The Visa Diaries

For the most part, I have been trying to avoid talking about things I am buying for my wedding (4 weeks away!) on this blog, because it is such a specific niche of purchases. Furthermore, it is endless, and could fill up posts from here until death do us part. However, since wedding planning is pretty much the only thing that I am doing these days, I don’t have any other material… so, with apologies, here I go.

I don’t know when weddings became such a big industry. When my parents got married, it was in the backyard of the bride’s parents’ home, as it was for most people then. Her mother did the majority of the planning, they showed up, badda-bing badda-boom, and five hours later they were rattling back down the driveway trailing some tin cans behind their VW. Perhaps this is a simplified view with 40+ years of hindsight, but planning definitely does not seem like it was the year-long full-time job it is these days.

These days the bar feels substantially higher. Take a gander through a Martha Stewart Weddings, or peruse one of the highly specialized and highly precious wedding blogs out there, and you know you’re not in Kansas anymore. A humble backyard affair will not cut it – unless, of course, it is styled by a celebrity stylist, who could make it come off as charming and naive… instead of it actually being naive. After all, this is going to be “your big day!” as everybody keeps referring to it, with a big smile! And with 100 plus of your most favorite people traveling from all over to be there, you do not want to disappoint.

The main thing I have discovered about wedding planning is that (like coastlines) it is a fractal-like process. Every bit of it, as soon as you dive in opens a world of questions of equal complexity. You need a cake, for example, so you research and find a nice cake baker. But its not done – you need to figure out what kind of cake, what kind of filling, what kind of frosting, what kind of decoration, what combination of tiered and sheet cake, will you have a what kind of groom’s cake and what will that be, how does everybody feel about cake toppers, and if so what kind and how much do they cost and con they come in time. Then you have to figure out how the cake will be transported and when, who will provide the pedestal for it to sit on, the table to support it, and the knife with which to do the ceremonial cutting. Each one of these questions could be an equally complex operation. You agree to use the cake knife that your aunt used at her wedding, until she back-pedals because she’s afraid it’ll get taken away at security on the flight there. Back to square on with the cake knife. Every step of the way involves endless research, coordination with vendors, and vetting of the proposed solution between a committee of people, including your mother, your father, your fiance, the secretary at work, and anybody else who happens to overhear. When a vendor goes out of stock on something you wanted or messes up an order, well then, just start right over.

This process happens with every item on the wedding shopping list, from big to small. The venue, the dress (the shoes, to veil or not to veil, the hair (down or up, and if up, high or low and how to make sure the stylist doesn’t use too much hairspray??), the make-up, the jewelry, the lingerie, the alterations), the ring, the caterer, the photographer, the dj, the officiant, the invitations, the flowers, the drinks, the decorations, the cake, the bridal party gifts, the favors. I could go on with the parenthetical decisions required. Throw in a couple of unresolved family issues (which, so thankfully, we have not really encountered. My parents are being a-maaaazing.) and I can see where Bridezilla comes in.

I realize as I’m writing this that I’m making this process sound like not much fun. But the thing is, it *is* fun. Obsessive and sometimes stressful, but so fun. When else do you get to design one day so fully, to pack it so chock full of beauty and meaning and special details. When else do you get to have all the people you love in the same place at the same time, and enjoy beauty and celebrate love with them! It truly is a once-in-a-lifetime event.

The getting married part is – almost – the icing on the cake.

Early on when Matt and I first started dating, apropos of very little, he announced to me that he had a great blender. He really emphatically wanted me to know what good quality his blender was, and went on about it at some length. This did not exactly make my knees go weak. “I’ve got a good blender, too” I said, referring to a cobalt-blue KitchenAid that had been my first grown-up home appliance purchase when I graduated from college. He looked at it, and was a bit dismissive, “Yeah, that looks ok. But I’ve got a really great blender.” I think the conversation must have ended about there, because I could not muster any more interest for the topic.

From that exchange until last weekend, I maintained the impression that my sweetie was a little weird and overzealous on the topic of blenders (actually kitchen stuff in general, but I can leave that for another post). It didn’t stop me from loving him or agreeing to marry him, but it did get filed away in that mental drawer where we all keep of secret judgements about the strange little quirks of others.

His error in strategy, I now realize, was announcing his blender asset in the middle of winter, when there wasn’t so much of interest to blend. Last weekend however, when he suggested that we could make frozen strawberry margaritas in his excellent blender, all of a sudden my attention for his appliance skyrocketed. “Frozen strawberry magaritas!!!” I thought, “I’ve never heard of such a genius idea!”

We went to the supermarket and got the ingredients: a big bag of frozen strawberries, a can of Limeaid, and a bottle of Jose Cuervo’s medecino. (We discovered while enjoying his elixir, that Jose Cuervo’s name in English would translate to “Joe Crow”… somehow not as flattering). That’s it: toss these things in the blender with some ice, and fire that baby up. This, then, is where the great blender becomes relevant. If you have one, such as Matt’s Hamilton Beach, after a few minutes all those icy ingredients will smooth out into one fine, slushy, slurpy, heavenly strawberry slurry. If your blender is not quite so great, well, after a few minutes you may have nothing more than some pathetically chipped frozen chunks and that unmistakable eau de motor burn-out. I’m sure you’ll agree that chunky, unblended summer drinks are just about as much of a buzz-kill as sunburn and sand in the bikini.

