Heartbreak Soup

Yesterday I went to Southern Maryland to pick grapes at my grandfather’s vineyard.

I know it’s not a normal grandfatherly hobby, growing grapes on a spare few acres of a friend’s tumbledown plantation, and I’m very grateful that I don’t have a normal grandfather.  It means I get to spend at least one day a year experiencing the satisfying thwock of ripe bunches hitting the bottom of a basket and later the even more satisfying squish of ripe bunches being run through a press, destemmed, pressed again, and turned into gallons of juice that will sit in oak and metal casks until they become a completely decent species of wine.  The vineyard at Cremona (that’s the name of the plantation) is one of my favorite places in the world.  No part of it actually technically belongs to my family, but every inch of it is suffused with my family’s history, and with my own history.  Here is the willow tree I climbed as a four year old, now split by a thunderstorm.  Here are the overgrown formal gardens I ran through as a teenager, terrified because I thought I had a giant black and yellow spider climbing up my back (it was a butterfly).  Here is the narrow spit of land that you can only get to via canoe where my terrible Kenyon boyfriend Nick and I passionately, stupidly fucked, grinding sand into our knees.  Here is the fig tree whose branches concealed me and my high school boyfriend Chris as we made out in tender, sweet high school style.

I don’t even remember being there with William but we must have gone together several times.  All my memories of being with him and doing things with him blur together; there are too many of them.  Six years’ worth.  I can’t think about William right now, which means that I really can’t think too hard about the last six years of my life.

He’s being kind of a dick, you know: emailing me passive-aggressively about how I’m better than my job, about how he hates reading about my dating online (so don’t read [website I work for], William!).  “How did you think I would feel when I read that?” he asked, about a recent thing I wrote about the acceptability of going dutch on the first date.  I didn’t think about how he would feel.  The point of our breakup is that I don’t have to think about how my actions will make him feel anymore.  I do care about him. It hurts me to know that he’s hurting.  His voice on the phone can still move me to tears.  I still love the sound of his voice.  I still love him, I guess.  It’s weird how long it’s taken me to realize it.  Or maybe I’ve known, all this time, that all I’ve been doing with all these other boys is filling up that William-shaped hole in my life, nuzzling into their shoulders the way I always did with him, biting their earlobes the way he always loved to be bitten.

But: I don’t want to be with him.  I’m happier without him. I’m happy alone.  If he really loved me, he’d recognize this and he’d want me to be happy.  I need to be alone and learn how to take care of myself.  I can’t be with him in any way without giving up a part of myself.  I can’t go back; I have to keep moving forward.

It has to be this way. I just hate that it has to be this way.

These pork chops aren’t a metaphor. They’re just pork chops. I made them for Lori on the one month anniversary of living in my apartment as part of the first real meal I’ve cooked here, which kind of blows my mind.  But today I went to the grocery store and bought some staples and ingredients and right now I’m cooking meal number two.  This one’s just for me.  I guess I broke the seal.

I got my pork chops from the famous Los Paisanos meat market, which is actually namedropped in the cookbook this recipe is loosely adapted from, Daisy Cooks! by Daisy Martinez. I love Daisy.  I feel like her attitude about cooking jibes perfectly with mine: she loves big flavors and minimal ingredients, and she avoids fussy sauces or intricate techniques.  Also all her recipes are perfect for a crowd and pretty cheap to make.  This recipe in particular is a budget special: you can probably get everything you need to make it for around $7.

Ingredients:

Adobo, which you can make or buy.  I recommend “make” because the idea of MSG grosses me out and it’s hard to find supermarket adobo that doesn’t have any.  It’s a pretty great thing to have around, cause you can just rub it on any meat or poultry, cook it however you like and then poof: dinner is served.  So: combine 6 tablespoons kosher salt, 3 tablespoons onion powder, 3 tablespoons garlic powder, 3 tablespoons ground black pepper, and 1 1/3 teaspoons oregano, and store it in an empty spice jar.

