Sideways, The Prequel

In more ways than a person who is female, childless and under the age of 40 should, I resemble my father. I have his notoriously underdeveloped ass, his sense of humor and his stubborn streak. I have not, however, inherited his facility with wine. Perhaps noticing this, my dad to took me to Italy after graduation and we spent days driving around Tuscany, stopping for tastings at wineries that we marked on our roadmap. In cliché fashion, I quickly gave up my weird devotion to white wine and learned to like red. We drank chiantis from chipped ceramic jugs at every dinner and we had to buy extra luggage to transport our bottled purchases home.

My new wine lust made my dad happy and he didn’t seem to care that my burgeoning appreciation wasn’t accompanied by any apparent sense of discernment. I still like to remember our impromptu visit to a very large winery at which I was asked to choose which wine I liked best from the several that we sampled. To my horror and amusement, the woman serving us informed me that - out of all the reds we’d tasted - I’d selected the wine that they supplied to the Olive Garden restaurant chain in the U.S. We cracked up. And then my magnanimous dad bought two bottles for our return trip.

Five years have passed with little improvement. Basically, Mark and I are the poster children for Yellow Tail. We’d be happy to branch out except that whenever we taste something else and like it, we can never, ever remember its name. We have no idea were to start.

Yesterday, ambling home from seeing Millions (don’t make the same mistake) we made the rare decision to browse in a local wine store and we stumbled upon a great idea for wine amateurs like us: the “best buy four pack”. Every month the store (Red, White and Bubbly for those of you who live in the hood) selects four good wines under 15 bucks and writes an informative little blurb about them. You can buy them separately or you can be suckered in like we were and buy the batch for about $30. It’s like a great little wine primer for those of us without much wine education and with even less cash. (I think what really won me over was a sentence in the description of the first wine which was something like “a $7 red from France that tastes like a $10 red from New Zealand!”.

Right now we’re sipping on the cheapest of the bunch - a $6 Spanish table wine called Prensa Real. It’s fine. It’s not making me swoon but I’m glad it’s not from Australia. Mark, who is currently sitting in the living room about 12 yards away from where I’m sitting in the kitchen eating left-over three bean salad from a giant serving bowl just called over his opinion: “When I compare this to the other wines I’ve drunk, like Yellow Tail for instance, I’d say it starts out good but then it just pussies out at the end.” I told him I would have to agree. For more expert wine opinions, stay tuned -- we have three more bottles and a surprisingly empty social calendar.

Samsara: Why I Deserve to Eat Your Popcorn

I like to imagine that in my previous life I was a sixties radical or the number one wife of a Chinese emperor. But I think the sad truth is that the former me lived through either the Depression or a famine. How else to explain why a child growing up with well-stocked refrigerator shelves, packed lunches and frequent supermarket visits would feel compelled to write her name on a box of cookies in order to claim and protect its contents? Or that her teenage self and her friend Jen would buy Whatchamacallits from the school tuck shop to enjoy in privacy by the empty school pool?

You might think I’m turning towards the mysteries of reincarnation so I can avoid the simple answer: gluttony. But it’s more nuanced than pure and simple greed -- there are power issues involved, for one. For example, there’s what you might call the "hoarding, lording instinct". This is the term that describes the inclination to string out one’s Halloween candy until Easter and to occasionally re-count the stale pieces in a slow, elaborate fashion in front of one’s salivating siblings before throwing the whole plastic sack of it away in June. There’s also the “licking tactic”, whereby a candy bar or Popsicle eater responds to a request for a bite of his or her treat by licking it in it’s entirety and then extending it towards the bite-wanter.

In many instances, I think the sizing-up of portions, the choosing of the bigger plates, the counting of the number of potato chips left, the small battles over last bite, have more to do with getting a fair share than getting the biggest share. I don’t need to have the biggest of the two muffins, for example, it’s just that I can’t accept having the smallest one. Forget that you might be twice my size, or have just run the marathon, or that you skipped lunch -- it just wouldn’t be fair!

I really don’t know where this innate need to protect my access and right to food comes from if I can’t blame it on a past life. I used to have a whole child-psych theory that it had something to do with being the first-born child-- you know, protecting your rank from the siblings born to usurp it, that kind of thing -- but I recently had a conversation about these crazy food habits with Amy, the baby of four, and she confessed to many of the same faults.

