That's My Bix!

Puppies noses, kittens in front of fireplaces.

Purring.

Lots and lots of frosting. Girl frosting.

Babies…. babies and blankets knitted by grandmothers.

This is because he called me “Miss Thang”.

So I’ve been feeling a little svelter this week. I think the boot called Louisiana DID kick my ass or at least slap it around a little. So that means one thing: Time for my weekly foray into reality.

Time to try on the Small Jeans.

No, they’re not really size Small. They are actually the exact same size as my other two pair of Pre-Bulbous Ass jeans, but one of those (the ones I call the Medium Jeans) fit rather perfectly, perchance even a little loosely, and the other pair (the pair I was so excited to get into back in June) are now so loose that they slide right off my hips and I have begun offering them as transitional living space for homeless people.

Oh, not really.

While I haven’t exactly been AWOL from Operation Hottie, I have definitely not been the healthiest of eaters. My nightly crunch regime has gone from 75 Killer Crunches while watching TiVo to a nice bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Shut up, it’s good.

A lot of it has to do with the fact that as I am writing this entry, it is 5 degrees outside. And that’s straight temperature. Not including wind chill, which brings it down into the range of Colder Than The Uterus of Donnatella Versace. So I can’t go walking. And also some of the power down has been due to my continued addiction to Sbux. But it’s not my fault! I got free drink coupons from a lovely Sbux barista reader who shall remain nameless, less the Sbux Mafia strikes. I don’t want to find out that she sleeps with the filters.

I can never get enough Mafia humor, you know that? Something inherently funny about implied violence. It’s probably the American in me. Guts and bloodshed’ that’s prime comedy.

So after working late, I came home and decided to take off my jeans and slip into my adorable fuzzy jammies, but in the process, I would also try on the Small Jeans. And on my way through the kitchen, I grabbed a truffle and stuck it in my mouth. And then I thought about the irony of the situation. Trying on a pair of pants to see if I’ve lost weight while in my mouth sits some luscious melty chocolate with a whipped ganache center, infused with Kirsch and wholesale liquid sin.

Hello Lard Butt party of one, your table is waiting. What’s that? An extra bread basket? But of course!

Oh’ jeans still don’t fit. Imagine that.

Speaking of Sbux, Baranskista (aka the Christine Baransky Barista) met Esteban the other day.

Now, one thing you should know about Esteban. He does not believe in politeness for politeness sake. One might say he was raised by truckers (which is a joke in our house. When someone does something bordering on rude or crass, we query ‘Were you raised by truckers?’ when in reality, Esteban was raised by factory workers and I was raised by a hippy waitress’ honestly, we would have probably had higher social standing being raised by truckers. Please, truckers, save your emails until I bitch about Wal-mart again. For every ten irate comments, Andrew gives me a punch on my Supergold card. When I fill up the card, I get a free car wash. With wax.)

So Esteban and I go through the drive thru at Sbux. I can tell from the way she answered that it was Baranskista, The Bitchy Barista. I ordered a Venti Cr’me De Menthe Non Fat No Whip Mocha. Esteban ordered a Venti Mocha.

One guess as to which of us is considered high maintenance.

So we get up to the window and Baranskista gives us two identical cups. ‘One mint mocha and one regular mocha.’ She grumbles.

‘Which is the mint one?’ Esteban asks.

‘Which one is the mint one?’ She yells back to the barrista manning the machine. No one answers. She turns back, looks at one of the cups and indicates ‘This one is mint.’ She then turned to fumble with the change.

I tasted mine. It wasn’t mint. I didn’t know if it was really supposed to be mine, however, since she has given me varying quality of mochas in the past. I think ‘Mint Mocha’ to Baranskista is like the term ‘Partly Cloudy&AO8AvwC9AO8AvwC9- it’s completely open to interpretation and barometric fluctuations. But then Esteban tasted his and sneered ‘Mint.’ Like it was a curse word or the name of a famous chef who lives on Food TV twenty hours of the day.

