Be part of the magic!

On February 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking3 Comments

Dudes. I have like 1997 followers. You know you wanna be #2000. The button’s right over there.

In which I know nothing at all

On February 24, 2014February 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized18 Comments

amnesia2

You’re 12 years old. It’s your birthday. Write for ten minutes on that memory. GO.

I can only do this if I type very slowly, because I r e m e m b e r n o t h i n g. Nothing at all. Zip. Zilch. I found out in one of my grad school classes that some non-trivial percentage of adults can remember little more from, say, 10 to 14 than they can from birth to 5. I have more clear memories from elementary school than I do from seventh and eighth grade, although I guess if I was turning 12 I’d have been in between sixth and seventh, since I was young for my grade. At any rate, I’ve got nothing at all and even filibustering for a few sentences I’ve only been writing for a minute or so.

(Man. I’ve been sitting here for several more minutes and I can’t come up with a birthday party story in general worth telling. Let’s turn this one on you guys: what do you think my twelfth birthday party must have been like? ENTERTAIN ME WITH YOUR LIES.)

(Real post later; I’ve got a meeting this afternoon so I’m killing an hour at home for lunch.)

More answers to this question after the jump:

Continue reading “In which I know nothing at all” →

No human would stack macaroni this way…

On February 23, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Parenting, Photography2 Comments

So while the boy was doing this (over, and over, and over again…)I was doing this:

Jambalaya with cheddar cheese cornbread is a hell of a way to end a Sunday, y’all.

Daily Prompt: Walking on the Moon

On February 23, 2014February 23, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories13 Comments

I may start doing these more often; forcing myself to write to a prompt every now and again seems like a good thing. Here’s today’s:

What giant step did you take where you hoped your leg wouldn’t break? Was it worth it, were you successful in walking on the moon, or did your leg break?

The summer after graduating from college, I went to Israel for a month. It was a program sponsored by the university; we were on a dig at Tel Beth Shemesh. (This was 1998, so it fascinates me that the girl next to the pile of pots on that page, the third picture down, was on my dig. That’s an old picture. I remember everybody going nuts when we found that refuse pile.)

Here’s how the dig worked: we worked five days a week, and weekends were programmed trips around the country with a tour guide. One afternoon– Tuesdays, I think?– we were on our own on the afternoons, and most of us took the time to go into Jerusalem and shop or sightsee or whatever. The problem was, by the time the digging was over and we’d had time to go home and clean up and grab some food and catch the bus, it was impossible to get to the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount before it closed for the day, seeing as how it’s an active religious site and not actually a 24/7 tourist site.

The thought of being able to tour the Dome of the Rock was a sizable portion of the reason I’d wanted to go on the trip in the first place. I was thousands and thousands of miles from home with no real reason to believe I’d ever be in Israel again. Missing out was not acceptable. So on the night before our last Tuesday half day, I dropped in on one of the dig directors in his office and let him know I was taking a sick day the next day. And I got up early in the morning, got on the bus, and went into Jerusalem. By myself. I was 21 and spoke no Hebrew (I could read it, which wasn’t terribly useful) and had never been overseas before. Also: 1998, so no cell phone or means to get ahold of anyone. But there was no way in hell I was leaving Israel without a tour of that building, and if that meant I had to do it by myself that was what was going to happen.

You have very likely never been to the Old City. It’s a maze. And, worse, it’s a maze that shuts down around prayer times and a few other times as well, meaning that all the shops close and you can lose your bearings very easily when all of your landmarks suddenly go away. You remembered the jewelry shop on the corner was where you turned right? Good luck when the face of the jewelry store suddenly turns into a piece of plywood. I hired a guide. Agreed on a reasonable price. He took me on a little tour, where I did my best to make sure to memorize my route because I was alone and half-convinced I was about to be robbed, and then brought me to the Temple Mount.

Where he attempted to double his price. There was shouting. He switched to Arabic. I switched to Spanish. This was clearly a performance on his part, figuring the American was going to back down quickly rather than attract the notice of the local authorities– and we were certainly starting to attract notice. I, on the other hand, was firmly in “getting arrested on the Temple Mount makes the story better” mode, and wasn’t about to back down to the dude, figuring that the blue passport around my neck and my connection to Hebrew University through the dig was going to sort everything out sooner or later. (Yay, privilege!) He backed down and left. And I took my shoes off, got in line and got my tour of one of the most beautiful, spiritual places on the planet. I met my friends a couple of hours later without any real incident, managing to get to the spot where we’d agreed to join up without getting lost or anything else stupid happening.

