I Wanna Bake a PEACE Cake May 6, 2007

It’s me I’m back Hi.

For those of you who can’t tell, ya gurl here at AF likes to bake. I spent last summer doing scutwork (cookies, cake layers, etc) at a local bakery in the Bull City, and while I enjoyed some aspects of it, I discovered that I do not enjoy being ordered around by uppity business people who are also lame enough to believe (yes, really and truly BELIEVE) that this website is for real. I BELIEVE IN JESUS AND JESUS DOES NOT WANT THERE TO BE A MONKEYDOGHUMAN. Indeed. Direct quote.

Is it possible to get a job where you both have no employers and no employees? Maybe I should sell Amway. Or, like, become a cobbler, or a suet-renderer.

Anyway the thing that really bummed me out about my foray into baking-for-profit was that the recipes I was required to use were Not That Good. They weren’t BAD, but they just weren’t yummy enough for me to really want to eat the stuff. Ever, really.

So– I’ve spent the past semester building up a stockpile of recipes that I am REALLY happy with. My buddy T hails from the great non-state of Palestine, and is always pissing and moaning about how much she misses the food from back home. I’ve tried to tell her to get over it– all she has to do to get back to her family is fly to Frankfurt, layover for half a day in a German airport, fly to Amman and then spend like EIGHTEEN FUCKING HOURS ON A LORRY crossing a very short bridge into Ramallah. No biggie. Nevermind that her Israeli counterparts studying here in DC can hop a nonstop flight to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv at a moment’s notice and be home before Savta breaks out the halva.

Anyway, as often as I tell her to buck her landless self up, still she howls on about things like zaatar and rice baked with yogurt and ma’amoul. So, I thought I’d try and oblige her. Ma’amoul it shall be.

Flaky, buttery crescents of goodness, ma’amoul are usually filled with nuts or dates and molded with a special decorative press, so they look like little, curved sandcastles. Uh, yeah right. I don’t like dates so there goes that idea, and I don’t have the proper mold (although T promises to bring me one in the fall) so I made mine with pistachios throughout and shaped them by hand. Also, (geez I am sounding lamer and lamer) I didn’t have semolina flour, so I had to use all plain white. Bah.

OK OK FINE. HERE IS THE TRUTH. I used a mexican wedding cake recipe and added chopped pistachios and rosewater. Are you happy? I am officially the least culturally dedicated baker EVER.

The funny thing is, T said they tasted like the real thing.

Anna’s Jacked-Up Ma’amoul

 

ingredients

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, room temperature
2 cups powdered sugar
2 tablespoons rosewater

2 cups all purpose flour

1 t salt
1 cup pistachios, toasted, coarsely ground

preparation

Using electric mixer, beat butter in large bowl until light and fluffy. Add 1/2 cup powdered sugar and rosewater; beat until well blended. Beat in flour, then pistachios. Divide dough in half; form each half into ball. Wrap separately in plastic; chill until cold, about 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 350°F.

Working with half of chilled dough, roll dough by 2 teaspoonfuls between palms into balls. Then, press balls into crescent shapes. Arrange crescents on heavy large baking sheet, spacing 1/2 inch apart. Bake cookies until golden brown on bottom and just pale golden on top, about 18 minutes. Cool cookies 5 minutes on baking sheet. Gently toss warm cookies in sugar to coat completely. Transfer coated cookies to rack and cool completely. Repeat procedure with remaining half of dough. (Cookies can be prepared 2 days ahead. Store airtight at room temperature; reserve remaining sugar.)

Sift remaining sugar over cookies and serve.

Oh, uhm, I’m done with my first year of gradschool. So, yes, I’m glad about that.

All You Bots Must Be Worried April 22, 2007

Check it. I am alive. I have been up to some serious shit, like doing my dishes. I have also experienced a resurgence of love for Joanna Newsom, completed an entire cycle of poems, and baked my ass off. No, dude, not like that. Like making stuff to eat. In an oven. Anyway, I don’t smoke weed because I fear that it will unlock a hidden font of crazy within me and make me into a schizophrenic.