We switched cups. I then noticed that the mint was CLEARLY marked with pen. Baranskista came to the window with Esteban’s change and he couldn’t resist.

‘Do me a favor’next time, if you don’t know what’s in a drink, don’t just guess. Actually find out, ok?’ And then he drove away.

While he grumbled about how much he dislikes Sbux (he inherently distrusts any chain and specifically suspects any successful ones to have made pacts with the Devil, which is why he calls McDonald’s ‘The Great Satan of Hamburgers’), I tried to restrain my utter glee. Baranskista got bitched at! And I didn’t have to do it! But then I did mental math on damage control. I couldn’t go on being That Grouchy Customer. I didn’t know if I could maintain my excellent relationship with Unsurly Girl if she sided with Baranskista, who while she is spectacularly bad at her barista duties, might be actually a very nice person. And that is the only Sbux in town, if you don’t count the one in Barnes & Noble which opens at 9:00. So I’d either have to change my work schedule or give up my love of the bean.

But then I realized that we weren’t in the Monte, but rather Esteban’s truck. And Baranskista is stupid. So she might not have seen me. However, now I’m afraid to use my free drink coupons because they are exactly the kind that you would get if you complained about bad service and I don’t want her to remember that I was sitting in the passenger seat next to Grumpy Bearded Favor Guy. So this morning, I paid cash for my mocha, despite two lovely free gift certificates sitting in my jacket pocket.

And they mocked me. Oh yes. It was bitter like yesterday’s grounds and hard like a stale cinnamon scone.

Remember when coffee cost 25 cents and you didn’t need interpersonal relationships with the person who poured it? Remember that? I don’t’ mostly because I just started drinking coffee when that Starbucks opened, but I heard that it happened. And I dream of those days. I dream and look forward. And so we beat on, boats against the current, ever born ceaselessly into the past.

And speaking of vaginas,…new Quoted is here.

The message board wants to get Baranskista demoted to working the register

Random things about the trip to New Orleans:

Went to Caf’ Du Monde and tried to do the Sbux thing. ‘I’ll have a mocha with a shot of vanilla.’ But no mocha. No vanilla. You want coffee? They have Caf’ Au Lait. That’s it. You want mocha? Stir in a chocolate bar you buy up the street. However, they do have beignets. Beignets’ damn. Damn damn damn. Best Southern Food Ever. Made me even like Caf’ Au Lait.

I realized after getting there that I didn’t have an adequate bag for my camera with zoom and hate to walk around with it around my neck like some durfy tourist. So I went to the French Market in hopes of getting a bag. I ended up scoring a delightful beaded bag with a monkey on it. Not just any monkey. A FANCY monkey. Wearing a hat and a coat and apparently, it looks like it might rain because she is also sporting a sequined umbrella. The thing that sold me was that the lining of the bag is this sort of Burberry-esque plaid and it also has a little special place to hold my cell phone. Love it. It was $50, but I haggled the guy down to $30, but then I was walking through Saks and saw almost identical bags for $300. Woot! Love my monkey bag!

I was going to take pictures of the monkey around New Orleans, but as I got it less than twenty four hours before I went home, the monkey only had time for a Sbux mocha at the mall. Poor little well-dressed monkey.

