of Lady Astor and the Colgate family. He could flip pancakes one-handed (always a hit with the grandchildren), retained a French accent despite 75 years in the U.S., and was in charge of Thanksgiving dinner every year until he died. We kids believed that he would eat absolutely anything:

“That’s rat shit, Pop.”

“Tastes good on a long roll!”

He made really good pasta e fagioli, which we all called “pasta fazool.” The secret of his turkey gravy went with him to his grave. Regrettably for my dinner guests, he never taught me a thing.

A lot of people say they can’t – or don’t – cook. In my experience, few of them actually mean it. I, on the other hand, attended a work-sponsored team building exercise disguised as a cooking class somewhere in my mid-30s, and it was the first time I ever sliced raw chicken. Probably the only time. I did fry hamburger meat once.

Let’s get specific: I can boil water and make pasta. In fact I always boil pasta before serving it and am quite proud of my perfect record, as according to family lore the same cannot be said of my entire clan. I can open cans of soup and heat the contents in a pot, though this sometimes gets messy. Getting out the lid constitutes a project, as does greasing the frying pan. I’ll put things in the oven if all I have to do is take them out of the freezer and put them on a tray. Given dried onion soup and some sour cream, I can make you a tasty dip. Plus I have an old family recipe for ham and cream cheese roll-ups. A friend christened them “ham jobs”. The secret ingredient is horseradish.

Let’s eat out, shall we?

Mostly I’m just lazy, and never learned to cook properly – I like to think of my life as a cautionary tale for today’s youth. But part of the problem is that the gadgets and such escape me. I'm not much good with a potato peeler, and have no use for a whisk. The blender seems all fun and frothy but when you stick your hand in there it bites. And occasionally, when left alone with pepperoni and a knife, I need stitches. I electrocuted myself using a butter knife to fetch an English muffin from the toaster when I was about 8. I wouldn’t do it again on purpose, but I have to confess I kind of liked the fuzzy feeling. These days I unplug the toaster as soon as I’ve finished with it – compulsively. After an ill-fated morning or two, I’ve ascertained that an unplugged toaster will fake out breakfast companions with dreams of toasted bagels.

It’s a wonder I still use a microwave, too, after the Tupperware Incident. In college I used to melt peanut butter on top of pasta. (Tsk. Don’t act surprised; I said I don’t cook.) So I put a Tupperware container of peanut butter in the microwave. On high. For a while.

I knew when I took it out that things had gone horribly wrong: the bowl was a bit warped and the peanuts were black. What I didn’t expect was the chemical miracle that occurs when hot peanut butter molecules bond with melted plastic. The resulting compound is part taffy, part crazy glue, and when I touched the bottom of the bowl it scorched my index finger. I jerked away my hand, plus a long tail of piping hot peanut-plastic and at least one blackened nut. I considered putting my burning finger in my mouth, but thought better of it. I looked wildly around the dorm room for a paper towel or water source. I’d nearly wiped my finger on my pants when I remembered I was wearing shorts. Alas. I was headed to the bathroom anyway, as both bowl and peanuts were still smoking ominously.

Also, for the record, it is possible (though neither easy nor fun) to remove the puddle of melted plastic formerly known as colander from the bottom of the oven. Now I check inside the oven before pre-heating. I also discouraged the cleaning service from storing further kitchenware in there – especially the melty kind.

Maybe raw food is the way to go; I can eat salads. I can even buy them in a bag to cut down on the opportunities to slice open a palm. I know: prepared foods contain chemicals and preservatives that aren’t good for me. On the other hand, they do me a solid by getting me out of the kitchen faster. It’s dangerous in there.

Fun fact:

Chinese food containers create fireworks in the microwave. They’re blue. Don’t try this at home.

Gus the Cat: An Honest Accounting

Pro	Con
Gus is furry and soft to pet.	Gus leaves white patches of fur everywhere he sleeps, which is just about everywhere.  Most of my belongings are also furry and soft to pet, and some of them are not meant to be.
Gus likes crinkly things.  He carries them around in his mouth while meowing.  Often he brings me papers as a gift, especially before bed.	Crinkly things include tax bills, uncashed checks, and that scrap of envelope with the window measurements on it.  Gus’s filing system involves leaving things wherever they fall from his mouth, a practice that makes retrieval difficult.
Gus is always interested in my comings and goings.  It’s good to have a friend waiting for you at home.	Gus is not much of a conversationalist. He remains straightfaced throughout even the funniest anecdote, and is downright incapable of a pep talk.
Gus lacks expensive hobbies and habits that would put a strain on the family budget.	Gus does not contribute materially to the financial well being of the household.  He mostly just lies there.
Gus is a reliable user of an uncovered litter box.	I bought one of those fancy boxes with a cover and swing door, but Gus refused to use it.  Instead he shat on the floor until I removed the lid.
When feeling petulant about his litter box or sick to his stomach, Gus has the good grace to make a mess in the basement.	Gus is a messy eater, even when eating dry food.
Gus sits outside with me when I’m having a smoke or taking in some rays, even if he was mid-nap when I headed out there.	He eats ants.  Strangely, he does so even though he doesn’t seem to enjoy them.
He has learned that “in” means it’s time to go back inside.	Gus is not consistent in obeying the command “in” when unaccompanied by a soft kick in the fanny.
Gus is a handsome devil, and he coordinates with the décor.	He has gigantic ears that I fear use up most of the space his brain might otherwise occupy.    Also, I’m thinking about bringing blue into my bedroom, and I don’t think Gus will take the dye particularly well.
Gus sleeps at the end of the bed, even though I kick him regularly during the night.	He settles right down after chewing on my feet for a bit.
Gus sometimes chases raindrops down the window.  This is an unmitigated positive.
Gus often sits on his own tail, then tries to chase it between his legs.  This is truly fun to watch.	His tail has a weird kink at the end of it.
Gus buries crinkly things under the seat cushion of the armchair and digs them up as if he’s a dog.	Gus also uses the chair as a scratching post, despite the No Scratch spray I put on it daily and the purpose-bought scratching post standing right next to it.
Gus is not afraid of strangers, and will visit with them if they sit down and don’t chase him.	He gets to know people by chewing playfully on their feet.
Gus likes to be scritched behind the ears.	Sometimes he likes it so much he accidentally chews on you.
Gus is an above-average napper.  When it’s bright outside, he sleeps with his paws over his eyes, which is extra adorable.	He snores.
He is a first-rate player – and not just with crinkly things.  Also, Gus is environmentally minded and will recycle toys from the trash.	I have lost 3 balls (one rubber, 2 ping pong) since moving here less than 2 months ago.  I haven’t the slightest idea where they get trapped.  Also, some trash is best left in the trash can.
Gus is generally a clean sort of fellow.	He is simply not down with having his claws trimmed.
When scared, Gus will sometimes pose quietly in a corner, as if he might be a decorative object.  There he waits patiently for the current horror to abate.	Gus is afraid of so MANY things he gives life to the concept of scaredy cat.  An abridged list: -- the vacuum -- his shadow -- other cats -- my shadow -- sudden movements -- the entire world beyond the back fence

