Twenty years

20 years ago today, the Berlin Wall came down.

The interesting thing about this is that it simultaneously feels like it wasn't that long ago, and at the same time, culture in Germany and in Europe (and in the world, I guess) has changed so much since that happened that it feels like a lifetime ago. It's a weird thing to think about, that 20 years ago, Germany was two different countries, one free, one under Communist rule, and Berlin was two cities, one with the Western ethos, surrounded by Communism. Kind of like Austin, Texas, I guess, being blue in a sea of red. These days it kind of feels like Communism was a blip on the radar, though I'm sure that perspective is one I have from never having lived in a Communist country.

I can't imagine what it was like to grow up on the other side of the iron curtain, but people who are my age now were there and lived it. Someday, our kids are going to study Communism and the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall and all that stuff in school, and they're going to ask us about it, just like we asked our parents about things like the Vietnam War. 20 years ago, Dan's brother (hi, Matt, if you read this!) would never have been stationed in Latvia with the US Foreign Service. 20 years ago, things were very, very different for people living in East Germany and in all those Eastern Bloc countries.

It's hard to believe, since that was what it was like when I was a kid, but the Cold War and Communism as a Western ethos was a 20th century construct, both in the making and in the unmaking. Someday, of course, our kids will ask where we were on 9/11 when the towers fell, just as people in my parents' generation remember where they were when Kennedy was shot. But someday, our kids will want to know about what it was like living with the prospect of nuclear war, knowing that there were so many people in the world living in a completely different sort of society. I was ten when the Berlin Wall fell, but I knew then, even as a kid, that it was a Really Big Deal.

One of my favorite songs comes from the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which takes the story of the fall of Communism and, in particular, the fall of the Berlin Wall, to a whole new level. It's a song about changing your mood by changing your outer persona, becoming on the outside who you want to be on the inside. The entire show revolves around a character who wants to leave East Germany, and in order to do so, has a (botched) sex change operation in order to marry an American soldier he's in love with. Then the wall comes down, and everything s/he's done to change his/her life gets put in a different perspective. See the show, or the movie, if you get a chance, because it is awesome.

A satisfying ending

Three things:

I finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem yesterday. At nearly 900 pages, plus fifty pages of appendices, it took longer than most books I've read recently. It was also the sort of book that I wanted to think about as I read, since so much of it involved really interesting philosophy and mental experiment.

The basic plot involves a different world, with interesting characters and an amazing storyline. The main character goes through a series of revolutions in the size of his world (so to speak), and each time his world expands it begins with a denouement of sorts. I absolutely loved just about every minute of reading the book - I'd forgotten how much I liked Neal Stephenson, maybe, so I am thinking I might go pick up the Baroque Cycle since I haven't read that yet. Anathem is highly recommended to anyone who likes to read, and it's a bonus for those who like science fiction and fantasy or who like playing with words in their head or those who like philosophy of science. Absolutely fantastic, and when it ended I was very sad, because I'd grown to love the characters and the story so much.

Today, we went to see The Men Who Stare At Goats, which was pretty much big dumb fun, with a bit more intelligence than big dumb fun movies usually are. George Clooney and Jeff Bridges got to reprise parts of the roles I've always thought they both had most fun playing (Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother Where Art Thou and The Dude from The Big Lebowski, respectively). Ewan MacGregor is in it as well, and it's definitely worth a matinee price to see it in the theater, though I'm sure it will be just as good on DVD. Overall, it was quite silly and entertaining while being well-acted and a bit unusual at the same time.

And tonight, the season finale of Mad Men, about which I can say nothing but DAMN was that ever good. WOOOOO! Now we have to wait until next summer to find out what happens. ARGH.

The last of Barrett's Privateers

In April of 2001, right around the time I started chatting with Dan online, I went to Toronto to visit some friends who lived there and to explore a new city (and a new country, I guess). One night while I was there, I was out with my friend Mike and some of his friends, and after dancing for a few hours in a club-type place we went somewhere a little more quiet to have a drink and wind down.