Secondary funny Israel story: On the first trip into Jerusalem, we went to the Holy Sepulchre. The history of the Sepulchre is fascinating and well worth a read if you’re unfamiliar with it, but suffice it to say that there’s a shrine in there that is believed to be the actual location of Jesus’ tomb. You have to crawl, or at least squat, to get in there:

This is, in case it’s not clear, a really small room, with space for no more than a few people, and those shoved tightly together. And that little entryway is several feet long, so it’s possible to stand up too early as you’re walking in. And hit your head. On a stone arch.

If you do that, shouting “OW! JESUS!” at the top of your lungs is frowned upon.

(It wasn’t me. Thank God. But I was right behind her and oh lord keeping a straight face in a situation like that is incredibly difficult. Also, I can safely report that it is in fact impossible to literally die of embarrassment or Betsy surely would have done so on the spot.)

Under the jump, other answers to this prompt:

Continue reading “Daily Prompt: Walking on the Moon” →

In which I have soup: a blog post

On February 22, 2014February 23, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Reviews8 Comments

pho p10 At some point earlier this week, the tasty Vietnamese dish known as pho popped onto my radar in three or four different places on the same day. I’d never had it, and for some reason I was seeing lavish paeans to the stuff everywhere I looked all the sudden.

As I’ve mentioned a couple times, I’m trying rather aggressively to increase my exposure to different kinds of food. I decided one way or another I was going to find an excuse to eat me some pho. While I was bored at work today I put up a post on Facebook looking for anybody who lived near me who could either recommend a recipe or knew a place that served it. I learned a couple of things about pho in the process:

It’s pronounced “fuh.” I have trouble saying that like it’s a word, as it turns out. It feels ridiculous in my mouth, like I was asking for Zzz or Mmm instead of saying a word. I assume it sounds less silly in Vietnamese.
That there is a large Hmong community in freaking Minneapolis, of all places, which got me wondering how exactly that happened.
That there was a pho joint– helpfully named “Bowl of Pho”– very close to OtherJob. The person recommending it said all sorts of good things about it. Hey! This means I can have pho tonight if I want to! I don’t have to make a big thing about it! This is good.
Cooking it at home seemed intimidating, especially since I had no real idea what it was supposed to taste like.
Incidentally, in discussing where precisely “Bowl of Pho” is located (next to the Burlington Coat Factory,) a friend of mine who lives on the other side of the country cracked that the street that Bowl of Pho was on must be the most literally-named street in the world. This will prove important in a bit.

As I was leaving work, I called my wife, who was already not planning on seeing me for dinner just because of how late I was working. I was planning on buying some pho to go (which would be pleasingly rhymey if pho was pronounced the way it looks like it should) but it turned out that she wanted me to run an errand on the way home so it made more sense to eat there.

This caused me a tiny bit of trepidation. I was single and unable to cook for a long time, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t comfortable with eating alone in restaurants. But I’d never been inside this place before and that caused me a touch of trepidation, since I wasn’t sure how “sit-downey” the place was.

I arrived at Bowl of Pho to discover that the businesses to either side of it were called Scrub Depot and– no shit– Boxes Plus. I posted to Facebook to that effect, causing no end of hilarity for the guy who already thought I lived in Literal Town.

So, interesting thing about Bowl of Pho: one of the long walls in the place is entirely mirrored, which causes a little bit of disorientation when you walk in if you’ve never been there before, so there’s a moment when you stand there like an idiot while you figure out where the walls are and then you notice the sign that says to seat yourself and you sit down. There was a table right by the door, and I snagged it, briefly considering moving deeper into the place to a smaller table. I had my back to the door. This proved to be a mistake, as I was greeted by a cold blast of air every time someone came in, and I’m also not good about having my back to doors in restaurants. Everyone else there looked like they were on a date, which kind of intensified the Creepy Single Guy effect. Pleasingly, fully half the clientele were Asian– and this is not a town with a high Asian population– which made me figure they were probably doing the food right.

Over the next five minutes, a guy brought me some water and the waitress came by. She and I had a brief conversation where I told her that I’d decided to eat pho and that Facebook had told me to come to them, and that she should just bring me whatever the most “typical” version of pho the Bowl of Pho had to offer. And water? Sure, yeah, water.

During that five minutes every empty table in the restaurant filled up. And most to capacity. I was at a table for four– not a huge table for four, mind you, but a table for four. This further intensified the Creepy Single Guy effect. I’d have moved, but the other tables for two filled up right away. And I was, again, right by the door, which gave me this weird feeling as people came in and saw me sitting by myself that they were resenting me for taking their table.

So, yeah, pho: what she brought me looked exactly like what’s in the picture up there; I wasn’t about to get even weirder by whipping out my phone and photographing my food. The only problem? The bowl was roughly three times as big as I was expecting it to be. Holy shit did they bring me a lot of soup.

I put a few of the leaves (I still don’t know what they were) into the soup and most of the noodles and the jalapeños (?) and squeezed some of the limes and put a healthy few squeezes of sriracha in as well. And dug in.