The Whole 10 Yards

 

Warning: the following essay contains profanity. Reader discretion is advised.

It's possible my family are not among the most attentive listeners.  I can tell because we have a tendency to re-construe clichés – a practice both embarrassing and more fun than it sounds.  I started collecting them around the time my mother said we were going down the tubes in a hand-basket, which seems like it would be a fun ride at a Six Flags park.  

Because the originals came from my mother and her sister, my cousins and I came to call them Momisms, but truthfully the entire clan produces them.  There’s no sense feeling superior when I say things out loud to myself like “why mot as nell” which, after some reflection, I determined was a mixture of “why not” and “might as well”. 

I know these crazy phrases pre-date the hand-basket ride, because I grew up thinking “bite your nose to spite your face” was something other people said.  Granted, I was puzzled about how one might bite one’s own nose, but I had never heard “cut off your nose to spite your face”, so I just shrugged and moved on.   Those are the worse kinds of Momisms – the ones you don’t recognize until after you’ve repeated them to people who can only be thinking worse of you for it.  Some of them may actually be more useful than the original; “a rash and a shit” certainly sounds more uncomfortable than just a ration of shit.  And if more football fans knew the origin of “the whole nine yards” (sewing of some sort, I’m led to understand), we wouldn’t need to go the whole 10 yards to explain it.

There’s an ongoing debate whether “smoking the drapes” is something actual people say, or just my family.  Smoking the drapes means you’re talking crazy, and inhaling what I can only hope are hemp curtains.  My parents are adamant about its wider use, but the inventors of gems such as “cleaning like a parrot all day” cannot be trusted.  I did, after all, spend most of my young life identifying “an underneath” as a piece of furniture (it’s a cabinet, usually occurring under a “draw” as we call drawers in Jersey).  I’d still be using the term if I my 3^rd grade homework hadn’t included drawing and labeling a floor plan of my bedroom. 

Indeed, I do still use the family term for speeding:  barrel-assing.  I can’t even form a mental picture of the activity, but who cares?  I think of it as a fond mixture of barreling and hauling ass.  Our house had a quarter of a mile-long stone driveway, which my grandfather had recently finished raking when he scolded my father “don’t come barrel-assing down the driveway and throw the stones all over; nobody’s gonna take your spot.”  Words to live by.

Some of the best – and most puzzling – Momisms are the result of two clichés combined.  “Happy as a clam in shit” is reasonably self-explanatory, though one wonders what became of the pig.  The same is true of “other fish on the horizon.”  My aunt produced “talking to the preacher” in lieu of “preaching to the choir” – a bit more of a stretch.  “Hanging over your head like a bad penny” didn’t make any sense to me, as I hadn’t heard that bad pennies keep popping up.  But I can understand the anxiety at looking up and seeing a penny with a menacing expression.  Honest Abe can be scary.

These pearls of idiocy are usually formulated when the speaker is flummoxed, which means getting my mother angry is a great way to collect them.  Mom threatened to throw my brother and me “out on the balls of your ass” if we didn’t behave.  I’ve also found myself “tough out of shit” on occasion, and have been told in a particularly heated exchange “stick THAT up your ass and smoke it”.  I decided against that advice.

In the heat of the moment, there were warnings (he who laughs last, laughs last) and exclamations (oh, for fuck’s fuck!) and orders (get the hell get out of here).  At least one of us was accused of being a “one-note wonder.”  In the years before we were old enough to drive, mom used to tell my brother to sit on his dick and pedal his balls to wherever he was begging to be taken.  And while this may not be a mangled cliché of any sort, I believe it has the potential to become one in certain circles. 

Sometimes we’re just missing the right word.  Where was the word “paraplegic” hiding when it came time to warn my cousin that he would “fall down and turn into a paralegal”?  Life in a law firm is awfully depressing.  At least if you choke, my family is fully trained to use the “hymen maneuver” on you.  Done correctly, the surprise alone could dislodge whatever’s caught in there.

My favorite Momism of all time was born the weekend of my cousin’s college graduation.  The extended family had gathered to go to dinner with The Girlfriend’s family.  I think Mom was trying to express that it was a red-letter day, or a banner week for both graduates.  Unfortunately she congratulated them, in presence of their future in-laws, on what was surely “a red boner weekend.” 

When do you suppose the statue of limitations is up on that crime?