Tuesday

Slim has his big financial exam tomorrow afternoon so I'm giving him a wide berth for studying. I also laid in Tollhouse cookies and some of those vegetable enchiladas he likes. I have had good luck with cookies lately; since I started melting the butter (I've been doubling the salt and adding very large hunks of walnut for years) the texture's been excellent - or at any rate, just the way I like them. I sometimes think Cook's promises of objective perfection are dicey when your definition of the platonic ideal differs from theirs, as in the case of banana bread. In case you can't tell, I'm very hungry. I've been looking at appealing/appalling casseroles on taste of home all morning and my yogurt is looking increasingly sad and lacking in Velveeta, ground beef and white sauce.

Have decided to give some Boy Bait to Bonecrusher.

Boy Bait

The Blueberry Boy Bait is somewhat less enticing than I had hoped. Plus, huge: an entire 13x9" worth. I guess it's good for what it is, but I'd anticipated a denser, more coffee-cake-like texture and this is decidedly fluffy.(I used Cook's Country, which is a division of Cook's Illustrated so obviously the recipe is perfect.) Slim was up all night and was only baited into consuming a small square. (He was trading gold, obvs.)

Still between books - finished A Special Kind of Love - and the panic is setting in. Never Let Me Go has been intimated but I don't know that I can wait for Amazon/my landlord to get it to me - I have mentioned his practice of dumping five Time Outs on my doorstep at a time, right? Usually on a Sunday.

On the Town With the Petite Sophisticate

Double-feature last night: first Mostly Mozart (WAM, Faure) and then downtown for Francis and the Lights show at Mercury Lounge. In between we got some steak fries at Katz's.

(Wow, uneven bars look really hard. I have a Blueberry Boy Bait in the oven.)

Soemtimes the Mercury Lounge whips me into a rage but last night I was reasonably calm; I mean, I was kind of irritated by the amount of self-consciously sexy dancing going on by a nearby group of girls; and, you know, I'm pretty sick of just anyone thinking she can throw aggressive glasses on which have nothing to do with her face; and this one guy crashed into me and kind of hurt my foot - but, overall, as good a show as one expects from Mr. Starlight - certainly one of the hardest-working men on the indie rock scene. Slim's not in his good graces anymore because he addressed him by his real name AND on another occasion referred to his style as "funk." The one time I had dealings with him I was so intimidated by his romantic pallor and palpable air of melancholy that I couldn't do more than ask him, 'is that carpaccio?" (It was.)

(Boy Bait looks good.)

Subway smells better. Maeve brought me (along with tub of maple butter from Polly's Pancake Parlor) a really bizarre career romance called A Special Kind of Love, which I suppose refers to social worker Helen's love for her work, as she seems to despise and maltreat all the men I've run across so far, to say nothing of her secretary and her patients. Await further reports.

It's A Miracle!

Enlarge and read.

The Thinking Cap

Slim has a habit of going into very deep thinking trances in which he has deep thoughts and finds talking very distracting. I'm prepared to respect this, but the problem is these are difficult to distinguish from his just zoning out, which he also does a lot. So I have proposed that, when he is in think mode, he don a literal thinking cap, which he removes when he is in talking mode. So far, it's worked; he's been putting on one of my berets, in lieu of anything else, and harmony reigns.

Charlie en vogue

Took my brother out for the promised lobster roll last night. He was sheepish because he was featured in a Times Styles section spread on "The Brooklyn Prairie" in which he was, presumably, one of the "homesteaders" fleeing Manhattan. Now, the very same photographer snapped me in THE VERY SAME SHIRT a few months ago and didn't use me! Hmph.

As to the other pic, which is only online - well, while I was with him a friend texted him, "NAMBLA called."