2 bone-in pork chops

2 oranges

1 lemon

a few crushed garlic cloves

apple cider vinegar

Rub your pork chops down thoroughly with the adobo.  Then make a little bath for them in a shallow container using the juice of the oranges and lemon, a healthy splash of the apple cider vinegar, and the garlic cloves.  Let that sit out on the counter while you get the rest of dinner together, or stick it in the fridge if you’re not going to cook dinner for more than an hour.  Flip them over a couple of times.

When you’re ready, sautee the chops over medium heat in peanut or canola oil, cooking until golden on both sides.  Serve with rice and beans or salad or platanos or salad or all of the above.  Savor the delicious flavor of finally getting your kitchen operational!

Today a schizophrenic homeless man almost punched me in the face. Earlier, I waited half an hour for the bus.  Earlier still, I waited half an hour for a car service guy who’d said he’d be there “in five.”

Oh, and I had a shrill conversation with my ex-boyfriend William, who is holding my digital camera hostage because he can’t find the cord that would enable him to download the pix he’s taken with it onto his computer.  “Have you tried looking for it?” I finally said, after weeks of politely asking to have it back.  “You don’t need to get upset!” he told me, incorrectly.

Also, I found out my cat — my fucking CAT– has a urinary tract infection, and I paid $50 for his antibiotics, plus $20 for the (tardy!) car that took me to the vet, arriving exactly one minute before they closed.

Oh, right, and!  I got screamed at on the phone at 9:00 by someone I’d written about for work, some I’d previously admired!  And then, half an hour later, I got an identical incoherent lecture from that person’s publicist.

On top of it all, a few days ago the Internet decided to cough up a clip of something vaguely humiliating I did a few months ago, instigating another barrage of hatemail and creepy fanmail (ex: “You stoopid cunt” “Fuck Jimmy Kimmel, yr hot! Lol”) in my inbox.  I can’t even read this shit anymore.  I can’t believe I used to be fascinated by it.  I guess I used to care a lot more what idiots and assholes thought of me.

I still care a bit, of course.

So, all in all, a la Alexander, it was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day, made doubly so because I’m very, very tired.  But the reason I’m still smiling right now is that the reason I’m so tired is … well.

Ahem. Like I said, I’m not good at writing about sex, or maybe no one is.  But the way I feel about last night is the way I felt about bacon after I started eating meat again after 1o years of vegetarianism.  Which was: I wanted everyone to understand how important, how absolutely essential bacon is.  I wanted to tell people about bacon.  I actually did tell people, several times.  “Have you had bacon? It’s like a potato chip made out of meat!”  Bacon.  Man, bacon is delicious!

Recently my friend Jim told me that right now boywise I should be just taking what I want and leaving what I don’t want like it’s half a tuna sandwich. (He knows about this blog so maybe the bad food metaphor thing is catching). And I am doing this! It’s not something that comes easily to me. Like, right now, I guess there are a few boys who I’m flirting with (with my retard-level flirting skills) but the idea of actually hanging out with any of them in an organized, expectation-inducing way makes me feel an immediate adrenalin surge and a wince of panic. Sometimes I feel this way about things that turn out to be fun, though? I don’t know, I’m just worried that if I sit around waiting to feel ready I could end up waiting forever. I know that this is an insane, ridiculous thing to be worried about, two months into my career of being single forever.

It’s especially insane and ridiculous because I guess I did sort of — heh! — eat a couple of bites of the tuna sandwich last weekend, resulting in everyone I ran into this week making fun of the huge vampire bite hickeys on my neck. I had to buy a turtleneck to wear to Rosh Hashanah dinner in Lon Guyland tonight.

At the dinner we ate overcooked chicken that wasn’t even home-overcooked and I looked at my Nana’s photo albums, which are amazing. Every time I’m at my grandparents’ apartment I look at the album that’s marked “DG [Doris Goldfield] 1943″ on the spine, which is the album of glamorous shots of my grandmother taken before she met and married my grandfather.