We ended up in what I think was an Irish pub in a well-to-do part of town. I ordered a hard cider and my friend and his buddies had beer, and we were happy to learn that there was a live band playing. Near the end of my drink, the band started playing a song that somehow, everyone in the bar knew, and every person in there (except me) began to sing along. It was a rollicking sea-chanty sort of song, and by the end I had gotten a bit of the chorus, and I happily clapped along to the beat. When it was over, everyone applauded and cheered the band. I asked my friend the next day what that had all been about, and he explained to me that the song, "Barrett's Privateers," was one all Canadians seemed to know. The song was originally written by Stan Rogers, a well-known (in Canada) folk singer. I had liked it so much that I bought a Stan Rogers CD in a record store while I was still there, and then after I met Dan I played it for him a time or two. He liked it enough to buy a copy of the CD for himself, so when we moved in together we had two copies of it. Anyhow, we're both fans of Stan Rogers, who died tragically in an airplane accident in 1983.

Tonight, we were out to dinner at a local place called the Irish Snug with Scarlett, which is only a few blocks away. They have terrific French fries and Strongbow hard cider on tap. While we sat on the patio, amazed that less than 2 weeks ago there was a foot of snow on the ground yet it was nice enough tonight to sit outdoors to eat, inside was an Irish folk singer, accompanied by quite a few tipsy people. The longer we sat there, the more he sounded like Stan Rogers, and at one point I remarked to Dan, "If he starts singing 'Barrett's Privateers' I'm going to wonder if Stan Rogers has come back from the grave." Scarlett didn't know who Stan Rogers was, so we told her about him, and I kept thinking that the guy inside sounded just like him.

When it came time to pay, the server was nowhere to be found, and we were getting cold, so we went inside to find her, only to stop and listen to the folk singer for a while. He even had a some songbooks with the sing-along parts in bold, and quite a few people were enjoying singing to the chorus.

I picked up one of the books and leafed through to find the song he was playing and sing along, only to notice that "Barrett's Privateers" was one of the songs in his songbook! I showed it to him, and he agreed to sing it for me. I sang along, knowing most of the words by heart, and the rest of the drunkards joined in on the chorus and clapped along to the sea-chanty beat.

I'll never get to hear Stan Rogers sing, but I had the next best thing tonight at the Irish Snug in Denver.

You can hear the entire song here or watch Stan sing part of it here.

Friday Faff: Because everything else is so sad

Man, the past week or two have been pretty awful on the general scale of people's inhumanity to one another. This week in particular has made my heart hurt.

So, because I don't want to focus on the negative, here's some faffiness that helped keep me from offing myself:

Wombat is walking! And I wish I could be there to see it.

Spats Turkey has teeth!

Dan made some awesome drawings and wrote exactly what I wanted to say about what happened in Maine.

Why I always read the recipe before I begin

When I was in college, I lived in a student run co-op house for two years. It was a great arrangement; your rent went for room and board and in exchange you had to spend a few hours a week working at some assigned task. The house I lived in had 27 residents; it was one of the smallest in the UC Berkeley co-op system.

Breakfast and lunch in the house I lived in were on one's own. There was plenty of food available that one could prepare for oneself, and a full industrial-sized kitchen. But six nights a week, dinner was prepared for the residents who would be around. Each semester, the occupants of my house would vote on when dinner would be served (generally this revolved around when the local Fox network was airing The Simpsons), and to be a cook once a week (always with a partner) was one of the best jobs one could be assigned for one's work hours. There was always a regular meal and a vegetarian option, and one could sign up to have a plate set aside if one were going to be out late and want a dinner waiting up one's return. It was a pretty good setup, all things considered.

The first semester I lived in the house, I was lucky enough to be assigned a cook shift once a week (my other shift was cleaning the oven/stovetop once a week, which sucked ass). As cooks, we had to make up and submit menus to the Kitchen Manager, who trained the cooks as needed, ordered all the food, and planned when each menus would be served. I knew how to cook, since I'd been doing it for 8 or 9 years at that point, and I had a great time trying to figure out how to turn a recipe that would normally serve five into one that would serve 25. (The answer wasn't always to multiply each ingredient by 5, btw.)

My fellow Tuesday night cook was a pretty Persian guy named Bijan, who was used to flexing his muscles and flashing his dimples to get girls to drool over him. He didn't know how to cook, but the Work Manager that year had the hots for him, so she gave him a cook shift. So Tuesdays I taught Bijan how to cook and generally made him do the chopping and other prepwork because he didn't know how to do anything else.