One of the cabbies was telling me about Caf’ Du Monde and how he took his in-laws there and they just loved it. This somehow gelled into him asking me how old I was. ‘Thirty One’ I replied and he, at fifty-two, confirmed that this is a good age for women, and that they are only truly becoming a woman then. I agreed with him and said that I’m feeling more comfortable with myself. But he didn’t mean that way, he meant the fortune cookie kind of way’. In Bed. And then he launched into a litany of reasons why men are stupid if they go for skinny chicks because they look like little boys and how they are just following what the fashion magazines tell them, and the fashion designers are all gay men, so why should the world value the opinion of men who aren’t even sleeping with women? Smart men, he opined, liked to be with women who had ‘some meat to them’ and his opinion was that if he liked a woman, then he wanted to sleep with them and he didn’t want a woman with corners. And I could only just sit there and nod, torn between telling him that he was preaching to the choir or covering my ears and going ‘la la la la la’. In the end, he dropped me off wherever it was and said ‘No charge, you’re my first fare of the day and you’re cute.’ And I gave him a $5 tip anyway, which was more than the original fare and said ‘Thank you.’ And even though I think I had just gotten hit upon by a Hindu cabbie old enough to be my father, my hips could help but unleash with a wiggle as I walked away.

I absolutely love sharks. Sharks rock my world. So I made sure to stop at the New Orleans aquarium to see their acclaimed shark exhibit and let me tell you, it was Feh Nominal. Not only do they have a huge wall of aquarium where there are no fewer than five ginormous full fledged man eaters (not those pansy assed nurse sharks as in the Chicago Aquarium), but you can also pet a shark. Sure, it’s a baby, but it’s the coolest thing ever. And its belly feels like a puppy’s belly, all sort of squishy and delicate, but also fat and hungry. And you can stand there at the aquarium wall and the big guys turn and come right at you at eye level and you can look into their crazy orthodontics and their soulless eyes and feel the hair on the back of your head stand up. It was absolutely thrilling. Sharks rock.

Not only are the beignets in New Orleans to die for, but the rest of the food was also exquisite. During our stay, I had in no particular order: red beans and rice, oysters on the half shell (eleven of them, because Esteban decided he didn’t like them, but I love them very much so no complaints from Madame!), double chocolate bread pudding, grilled red fish, steak and eggs, lobster bisque, tenderloin au poivre, poached eggs with asparagus, grilled tomatoes, and biscuits, veal chantalle, crawfish, bananas foster, and things I’ve undoubtedly forgotten. It all reminds me how bland everything is in the Midwest. I hate bland. Damn, now I’m hungry, thinking about all of that food. Yup’ Operation Hottie was definitely on hiatus.

Unfortunately through some huge oversight, Esteban and I only have one picture of ourselves in New Orleans (unless you count the blurry one of me on the Bourbon Street web cam). And this is it. Sad. Very sad.

Oh, and I added pictures to this entry.

Dear Marti Noxon,

I came back from my trip to watch the new episode of Buffy that my TiVo (Ricky Fitts is his name) had so faithfully recorded and found that suddenly, Xander, Willow and Buffy all seem to have developed ESP. I think I speak for every Buffy viewer over the age of fourteen with my concerned query of ‘The Fuck?!?’ Apparently you are partaking of the same hallucinagenics they are on over at ‘Angel’ when they had Cordelia sleep with Connor. Because that could happen.

Oh, and if you make Giles the Evil Dead, I will hate you forever.

Sincerely,
Weetabix

PS. Seriously. For. Ever.

The airport smells like red beans and rice with a healthy kick of Tabasco. We take a stretch limo because it is less expensive than taking a cab. From our tinted windows we look at New Orleans, which is poor and crumbled and dirty, or at least the part between the airport and the hotel. The driver is playing Staind and Linkin Park on the CD player and takes no fewer than eight cell calls while we all stare out the window and wish there was alcohol in the limo’s bar. I see beads strewn onto a barbed wire fence of a parking lot.

We pull up to the Ritz Carlton and crawl out, three people wearing business wear and black leather jackets and me with my Tinkerbell t-shirt and bootcut faded jeans. I pretend that I am the female Douglas Coupland, rock star writer extraordinaire, and Lori, Don and Esteban are my entourage. I try out the word ‘peeps’ in my head and decide that even my inner brain voice sounds like the whitest girl in the world.

