County Fair, Bookstores, Cookbooks, and Being a Road Hazard

I don't know how these long post-less periods occur. I'm always thinking about my next post. I sign in. I check up on my account. I read other blogs I follow. I think about things I would like to talk about. It just somehow doesn't happen. I think part of it is because the next entry, ideally would be a Fiction Update, but I haven't made any progress, so there's no point to that. Instead, I'll blather on about random stuff.

Went to the Alameda County Fair on the Fourth of July.

I love the fair, even though I hate amusement parks (and one of the biggest draws of the fair for some people is all the carnival rides). I love seeing the diversity of the visitors (well, at least out here), the interesting booths, the warm weather, the live music (county fair karaoke FTW!), it's all just wonderful. Not a huge fan of the farm animal displays, but...

On to today. I have a like-hate relationship with big chain mega bookstores like Borders and Barnes and Noble. For one, I love privately owned independent bookstores and like to support small business owners like that. You find really interesting things on the shelves of an indie bookstore-- at Borders, all you've got are the big bestsellers. No niche genres, no out-of-print books, no obscure, hard-to-find titles, no local or small-time authors. Mega bookstores are just kind of soulless. If I had more of a choice, I wouldn't shop at Borders for everything. Maybe just periodicals. Unfortunately, the nearest private bookstore had an owner who was just... hrm. Let me explain.

It was a hole in the wall. Dark, cool. A bookstore that could fit in the palm of the main library's hand, so to speak. The labyrinthine rows of shelves reached for the ceiling. The whole place smelled like the public library, but older and dustier-- if that's possible. It was perfect. I visited twice, back in the days when I lived with my sister and walked home from campus. The first time, the bookstore owner, a tall, thin woman brown-haired woman, didn't greet me when I walked in smiling.

She stared. She eyed me as I browsed. She never verbally acknowledged me in any way, not when I walked in, not when I left. Yet she engaged heartily in casual banter with other patrons, at least a few of whom I assumed were regulars. Still, that's no reason for iciness towards a newcomer. I'm not someone who takes bringing race into matters lightly, but I honestly think she had negative perceptions of me because of that. I had two options. 1) Continue frequenting the small store, braving her coldness in order to disprove all her negative assumptions about me, and have a nice bookstore to frequent. 2) Stop attending a store at which I am not welcome. I chose the latter, obviously. Why give her any money?

The second reason the whenever I walk into a bookstore, the nearest Borders in my case, I always... always... walk out with something. I don't understand it. I can't restrain myself. A trip to Borders almost always means spending money I shouldn't necessarily be spending. Take for example my latest find: The Ultimate Book Of Vegan Cooking.

I'm almost positive that this book doesn't contain any information I don't already know. I've been vegan for a little while now, and was veg before that. But how could I resist? Look at that thing. It seduces you with its huge, full-color photos and cheapest-vegan-cookbook-EVAR price of six dollars. Veganomicon is thirty dollars off the shelf-- thus, why I don't own a copy of Veganomicon (yet). The book I bought today isn't as thick, and probably not as useful, but full color photos, for six dollars? Okay!

That's Borders for you. They have a huge "Bargain Books" section filled with relatively cheap stuff. Four bucks, five bucks, six bucks. It's typically full of how-to books, inexpensive coffee-table books, cheap kits (like a sushi kit that comes with a bamboo rolling mat, chopsticks, etc.), and imports like this one. I don't quite get how that works, because usually stuff from other countries is more expensive, but I never claimed to be an economic wonder kid. I assume these books are Borders exclusive, in this country anyway.

This new book, printed by Hermes House publishing, is from London. I will admit, that's part of the draw for me. I love books from the UK for some reason. Something about the clean design, the use of Helvetica or Arial font, the slightly different language (e.g. "sultanas" rather than "golden raisins"), and the different measurement units. My first vegetarian cookbook ever was a tiny spiral-bound thing called Cookshelf Vegetarian, and it served me quite well. I bought it out of pure, desperate need; I was new to cooking for myself regularly in general, and didn't know what recipes other than my mom's to begin with. The recipes were simple but helpful, and the pictures were gorgeous. I'll be honest, I regularly sit down with cookbooks and just look at the pictures.

After Cookshelf, I bought another cookbook from the bargain section at Stonestown Borders, purely on a whim. It's called Vegetarian Cooking and Vegetable Classics.

Interestingly, it was published by Hermes House as well. Unfortunately, it's not exactly as stellar an example of vegetarian cookbooks; it has a chapter called "Virtually Vegetarian", which includes recipes with fish and other seafood.