As per my previous promise: the above listing of activities was really an attempt to justify the fact that I didn’t post on this blog thing for almost a month, even though I pledged to post on it daily. Oh, intentions. Remember that radical theatre company I was going to start? How about the neighborhood catering service? Or, to go further back, the extra-curricular organization that was going to save all of the kitties and puppies that didn’t have owners? Or the vigilante squadron of eight year-olds dedicated to stopping the McDonalds Happy Meal Religio-Fascists from offering the race-car toy to boys and that lame-ass fake Barbie to girls? Excuse me, I have to go lie on a blanket under the stars and dream about my upcoming summer project: an avant-garde performance art magnet boarding school for the disadvantaged children of bottomed-out IT specialists! Baby’s gonna change the world, Mama! Baby’s gonna fly!

Now then. It seems like spring might be here for good. I am excited about that, so goodbye to my bra and hello to my blue summerweight quilt. It’s also the best time of year for green garlic, fresh english peas and squash blossoms. Ding-a-ling!
In honor of the season: did you know that you can make honeysuckle ice cream? It’s easy as hell and so good that it will make you believe in G-d.*

All you do is take your basic ice cream recipe (I use a custard base). But BEFORE you make the custard, warm the milk/cream gently, mix it with several cups of honeysuckle blossoms and let it steep in the fridge for ~3 hours. Then, yeah, strain that shit really well. It will taste like flowers, I am not even kidding. Some of us like to top the finished product with unsweetened cocoa powder. Bitter, sweet, aromatic. Fahhk yeah.

*Hello, religious superstition-inspired spelling of the g-word. Hello, psycho-social machinery that just keeps churning churning churning, forcing me to pay semiotic homage to a deity that I’m 99% sure I don’t believe in! Hello, Dr. Klein! Hi there, Dr. Jung! Sigmund, good day sir! Donna Harraway, is that you?

PS: Cameron has procurred a green jeweled pendant, the exact color of his limpid eyes, which he wears dangling from his collar. Stunning. Just, stunning. Oh my secular Jesus I love that cat.

! April 3, 2007

I love how whenever I write a really sincere post in this blog thing, I inevitably look back on it the next day with mixed feelings. Part of me is like, I am really RAW, emoting all over the internet and such. But most of me is like, PERSON THAT I WAS YESTERDAY, YOU ARE A LITTLE BIT LAME. Balance in all things, my friends. Balance is key.

No worries today though, because I’m not planning on assaulting you with anymore sentimental bullshit for a while. I’ve got much more important intelligence to communicate because I SAW THE FERRET. Hell yes.

Where should I start… Ought I to begin with the way he lives in aquarium and seems to spend most of his time burrowing flounderingly into piles of cedar shavings? So cute/desperate-seeming. How about the little, pokey bones that stand up along his back, thin as bristles on a porcupine? No, I think I’ll start by telling you that, while I did not touch him, he looked MOIST. Indeed, friends. Plus, unlike Cameron, who actually has a little bit of grey peach fuzz, this animal is totally fucking bald and WAY pink. I stood there and stared at him for about five solid minutes, unable to tear myself away. I think that ought to be enough of the story to convey that my overall reaction to this little guy was UM EW with a side of OMG I LOVE YOU.

The old man working the store (father of the dude who owns Cameron and his ferret companion) did not remember the moist one’s name, but I think a good name would be Wet Pencil Eraser. Old man made it clear that he was as mysterified as I was by Wet Pencil Eraser’s presence in the store, but not half as delighted. He confirmed that WPE had been obtained because he’s “supposed to keep Cameron company”, but opined that “Cameron doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s there.” Aw.

Furthermore, he shared, Cameron’s lassaiz-faire affect is actually oweing to the fact that he likes to sneak out of the store mid-day and enjoy a few pints at the Four P’s. Oh god I wish I were just a LITTLE more gullible… Anyone interested in helped me breathalyze a cat?

Chin Bent, A Daffodil April 2, 2007

Tonight was the first night of my 22nd Passover, my first without my grandmother. Passover is, at its core, a celebration of redemption. It tells the story of one kind of freedom, hard-won and high-priced– of a journey to get home. I am so lucky to love my home.

Today I feel like shouting how good it feels to struggle. I want to celebrate our universal effort to get free–in so many ways. From the bonds of racism, homophobia, classism and sexism that strangle our ability to relate and create. From external opressive forces that limit our ability to move, to express, to sleep and eat well. From the internal pangs of anxiety, fear and sadness that weigh us down.

I also want to celebrate how good it feels to be bound– to community, to people, to movements and projects and goals. To memory. I want to revel in the ability we have to create change in ourselves and in the world, in the responsibility we have to do so.

I want to celebrate my Grandma, who loved me completely, even when she didn’t like a certain part of me. I want to feel ecstatic about spring. I do. I do.