Guys, pho is fucking delicious. Neat thing about it: the beef is put in raw, and then the broth poured over it, and because it’s cut so thinly the broth actually cooks the meat basically right in front of you. It was wonderful. And not to repeat myself or anything but the bowl was so big that I spent two or three minutes eating before discovering the huge pile of rice noodles underneath all the broth; I’d wrongly assumed that the stuff on the plate was all the noodleage I was going to get. Nay-nay. There’s so much more.

Something else pho is? Spicy. Especially when you pour sriracha all over it before you start eating. I figured out quickly that I was going to be in some trouble here; as I said, the place went from half-empty to packed in less time than it took to talk about it, so the one waitress was waitressing her ass off at high speed and didn’t look terribly amenable to being flagged down to bring me more water.

Man up, bitch. I kept eating, rationing my water, trying not to embarrass myself too much, and kind of glad I wasn’t facing the door so that no one coming in could see my nose running from the heat. Then I heard the Asian couple at the table next to me explaining to the white couple that they’d come in with what Thai iced tea was and how they should try some. (Their races are relevant, as I was basically eavesdropping on their conversation through the entire meal and it was very clearly a case of Introducing Old White People To Our Culture.)

I’d spent less than a minute looking at the menu. I went there to eat pho; I ordered pho. Nothing doing. They have Thai iced tea here? I love Thai iced tea! I want Thai iced tea.

Eventually the waitress came by with water and saved me from running to the bathroom and burying my face in the toilet tank. I asked her if she could bring me some Thai iced tea. She did.

I took one sip. Involuntarily, my eyes fluttered. I almost passed out. Bowl of Pho should be called Glass of Thai Iced Tea. I fucking love Thai iced tea. This might be the best glass of it I’d ever had.

She dropped off the check with my tea, a subtle hint that perhaps I should hurry; one I didn’t mind, as, again, they’d brought me roughly twelve times as much food as I’d expected. I ate all the meat and nearly all of my noodles and there was still enough broth in the bowl that had that been the entire ration they’d brought me I would not have been surprised.

The bill was just under $13, which made me feel a bit better about the size of the bowl; if you’re gonna charge me nine bucks for soup there had better be an enormous amount of it. That said, I left a $20 and didn’t bother waiting for change. Like I said, the waitress was running her ass off and the soup and especially the tea were that good.

I got into my car and texted my wife, letting her know that I was planning on leaving her for whoever had made the tea, just as soon as I found out who that person was. If that person turns out to be a man I’m gonna have to get gay marriage legalized in Indiana.

That damn good.

(RIDICULOUS BLOG ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Write 1500 words about soup.)

In which I do a terrible thing to a nice person

On February 22, 2014February 23, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy20 Comments

Today is clearly going to be one of those days where I don’t get a whole hell of a lot done– I’ve spent the day at OtherJob surfing the Web, babysitting the blog, and intermittently going outside to whack the crap out of the ice in the parking lot, which I’ve managed to upgrade from “moderately dangerous” to “safe” over the course of the day. I have a fair amount of grading and other school stuff in my bag with me and a Robert Jordan book to finish (I’m resisting the urge to write a post called “Re-re-re-considering Robert Jordan“) and I think by now it’s clear that I’m not doing any of those things.

On the plus side, I have a couple of regular customers and a small horde of eleven-year-old girls in the building, so at least I’m not lazy and alone.

But anyway. I want to write something, so I did something I’ve never done before and took a look at WordPress’ Daily Prompts website. And I think I’m going to do today’s:

Ever been dumped by a boyfriend or girlfriend? Was it a total surprise, or something you saw coming? Tell us your best worst breakup story. Never been the dumpee, always the dumper? Relate the story of a friend who got unceremoniously kicked to the curb. Change the names to protect the innocent if you must.

I’ll not need to change the names, as– compounding the correct feeling that you’ll get while you’re reading this post that I may be a terrible person– I’m discovering right now that I can’t remember hers. That’s… dag, that’s a shame. I seriously can’t remember her name at all.

We met online, on some sort of dating site. I was in grad school at the time, so this was around 2004 or 2005, and the majority of my dates were coming from the Web in some manner or another. By the time I convinced her to go out with me I was in full-blown mercenary mode about Interwebs dating, well past the point where I had the patience for a couple of weeks of emails or phone conversations. If I found someone interesting, I moved to “let’s get coffee someplace” almost immediately. We met at a diner for an hour or so and made out rather ferociously in the parking lot for a bit afterwards; only the revelation that she had a roommate and I had two cats (she was terribly allergic, and never once set foot in my apartment) kept me from taking her home for the night. So there was some chemistry.