I kid you not.

...What?

The intro below says, "For all those demi-vegetarians who just cannot resist fish and seafood, here is a selection of starter and main-course dishes that combine unusual vegetables and herbs with fish in nutritious and flavoursome ways."

Seriously? "Cannot resist"? Really? And yeah, that's a fish filet in the photo behind the box.

Whose idea was it to publish a vegetarian cookbook with an entire chapter on fish and seafood? I understand that they're trying to appeal to pescatarians. That's fine, but that's not vegetarianism. It has no place in a vegetarian cookbook, especially considering the fact that many if not most vegetarians are so for ethical reasons, and so the idea of not "resisting" is out of the question. If pescatarians want to learn recipes with fish in them, there are countless omni-centric cookbooks for them to choose from. Why pick a vegetarian cookbook for such an outlet? It defeats the purpose of the book. One picks up a vegetarian cookbook to get away from flesh. By that logic, I guess the vegan book I picked up has a chapter on eggs and dairy called "Pseudo Vegan"-- because some vegans "cannot resist" omelettes and cheese. Makes no sense. Nice work there Hermes House, -1 for you. Now I've learned to look through a book thoroughly before purchasing.

Something scary happened to me on my way back home. I was at a red light, and I was turning right. I paused, and prepared to make a right turn on red, which is legal after a stop, right? Right. So I look to my right. Three lanes, all clear. Left? Three lanes, all clear. I also assumed that the light would change soon, and that the people heading straight (in the direction I was coming from) would soon have a green light, thus making my turn completely clear and care-free.

Then I made an error in judgment. There were no cars coming from the direction that had the right of way, so I assumed I'd have enough time to cross all three lanes of traffic during my right turn, and wind up in the far left lane.

Wrong!

All of a sudden I see a Honda Accord off behind me and to my left in my peripheral vision, just clearing the intersection. It was careening towards me, and technically, it had the right of way.

Oh crap. Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, I thought midway through my turn, still in the middle of the three lane road. I gunned it and accelerated so fast I thought I'd hit the concrete road divider I was heading toward.

I've gotten too lax behind the wheel, and I think part of it is because breaking rules is part of what I deem "aggressive/defensive driving". I know there's no logic behind that, but it's true. In person, I'm not a confrontational person. I don't speak loudly, (though that's partly a physical thing-- I just have a soft voice) and I always try to maintain a certain degree of calm courtesy with others. So I think people don't always take people like me seriously when they first meet me, or actively try to take advantage of people like me. I feel like behind the wheel, I can't afford to be the person who's not driving defensively and/or aggressively.

But I'm beginning to see advantage to the paranoid driver I was when I first started. Being constantly on-edge means I'm less likely to put myself in a situation where I could get knocked around by some other car, like I did today. That is all. No more shortcut-driving, or whatever I'll call my current state. Just plain, simple careful driving.


That's all, I guess, for this massive beast of a post. Good day all.


P.S. Yeah, I know about the bad Paint job on those pics, esp. the first one. I'm working on a PC today, so *shrug*.

Road trips, anklets, and other things of note

Yeah, yeah, I know. No Fiction Updates, or updates of any kind,  in a while. It's due to a series of things occurring at once. The first of those things was the last Thursday I actually posted. I had too many (good!) things on my mind for days afterward to bring myself here. Then, I actually went on a small trip with my sister. I figure I'll talk a little about that.

A couple of Mondays ago, back between around May 31st and June 3rd, I was actually out of town. I went down to Southern California with my sister and niece. A couple of weeks prior she asked me if I wanted to just drive down and hang about. I love both spontaneity and road trips, so I gleefully agreed to go with her.

This particular Thursday...

This was one of the most intense Thursdays of my life.

Small Obsessions...

I love bottle caps.

There’s something so alluring about them. They’re like little metal gems. So varied, and often so artistic. I don’t think any two collections could be exactly alike. Some people collect paintings. I would, if I had the money, I guess. I’ll always collect bottle caps. Somewhere out there, a graphic artist put her or his time and brainpower into designing that cap. I appreciate that. We spend a lot of our time surrounded by art that we don’t even think about. Some people downplay it because it’s commercial art, intended to visually buttonhole us and ultimately weasel us out of our hard-earned dollars. I don’t think that’s completely fair.

It’s one thing if you bought the drink with the cap, but when you find one out on the street or in the grass, or best yet, someplace completely unexpected, then you start thinking about the story behind it. Where’d it come from? Who threw it away? Every bottle cap, whether you bought it or not, has a story, as hokey as that sounds.