> The hotel has a bouquet of cut flowers on every flat surface. Fleur de lis, fleur de lis, fleur de lis, I chant it to myself in my head. We take the elevator up to the lobby on the third floor. There is a table there with a floral arrangement of cut lilies and peach roses. I can smell it thirty feet in any direction. Mozart is piped in from somewhere and I dismiss the rock star writer fantasy and instead decide that I am Marie Antoinette. Showing humility by carrying her own laptop.

Our room is lovely but swims in patterns of strange colors. Magenta and pine pastoral scenes on a yellow background. There is a phone in the water closet, with a data port. The very high bed has a down coverlet over a down comforter over a feather bed. I lay on my stomach to study the map and feel as though I have fallen into a souffl’. There are six pillows propped against the carved wooden headboard. I read the hotel’s brochure, including the spa services, detailing the morning and nightly housekeeping. I learn that the sheets are 350 count, the toiletries are from a boutique in New York, and everything is available for sale in the lobby gift shop. The comforter has a corporate sponsor.

Followed by Esteban’s admonishments to ‘Not go wandering!’ I go wandering and find the St. Charles trolley. It is primarily empty this early in the day. A woman gets on with a gaggle of young boys. They are going to the zoo and she asks the driver to tell her when she needs to get off. She takes a picture of the boys on the trolley. I ask her if she would like me to take a picture of her with the boys. She declines but thanks me several times for offering. I can tell I’ve just been too friendly again. What is automatic at home is seen as abnormal or miraculous behavior abroad.

A man gets on with his’ something. Woman friend? Wife? Mother?’ taking her by the arm and helping her to a seat four up from me. He’s wearing a blazer and shirt unbuttoned too far, showing a middleaged chest with sparse black hairs. The hair on his head is slicked down, not wet but more purposeful. Hair tonic, I think, or Dapper Dan Hair Pomade. I can smell it from where I am sitting, spicy and masculine, like leather stored in cedar. He then sits next to her, then moves adjacent to her and then flits to the seat in front of her. He’s too anxious, too uncertain. She doesn’t move, just stares out the windows. She reminds me of an emaciated Rosario from Will & Grace. Her eyebrows are gone and she’s drawn on precise slashes with pencil onto her stony countenance. The man takes a picture of her and she does not move, simply stares out the window.

Everything is so bright in New Orleans, like an overexposed negative. There are some trees that are twisted with beads from last year’s Mardi Gras but they look antique, irradiated by the incredible light. I begin to wonder if the air is filled with powdered Mardi Gras beads, blinding me even with sunglasses on. I walk down First Street, up Chestnut, through garden paths and carriage lanes, past houses that must have twenty foot ceilings. I stand for fifteen minutes at the garden gate of a two hundred year old home, staring through the plate glass at the entry hall and the graceful curve of the stairwell, watching the Cajun ghosts run up and down. Fleur de lis, fleur de lis, fleur de lis.

I catch the trolley back to Canal street. This time, it is quite crowded, so I make my way to the back and sit next to a man who is wearing far too much cologne. I begin to wonder if everyone here wears too much cologne or if my sense of smell only turns on when I travel. Perhaps at home it is deadened by the smell of cow manure, paper mills and aging cheese? Or perhaps they eat so much spicy food that it deadens their own sense of smell? I don’t know. There is trolley grease and cheap cologne and smoke.