Cameron, Cameron, Ya Habibti, My Love March 25, 2007

Well ding dong, my kiddies, spring is here. It’s been over fifty degrees in the district for three days now and I refuse to believe the warm weather isn’t here to stay. The cherry trees outside my apartment buildings are blossoming as well, which is pretty stellar. I live in an older building with all of the sort of cute, echo-y details that older buildings have– little concrete bobs and flourishes on the brick, high ceilings in the lobby, etc. It’s not fancy– our front lock is prone to breaking and the call-up system long since gave out, but I do love it. I also love the fact that it’s quiet. No drunken frat boy rabble, no howling, no tenant squabbles. Recently someone with the initials E.E lost a diamond out of her ring, but hopefully that will be resolved via her friendly bulletin board posting. It would be a real shame if the Angolan kid who mined it lost half of his fingers for nothing. Seriously, ya’ll, please stop buying diamonds.

Okay, I’m done being preachy. That whole bit about my apartment building was really just a device, a way of winding my away around to the story I really want to tell you. So here’s the tag-line: Although my building might be calm, there is something pretty exciting going on right down the block. Allow me to start from the beginning.

When I first moved to DC, fall classes had not yet started and I spent an entire week riding my bike around the city in the middle of a horrendous heatwave, eating carrots and triscuits out of small tupperware container, looking for jobs, and willing myself to believe that I had not made a horrible mistake in deciding to go to grad school. Were it not for good times with my dear Loyal, my transition would have been much harder. Case in point: one evening I received a voice-mail from her, describing a visit to the consignment furniture store one block from my apartment. What made this place remarkable, Loyal said, was not what they had to sell, but the fact that there lived in the store a hairless cat. No shit.

Naturally, I went to check things out first thing in the morning, and there he was, reclined in the front window like the little pasha he is, taking in the morning sun and regarding all of Cleveland Park with an air of sleepy diffidence, his rhinestone collar glittering regally: my Cameron. So began my love affair with the cat, who could clearly give less of a shit about me.

When my sisters caught site of Cameron, they too fell under his spell and he became something of an obsession for us all: Loyal, the girls and I. Whenever I pass by his window, I stop and look for him. I have been known to go into the store and ask timidly “Uh, I was just wondering. Where’s Cameron?” This always goes over really well. What can I say? There is something about his little, hairless belly, the way you can see down to the bottom of his crenellated ears, that touches me. Or maybe it’s his total arrogance, that he cares not for anyone but himself. Or maybe it’s the fact that he is a fucking HAIRLESS CAT and HOW CRAZY IS THAT. In any case. Last week the plot thickened.

I was walking home from brunch with another friend (also a member of the Cult of Cameron), when she casually mentioned that she had been in to see Cameron recently and that when she went into the back room of the store she saw a cage in which, she claimed, resided a HAIRLESS RAT. That’s right, folks. I totally flipped and went over to the store investigate for myself at the first opportunity. Grad-school might be time consuming, but I still have my priorities straight. I scoped the joint thoroughly, but could not find any cage, nor any rat, hairless or otherwise. I had no choice but to ask the saleswoman. This was kind of awkward because, what do you say in this situation. I settled for “Uh, so I heard from like a friend who loves Cameron because we all love Cameron that when she was here one time there was this rat also and it was in cage. A hairless rat?”

The look of pity on the saleswoman’s face was pretty striking. She paused briefly, as if contemplating something and then said (direct quote here, folks), “Well, yes. There is a hairless rodent that is Cameron’s companion. He’s actually a ferret and he’s over at our Wisconsin Avenue location today.”

WHAT??? WHATTT???? So basically, Cameron (who is a cat) has a pet. A pet who ALSO HAIRLESS, and who is a FERRET. Could my life get any better? Could it? This all went down on Friday and I’m still walking on air. Obviously, I will be on the lookout for this new character, and will report our first meeting to you down to the very last detail. It’s the least I could do.

In other news, I am learning to speak Arabic. And by speak Arabic, I mean say some Arabic words. My Palestinian friends have decided that it is important that I acquire their native tongue ASAP. Their reasoning is, and I quote, “Otherwise it is hard to talk about people with you behind their backs”. Alright. I dig it. So far my Arabic lexicon includes: Weinek (Where are you?), Momtaz (excellent), Bejanen (Very Super Excellent), Habibti (Sweetie, Babe, Darlin, etc) and Biz (Nipple. Contemporarily, it has also come to mean The Little Plastic Cover You Put on the End of a Shisha Hose So You Don’t Catch Someone Else’s Cold).

