getting laid off means more reason to explore

I was going to do a classic "good news/bad news" post but I believe all my news is good so I will just do a good news/good news" post unless I can think of anything.  For bad news, check out Soupie's blog ("you poor bastard!" sorry pookie).

The good news is I bought my tickets to Mexico, and despite the hike in oil prices, it was a breeze $337 round trip, including traveler's insurance in case I lose my hand and need medical assistance pronto, or come down with dysentery, or my flight's delayed for days or something.  I bought the tickets because I knew I would end up wanting to go regardless of what my work said, and I knew they were going to let me go anyway, even though they hadn't given me a straight answer.  So I have been studying the region to try to decipher the best way to utilize my ten days there (which is really only 8 since the travel is long.

The good news is that I did not act incorrectly, as my work did grant me the days off, no problem.  However, they are laying me off at the end of May, so I will be gone for a week (four days) of work, then come back for another few weeks, on the 12th, and then work for another couple weeks and then I'm done.

But the good news is they are laying me off not because they are dissatisfied with my job there, but because one of my bosses is moving her practice mainly to Alabama, working in Pittsburgh every other two-weeks, so the other attorney, who will be taking on most of her cases, wishes to hire a paralegal to help her out, rather than a secretary who does not do research, etc.  Attorney 1 says that I do a paralegal's job right now so attorney 2 will be sad once she has to pay someone more money to do the same job, but probably not as well.

This also means that I am going to be on unemployment, so I will still be receiving money while I am in school, so I can work on my thesis and leisurely try to find another good job, without being pressed to find one immediately in order to keep up with bills, etc.  Since I will have some time on my hands, I am looking at applying for grants, specifically the Fulbright Fellowship which supports students and artists (I am both!) in their overseas endeavors.  I have a meeting with a representative on Friday.

Since these last semesters I will just be working on my thesis, plus taking on one class which if I can come up with an itinerary for Oaxaca, will be taken care of in May, I don't have to be in Pittsburgh too much.  I am looking forward to be a bit of freedom and room to move, since my schedule has been rather packed, though I have been enjoying my time as I've been spending it.  I like being busy, feeling like I have some semblance of a purpose.

It also means I can perhaps visit friends just within the US or elsewhere.  I miss a lot of people.  Sometimes the internet is good for relieving that, but sometimes it just makes it worse.

As a final good news since my hands are getting cold and stiff, not like dead but like winter, tonight I made a delicious dinner.  Here is the very basic recipe.  Cut a Spaghetti squash in half, scoop out seeds, and bake for 45 minutes at about 425F, in a pan with about an inch and a half of water (so it's steam-baked, in a sense).
Cube a block of extra firm tofu.  Put it in a bowl with stir fry sauce, Braggs, honey, and flax seeds, and mix.  Let marinade.
Chop and saute onions and garlic, then add shittake mushrooms cut into slivers.  Steam kale, chard, and spinach, in whatever ratio you need to get rid of rotting veggies.  Pour some water into saute pan if it looks like it's drying, then a bit of salt.  absorb water into vegetables, then when onions are carmelized, scoop it all out and put on a plate.
sprinkle corn starch into tofu bowl a little at a time while stirring.  Pour into pan, complete w/ excess sauce from the  bottom of the bowl.  add a tiny bit of oil.  Chop up ginger into tiny pieces and add to pan.  Let fry, but keep an eye on it through the next stage, flipping tofu every so often to make sure it gets cooked all around and doesn't burn.
Take squash out of oven, assuming it's done by now.  flip over so they're on their skins and scoop out flesh from one half (a squash feeds 4 hungry people, but we were just two hungry people so we only used half).  It will look like spaghetti, hence the name.  place it on a plate, as there will be a pretty big pile.

When tofu is done, scoop onion mix on top of tofu, in pan, and mix quickly.  Place back on plate and place on heating rack if your kitchen is fancy like mine and has one.  Don't forget about the greens!  If you haven't turned that off already, do so now before your spinach disappears (it happens!)
Melt a bit of margarine in pan.  Flush squash from plate into pan and mix up so it all gets a tiny bit of butter on it.  Add spices to taste: cinnamon, cumin, curry, basil, cloves.  Let simmer in pan for a couple minutes so the flavors can seep into the squash.
Place squash on two plates, cover with chunks of tofu mix, then dress with greens on the side.  Serve with roibos tea (I had jasmine).

bon apetite!

My Kingdom for an Unfamiliar Street Corner!

This past weekend I went to New York City for the annual AWP Writer's Conference. I sat through panel discussions of the Future of Environmental Writing, where famous writers discussed their views on the strengths and weaknesses of their genre and craft, and where the movement is headed and how it should be steered; a panel of young people who have careers in writing and are not teachers who discussed how they went about getting their jobs; memoirists discussing memory (though they actually all mainly read from their works, which was nice, but did not provide too much insight); independent publishers discussing funding, getting started, contests, marketing, layout, cover design, and other needed tidbits of information in a number of panels; and a few other panels that were fairly interesting at the time but not enough to really stand out in my mind after such a packed weekend of momentum, nostalgia, and motivation.