Cooking with Bijan was fun most of the time, but I learned over the semester that I had to kind of watch what he was doing a lot of the time, because he liked to experiment, especially when we were making something that he thought might be "improved". He had a habit of adding Chinese five spice or hoisin sauce to things that really should not have been seasoned or sauced such. One time we were making marinara sauce, and he added several tablespoons of cinnamon while my back was turned "because I thought it might make it spicy." But the most awesome time, oh, the best time, was the Cream Puff Incident.

The dinner we were making that Tuesday night was well underway, and Bijan said he wanted to make something for dessert. I tossed the cookbook at him and told him to go to town, but to read the recipe before beginning. "Of course," he said, since I thought he'd already learned his lesson from previous culinary failures. "I'm making cream puffs," Bijan declared.

Somehow I lost the coin toss and ended up whipping cream by hand with a whisk, because our house didn't have a hand mixer and neither of us wanted to clean the industrial stand mixer. So I spent 20 minutes or half an hour hand whipping the cream while Bijan made the puff parts. They went into the oven and came out a few minutes later, looking great.

Finally, my arm aching, I triumphantly finished whipping the cream for the cream puffs and they had cooled enough for each of us to try one. I cut two in half, filled the middles with whipped cream, and as we bit down on our respective cream puffs we looked at one another in horror as we realized we were eating cream-filled salt dough.

"Bijan," I said, "did you read the recipe?"

"I did!" he swore.

I looked at the recipe. It called for 1/4 teaspoon of salt. No way there was only 1/4 of a teaspoon of salt in my cream puff alone. I pointed this out to him, and he realized that he must have put in 1/4 CUP of salt, not 1/4 TEASPOON.

I do not have to tell you the huge difference putting 1/4 cup of salt in any dessert-type baked good is from 1/4 teaspoon. Needless to say, the puffs were completely inedible. I put the remains of my hand-aching hard work in the refrigerator and we served dinner without dessert.

After dinner, one of our housemates found the whipped cream and somehow decided it would be a good idea to start a whipped cream fight, so the next half an hour involved 10 or 15 people flinging the product of my labor at one another, making a huge mess. I did not assist in the cleanup, since I figured I'd done my part to aid in the fun by whipping the cream in the first place.

I never let Bijan bake anything during one of our shifts again. And that is why I always read a recipe all the way through before I start cooking or baking anything.

a moment

I have a friend that I met at the gym. Her name is also Emily, and we've made dates off and on over the past year to work out together. We walk on the treadmill or around the indoor track when the weather's bad, and we walk outside, from the gym to the park and back, when it's nice. She takes the same weights class, which is where we met.

My friend is a few years younger and in a slightly different place in her life. We come from different backgrounds and have a lot of dissimilarities, but when it's been a couple of weeks or more between workout sessions (usually because she's busy with work), I miss hanging out with her.

Today we went on a walk at lunch. The sun was out, the sky was a piercing blue. The air was cool, but we walked fast enough to stay warm and chatted about her recent trip to Tuscon and our Halloween activities and all sorts of other things. Halfway through our walk we were in the park when she looked up at a huge oak tree and said, "I've found it!"

"Found what?" I asked.

"It's my favorite tree," she said. "That is a beautiful tree."

And it was. It was still covered in giant leaves, and the colors ranged from a dark rust to orange to burnt gold to lemon to green, depending on which part of the tree you were looking at. The colors of the leaves sparkled in the sun, set off by the deep azure sky behind.

"I have a favorite tree at home," she told me. "My mom takes a photo of it this time every year and sends it to me." My friend is from Pennsylvania and usually only makes it home for Christmas each year. "I miss the colors," she said. "Colorado is great, but it's all aspens, evergreens, gold, dark green. I miss the red and orange."

I need to find myself a favorite tree.

Else the Puck a liar call

One thing that I used to do but don't do anymore is perform. Sometimes, I really miss it. My first stage experience was at age 5, my first ballet recital. After that, it was yearly ballet recitals until I got the opportunity to act in a play my mom wrote when I was in middle school (it was called, I believe, "Who kicked the bucket?") After that, I was hooked, and signed up for Drama class when I got to high school (my first opportunity to do so).

When I was a freshman, most of the drama students in the school, including the two who got all the lead parts, were girls. So the drama teacher had to find plays that could accommodate any number of girls (and the few boys she could wrangle into participating). That first year, for the big production I played the part of a French Maid in a terrible play called "Our Hearts were Young and Gay" (so chosen, I believe, because there were two main characters - both female - and almost no male parts).