At the very end of the trolley by the door sits a punk guy, roughly my age, wearing knee high Doc Martens and pants with one leg ripped to his inner thigh. He is sitting very confidently. For a second I think he works for the transportation department because he owns this trolley and he surveys these people but he does not, he is just a passenger for $1.25. The trolley stops and lets on some folks and misses some others. They try to run for the trolley but the driver ignores them. The punk guy yells ‘HEY YOU’VE GOT PEOPLE RUNNING BACK HERE!’ but the driver does not listen, does not stop. He shakes his head and sighs. He has obviously given up responsibility for the trolley. There is a loud bang in the back of the trolley. It was hit by a delivery van, stopping the motor. The driver gets out and walks to the back to tinker with it. ‘Good thing we’re not on a hill.’ He sneers, which strikes me as insanely funny, so I give him a sardonic smile. We then exchange looks and I can see that he decides I am one of his people right then. Not crazy, not stupid, just cool. Or at least this is what I imagine he thinks. When I try to exit out the rear doors but don’t time it well and the trolley restarts, he shouts to the driver to stop again, just for me, and she does. Then he gallantly opens the door for me, his torn pants rippling in the breeze. I disembark from the trolley and feel as though the entire punk movement has appraised me and found me worthy. I feel like a hard ass punk fat grrl, ready to kick some ass, get something pierced, and then hate society. Then I remember that I’m staying at the damn Ritz Carlton and my punk rock girl sneers, turns away and walks off toward Bourbon Street.

The air is andouille. The air is gumbo. I walk by a beignet shop and smell a Parisian confectionary. I walk by an oyster bar and smell the ocean. I walk by a cigar shop and smell Cuba.

That evening, Esteban and I go to a corporate dinner, as he is here on business. We have a salad that looks like a mini structure, a child’s fort made of lettuce Lincoln logs and pungently sharp cheese that makes your cheeks hurt. For dessert, there is a dense little ball of chocolate ice cream and a shortbread cake with chocolate chocolatechocolatechocolate mousse, the kind that you can actually taste the fermentation of the cocoa, so infused with chocolate that it makes you somewhat high, as though you’ve just had sex. That is covered with a chocolate ganache and flecks of gold that sit on top like crumpled stars in a midnight sky. That is New Orleans, right there, chocolate on top of chocolate on top of chocolate with stars they’ve taken from the night.

We go to sleep between two layers of feathers, feeling like overfed baby birds. I dream that beignets are really deep fried baby down pillows. The next morning, I wake up early and get dressed, ready to explore the other direction. Esteban admonishes me to be careful and chastises me for not bringing the charger for my phone.

I take the first set of elevators down to the lobby and am greeted by the scent of roses. The mountain of peach roses and white lilies in the lobby. I walk through the room and I am Marie Antoinette, swimming through flower petals. I step outside into the insanely bright morning and blink, walk to the corner of Canal and Dauphine and turn toward the French Quarter, keeping an eye out for my Punk Girl along the way.

I should be packing, but instead I’m as not-packing as I possibly can be. I also should have been a good little homemaker and made stroganoff out of the roast tenderloin I made on New Year’s Day, but I had a serious hankering for some tekka maki and sticky rice with shrimp sauce that could only be quelled by the little Japanese place on Broadway. And oh how good it is, too. No waxing entries about the experience this time. It was good. That was all.

I’m still not packed. I’m so not packed that my suitcases are out in the mudroom. Esteban, without even packing any bags, is more packed than I am because he has a packing plan. As we will be dining at a restaurant which requires a coat and tie, he plans to wear his sport coat on the plane so that he doesn’t have to haul his garment bag. He’s very efficient sometimes.

I outrightly refuse to pack for him. Every time we go on a trip, his mother is aghast. ‘Well, what if he forgets something?’ She asks incredulously. Then I guess he forgets something. Besides, what sort of egotistical gendercentric bullshit makes ME better at remembering the stuff he’ll need than HE is? That’s just the kind of sisterhood crap that keeps women working 40 hours a week AND refusing to relinquish any of the housework because ‘they don’t know how to do it’. Esteban doesn’t complain about this. He doesn’t even harbor the expectation that I would pack for him.

Sometimes women really piss me off.

But rather than dwell on that or talk yet more about how I will be wandering the streets of New Orleans naked, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘Big Easy’, I’ve had some cooking mishaps recently.

First off, about a year and a half ago, because he likes ice cream and he likes things that plug in, for our anniversary I gave Esteban a Cuisinart ice cream maker. It is the giver of ice cream and it also plugs in, thus one would think this would be a certainty, but his comment? ‘Because I’m not fat enough? Now you want me to scare small children?’

