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It’s the sea­son for cel­e­bra­tion! Whether you’re toast­ing in the New Year, Matthew, Laura and me in honor of our grad­u­a­tion, or fam­ily and friends on Christ­mas, these lit­tle babies are com­plex enough to knock your taste buds into cel­e­bra­tion mode.

Luck
(Adapted from Katsuya’s “Burn­ing Manderin”)

I am a huge fan of “spice-rack” cock­tails, or cock­tails that fare on the savory or spicy side. I saw some­thing like this at Kat­suya and decided it might be my new favorite. The com­plex­ity of sweet, spicy, and sour in this mar­tini is painfully perfect.

• 2 oz Man­darin Vodka
• ¾ oz fresh squeezed OJ
• ¾ oz fresh squeezed Lemon Juice
• 1 chopped Ser­rano chili (I like it with the seeds still in but you decide)
• splash of cran­berry
• Shake and strain into a chilled mar­tini glass with a sugar-coated rim. Gar­nish with a large’ish jalapeño wheel.

Hap­pi­ness
OK this may seem like a sum­mer drink, but I had a crav­ing the other day, so it made the cut. The pome­gran­ate and grape­fruit combo is fuck­ing beau­ti­ful. For a(n) (impor­tant) vari­a­tion, try some crushed ice and a splash of lemon-grass liqueur.

(serve in high­ball glass with ice)
• 2oz (not well!) gin
• 1 oz pome­gran­ate juice
• Fresh squeezed lime wedge
• Top with grape­fruit Izze and gar­nish with a lime

Longevity
Every­one needs a booch’ey cock­tail every now and then to make their bod­ies happier(/lives bet­ter?). Well I could lit­er­ally drink this cock­tail for break­fast it’s so easy/perfect. For those of you who feel weird about Raspberry-infused vodka (cough, me), try mud­dling the rasp­berry with some lemon and using reg­u­lar vodka to avoid the unfor­giv­ing fake rasp­berry fla­vor (and let me know how it is!).

(serve in a high­ball glass over ice)
• 1 ¼ oz Raspberry-infused Vodka
• 1 fresh-squeezed lemon wedge
• 1 tsp fresh squeezed gin­ger
• Fill with home­made or unfla­vored raw organic Kom­bucha
• Splash of soda water
• Shake and top with a raspberry

Pros­per­ity
Dur­ing win­ter­time, most peo­ple opt for thick, sweet drinks that they think make them warmer. It is due to this time of year that we have unfor­tu­nate com­bi­na­tions like the North Pole Cock­tail. That’s so filthy.
When it gets cold in SoCal, the only thing I can think about is some­thing fresh and crisp to match that not-too-cold bite in the air! Some­thing like shochu (which you can get at most Japan­ese mar­kets, prob­a­bly some­where like Whole Foods, and def­i­nitely at a Japan­ese restaurant)

(serve in a high­ball glass with CRUSHED ice)
• 1 ¼ oz Japan­ese Shochu
• mud­dle 2 cucum­ber slices and a kaf­fir lime leaf
• top with Lemon­grass Dry Soda
• Stir
• gar­nish with 2 mint leaves

“Be always drunken. Noth­ing else mat­ters: that is the only ques­tion. If you would not feel the hor­ri­ble bur­den of Time weigh­ing on your shoul­ders and crush­ing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

And if some­times, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary soli­tude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunk­en­ness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or what­ever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: ‘It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be mar­tyred slaves of Time; be drunken con­tin­u­ally! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.’”

- Baude­laire as quoted in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Jour­ney Into Night“

Cheers! May you been drunken with wine, with poetry, and with virtue. Here’s to us.

1.3 Exper­i­ments:
There have been a num­ber. of .things that keep bring­ing me back to think­ing about Kevin lately.
Near the top of the long (end­less?) list of less-than-awesome things about bar­tend­ing for a cor­po­rate bar-and-grill, is small-talking with the saucy, gen­er­ally inap­pro­pri­ate men who sit at my bar-top every night e x p e c t i n g. And so, I per­form: I talk about foot­ball; I don’t punch their faces for their con­tin­ual igno­rance.
But Kevin, Kevin is my tiny jewel.

Kevin is a kind man. He is hands-down the most devoted bar reg­u­lar my restau­rant has ever seen, and def­i­nitely the most laid-back cus­tomer we have ever served. But he is also my friend.
Every time Kevin shows up, I get but­ter­flies in my stomach…we all do, I think. He has one of those faces that you could search over every day and still feel as if you could not fully know all of it…like it might shift or swell at any time and you do not want to miss it. He is always kind, always new. He expects noth­ing and so we offer him every­thing. Even his drink is pro­grammed into our com­puter sys­tems under the clever title “The Kevin” (Pres­i­dente mar­garita, extra brandy, shaken, in a frosted mug, no salt, lime squeezed on top) and is made more care­fully (lov­ingly) than any drink in the house. Instead of bull­shit­ting about foot­ball and the weather, we lit­er­ally talk for hours about art (he is end­lessly try­ing to get me to love Dali the way he does), and folk music (Indian, Cuban), and the world in gen­eral (we both lis­ten to too much NPR). We exchange nov­els and dis­cuss the details with each other the whole way through read­ing. On Sun­days, Kevin comes in dressed in his Sun­day suit and brings with him a new rid­dle that he hears on the radio. Some days I solve them, some days I beg and beg until he tells me the answer (after swear­ing up and down that he never would tell). He is wiser than any of us are ready for. Some­times I watch him work­ing out responses to ques­tions inside his head for lit­er­ally hours before pre­sent­ing them, some­times days even. He is often the best part of my day and is undoubt­edly the best part of my job.
I’ve con­cluded that I am in love with Kevin, in every way that I want to know how to be in love with a per­son. He is more than three times my age. That is so awesome.