I considered collecting them seriously once when I was ten or so. Maybe younger, maybe older, I honestly don’t remember how old I was. I had a gigantic brown shoebox in the hall closet filled with maybe thirty or forty old beer caps from brands my father drank. My father has always been an adventurous beer aficionado— every so often he likes trying small breweries for interesting flavors.

Most of the caps I collected were typical, ubiquitous brands you can find at the grocery store—Heineken, Miller, Michelob. Dad rarely had American beer, though. He never did, and still doesn’t buy Budweiser—can’t stand the stuff, ha. Yeah, there were a lot of typical caps there, but a few of them were real finds—stuff from tiny labels my dad purchased on a whim and would probably never try again.

One evening I looked inside the closet and opened up the shoebox only to find it empty. I scurried into the living room and called out into the house at no one in particular. “What happened to all the caps in that shoebox?”

High Tea

Today I ran a bunch of errands and wound up coming home with a few more things than I’d anticipated. Among those things was a Snow White tea set.



My three-year-old niece loves all things Snow White. I don’t know why. She’s never even seen the Disney film. Still, her toothpaste, toothbrush, tricycle, pretend cell phone, underwear—and now her first tea set—are all adorned with the image of the raven-locked maiden. I don’t even think she knows the Seven Dwarves exist.



Watching my niece play with her tea set makes me long for years past. We had a tea party this afternoon. We filled the teapot with water and she daintily filled my teacup. She spooned tiny droplets of “sugar” from the little plastic sugar bowl and sweetened my tea.



I instantly thought back to my tea parties. I have a much older sister, so I primarily had stuffed animal guests for my tea parties. The action figures and Barbies’ schedules were a little too busy for the affairs.



Ah, to be three.



Fiction update later this week.

Christmas Eve/Mission Statement

It's Christmas Eve. No matter what you celebrate (or don't celebrate), I hope everyone's warm and snuggly with family, and anxiously anticipating tomorrow. 


On to something else that might be fitting for this particular time of year: 

I wrote this for one of my television production classes, but my dad recommended that upon restarting my blog, I should post it here as sort of a way of letting people know more about who I am and where I’m trying to go. So here you go. It’s written in the form of NPR’s “This I Believe” segments.

I believe in late nights serenaded by the whirr of an aging desktop computer, basking in the glow of the monitor, and crying until my head throbs. Or I guess in other terms, I believe in writing.

In fact, words are probably the one thing I am surest of.  I must be, if I can spend years staring at blank Word documents, depriving myself of sleep and overall satisfaction with myself until I feel like smashing my head through a plate glass window. But still, I return to the chair, knowing that somewhere amidst all the frustration and self-doubt will come those precious few hours when all of a sudden the prose spills forth from me almost as profusely as the swear words had just a few minutes earlier.

It wasn’t always this way.  I knew that I wanted to write since I was eight years old. When you’re eight years old you can do anything, but time and teenage angst can beat the confidence out of you like some punk with a baseball bat. I would like to say that I’m beyond feeling that way, that at some point during my teen years my fear of being incapable was proven unfounded. Not really. I am in a state of perpetual uncertainty. A chapter that I think is excellent one night is crap the next morning. To be honest, there is only one very specific moment in time when I know that what I’m doing, what I love, is right for me. It’s at three am, when I can’t pull myself to bed not because I’ve spent the last several hours skimming blog posts on Oh No They Didn’t! whilst slowly damaging my hearing beneath the blare of my headphones. I can’t sleep because finally, I can’t bear to leave my protagonist hanging there in mid-action on the page, as if dangling off a cliff, waiting for me to rescue him. I go to bed that night feeling like I climbed—no, leapt over—Mount Everest. That’s when I know I can make something of this.

And so I guess I really believe in dreams. Which actually leads me to my father. I have an incredible mother and sister as well, but my relationship with my father is different, because I am more like him than I could describe to you. He’s a writer too. He also knows what it’s like to be on the receiving end of that bat. But on top of that, he knows what it’s like to aspire for big, big things. I’m a first generation American, one of two children of Nigerian immigrants who arrived in San Francisco on an uncharacteristically clear and sunny day in 1984. Dad had made a career of his words in Nigeria. He’d worked in both print journalism and radio as an entertainment critic and a playwright, respectively. When he got to the states, all this changed. Doctors and schoolteachers in one country find themselves holding jobs and not careers out here. His writing had no outlet, nowhere to go except into a folder on the family computer.

