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.

You know it’s getting bad when you have to add things like “blog” or “eat lunch,” or even my classiest entry “fucking sleep tonight!” to your to-do list.

With the ending of UB3, Laura’s show and now my mini art show, I have run out of justifiable distractions from the work I’ve been avoiding and my life now officially consists of only School and Work. A LOT of school and work. Like the amount of school and work that makes you throw up a little in your mouth. Thus, let’s not be surprised that, until graduation, the content of this blog will not likely stray far from a) my eclectic and rather poorly chosen APU classes and/or b) Chili’s bar and grill. This is gonna be an awesome few months.

Does it ever happen to you that you learn something new—say, a new word—and suddenly you are reading that word in your favorite magazine, hearing the newsperson say it on the nightly news, noticing that your professor uses it a lot? It almost seems that your learning of that word released it into this collective conscious where people all around you suddenly started using it more because you read its definition. Well lately it seems like everyone and everything around me is talking about thinking musically. This semester for the first time I am taking an ethnomusicology course on the music of Latin America and, while I’m not suggesting that musical analysis was recently released into the collective conscious, I am suggesting that it is a hot topic that I am totally in to right now.

On the first day of my class on the music of Latin America my professor asked us—seemingly rhetorically—why every culture and people group in history has created music. As we all took a moment to feel impressed by his point, he answered his (apparently non-rhetorical) question:

We create music because we HAVE to. We have ALWAYS had to. Because we cannot possibly express the glory of this life through anything less than music.

His voice cracked as he said it.

There really is something to be said about the universality of music. Virtually as long as humans have been known to speak and build tools, they have sung and played instruments. Too often, for me, prose or images fall short of what I want to convey. I am consistently left unsatisfied, combing my mind for some tool I am overlooking that could allow another to really see through my eyes. Sure, this may be because I am neither writer nor visual artist (and sweet god, I am NO musician), but I recognize a breadth of expression in music that I do not see elsewhere.

Much of Latin music finds its roots in Africa (obviously an import that arrived along with the slave ships) and so heavily utilizes the brilliant musical style of improvisation. In the same vein of jazz and good freestyle rap, improvisation forces the musician to keep a rhythm, invent meaningful and clever parts (often lyrics) on the spot, deliver those parts immediately to the melody, and to engage or respond to fellow musicians playing along. My mind is bending even now as I consider this. It is no surprise that as neuroscientists only begin breaking ground on studying the chemical functions of the brain, they would devote so much focus to the musical mind. As neurologist and author Dr David Rosenfield notes,

“Musicians can learn new visual memories and new motor programming memories throughout adulthood. If you want to learn a new language as an adult, it’s hard. Yet a musician looks at a visual symbol and translates that into a motor output that in turn provides an auditory input. People who do that professionally have different brains.

An awesome study came out a few years ago in the Scientific American that showed that there was 25% more brain activity observed in a musician’s mind than a non-musician’s when simply listening to a musical piece. Children as young as five years old were observed to have hyperdevelopment of brain activity do to their musical exposure in the home. The study concluded that music had a biological basis and that the brain definitely has a functional organization for music. So I guess a better answer to my professor’s question would be that the reason all people in observed history have created music is because the human body is made to produce music…it is in our nature.

This holds a lot of weight for me as a non-musician interested in the endless expansion of her mind, as it should for you even as a musician. It is absurd that I do not play.
I am planning to spend a year in and across Central and South America (youshouldcome) beginning in June 2008. I will reveal details as they emerge. One of my goals between now and then is to really begin to learn a musical instrument. I’m considering percussion…maybe the Marimba or (more likely) the Steelpan.

I mean, can you imagine what it would do to your mind to play in the pan yards of Trinidad and Tobago?

holy sweet jesus.

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.

1.1 Observation:
Last Thursday I was riding the MAX home from downtown Portland, losing myself in thought and near-sleep, and generally feeling pretty shitty. There was a large woman hogging the seat next to me, squawking loudly with another woman (her mother?) about boring things. The younger woman’s child-son was with them, staring out the window of the train and dangling his feet below chair. He was cute. As I dozed or dazed off in the dark subway tunnel, this happened (like it does every day):

On the MAX from Jennabee and Vimeo.

Before I could even react, the little boy next to me looked back from the window where his eyes had been glued and said “whoa.” His mother looked down at him, surprised, with a silly look on her face and said “What?” She had missed it, they all had…they were talking too loudly.
“Yeah man,” I said to him quickly “whoa.” And he smiled.

Every day my breath is almost taken away and my eyes well up with tears from this unlikely moment of pure and severe experience. That explosion of light and quiet. It’s like birth. Or sex. Or church. I always feel silly afterwards, embarrassed…like birth, or sex, or church. And that little boy is the first person I have ever seen notice it.

1.2 Hypothesis:

I sort of hate the way time works. It has always seemed like a cruel joke to me that we can recall each detail of the past, which we have no control over, but that we cannot see what may come in the future, though our every decision affects it. This powerlessness has left me rather depressed with the grim prospects for our tries at truly empathizing with one another.

Why is it that all of my closest friends are my age; look a lot like me; act a lot like me?

As a true believer in human goodness, I think that if we were able to fully grasp the effects of our decisions across time and space, our actions, and our world, would be much more true. Or pure. Or what have you. As a true believer in human connection, I know that I would really love you, if I could see all of you.
I’ve been looking for ways to look into your eyes and find myself able love their bright spots for the way they evolved from your baby blue, to the way they will one day dim into a yellowed grey. Trying recognize your vice as the innocent childish habit it evolved from, and the messy recovery you will one day have from it. I want to really see you, you know, so we can be friends.

Someone once told me that they thought heaven was this single moment where you were able to see EVERYTHING across all of time.
With everything laid out it front of you–every cause and effect since and until all of time–you
u n d e r s t o o d,
and you loved it all.

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.