Things I Want To Spend My Paycheck On

Weekend Feast

I've been very lax at blogging recently, due to starting a new job and attending high holiday services and surprise parties and seeing friends who are in from out of town. The most recent was my friend Andy, amateur chef and Shadow Machine animator. He stayed at my house over the weekend and we cooked up a storm on Sunday night. (Well, he cooked; I chopped). He drew inspiration from whatever he could find at the Tompkins Park Farmer's Market. Behold, the menu:

A salad of Bosc pear, honey, yogurt, and aged goat cheese.
A main course of New York honey glazed duck breast with plum sauce, chard, sunchoke, and roasted shallots.

And for dessert: excellent hipster artisan chocolate from Brooklyn.

And lastly, in equally exciting food news, our own Freya Bellin is blogging on Mark Bittman's website. Check out her delicious writing here.

Guilty Pleasures

Now that I'm spending more time commuting, I'm also spending more time with the iPod that I've liberated from my mother. (She never used it.) I filled it with lots of my favorite musicians, who are all acceptable and borderline cool, like The Mountain Goats and Dar Williams and Okkervil River and the Magnetic Fields and Passion Pit and Lady Gaga. But sometimes I just have to listen to something that is purely pleasurable and barely respectable. Like, the other day, this dude on the street was all, "Hey, baby" or whatever to me. That moment was so out of sync with what I was listening to ("Be Our Guest" from Beauty & the Beast) that it was almost magical.

So here are some guilty pleasures I listen to when I feel that familiar New York City subway cynicism crawl over me. ("Why is it so hot on the 59th Street 4/5 express platform? What just dripped on me? Why did I wear such stupid shoes?")


I guess Michael Jackson's vocals in the chorus make this song somewhat more legitimate, but just barely. Pretty much all the lines are my favorite, but I particularly enjoy, "All I want is to be left alooone / in my average home / but why do I always feel / like I'm in the Twilight Zone?" I think it's the delivery. Also, Rockwell is a terrible actor in this music video.



Again, a feat of songwriting. (No sarcasm.) I love this song. I like how they rhyme "the future is littered with prizes" with "the point that I must emphasize is." Disney's Golden Age!



I had this song on a cassette circa 1997. It's like a delicious, high-pitched bug in your brain. I couldn't find the original video, unfortunately.



I like country music, even the cheesy stuff, but this is pretty gosh-darn cheesy. And sort of a terrible message. But it's a classic and I think what I like most about it is the over-the-top theatricality. She really drives it home with that tremor in her voice. When I listened to the song in the past, I always imagined her with some huge hairdo, belting it out on the stage. Well, I was right about the hairdo, but this video is just sort of sad.



Oh, this song is just awful. But it's catchy and it reminds me of my equally-awful Belarusian fake-boyfriend, who played it for me the last time I saw him. It translates to "You Have the Sweetest Ass in the World."

Just Call Me Mr. Manager

In honor of my first few days at my new full-time job, I'm posting some work-related quotes from one of my favorite television shows, Arrested Development.

Michael: I'm moving to Phoenix. I got a job.
[awkward silence]
Michael: Something you apply for and they pay you to... Never mind, I don't want to ruin the surprise.

Maeby: Didn't you get a job or something?
Tobias: No, I didn't. Unless you consider "World's Coolest Daddy" a job.

Gob: I figured out a way to make money while I'm working.
Michael: But that is what we call working.

Gob: Yeah, the guy in the $3,000 suit is holding the elevator for the guy who doesn't make that in four months. COME ON!

In Every Generation, There is a Chosen One

In my last week of unemployment, I finished the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, which was about ten years overdue. In junior high school, I loved that show. No, love is too weak a word for what I felt about it. I lurved it, I loaved it. These feelings were shared by my friends Sarah and Meaghan, and we formed an unofficial fan club. Meaghan made me the President, which surprises me in retrospect because we were both horrifically bossy little girls.


However, despite many episodes being taped on VHS cassettes, and scrapbooks of magazine articles, and breathless phone calls recapping vampire drama, after the third or fourth season, I suddenly didn't care any more. I watched on and off, but mostly off, and my love of the show faded until it was just a joke tossed around among friends from high school.

But then a few years ago, Hulu put seasons 1 through 3 online and I watched it in my kitchen in Astoria, just to see if it held up. I realized it did, even if it was partially due to nostalgia. So I gave the rest of the series a shot and it's been pure pleasure for the last month. Anything intelligent I could attempt to say about the show (the humor, the wit, the writing, the camp, the feminism) has already been said on Wikipedia. So I'll just say that it's the end of an era for me, and 12-year-old Maggie would be very happy with my back-to-back episode watching and obsessive internet quote-hunting. Long live Buffy!

It's hard to be a dramatic 12-year-old when you're keeping your mouth closed all the time due to braces

If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island

I was killing some time the other day in the Lower East Side, so I ducked into the Tenement Museum gift shop, which, by the way, is a great gift shop. Inside, I saw this children's book:


I thought it was interesting because I recently learned that the whole name-changing thing is a myth. A genealogist dude told my dad, who told me, and then I did some internet searching, which proved fruitful. Nothing overly official, but these sites all seemed to say the same thing.

According to the World Wide Web (and the genealogist dude), most paperwork was filled out in the immigrants' home countries, not upon arrival. Additionally, there were tons of language interpreters at Ellis Island, so there was less opportunity for miscommunication than is popularly imagined. While a few names were probably changed at Ellis Island, most of them were changed during the naturalization process, years later, when the immigrants realized that having an ethnic name wasn't always super advantageous.


People still do it, of course, though mostly they're attempting to become famous. Et tu, Jon Stewart?