Is This Thing On? by annie newman

You Funny Little Good-for-Nothing Meme

(This title is from a Maurice Chevalier song which we wish we could reproduce on this blog. Suffice it to say that Mimi is a girl and Chevalier is asking if he's her guy. It all ends in a lot of suggestive French snorting of the sort that La Skolnique and ourself refer to as "hon, hon!"

As to why we are answering this meme, it's because we never have done one before, and we filed our income taxes a full 20 hours before the deadline, and we are very proud of ourself.)

1. We've come to realize that our last kiss ...was shared with someone we have completely forgotten

2. We are listening to ...the knockabout comedy of Odillio and his work crew painting our house

3. We talk ...to the trees, but they never listen to us.

4. We love ... iTouch apps. To a really frightening degree.

5. Our best friend ...is La Skolnique. Although it's okay if we are not hers.

6. Our first real kiss ...was extraordinarily hot. 

7. Love is ...on the whole, a positive thing.

8. Marriage is .... a socio-economic construct for which there is (just briefly, right now) no real reason.

9. Somewhere, someone is thinking..."will this pain ever end?"

10. We'll always...eat m&ms.

11. The last time we really cried was because....We were feeling emotional.

12. My cell phone ...plan has really good coverage.

13. When we wake up in the morning ...we'd really rather not.

14. Before we go to bed... We kick the cat out of our room.

15. Right now we are thinking about... errands. 

16. Babies are... so fragile

17. We get on Myspace... never.

18. Today we...feel about as lonely as usual.

19. Tomorrow we will be... Just about as lonely. But we will not be with in-laws, which reminds us that there are worse things than loneliness.

20. We really want to be... financially solvent, and of some help to people.

21. We are allergic to...penicillin

22. We are annoyed by... humorless people

23. One food we refuse to eat is...snail caviar

24. The most recent thing we've learned is... even when it hurts like a sonofabitch, it's not personal.

25. The number one thing on our bucket list is... stay the hell away from the bucket

26. Something we've always wanted to learn to do is... speak Spanish

27. We have a high tolerance for... children

28. We have a low tolerance for... narrow mindedness

29. My wish... for my daughter to be safe and happy after her father and I are gone.

30. Person in front of whom we wouldn't mind behaving like an idiot if we saw them in real life...George Clooney.

Love in the Basement

One character to whom we wish to introduce you is our house. Known to us as The Old Newman Place, it is a 1932 four-square bungalow, apparently built from a Sears kit by a crew of loafers who were sitting around the corner tavern waiting for the New Deal to kick in, when the person who owned this 1/3 acre told them it was free beer for them as would lend a hand, and he didn't mean the needled stuff, neither.

(If this passage made sense to you, you were probably wondering what good it did anyone to sit around a tavern before Repeal, anyway. You're such a smarty!)

Anyway, the boys pitched right in, and we think many a fine craftsman learned a profession on this job. As in, the electricians learned plumbing, the plumbers learned floor-installation, and the flooring men learned wallpaper hanging. We should point out that no one learned any of this well.

Time went on and we have owned this house since since 2005. We actually got a mortgage in 2005, although we were broke, in school, and subsisted on a small and undependable hand-out from our brother. This, in its essence, is the germ of today's Financial Crisis. 

Anyway, we live here with our Beautiful Daughter, our Cat and our Young Roommate. We refer to her as a Roommate although she does not contribute to the upkeep of this house in any way. She pays for her own food (a slight cost), beverages (not at all slight) and cell phone bill (roughly equal to the gross national product of Peru).

Every third week she unloads the dishwasher and puts everything back in the wrong place, an action which must be greeted with fawning approval or else we will lose the right to ask her to do it again. (Not that she will, but we like being able to ask.)

Our Roommate keeps company with a nice young man who looks forward to working in his father's construction company. This ambition has the dual benefits of preventing him from taking any further education (he doesn't know when he'll be called to a full-time job) and keeping him under his parents' thumb, unable to do anything of which they disapprove. They are the sort of people who disapprove as a way of life, although they call it Religion.

Our Roommate has been working part-time at Walmart for two years and is already up to 25 cents more than the minimum wage. She works 45 hours per week, which is called part-time with overtime. In this way, she is protected from having to take time off to go to the doctor, as she has no benefits whatsoever.

In this happy situation, it is obvious that the two needed to become engaged, and so they did, on a $300 ring and a sixpack of Mike's Hard lemonade. And they have been miserable ever since.

Since they live in our basement, we have ear-witnessed every moment of the romance: the recriminations, the second thoughts, the throwing of the ring in the ring-giver's face, the piling out of the basement and into the cars and the speeding off madly in every direction, the reconciliatory pizza, the creaking bedsprings, the having the ring re-sized because it cracked when it hit the basement's concrete wall.

Does Love always go this way? Or is it Love in a Basement which makes it go wrong?

We are actually happy to be living on the celibate (and airy) second floor of the Old Newman Place.  

Truffiverous

Like we had nothing better to do, we suddenly find that we have fallen deeply and passionately in love with truffles.

Not the ones to the right. (We've been in love with them for years, but there's no news value in that.)

No--the truffles which we love (to which we have become devoted, for which we will bankrupt ourself, with which we wish to have our tombstone decorated every August 29th) are the real thing, the fungi which grow, without root or branch, imbedded in the earth near some (but not all) oak trees.

They cannot be planted and they cannot be predicted. When you want to find a truffle (and you don't happen to be standing in the cheese department at Eli Zabar's massive gourmet supermarket in Manhattan) you need to find, first, a well-trained dog or pig (you heard us), and then a forest with a lot of oak trees in it.

(It helps if you, the pig, and the forest are all either French or Italian.)

Then you let the dog or pig sniff a bit of truffle in your hand. Then you let the dog or pig run around for a while. Eventually, the animal will be found digging at the roots of an oak tree, where you will find a truffle.

If you are using a dog, we suppose that he will be found peeing on certain oak trees, which may or may not mean that there is a truffle there, but probably does mean that even if it's there you won't want it.

Anyway. If you're very lucky, the truffle will look like this:

You will clean it and then rush it to market, where quaintly-dressed local merchants will scream "Sacre bleu!" or "eh, Maddon'!", depending, and you will receive a great deal of money, and probably you won't get a taste of the truffle. Which will be OK by you, because they probably give you gas.

Soon, your truffle will find itself in one of the finest kitchens in New York or Paris, being sliced thin enough to see through and then being sprinkled on pasta or grilled cheese for an extra $60.

And what does it taste like, this truffle? Or--to put it in a more succinct way--is it worth it?

In our opinion, yes it is worth it, because it tastes a little like garlic, but mild and richly lingering. 

It tastes nothing at all like any mushroom we've ever eaten, so we don't understand why the taste is sometimes described as "mushroomy". 

It makes eggs, cheese, and cream taste like larger quantities of truffles, so that is how we like it best; we don't think a truffle can add much to meat or fish. (As a cream, egg, or cheese sauce over chicken it is excellent).

At its very best, truffle tastes the way someone smells when you absolutely adore them and they are just about to kiss you.  So a truffle tastes not just like a good kiss, but a great one.

May your 2009 be filled with truffles...or may it be filled with whatever and whoever you love.