So for now, I control myself at dinner parties and office gatherings -- I won’t wince if you snake a few fries and I might even offer you a taste of my pasta without asking for a mouthful of your salad in return. But until someone can come up with a better theory, I choose to console myself with the understanding that I have lived through some very hard times in human history, and that in contrast to my lifetimes of suffering, all of you with your laid-back relationships with food spent your past lives being very, very spoiled.

Submission

Mark and I have a new master.

When we moved into this apartment last summer we consciously decided not to hook up a TV antenna or to order cable. I wanted to escape the powerful elixer that is exhaustion and the Bachelorette, and Mark was fleeing from too many Star Trek Marathons. I wanted to read more, to write more, to clean more, to call friends more. And, well, Mark wanted to play more video games.

So, we didn’t have TV and we both did read a little more. I started this new site; Mark went to the gym more frequently. When we hankered for some auido-visual diversion, we rented a movie. Overtime, though, we realized that while we really didn’t miss zoning out to The Apprentice or the unfortunate combination of dinner and Fear Factor, sometimes we did long for the short, serialized nature of television. At those times, a good movie demanded too much framing and plot, and a bad movie was just plain too long.

What we needed, we realized, was someway to weed out the brain sucking television and just get the shows we wanted. The answer leapt out at me one afternoon from the Yahoo homepage, shortly after a Friday night Ali G plan was squelched by our local video store: Netflix! We could rent all the series that we were interested in, and watch them on our own schedule! Without late-fee fears, we wouldn’t feel compelled to watch a full season of something in one night - we could space things out, watch them at our leisure and still fill in control of our watching habits!

We were the first Netflix members in our circle. There was no one there to alert us. There was nobody who could tell us, like I will tell you now, that Netflix will RULE YOUR LIFE.

Those of you who have not yet succumbed, hear this cautionary tale:

This afternoon at 12:45pm, after more than seven days filled with fevers and snot and other things that make sex sound like suffering, Mark and I took to the bedroom. Clothes were removed. Things were set in motion. And then we remembered: mail put in the mailbox on the corner gets picked up at 1pm and we hadn’t dropped off our two completed Netflix! If we didn’t get them to the corner in fifteen minutes they wouldn’t get picked up today. And if they didn’t get picked up today then they wouldn’t be returned to Netflix by Tuesday. And if they weren’t returned to Netflix by Tuesday they wouldn’t be processed on Wednesday. And if they weren’t processed on Wednesday then the next two DVDs on our list wouldn’t be delivered until Friday. And if the next two DVDs weren’t delivered by Friday then we would have to wait to get them until Saturday!!!

Mark put on his pants and went to the mailbox. I lay daydreaming about the next installment of the West Wing.

My friends, you have been warned.

Mystery Train

If you live in New York City you know the feeling of self-pity that takes over you on a cold winter’s night when you wait and wait and wait for the subway train that’s supposed to take you home. And more likely than not, you know the feeling of disbelief that quickly mutates into blinding rage when the train that finally does come charging through the tunnel simply blasts its horn at you and does not stop. But, fellow New Yorker, have you experienced the total amazement and amusement that comes with the realization that the subway train that does not stop is packed to its most extreme limit with Orthodox Jews?

I have! On an ordinary Tuesday night, returning from a birthday party, I sat on the platform wondering whether a group of Orthodox Jews had managed to charter their own subway car, or if I was an unknowing extra in a weird movie. Then, another F train arrived, and this time it did stop. And what do you know -- this train almost matched the one before it! Apart from a black woman reading in a corner seat, a white homeboy and the Asian man that got on the train with me, it was once again a sea of modest black dresses, black hats and beards.

Everyone around me was holding on to a program from what I’ve finally figured out was this event at the Continental Airlines Arena, a huge gathering of Jewish people coming together to mark the completion of seven and a half years of Talmudic study and the beginning of some more studying. I asked the group of women and girls I was pressed up against where everyone was coming from. All I could discern from their answer was that it was some sort of celebration, but that was obvious from the energy in the car and the smiles on the 12 year olds who had gotten to stay out so late on a school night. I got off three stops later , a little reluctant to leave the party.