Some bean salad is mushy*, weird, bland, and yucky, but not the bean salad we will be eating for dinner tonight**. It consists of:
Vallarta beans (small, dense, rich)
Chopped broccolini (steamed)
Chopped butter lettuce
Red onion
Toasted pine nuts
Preserved lemon
Garlic
Olive oil
Vinegar
Salt
Lots and lots of pepper
My regret of the evening is that we don't have some good bread in the house to go with it.
*Sometimes, if there are kidney beans involved, it can be both mushy and all too toothsome, at the same time. This is a most regrettable state of affairs.
**No doubt it is our good luck that we are not trying to feed this to a child, as then the smooth expanse of our enjoyment would be wrinkled by dissent on at least one of these points.
It's a bit embarrassing how cheaply my good humor can be purchased by hot, sunny, summery weather, and being out in it. If you could see how sad I was on Monday (when it was cold and grey) and how happy I am today, you would laugh at me.
When I was five, I liked to put talcum powder on my hands before I went to bed (why, I have no idea). I also liked to get myself a glass of water. The trouble was that if I put the powder on first, I'd get it wet when I filled my water glass. If I put the powder on second, I'd get powder in my water. I did the former, because I was worried that the powder might be poisonous. But one evening, I decided to live a little and do it the other way around.
But after I had been in bed for a few minutes, I was struck with terrible remorse. Oh god! It probably WAS poisonous. How could I have been such a fool? I wept. My father heard my stifled, choking sobs from the next room.
"Are you all right?" he called.
"Yes!" I said. "Fine! I was just coughing."
Then I got to work wondering how long poison could take to kill me. After all, I wasn't dead yet. How long would it be before I knew I was in the clear? I began to calculate. Right now I was in kindergarten. Next year, I would be six and in first grade. When I was seven, I would be in second grade. (Hey! If you subtract five from your age, you get the grade you're in! Clever!) Right. Probably if I was still alive by the time I started second grade, then, I could safely assume that the talcum powder had not, in fact, killed me.
The end.
"I still want a bronze cast of your nose."
"Mm."
"I've wanted one for YEARS now."
"I know."
"You would think someone would have believed me and made it happen. All I want is your nose, in a form I can carry in my pocket! Is that so strange?"
"Yes."
Today I went to the mall in an attempt to purchase a pair of linen trousers that did not make me look frumpy and saggy-bottomed. I did not succeed, but I did have the magnificent experience of being at the mall on the afternoon before prom.
It took me a while to work out why I was surrounded legions of fresh-faced young girls wearing jeans, sweatshirts, and elaborately lacquered dragon-lady hairdos. When I wandered through the makeup section of Saks and saw several of the same in the process of having their fresh young faces transformed into extravaganzas of maquillage, light dawned. Prom night! Oh glory.
I went up to one of the counters and asked the nice woman, "Is it prom?" Behind her a wholesome and freckly blonde was being transformed into something that would have made a suitable love object for James Kirk in the original Star Trek, and an entire nuclear family (tired mother in shalwar kameez, text-messaging father in rumpled sportscoat, and rapt little sister in Dora the Explorer shirt) watched as inch-long eyelashes were applied to their adolescent representative. Another pair of girls with uncannily similar arrangements of sausage curls waited their turn.
"Oh, yes, honey," she said, and there was a haunted look in her eye. "It's prom all right. It's been prom all week."
The facilities manager for the College tells me that the cooling system for the building where my office is located involves some enormous water "chiller" a block and a half away. From this chiller cold water is pumped through pipes (like the hot water that serves to heat things) in any number of buildings. In the ceilings of these buildings there are mysterious objects called mixing boxes that chug hot and cold together? in tandem? cold water from the chiller and hot air from somewhere else? somehow to produce air of the approximately right temperature and blat it out at you as your thermostat requests.
They don't fire up this chiller until a certain mysterious date. Then the cold water takes some time to make its way through the pipes, and I suppose once it's there, it displaces the hot water, or some of it, or something, so the whole system is rather inertial. This is all most fascinating and obscure.
In any event, however, the chiller is now GO and everything is VERY COLD. This is too bad because it makes me even less inclined to be a good little worker than I would normally be, which is extremely not very. I could in theory up and go home, but this would not produce any better results, and would make me feel that I had given up, which I have, but later I will feel the psychological effects of having given up less, I think, than if I do. Better, I think, to stay and suffer.
On the matter of the suffering: The skin on my hands, alarmed by these unfavorable conditions, has taken on a creepy waxy sort of appearance, which sets off my uneven, bluish fingernails very nicely. Now that I examine this situation a little more closely, I see that the waxiness is part and parcel with a general failure of elasticity. This is interesting because my typing is actually producing strange dents in each fingertip, and the dents don't immediately go away. If I hold up my hands, each finger looks to be its own specially malformed baby head, squashed by the birth canal. Sorry, fingers, but it's true.
Grades are filed hooray. A great big stack of papers to review, research protocols to thrash out, things to read in preparation for next semester's teaching, and myriad other tasks loom, but just at the moment I am more interested in staring quietly at the wall.