So then there’s her. A few months ago a girl so sim­i­lar to my own self that I have more than once con­fused her face (her words, her irra­tional­ity) for my own, told me that she hated me so fer­vently that it made her phys­i­cally ill. I still don’t know what to do with those words. As I read them printed out per­ma­nently in front of me, all I could think about was dri­ving to her filthy, smoky apart­ment and press­ing my face really close up against hers until we saw some­thing, ANYTHING in the pores of the other to con­vince us that there were lovely things there. I never said a word to her in response, and I know I will not now.

1.4 Con­clu­sions:
In the (prob­a­bly butchered) words of my sweet friend
“Maybe it is not that there are no old men and only girls, but that I am supremely envi­ous of old men and girls. I want their kind of cat­e­gory and placement…a place to fold my legs up into my chest, like age.”

There are peri­ods in life when it seems that the cos­mos are laugh­ing hys­ter­i­cally in your face. Maybe that is what this is all about, not about a lit­tle boy on a train, or lov­ing an old man, or a woman remind­ing me of me. I have clas­si­fied the young and the old and the somewhere-in-between because I do not know what else to do with them, and because I myself feel some­where lost in that mid­dle. To over­come age, and con­ve­nience. To be time­less and trans­par­ent. What would that even look like? There is this the­ory about human con­nec­tion that has been made pop­u­lar recently by Dr. Fred Alan Wolfe (who I find bril­liant and won­der­ful a lot of the time, and a kook the rest of the time) and a whole swarm of “collective-joy” schol­ars, which basi­cally states that human beings can be thought of as sep­a­rate wave-producing bod­ies that, when res­onat­ing in har­mony with another body of waves, pro­duce expo­nen­tial amounts of energy between the two. This is to say that our bod­ies, the chem­i­cals and move­ments and reac­tions inside of us, are already defy­ing (all ready to defy) the con­straints of time and age and “love.” Now that is awesome.

So let’s just say, it would be really nice to meet up…in the train, my bar, your smoky apartment.

I have always thought of myself as a sci­en­tist.
As a lit­tle girl I can remem­ber want­ing so badly to walk on water that I spent two entire after­noons fig­ur­ing how much salt needed to be added to a beaker of water to make a mar­ble float (how much for a bouncy ball in a plas­tic cup. for a bowl­ing ball in a bucket. me, walk­ing across my bath­wa­ter). Even though I ran out of salt long before that bowl­ing ball was float­ing, I can remem­ber acknowl­edg­ing– maybe for the first time– that I had dis­cov­ered some­thing that I thought was “real.” As I get big­ger and learn more about the Every­thing, I keep revis­it­ing that mind-blowing moment of touch­ing the fringe of “truth”- where for a moment you know some­thing in the world:but maybe noth­ing at all. Per­haps the rea­son we are so in love with the sci­en­tific process– that metic­u­lous attempt to prove some­thing– is that it has never lied to us:because it has never claimed to have all the answers. Sci­ence lies on the fact that truth is rel­a­tive, that no mat­ter how many times I walk on salty bath­wa­ter, salt and water may one day drown me.

Wait, I’m also talk­ing about some­thing big­ger than that here.

I’m talk­ing about col­lec­tive obser­va­tion. I’m talk­ing about exper­i­men­ta­tion. I’m talk­ing about us help­ing each other into the warm lap of truth and nuz­zling our faces against its huge, trans­par­ent knees. The Nobel lau­re­ate in Chem­istry John Polanyi talked about you and me in his love story about the sci­en­tific process:

“Sci­ence, by con­trast, is story-telling. This is evi­dent in the way we use our pri­mary sci­en­tific instru­ment, the eye. The eye searches for shapes. It searches for a begin­ning, a mid­dle, and an end. What we see is as a con­se­quence, cul­tur­ally con­di­tioned. This is open to mis­un­der­stand­ing. It might be con­strued to mean that our con­clu­sions are sim­ply a mat­ter of taste, which they are not. Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the real­ity we sketch is uni­ver­sal. It is this, at its most basic, that makes sci­ence a humane pur­suit; it acknowl­edges the com­mon­al­ity of people’s experience.”

I am privy, too, to your sci­ence. I see you observ­ing your sub­jects, tal­ly­ing your lit­tle find­ings. You pour over pages and pages of human expres­sion to find some con­stant, some glo­ri­ously sim­ple equa­tion prov­ing (finally!) that you are as much me as I am you. What you do not know but have always known, what I have been scared to tell you for so long, is that I love your try­ing. Observ­ing your attempts is my exper­i­men­ta­tion. Climb­ing into your skin through your back, press­ing my face into the mold of your face, look­ing at the color that your eyes think is green:THIS is my phenomena.

I’m so glad that you’re here. This is for Us.