While the Conference was helpful and inspiring, what was really so wonderful about the trip was getting to see all my friends. Here's a small story, much abridged:



When I was 18, I had a penpal. I lived in Santa Fe, and he lived in Atlanta. I don't know how we met, but we were very good penpals and very fond of each other. We talked on the phone, sent packages, wrote letters, made mixtapes. There was a certain romantic quality to it all, partly due to the comradery felt between each other, the sense of self found when talking to this other person so similar and so supportive of our own ideas and ideals, and also due to the mystique of communicating with this person with whom we've never met, writing letters, sending pictures with no faces, creating a bond that was purely based on personality and goodness, not on aesthetic or any carnal impulse.


At one point, though, he just stopped responding to me. I never received a letter back, never heard whether he liked my latest mixtape, never got another call or saw him on the internet again. He'd just disappeared from my prism.


Years go by and I move out of Santa Fe to New York City and start working at Bicycle Habitat. It is a hard time in my family, and a number of relatives die, and some of my friends are also going through a bad period in their lives, and I decide that it is best for everyone, including myself, if I move back home for a while to nurture and be nurtured. Mainly I had just come to a point where I really needed a really solid homebase where my connections with people were incredibly deep rooted and not based on interests but on fate and history.



I quit my job at Bicycle Habitat in the middle of the summer. They obviously need someone to fill my position, as it's a good bikeshop that remains busy even in the winter seasons. As I do have some friends in New York who are very good people and with whom I have never lost touch, they kept me updated as to the world I left 200 miles away. They told me about a boy named Josh who started working at the bike shop, how he is incredibly similar to me, how he is such a great person and it's a shame he was not in my life when I needed someone so soulful. Erin Nicole even made us Myspace friends, though I never really talk to anyone on the internet who I don't know in real life, so our communication was not a success. As time went on, I heard more stories about Josh, how similar our stories were, tidbits of information. I forgot about the Myspace account.


I heard that Josh was from Texas, and thought not too much about it. Then I heard he was from Atlanta. Small coincidence, I thought. More stories come about and finally I ask, "Is his last name Shaw?" And as it turns out, my penpal from so many years and lifetimes ago, had moved to New York and was living in my neighborhood for much of when I lived there, and then applied for my job when I moved out, and was now best friends with all my favorite people still in the city.



On Friday, I walked 60 blocks in the rain, fed up with the feeling of stuffiness and claustrophobia of the conference, headed Southbound but with no real destination in mind. I was of course headed to Josh. But After 60 blocks, soaking wet, hungry, I did not seak shelter and friendship, I got on the train and headed back to the conference for an hour or so, before heading back to Brooklyn to have dinner with Stu and Adam.



Saturday, though I finally built up the nerve to stop by. I was terrified. What if this person I was so fond of was nothing like I remembered? What if he didn't remember me, or resented that I'd tracked him down? People (ok, I admit it, I had "Men" written here first, but thought that it sounded too much like I think of my friend as a Man with a capital M, and not a person, or that women are higher than these bad things, but truly, if I were to be writing this essay on a different topic, I would keep the Man in there, without any bitterness, and no particular emotions directed any any particular individual. Just truth.) have done horrible things in the past, have resented the simplest and kindest of gestures, spat blindly to keep from having to process and adapt. I hestitated, got lost in familar neighborhoods, perhaps looking for something to show me a new direction of thought.



But ultimately I ended up at the bike shop, nervous, talking to everyone I saw who I could possibly convert with, and finally in the back was a face I'd never seen but that was oddly familiar. It said "HEY!" and I said, "Hey man, what's up? Thanks for the food recommendation, I haven't had the Crispy Soul from Veggie Paradise in a while." And there it was, we had never lost the friendship; we may have lost contact but we never lost touch in the metaphysical sense. After missing Frank McCourt's reading to hang out at the bike shop, I left with the promise of meeting up with Josh the next morning.


I met up with friends from college at their apartment, and talked about art and inspiration and how inspiration is already within, but they need to constantly write in order for the ideas to come up on the paper. We went to a party and after only a few minutes, I left Daniel and Pete and took off back to Stu and Jonathan's apartment to sleep well.



On Sunday, Stu and I met up with Josh for an hour or so until he had to go to work, then I hopped on a train and met up with Erin Nicole, Cassidy, Keith, Libby, and Zach for coffee at Gorilla. They all eventually left for breakfast somewhere and I sat and wrote about the importance of feeling lost in order to find a deeper part of onesself until Michael showed up, we sat and talked, grabbed lunch, went to his workplace.



On the walk home, we found these movie record things bundled up with twine in someone's trash. Michael took one bundle and I took the other to give as an offering to the gods of Habitat, spilling coffee all over myself, my laptop, and the records quite a few times along the way. When I finally got there, Jonathan told me they were called Selectavision and were virtually obsolete and not worth a damn thing. We checked on Ebay to confirm the value and as you can see from the link, nope, not a dime. Well, maybe a dime. Apparently their lifespan is too short for anyone to really care about them, because they get warn out so quickly and easily. I left them there. A shame, too, because there were Woody Allen movies, James Bond: You Only Live Twice, and a bunch of other classics.


Stu met me at the bike shop and we took the train back to his place, had a purposefully undramatic goodbye and I ran to catch my train and made it to my flight just in time for boarding, with a couple minutes to spare and about 8 cups of caffeine in my system.



Although I hate it, or have hated it, I could see myself living in New York again, but only if I have a job there already set up, since rent is insane and I don't feel like dealing with any sort of rat race. I have a few connections. We can see what happens.