The chemistry lasted, oh, three weeks? A month? I dunno. There was nothing wrong with her– and I was saying this to other people when it happened, too; this isn’t 20/20 hindsight– we just weren’t going to be a thing. But we’d gotten into that weird place where we’re not really official, but if we’re going to stop doing the unofficial thing that we’re doing we need to actually stop doing it, officially. Does that even make sense? I dunno, it did to me at the time.

I had never broken up with anyone before. (Wait, no! That’s not true. I’d never broken up with anyone well before. But that’s its own story.) This, as it turned out, was going to be a problem.

I went home over Christmas. I’d seen her the night before I left and promised to call her on Christmas day. On Christmas eve, my brother got abominably, violently ill from what he thought at the time was a poorly-chosen piece of mall pizza. My dad and I spent the evening with him in the hospital. Christmas day, I didn’t call her. I honestly, truly and completely just forgot. I went back to Chicago the day after Christmas, getting home just in time to go to my job at a local music store. Right around the end of my shift, I discovered that my brother had not in fact had food poisoning. That he was, in fact, contagious. I got so sick so fast that to this day I don’t remember how the hell I got home.

Whereupon I collapsed into bed and died. She called me at some point in the next 12 to 18 hours, where we had a horrifying, hallucinatory conversation where she got on my case about me not calling her and my response was something along the lines of “Oh, sorry– how about I never call you again? Will that make it better?”

In my defense, I was unbelievably sick. And the story is going to get worse before it gets better. So, yeah. Broke up with whatshername, I guess. And when I came out of my coma a bit later and realized what I’d done, I found myself in the terrible position of wanting to apologize— again, there was nothing wrong with her; she was perfectly nice and didn’t deserve what I’d just done. But I had in fact wanted to end the relationship, right? You can’t call somebody and be like “I’m really sorry about how I broke up with you, but… yeah, we’re still broken up.”

My roommate asked me what had happened. I gave her the story as best I could, but found that I couldn’t remember the conversation very well. And, worse, she kept calling– a couple of times a day for several days. I ignored the calls and deleted the messages, unlistened-to. This was before text messaging was really a thing (Wait– wow, really? Yeah, that must be true. Is text messaging that recent a development?) so it wasn’t that hard to avoid hearing from her. Again: the band-aid had been ripped off, and I was a bit of a coward about the whole thing, too, if I’m being honest– I just didn’t see any point to having the conversation again. And it had only been a month or so. Maybe less.

I said it’d get worse? Sure. I worked at a music store, remember? She didn’t know exactly where I lived, having never been to my apartment due to the horrifying contagions produced by my cats, but she did know where I worked.

I was working in the back room restocking some CDs one day and turned around and she was there. In my stockroom. At my job. And she looked very, very, very angry with me.

I came very close to calling for security.

Then something terrifyingly confusing happened. She started yelling at me for not calling her after Christmas. Which… what? I didn’t not call you after Christmas. Well, okay, technically you called me, but… what? How do you not remember the phone call we had where oh holy fucking shit.

Suddenly a whole bunch of things fell together. The fact that she’d been broken up with brutally and had continued to call me seemed out of character for someone who had only been marginally with someone for a month. The fact that, the day after the conversation, I’d not been able to properly recall how it went when describing it to my roommate. The fact that I had never once been exactly sure precisely when the breakup conversation happened– that, at one point, I’d thought maybe it had been in the middle of the night, or early in the morning, when she’d have been at work. That “twelve to eighteen hours” thing? Calling the conversation “hallucinatory?” Not minor exaggerations.

I had either dreamed or imagined the entire breakup. It had never happened. As far as she knew, I’d gone home and then just never called her again. Those calls? They weren’t from some jilted lover or some shit who had been broken up with and was trying to restart a relationship. They were from someone whose friend had disappeared and was trying to convince herself that he wasn’t dead.

When I get home tonight I’m going to dig out my old blog archives and find the place where I told this story for the first time, but I’m pretty sure I’m ending it the same way– to this day I have no idea what the hell I said or how I got out of that room alive. It may be that nothing more than the nearby presence of several of my co-workers and an actual gun-toting off-duty Chicago police officer kept me from getting my ass kicked, and I’d have deserved every second of it. She ripped me up one side and down the other, and I took it standing, because I deserved every damn word she said– and, as it turned out, she was not terribly interested in getting back together.

Beat that shit. I dare you.

(Links to other responses to this question after the jump)

Continue reading “In which I do a terrible thing to a nice person” →

Let’s play a game

On February 22, 2014November 4, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Politics8 Comments

One of the individuals in this picture is the mayor of my town. Identify him or her in comments:

~~This will magically turn into a real post with more words (and the answer) later today. I’ll even put a page break here so you can choose your answer without seeing it.~~ Click on the “more” button to see the rest of the post, including the startling answer!