OF A GOLDEN AGE

In a city of millions of people, I am always surprised by how un-crowded many places are, how entire times of day are so empty as to feel completely private. In a city of millions of people, there is frequently no line at the grocery store; my prescription can be ready in five minutes; I can drive from here to downtown in about ten. I am the first and only car at the red light, with no one waiting to drive through the intersection on the perpendicular street.

In the suburbs this feeling only intensifies, fewer people per square mile and more whole areas made up of stores without any residential. Where the city feels peaceful during the empty times, the suburbs feel a little bit alarming, desolate. Instead of enjoying having everything to yourself, you wonder why no one else is there.

But I love the stolen time, the feeling of accomplishment. Completing tasks in less time with no lines or traffic; freedom to look around and think. As it starts to turn light on these short January days, I watch the streetlights switch off in the blooming near-sunlight.

My sweet, precious little cat was put to sleep on Monday because of a giant, growing, inoperable mass in her throat. She got very sick over the last few months and she started to suffer a great deal as the tumor obstructed her breathing and eating, which made this the only humane and decent thing to do. She was 7. I loved her so much, and I am so, so sad.

My workplace now houses an environmentally friendly tankless water cooler. It taps into our main water line, filters the tap water, and dispenses it hot, lukewarm, or cold. It is marvelous (literally) to press a button and have water hot enough to brew tea within a few seconds.

Our ongoing conversation here about ways we can be more conscious is almost a matter of company policy more than moral fortitude, and the natural manner in which we all assume we will move toward a smaller carbon footprint and less waste is one of my favorite things about working here. Of course, in homes and in personal lives the dialogue can play out very differently. The New York Times ran a tragicomic piece on the rise in green issues among reasons to visit a therapist, like one California couple:

Mr. Fleming, who says he became committed to Ms. Cobb “before her high-priestess phase,” describes their conflicts as good-natured — mostly.

Even being a vegetarian has opened my eyes to how sensitive everyone is to feeling like they’re on the receiving end of someone’s judgment. “I don’t care what you eat, I’m just choosing for myself,” I hear myself say constantly. And sometimes I forget how easy it is to be a vegetarian in a huge city, or how understanding my parents or other people from previous generations have been for me. Imagine if this were your life, from the NYT piece:

If Ms. Petso prepares a vegan meal for the family, her parents prepare hot dogs to go alongside. Her parents serve on throwaway Styrofoam plates; she grabs a plate that can be cleaned and reused. Her mother, who says she prefers the way food tastes when it is served on Styrofoam, notes that washing dishes has its own environmental costs.

“She prefers the way food tastes when it is served on Styrofoam”?!

Mindy Kaling, who executive produces, writes for, and Kelly Kapoor in The Office, has a sweet holiday feature in the New York Times. In it, she tells a stranger that she’ll be spending the holidays with a family she doesn’t have, a fictitious husband and children. Instead, she’ll be with her parents and her older brother:

Do I want to be the child in my current family, or the parent/wife/grown-up of some other one? The first seems real and comfortable. The second seemed like a silly bit of mischief, a game of pretend, even though I have a sense it might be just around the corner.

I hope my future family always feels like this. Like I got away with a little lie, but with accomplices. “Oh, this is just the cute boy I married and the crazy kids I have, can you believe it? I can’t.”

Sometimes before work I get my act together early and decamp to Starbucks for a little bit of reading.

One day very recently I sat, reading Sue Grafton, admiring that morning’s musical choices in the shop. Some semifolky classical knockoff came on and I longed for Clair de Lune, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, lovely, at once plaintive and powerful, understated, filled with enormous life. It makes me think of winter, and light glinting off of water, and my grandfather, who always tuned the radio in his Mercury to the classical station. The abused old baby grand piano I made my parents keep when they moved to their new house, because how can you get rid of a piano?

I stood and put on my coat, and what piece came next? Clair de Lune, as I live and breathe. “Hokey smoke,” I said. People turned but I left, and strains of the piece rang in my head as I walked to work. As I turned the corner I looked up and saw a flock of geese passing overhead, standing still in the strong winter wind.

Isn’t a pilgrimage a beautiful concept? These geese make one every year and its significance is on par with any religion: They live because of it. We grouse about the weather, the inconvenience, our dead car batteries or freezing groceries. But what we can fix with extra layers and patience, the geese must fly thousands of miles to find.

