I read
this New York Times "City Room" post and the ensuing comments with much bemusement and a little bit of empathy. No, New York hasn't "broken my heart," but as an outsider like Mr. Solomon, albeit one with more lightbulbs and fewer carrot-topped vixen problems, I, too, have noticed favorite and unfavorite aspects of the city. Favorites include the chill in the air very early in the morning in autumn while you're walking to yoga and the only people around are either very creepy, very sweaty due to jogging at as breakneck a pace as they could jog and still be jogging, or very friendly in that blue-collar way in which one person greets another with an utter lack of pretension while holding a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee in his work gloves and warming one hand in the pocket of his cement-stained jeans, because when one of you is wearing work gloves and cement-stained jeans and the other is wearing a ratty bandanna barely containing her crepuscular frizz and exuding a sweetish odor of yoga sweat, pretension is pretty much impossible, and a peculiar sort of anonymous warmth takes its place.
In related news, they finally turned on the heat in our building today, so despite the fact that I like the ambiance of the new library study level, I am in my toasty room rather than the frosty library.
So today called for a warm meal, but I also wanted something light. I've written before about
Andy's rosemary bread, specifically about how exceptional the texture is. I omitted the Italian spice and swapped out the rosemary for teaspoon and a half of cumin seeds, and I cannot adequately describe the goodness of the results. You know those old Yoplait commercials about how "it's so good" with the two oh-so-chill girlfriends? That good. A warm chickpea, edamame, cucumber, and feta salad dressed with lemon juice, pepper, and a touch of mint rounded out an early dinner.
> Favorites include the chill in the air very early in the morning in autumn while you're walking to yoga and the only people around are either very creepy, very sweaty due to jogging at as breakneck a pace as they could jog and still be jogging, or very friendly in that blue-collar way in which one person greets another with an utter lack of pretension while holding a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee in his work gloves and warming one hand in the pocket of his cement-stained jeans, because when one of you is wearing work gloves and cement-stained jeans and the other is wearing a ratty bandanna barely containing her crepuscular frizz and exuding a sweetish odor of yoga sweat, pretension is pretty much impossible, and a peculiar sort of anonymous warmth takes its place.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this is a record for you, because I know you like writing long sentences, but this is a particularly long sentence which, when you begin reading it, seems like it's going to end pretty soon, but then continues on long beyond where you expected it to end, so that by the time you're a third of the way through you realize that it's one of those artistically long sentences, and then about when you're two-thirds of the way through you have to stop to parse "crepuscular frizz", which makes you forget exactly where you were in the sentence, so you have to go back and re-read it, and then you get back to "crepuscular frizz" and you realize that you forgot again what she meant but ignore it and keep reading, and by then you're kind of tired, so you read "sweedish odor" instead of "sweetish odor", since really who would write "sweetish" instead of "sweet", but then you read "pretension is pretty much impossible" and you give up.