you can watch yourself while you are eating

It's amazing what dinner and a few bottles of wine with friends will do for quelling the rage. Preparing the meal is a calming act in and of itself. The walk to the bodegas to get the proper vegetables in the balmy morning, the afternoon spent chopping vegetables, hands smelling of garlic and ginger, the sweeping of the floors to make the place semi-presentable to guests. I also played the English Beat's greatest hits while making dinner, and that is enough to put anyone in a good mood.

J & P were the main guests for dinner last night. J had just returned from traveling through Southeast Asia for a whopping two months, and brought me back a beautiful green silk scarf from Laos. It should be noted that I'm usually no fan of this particular green, kind of a mix between grassy green and lime (as you can see, I've never worked at J. Crew). But there was no denying its beauty in this particular case, and the thought was superbly touching, considering I do not know J that well. Sweet gesture. P brought over a bottle of wine beause he predicted I would only have two-buck chuck on hand. He brought over a Meridian 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon that was okay. But I then produced a bottle of Stone Creek Cabernet Sauvignon that I bought in 1997. Amazingly, the wine had not gone bad over the years. I had been meaning to open this bottle of wine for a while, but kept waiting for a special occasion. However, after watching Sideways (and since I'm on rage control, I won't complain about my problems with that movie- accentuate the positive), I realized that opening the bottle was the special occasion.

Today was a strange day, filled with good intentions that never translated into action. All of yesterday's productivity transformed to complete inertia today. I called my parents to wish them a happy anniversary. Even when I feel I ought to worry about my parents, they put me in my place upon speaking to them. They're like 24-hour party people. They celebrated their anniversary all weekend long, with people throwing them parties every night, and the whole nine. It's odd. I've always rebelled against my parents' socialite tendencies, and yet, I can see the advantage in their case. It's nice to know that, even though I am 3000 miles away, there are people, people by the dozens, who would help my parents in a heartbeat if need be. I've been thinking about the aging process a lot lately. Because it's easy, at this point in my life, with little apparent responsibilities, to behave as though I have not a care in the world, to make decisions about my life in a vacuum. But the fact is, the aging process is a cycle. Your parents take care of you, and then eventually, you take care of your parents. And the longer I take to wander and meander, the longer my parents are on their own. At some point, reality will crash in and force me to get my act together. In the meanwhile, introspection and navel gazing continues in full force.

Hunter S. Thompson passed away today from a self-inflicted gun wound. When I was 21, a guy I was dating gave me A Generation of Swine, and it was as though I suddenly opened my eyes to a whole different way of telling stories, of experiencing story telling. So many times, reading his work/ramblings translated to sifting for moments of brilliance in otherwise incoherence, but it was worth it for those hidden gems. For example, Jeff Johnson interviewed him for Vice's Hate list, and that was pretty good. Thompson lived the sort of lifestyle that is perfect for a movie character, but seemed thoroughly unsustainable in real life. Which is why today's news did not come as an utter shock, though it's sad.


Uggh... am I dreading a return to my working week...