My sophomore year, those girls were seniors, so of course (again) the big play had two female leads. I played one of the students at the school in "The Children's Hour" and the most memorable moment of that experience was during the performance that I picked up pieces of the broken ceramic cat (part of the plot) and attempted to tape them back together, and in so doing a small shard of ceramic cut my finger, which then bled all over the stage. I clenched my fist closed during the rest of that scene, trying not to bleed all over everything, and had to clean up the stage during intermission. I still have a tiny scar from that.

I was considered an "advanced" drama student by my junior year, and even though I was unable to be in drama class (due to scheduling reasons; I think my math class was at the same time as that class or something - remember, I went to a tiny, tiny school), I was cast as Annelle in the fall/winter production of Steel Magnolias. I loved being a part of this play and can still parrot most every character's lines if I think about it. Each of the other actresses in the play was a friend of mine, or if we weren't friends before the play, we certainly were by the end. I had another memorable stage mishap during a performance; I got sick with my annual Christmas cold (you know, the cold you always get right at the start of winter break while you're in school) a few days early and ended up losing my voice on stage. Again, it was right before intermission, and so I spent the entire 20 minutes once the curtain closed desperately downing hot liquid in hopes of getting my voice back for the rest of the performance. I'm not sure how well it worked, but I still had a great time doing the show.

That spring's play was Charlotte's Web. I was SO EXCITED about doing this play. It was going to work out perfectly: my friend Mishel was trying out for Charlotte, Nancy for Fern, Laura for Templeton, and I was going to be Wilbur. We even all rehearsed and auditioned together. It was in the bag, I thought. But then.

THEN

Then, the cast list was released. Mishel was Charlotte. Nancy was Fern. Laura was Templeton. And I? I was LURVY. Wilbur went to a sophomore who looked, no joke, like a pig. Talk about typecasting. I was PISSED. I was PISSED AS HELL, after years of playing crappy parts because those two girls and their cronies got all the good parts, after Losing My Voice during Steel Magnolias and still finishing the show, I was a junior and ALL MY FRIENDS were the main parts and it was going to be awesome. And because another girl looked like a pig, I didn't get that part.

I declined the role of Lurvy and attended one performance of the show to support my friends. I would have made a much better Wilbur.

My senior year, I was so incredibly busy with everything I was doing that I didn't even consider auditioning for the fall show. I can't even remember what it was, now. But the performance bug wouldn't leave me alone, and when I learned that the big spring production was going to be A Midsummer Night's Dream, I was sorely tempted. It was the first time my school had attempted Shakespeare. Not only that, it was my favorite of the bard's plays. The advanced Senior English teacher was also the drama teacher, and I think she felt bad for what had transpired the previous spring, because she encouraged me to audition for the show. I figured that since I wasn't in the drama class (again, scheduling conflict) and since I had about 10 other extracurriculars going on, not to mention it being my most difficult year academically, I auditioned for one of the small fairy parts - Peaseblossom, maybe. During the audition, one of my friends wanted to try out for First Fairy and she asked me to read Puck opposite.

I thought nothing more of it until the cast list was posted, and I was given the part of Puck (half the performances) and First Fairy (half the performances), my friend and I sharing both parts. My gast was flabbered.

Despite my incredibly busy schedule, I thrived during rehearsals of this show. It helped that there were finally boys involved, so our practices weren't just estrogen fests, and the experience of trying to learn Shakespeare lines while blocking and staging and dancing and singing and, you know, acting, was a fantastic challenge. I loved every minute of it, though I was exhausted pretty much all the time and getting about 5 hours of sleep a night what with all the academic stuff and the other extracurriculars I was doing. Most of the cast were my friends, and we all got even closer during all our preparations. As Puck, I had an awesome costume with really fun makeup and had the real stump of a redwood tree to sit on during much of the show. I got splinters in my butt, but I didn't care.

I only got to be Puck twice (and First Fairy twice); four performances for all the months of hard work, and when I delivered the final speech for the last time, I was nearly in tears. It had been an amazing experience, and I still remember the final speech:

If we shadows have offended
Think but this and all is mended
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear
And this weak and idle theme
No more yielding than a dream
Gentles, do not reprehend
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue
We shall make amends 'ere long
Else the Puck a liar call
So goodnight unto you all
Give us these hands if we be friends
And Robin shall restore amends