Most frequently, I use these words in text messages, like the one I sent to my buddy T a few hours ago: Ani Difranco, Habibti! BTW, Weinek?

I’m growing up so good.

The Miseducation of Baby-G March 24, 2007

I think it’s absolutely criminal to neglect a young person’s education. Especially when the young person shows such obvious promise as my dear, intrepid Baby-G. As such, I make it my business to plan a variety of enriching and stimulating activities for the young prince. In addition to our regular adventures in cookery, we also take frequent trips into the city. He is young, strong and loves to ride the metro. I am young, strong and hate suburbia. We are a perfect match.

These trips are more than just crucial investments in my sanity, folks. They are also key opportunities for his precious highness to see the world. And to hear my constant commentary about it. He particularly enjoyed a recent trip to visit a friend of mine who teaches at the Studio School. Strapped to my back in the Ergo, he offered a great deal of praise for the children’s artwork that lined the walls, pointing and crowing with gusto, and listened intently as I expounded upon the virtues of a community lead, child-focused educational system. Several weeks later, as we were sharing a sandwich at Busboys and Poets, I could have sworn that he nodded sagely when I exclaimed, “And this, tiny one, is how the bohemian bourgeoisie do capitalism”.

It’s something of a joke between myself and Mama and Papa G that I am attempting to make Baby-G into a tiny anarchist. It’s one of those jokes that I always find funny, while they are at times amused and at other times a little weirded out by the whole thing. The other day Mama G came home and asked what her son and I had been up to. “Oh, well, we made that wheat bread you see on the counter,” I said. “Then we took the metro to the national mall and looked at the Kermit puppet in the Air and Space Museum. On our walk there I pointed out the Capital Building and we dialogued briefly about our current socio-political organizations, and the more sensible and humane alternative of a localized, non-hierarchical power structure”.

“Um, Oh.” said she.

The truth is that my description was perhaps verbal longhand for what was really said. Baby G is small, and I like to keep things simple. Rather wasting my time with the whole localized, non-hierarchical blah blah, I just say “smashing the state”. He gets the picture. Similarly, when the dome of the Capital came into view, I pointed to it and said “Boo-Boo, there are lot of people in that building who are going to try and make you think you’ve got to do what you say. Now you just take it from me, you are smarter than all of them put together. Nicer, too.”

He got the message. At least, I think he did. Truth be told, he was unable to offer a response because he was very intent on the more crucial task he had at once identified for himself– trying to catch and eat a bird. That’s my baby!

To Survive Love March 19, 2007

My tiny sister is dancing in the living room. She is an animal in these moments, and I am moved to a place beyond happiness by the whirl of her limbs, the stomp of her heels. Watching my sister dance, I love her in ways that make me realize how abysmal I sometimes feel. I am terrified. As often as love lifts us up, pushing us to new heights of inspiration, it also forces us deeper into whatever despair has afflicted us always– whatever misgivings we carry about what it means to be alive.

The sadness of love– that the one we care for lives in a world as full of despair as our own, can sometimes be the biggest thing we are moved to feel. There is no solution to this problem of love. We can choose to simply live through it, but that often means becoming to numb, losing touch, the end of the love itself. What we want is not to live through love, but to survive it. To survive the problem of love , we must answer it with what we hope and believe. I take a deep breath, and look at my sister– her sinews and bones in delicate traction– and repeat my hopes.

In my darkest moments, when I must force myself to hope for something, I hope for her health. I hope for her health because it is the smallest thing I can hope for in a world that seems swollen many times over with ecstasy and pain.We are taught that health is a miracle, and I believe it is true– the balance of physics and chemistry that sustains us could go awry with the smallest intrusion, the tiniest tweak. In the face of how large life is, though, health often seems like the likeliest of all improbabilities because we know that, given balance, it can be done. Not so for happiness, even in the presence of abundant love.

Not so for kindness, even when survival is assured. Even the brain, our final frontier, is at least a single orb, a solid self edged on all sides by nothing. I will set my sights on health. I hope for a common sense of stasis in her liver, business as usual in her veins– dark blood going in, bright coming out. I pray that she has the chance, for some years at least, to fall back on the oldest, unaltered way of living in her physical self– that her body surrenders to the patterns that were decided before anyone could speak words like “creativity” and “desire.”