See, not always the sweet man you all went ‘Awwwww!’ over yesterday.

So he shoved it behind one of the computer desks and there it has sat. Until last week, when I unpacked everything and stowed the two freezer tubey things in the freezer. Last night, I made a lovely vinaigrette salad, baked salmon, orange pepper asparagus, and rice pilaf. And also some vanilla ice cream, which involved doing the most uber Food TV thing of slicing a vanilla bean in half and then scraping the little black seeds out into the perfectly good cream and whole milk. I have had three vanilla beans for a year, just waiting for the opportunity to use one of them. I finally stuck one in my sugar bowl to make my Special K taste all that much more Special, but that was pretty much exhausting my use for the beans, which look actually pretty nasty, like some kind of dried up placenta or something.

Did I mention the cream and whole milk? Yes, two cups of heavy cream and one cup of whole milk (and ‘ c sugar, if you want to make it right now, along with the vanilla bean seeds). Yes. Lots of creamy milk fat in that. So you would have thought that at some point, maybe when I was surgically removing the seeds from the pod or whisking together the milk fat with the other milk fat and sugar, that it would have occurred to me that hey, I’m pretty allergic to milk fat.

You know, I just want to point out right now that I am not lactose intolerant. When I tell people that I’m allergic to milk, they always ask if I take lactaid or something. No. Lactose Intolerance is when you cannot digest lactose. That always makes me want to crab a big pile of poop and smush it on their cheek, (like that one guy with the grapefruit, Jimmy Cagney? Steve McQueen? I have no idea. No, Steve McQueen was something with hardboiled eggs. And Ally Sheedy. Or something.) and yell “How about this? Are you poop intolerant too? Are you ok with the poopy?” Basically, if the stuff doesn’t close my throat in a big swollen mess or cause a big snorky asthma attack, I can digest it just fine. And I can drink skim milk pretty much without noticeable problems, but the same amount of whole milk will leave me wheezing and that much butter or cream will pretty much guarantee not only an asthma attack but a stuffy nose and a whistle in my lungs for the next several days.

So I made the ice cream and after much anticipation during the churning and the freezing process, we dug into our respective bowls. After about five spoons, I started to feel ill, but I perservered because damn it, I had scrapped a BEAN for that ice cream! And it was tasty too! All creamy and luscious and sweet and cold and snorky and snotty and can’t breathe and aw crap.

Without a word I handed the bowl to Esteban.

‘Killing you, isn’t it?’ He asked, grinning for the sudden landfall of a second bowl of ice cream.

‘Nnyah. Nucking Stunnf.’ I grumbled.

So, there goes the ice cream maker. Although I’m going to look up some recipes using Rice Dream, because I think that would be yummy. Or at least won’t kill me.

In other kitchen experimentation, we went to Joel and Cheri’s house for dinner on New Year’s Eve. Joel is an incredible cook and last year he had specifically made a zucchini soup that used no cream. It was incredible, not to mention conducive to Operation: Hottie. But since he was already encoring some of the dishes from last year’s New Year’s Eve (lamb chops in garlic and red wine sauce, lobster tails, raspberry/walnut salad), he experimented with a new soup.

Garlic soup. Made with twenty heads of garlic.

Not cloves. HEADS.

It actually made all of our eyes water. Apparently his house still reaks. The soup wasn’t bad’ it was just strong. In fact, if you can smell something right now, it’s this website. I can’t help it. I’m sorry. It’s coming out from within.

I’ll bet none of us will catch a cold for YEARS. The scary thing is that he’s planning on bringing the leftover garlic soup to the guy’s game on Sunday. And I have to sit next to Esteban for several hours on a plane roughly eight hours after that.

Pray for me, people. Pray hard.

And pray for someone to come and pack my suitcase.