LEFT: Looking out from the buttresses on the 25th floor of Tribune Tower.

CENTER: A chalk Bubbles by the front steps of the American Indian Center of Chicago.

RIGHT: Typeface at the Columbia College printmaking studio.

I like the similar colors across these three photos. They have a palette like (season 6 of Project Runway) Christopher’s doomed Santa Fe dress, and something about sandy brown with light blue is always pleasing, probably because they’re very mild, washed-out versions of complementary colors.

. . . for pictures of things that improved my mood yesterday!

First, my small collection of small things to put food in, appropriately stored in a small drawer. Note the small ring molds intended for Jell-O? Tiny tiny bundt cakes? A mystery:

Second, my small collection of small stuffed toys that belonged to my grandparents, including Herman the beanbag frog, who is unspeakably priceless to me:

I have never been a one-size-fits-all eater, and while on the one hand I envy those who can eat anything, order anything in a restaurant, try any new food fearlessly . . . There’s a certain meaninglessness to a foodlife with no limitations at all. Where’s the challenge to learn to cook for yourself if you can eat anything you find? How will you learn what purpose a certain ingredient serves if you never try something different in its place? If you’ve never thought about where it comes from or what it does to your body?

At some point in my childhood I stopped being able to drink cola (I don’t remember if this was all soda or just the browns, haha), and I was also lactose intolerant. Then that went away for a while, but I developed general digestive malfeasance and have gone through that ever since — the kind of thing doctors tell me is IBS, which is doctorese for “I don’t know, and gosh, that sucks for you. Will your copay be cash or credit?”

I’m back to lactose intolerance these days, and with migraines in the mix since college, I try to avoid some of the standout migraine trigger foods. Soy’s the biggest offender here, since regardless of what I read about soy and how much it can fuck you up, I know that the way it mimics estrogen in your body does affect my occurrence of headaches, and I know that it did for my dad as well, since we were both chug-a-lugging soy milk and getting migraines three or four times a week or more.

The most poignant moment of apartness came in high school when I was talking to a friend about something I’d eaten recently that had made me sick right away. “About five minutes later, I knew something was really wrong,” I said.

“No, that’s impossible,” she said. “Digestion takes six to eight hours.”

O ho ho, simple girl, I envy you your blissful unawares.

My first Vegan Mofo post is dedicated to my good old friend C. Andy, a genuine sasspot who has made my life immeasurably better in many ways. While waiting for friends outside of Tanoshii last Friday, I texted C.A. and said I was thinking of going vegan for a while after being a vegetarian for a little less than six months. He called and reminded me that, not so many years ago, I had been critical and judgey about “the vegans” and acted a fool.

Well, I acted a fool about a lot of things, and was critical and judgey about a lot of things — we can charitably self-label this as personal growth. But I remember the time he, a then-professed vegetarian, insisted on eating part of my chicken burrito and then fell deathly ill. Who’s acting a fool now?

We can all sometimes benefit from keeping a lid on it.

My friend Emily (of the Petit Four) managed to shut the case on one of our great personal mysteries when she traced from the blog Orangette to its progenitor Molly’s new restaurant Delancey. Seeing the “designed by” tag in the corner, she learned the site was the work of Sam T. Schick, our former editor-in-chief and object of great collective fascination.

More than someone I find interesting, Schick is responsible for events that changed my life — namely, when I was 17 and a freshman and a dutiful head-nodding staff writer, he pulled me up when someone quit and installed me in her place. I stayed on staff as the news editor for two years then ran the paper myself for two more, leaving reluctantly when I graduated and fearing for is future well being. I began as someone who could write and ended up becoming an insatiable aesthete with a particular eye and deep personal investment in whatever I do. Sometimes my coworkers or friends don’t understand why I have to spend the extra time to really love the way something looks, why I actually use all those features Microsoft Word offers to change the line height or indents. In turn, I have no idea how those people don’t see the same way.

Schick now operates Sam T. Schick & Wandering Works (what a great name) and seems to be making good for himself, which is so pleasing. He left school and disappeared, and we heard bits and pieces that usually were unsubstantiated. In the website for Wandering Works, I see the same sparse, simple layout that he valued when he trained me at the paper, the same love of negative space, an overall uncluttered look, and serifs. It’s satisfying.