Dancing, my sister knocks her elbow against the piano and comes to me for comfort. Holding her in my arms, I don’t dare make a wish regarding her wants, or even her actions. If I am to survive my love her, I must believe that, in wishing, we do out best work in the small, in the simple. I don’t ask life to visit her with a concert of impulses that might keep her close to me– just for a continuation of the pumping and churning that hold her in the world. Happiness, I think, entangled as it is in stuff much thinner than blood, might be beyond hope.

This is not to say that I don’t think my sister will be happy, merely that the intensity of my love for her means I must take a different tack. No, I don’t choose to hope for happiness for my tiny sister. I choose to believe in it. That, after all, is what believing in someone is: knowing that they have to ability to dance beyond the outer reaches of wispy, potential hope, and, solidly, take what they want. The conviction that if we ever forget the difference between living and surviving, they will be there to remind us.

An Ecstacy of Fumbling March 18, 2007

I don’t know about you, but for me Sundays are all about puttering around alone in my apartment, washing dishes, making grim predictions about my future and casting aspersions on the success of others. Somewhere in there, the laundry gets done. But don’t pity me! Don’t! Today was the Friends of the Cleveland Park Library’s semi-annual used book sale. Semi-annual means it happens twice a year, right? Because that’s what I was trying to say.

Considering I walked in the door six minutes before closing time, I’d say I did quite well for myself. Anybody who is everybody knows that everything in the booksale is half off for the last two hours, so we can pretend my tardiness was actually well-planned strategery. Even considering the lateness of the hour, I got some great stuff:

The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (never actually had my own copy of this)

Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barret Browning (my grandma loved her)

The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (he wrote one of the most powerful anti-war poems I’ve read, “Dulce Et Decorum Est”)

A Place called Milagro de la Paz by Manlio Argueta (the author was quite strenuously recommended to me)

The Findhorn Family Cookbook ( lived there for five months. I actually cooked in the Cluny kitchen as my work assignment)

At the last minute I grabbed a copy Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer. Didion is best known (and well-admired) as a memoirist, but this is actually an early novel of hers. It received accolades from Tennessee Williams, which I makes me more inclined to actually read it, but I have admit that the purchase was inspired at least in part by guilt. I had the opportunity to go see Joan Didion when she came to UNC last fall and I totally squandered it. Well, not only that. I went to the reception given in her honor, ate the food, drank the wine, schmoozed like I do (I saw her! She is tiny!) then went directly to a friend’s house and watched Lost instead. I know. I do not deserve to have any good things happen to me anymore.

The funny thing is, this book of hers, which I now own, looks really trashy. The tagline is A story of passion, and the cover shows a woman’s manicured hand, clad in pearl bracelet, holding one of those old-school propane cigarette lighters with a giant, clitoris-looking flame shooting out of the middle. I just cannot tell what kind of book this will be! Sorry, Tennessee, but the fact that you liked it does not reassure me that it is not, in fact, pseudoporn. That’s what we love about you, Tennessee! The good news is, it doesn’t matter at this point what the book is actually like. With a cover like that, I feel like I really can’t go wrong– smutty bathtub read or highbrow literary-street-cred-earning-yawn-fest? Who cares! I am already satisfied!

Late-Night Rebutal– real post below this one March 10, 2007

I cannot sleep, and have nothing good to read, so I thought I would address this. It has been brought to my attention of late that some of my readership feels that I can sometimes be a little bit too link-happy. As in, I use those fun little worded-embedded links at every opportunity, sometimes to the point ridiculosity and/or obscurity. I don’t remember who it was who said this. It could have been one those Little Mean Insecure Voices In My Head, but I don’t think it was. I think was a real person. And to them, I say this:

Suck it. Linking is pleasing to me. It somehow fills, or at least allows me to touch, the void that my existentially enlightened lifestyle has rent deep in my soul. Sometimes, at dusk, when I am “alone” on the crowded metro I begin to feel as if my existence means nothing at all. As if my face, around which my relations once gathered to rejoice and crow with pride, were really just another one of those goddamned petals on a wet black bough. And then I come back to my apartment. And write in this blog. And I feel connected to the infinite possibilities that the interz0rd can provide. I am not afraid to say that this brings me joy, which I need, because am bereaved. So suck it. It’s my blog and I’ll link if I want to.