I’m always amazed at her beauty. She had — still has, to some extent — this sort of 40s face they just don’t make anymore. In her prime, which lasted for some 30 years, she looked almost exactly like a Gibson girl pinup: high arched eyebrows, pert button nose, cupid’s bow lips, apple cheeks. Oh and: insane slender but sexy body with no discernible muscle tone, just perfectly proportioned curves. No one looks like this anymore, maybe because we work out more or eat different foods or something. She’s more gorgeous than I’ll ever be in any picture ever taken of me but the photos are still just as much fun to look at as photos of myself because there are sort of bits of me here and there around the mouth and they eyes and the hipbones (there are a lot of bathing beauty shots; she grew up in Brighton Beach).

She and my grandfather must have thought that being a ridiculously beautiful couple would float them through life and I guess it did for fifty years or so. Things are starting to break down a bit now. It doesn’t really bear dwelling on.

I also looked at my parents’ wedding album. They, too, were an almost disturbingly beautiful couple, even though my Dad’s 1977 haircut makes him look sort of like Andy Samberg. In those pictures, they’re 26. A month from today, I’ll be 26 too.

I am so down with Sinead’s message in this song. Except the last verse, which I think might be about Jesus. Or maybe Osiris.

This is a special recipe for the ladies. Ladies, do you ever get urinary tract infections? Alice, I know you do. Oh and Slut Machine, obvs you do too. I guess most women do? I’d never really had one before. And then I had four of them in, like, a month. Jury’s still out as to why; one psychic I saw recently (uh, I saw her because I’m writing about psychics for work, I’m not that much of a hippie) (except, clearly, I am) said it was because I was “suppressing tears.”

After a bout of rigorous self-examination (for those of you keeping score at home, that would be bout number fourteen billion and three), I realized she was right: I used to cry all the time when I was with William, but since I haven’t had an audience, I’ve rarely shed a tear. I mean, except the tears I cry like clockwork in my sessions with Susan — just the sight of her tissue box sets me off sometimes! — and the ones I cry when I’m on the phone with R.E.C.

In fact, the only time I’ve cried alone in recent memory — and, maybe, ever? God, is that possible? — was after my final, final, final IM conversation with Jake, when he apologized for not respecting my feelings (uh, after telling me that he’d dumped me via IM because I’d “forced the issue.”)

Anyway! If you’re not crying enough, or if you’ve had too much sex with someone who learned to fuck from watching mainstream porn, you will probably get a UTI. Here’s a home remedy I just learned that, as far as I can tell, works like a charm. However, be advised that I combined it with nearly a month on Cipro and then Sulfa drugs. Still, it’s worth a shot, and it doesn’t taste that bad.

Ingredients:

yogurt (I used Total greek yogurt for extra palatability)

ground cinnamon

fruit (optional)

What you do is, mix enough cinnamon into the yogurt to turn it the color of chocolate mousse, then pour this mixture over fruit (watermelon’s good!) and eat it. The idea is that the cinnamon is a natural antibiotic and the little ground-up bits sort of gently sandpaper your innards, taking nasty bacteria with them.

It turns out that I am the kind of crazy person who needs to have everything JUST EXACTLY A CERTAIN WAY as soon as I’m in a new place in order to feel at home. For example, I bought my friend D. a new shower curtain the first time I house-sat for her. It was all I could do to wait until she was out the door before I started clearing the clutter off her countertops. It’s not so much that I’m a neat freak, although I guess it is that a little bit. It’s maybe more that I’m a control freak!

And for so long I sublimated my control-freakiness when I was living with William. Because: I would have gone, like, requiring-institutionalization insane if I’d actually tried for a minute to combat his sloppiness seriously while I was living with him. We are talking here about a person whose sole concession to anything resembling the idea of cleanliness, since I moved out, has been to buy a bunch of flystrips to trap the fat black flies buzzing around his piles of filth. “They work really well, ” he told me as I packed my dishes, a note of wonder in his voice. He seemed really proud of himself for finding a solution to the fly problem.