My mom recently helped me see this in a new way. She and I and my sister and niece were coming home from long trip to our native Nigeria. I have never been fond of the exhausting side of travel—the luggage hauling and the long layovers and the constant takeoffs and landings. At that particular moment in time, I was glued to the seat as the plane ascended at 500 miles per hour, one hand clutching the armrest and the other squeezing my mother’s. Mom looked down at me with a sympathetic smirk. “You don’t have to be scared,” she said with her usual calmness. The plane shuddered and trembled, and I practically cut off her circulation, but she just smiled at me, like Mom’s supposed to.  “Nothing’s going to happen.” I tried to tell her that she had no way of knowing this, no real reason to believe that. She just looked at me and said, “You still have so much to do with yourself. Look at you. Do you really think you would even have the opportunity to go back and forth between Nigeria and California if you weren’t meant to do something with it?” That’s when I thought to myself, Now that’s believing in someone. I’ve always been ambivalent about the idea of fate, but who’s to say that one might not receive an occasional cosmic nudge in the right direction?

So because of this, I believe in dreams. I certainly believe in my own, but I hope that someday I can be selfless enough to be passionate about someone else’s. My parents’ primary interests have always been my sister’s and my dreams. They would never have left their careers, families, or home, if they weren’t. She and I were their big, big aspirations. In my father, I could not have asked for a more supportive, encouraging human being to share my ambitions with. He has always made me feel like nothing short a worthy protégée, and for that I am immensely grateful. I guess it’s because of Mom, Dad, and Sis that I believe in family as well.

I spent days and days agonizing about how to get all this onto paper. I didn’t know what I believe. Or how to translate what I believe. Or whether or not I really wanted anyone to know anything about what I might believe. But what do you know, it’s done. I guess I’m doing something right. 

Mindstride: A Primer

Ah. Feels good to be back in the old chair again.

Hi there. I’m T.

“T”, of course, is short for a full name, but maybe I’ll tell you that later. I’m extremely identifiable by my name, and I’ve always appreciated my anonymity.

This blog is a third incarnation of a chronicle of my life—my long-term goals, my interests and hobbies, my thoughts, dreams, and other cliché stuff.

I first started blogging in February 2005, when I was around seventeen, pushing eighteen. I had an old Xanga account—ha. I still have the account, and the blog is still up, but I stopped updating it—I think the last posts are from sometime in 2007. If you want to look at them (and laugh along with me), the address is xanga.com/princessfedora.

Aside from feeling ready to move on from Xanga (at the time, I was just hopping onto the Myspace bandwagon), I fell into a point at my life where I just wasn’t really sure what to say any more. For some reason, I felt stretched for subject matter. To a certain degree, I still feel this way. My Xanga blog was about current events, tangential thoughts, and Michael Jackson. Yes, really. That Michael Jackson. As an ardent fan (to this day), I found that there was actually a fairly active fan community on Xanga, where other young fans found a place to discuss his impact on our lives in a positive, supportive place. I actually met (and still talk to) some of my closest fan friends through Xanga.

After Xanga, I started posting blogs on Myspace. The address is here, if you’d like to see. The funny thing about Myspace though, is that blogging is probably one of the last things people really do on that site. It’s kind of like Groups or the Forums. Utterly useless. Who joins groups on Myspace?

Interestingly, I didn’t have a problem being one of only a few people who ever read my blog. It served as an effective outlet for my thoughts, even though I have a hand-written diary. I guess this was part of the problem, though. After a while, my Myspace posts turned into a pit of self-pity and adolescent angst. I mean, I never cut myself, I never wrote dark lyrics or poetry, I never did any of the things that people associate with angsty blogs. But my posts became tainted with a sort of negative vibe. School was getting to me. My job hunt was getting to me. But the most pressing of my concerns was my self-doubt, my fear that I was not, and could never be, the writer my heart longs to be.

As much as I’d like to say that I’ve gotten past that fear, I will freely admit that I have not.

My return to blogging is sort of my way of working to overcome that, not to mention my way of making up for the time wasted in worrying about writing instead of just writing. Now is the time, maybe more than ever, that I cast my doubts aside and work toward my goals with a renewed sense of ambition. After all, I’m not getting any younger. ;) Please feel free to join me along the way.

One last thing: today is my birthday. I’m twenty-two years old today, and holy crap, the years are actually starting to add up. I mention this because I would like to present myself with a challenge. All I want in life, at this point, is progress. Here’s to hoping that by my next birthday, I’m closer to where I want to be, and that this entry marks the beginning of real efforts—emotional, physical, psychological efforts-- to get there.