Love, AF

Jiggity-Jig March 10, 2007

Back to North Carolina tomorrow! This time I’ll be there for a week. Spring Break Durham ‘07 Baby! Man, life is really going to suck when I’m done with grad school and no longer get “breaks”. There’s really only one downside to this and that is the fact that my apartment is a HIDEOUS DUMP and I’m betting I don’t do any cleaning before I go. I noticed things were starting to backslide when I had Baby-G here last Friday and he kept munching on dustballs and twirling my dirty underwear around. It’s amazing what escapes my eagle eye! There’s nothing like a visit from Baby-G to make me feel like a real slattern. Wait–doesn’t slattern mean whore? Yes, yes it does. I think I was confusing it with slovenly or something. Anyway, you get the point. I live in my own filth.

I don’t need to say again how much I LOVE where I’m from. The veritable smorgasbord of friendship that awaits me is wonderful to contemplate. Especially after I pissed off all my DC friends today in class with two revelations:

a) I hate Beat poetry. I dare you to ask me why (I think I used the phrases “grandiose social dysfunction” and “sociological revulsion”. “Bad” also comes to mind).

and

b) I think that culture is sometimes “invitation-only”.

Oh the horror! I have dismissed an entire GENRE of American artwork! And ATOMISED the incredibly SYMBIOTIC, MULTIPLICITOUS and BLAH BLAH BLAH cultures of this wonderful world! Oh spite! Oh goat semen! My children will never know tolerance! I will die of spiritual starvation, moored on the Alcatraz of my own xenophobia!

What I really meant, of course, is that I wish to hell people would stop thinking they could buy or consume culture, then use it for their own personal devising. Culture is PEOPLE*, and interactions with people ought to be VOLUNTARY. And hopefully, GENUINE. Dare I say it– even EQUAL.

And yes, I am pissed when I think about all the people reading “Buddha* In 90 Minutes” and then thinking they have the right, let alone the knowledge, to use Buddha as a lever to lift themselves out whatever banal suburban misery they themselves have crafted. Obviously I’m in favor of genuine cultural interchange, but not some bullshit born of desperation, co-optation, mutual or one-sided exploitation or any of those of “-ations” that so often involve a bar mitzvah party henna artist, a self-help manual or a debit card.

*insert “Jesus”, “Krishna”, “Sartre”, “Cindy Sheehan”, “Rashi”, “Ann Coulter” or “Weezer” here

Beyond that, my own experience tells me that it is healthy and healing to have cultural “sacred spaces” in which the rules are implicitly understood and internal discussion/politics/exchanges are the main fare.

K, I’m done with that.

As far as this weekend goes, my schedule is filling up but I would doubtless love to see you. I have probably already made frantic attempts to get in touch with you, but if not it will happen tomorrow while I am on the train. While my grandma was sick I was afflicted with a strange but neccessary form of agoraphobia which required that I spend 90% of my social time sitting cross-legged in the playroom at my parent’s house with the space heater blasting and the other ten percent in the kitchen cooking and freezing large vats of soup and broth for her to eat. “The Minestrone of Magical Thinking”. Freezer space is still on a high premium at my grandpa’s apartment. Anyway, on my most recent trip home I discovered that I was pleased to venture farther afield, even into Orange County, and I surely hope you’ll join me as I explore the outside world once again.

In any case, I promise you that at least one lunchtime next week will find me enjoying these rice and beans, washed down with this juice. Seriously, if you have never had pitalla (some pronounce it pitaya, others call it dragonfruit) juice, you are missing out. It is like washing your tongue in rainstorm of tart, magenta…rain… that is sweet and good. Really, it’s one of the most pleasing, unusual flavors I’ve come across. I highly recommend grabbing a glass (the green guava and cacao juices are great as well) and a chair by the window and just sipping away as you watch 9th Street go by:

“Hey there, Organic Grocery Store Checkout Lady Of My Youth! Thanks for the chocolate bunny!”

“Hey there, High School Gym Teacher! Is that your pitbull? He is cute!”

“Hey there, Young Man I Slow-danced With To KC And Jojo At A Bar Mitzvah Party That One Time! Why is this so awkward?”

“Hey there, First Kids in Middle School To Experiment With Weed! Sadly, it appears that our predictions about you were correct!”

“Hello, Friends! Hello, World!” Ah, coming home.

*EDIT SEVERAL HOURS AFTER: Wait. Culture is also media. I’m not sure to what extent this complicates my argument but we’ll deal with it some other time.