So obviously during my first week in my new place, I was tempted to call in sick to work every day and do nothing but clean and unpack and line shelves and invent storage solutions maniacally until everything was perfect. Two things prevented me from doing this: a) my tiny remaining vestige of sanity and b) the kitchen sink. The kitchen sink was filled with black filth.  Also it was connected to a nonexistent pipe and it stank of rotting vegetables and rust. Every other day, the super would come, start to “fix” it, then leave because he “needed a part.” It took more than two weeks and a lot of arm-twisting on the part of my sublettee CK for him to finally fix the damn thing for real (uh, knock on wood that the fix sticks.)

Because I couldn’t use the sink, and because the kitchen was getting tromped through and splattered with thick brown water from the depths of the sad old plumbing on a regular basis, it seemed silly to unpack my dishes. And even after I finally did, it took a few days for me to cook anything more complicated than scrambled eggs. It turns out that when one lives alone in a neighborhood full of prime specimens of every takeout option from Afghan to Vietnamese, cooking perfect little meals for oneself a la pre-Latte Amanda Hesser is actually pretty unappealing. Huh! Maybe I’ll change my mind about this come winter, or when I get my kitchen a little bit more tricked-out, or when I run out of money. But for now, I’m barely cooking. I’m definitely not making the kind of meals I used to make when I was doing the weird bringing home the bacon, frying it up in the pan, and then washing the pan afterwards thing I was doing with William.

This is how nutty I was about cooking for William: on the night we broke up, moments before we broke up, I was in the kitchen, preparing to make angel hair pasta with sundried tomato cream sauce, lamb chops, and asparagus with lemon. I remember standing in the kitchen, staring at the ingredients, vision blurry with tears, thinking that if somehow if I could just get through this night, this dinner, then maybe I would be able to figure out a way to make things work out. William saw me standing there and put me out of my misery. “Just pack a bag as quickly as you can and go to Alice’s.” I did, and I didn’t come back again for two days, and that was to get all my clothes. I took the lamb chops and pasta too, of course (the asparagus had gone wilty.) I cooked them for dinner at Lori’s house that night and ate them with a voracious appetite. And then I didn’t come back to the apartment until two months later, when I found it infested with flies and reeking of cigarette smoke and eau de single guy.

Finally on Labor Day I cooked something resembling a meal in my new place: a pasta salad for a BBQ at D’s house. It’s just about the most basic thing I know how to cook: you need to be able to boil water, you need a knife and a cutting board and a bowl, you need salt and peppper, and you need seven ingredients. The only thing not-easy about the salad is that you can only make it in August when tomatoes are ripe.

Four ripe tomatoes

1 lb short pasta

Olive oil

Ball of fresh mozzarella ( I got mine from a picturesque Italian pork store on Court St.)

Fresh basil (I got mine from a planter on someone’s picturesque front stoop on State St. What? It had gone to seed, and I’m sure they weren’t planning to use all of it anyway).

Four cloves of garlic

Juice of half a lemon

Finely chop the garlic, dice the tomatoes making sure to catch all their juices, sliver the basil, and combine with the lemon juice and plenty of olive oil in a large bowl. Season generously with salt and pepper. Let the mixture macerate while the pasta cooks. Drain and rinse the pasta, then introduce it to the tomato mixture. Dice the mozzarella and fold it in. Adjust seasoning. Eat while waiting for burgers.

This recipe is better than Amanda Hesser’s recent redux rediscovery, Pamela Sherrid’s Summer Pasta, because of the lemon juice. Actually other than that it’s sort of the same recipe with less florid description and “stir from the bottom of the bowl” sensual but useless directions. Okay, it’s not better, really, but it’s mine.