So that’s it – my purchase this week was summertime joy in a glass. All it took was three simple ingredients, and a guy with a great blender.

Back in March, I went to a beautiful, fancy spa with my mother. It is hard to imagine that anybody anywhere could have stuffed more loveliness and good feeling into one week than the folks at the Rancho La Puerta. The weather was sunny and dry; the grounds were fragrant and beautiful; the fitness classes were fun and toning. The morning walks were magical; the people were friendly; the spa treatments were decadent. And to top it all off, the food was simply amazing – fresh and beautiful and delicious. At every meal I wanted to oggle the gorgeousness of the vegetables and marvel over the succulence of the fruits almost as much as I wanted to eat them. And when I did eat the food, not only was it delicious, but with every bite I could feel its vitaminy-goodness entering into my cells and its phyto-wonder sweeping out my toxins. But there was something even more: it was as if all the essence of the food’s simple, organic life – short but well-lived, grounded in the earth, reaching for the sky, kissed by the sun and stars – was entering my soul. I somehow felt more *moral* with every bite that I ate.

Yes, the week at the spa was divine. And then it drew to a close. I found myself in the San Diego airport, a little peckish. The options, as I looked around at the vinyl airport chairs and the gray utility carpet, seemed to be old tortilla chips with fake orange cheese, and the plastic baggied, slightly soggy sandwiches they now peddle at Starbucks. I felt sad. And the thought of returning to my life in New York made me sad too. Of course good fresh food and produce exists in New York, but it didn’t exist so very consistently in my life. I used to go to Whole Paycheck pretty regularly, but then I changed jobs and no longer work or live near one. I could go to the Farmers’ Market at Prospect Park on Saturdays, it is true, but I never seem to make it. The fast food options near my work tend more toward street meat than biodynamic. As I mentally surveyed the state of my food life in New York City, I could feel my cells shriveling, the energy depleting, and the chemicals pooling. My color fell and my skin sagged thinking about it.

Never one to resign myself without a fight, I looked into my options first thing when I arrived back on the Right Coast. Being the bobo place that it is, CSAs are quite popular in Brooklyn, and at first I thought this was the thing to do. I came close to signing up for one, but then I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to go pick it up during the 6-10pm window on Thursdays when it has to be fetched, and thus would waste my bounty. In the end I settled on Urban Organic. Unlike a CSA, they are not tied to one farm. They buy a selections of things that are in season (all organic) put ‘em in a box and – here is the key – deliver it to you. I was sold.

I get a box every two weeks. It is usually waiting outside my door when I get home from work on Mondays, filled with a friendly crew of things like chard, cabbage, tangellos, potatoes, etc. Some are more exotic than others, some I like more than others, but all of them provide that vital nutrient I was craving: the goodness for body and soul of well raised food.

Global warming notwithstanding, winter has finally arrived in the Northeast. Although I live across the street from my studio and my commute could be all of 2 minutes, every morning I make a short detour to BookTrader, our local independent coffee shop. Until I have my cup of dark roast coffee, with a generous pour of half-and-half, the day just feels jagged and provisional.

I remember when I was living in San Francisco during the height of the dot-com boom, and working near South Park, which was a mecca of venture financed start-ups, all hysterically racing to capture eyeballs, market share, and millions with their web-thingy’s. In the aftermath of the bust, a friend of mine who worked nearby commented, “out of this whole area, I bet the company that made the most money was Centro,” the little independent coffeeshop on the park. I had to agree.

Coffee is a small, momentary comfort and pleasure. It doesn’t break the bank or split the seems, yet somehow makes life bearable, whatever is seeming unbearable without it. It facilitates a whole attitude shift, almost a lifestyle shift – bringing whatever the task is into the image of the furnished lifestyle. Does that make sense? I mean, all of a sudden, gourmet coffee in hand, I feel like  a person in a movie, or a person in an image, who’s doing the thing I’m doing with grace and forbearance, as opposed to the dumb banal schmuck who just does it and suffers (whom they don’t make movies about).

My thinking goes, ‘ugh, I didn’t get enough sleep and about to get reamed by my teacher for not producing enough, but at least I can have a nice warm cup of coffee.’ Or, ‘I can’t do much about the jerks in power or the war in Iraq, but at least I have a hot, fragrant liquid warming my tummy.’ Its that small turn-around, that small thing to look forward to that makes it possible to face the rest. Maybe it is all very Zen, or maybe it is escapist. Maybe it is an example of a modern ritual, which commentators say we lack, or maybe it is buying into Starbucks’ marketing hype. Or, maybe after I have another cup of coffee, I will be able to deal with the uncertainly.

I am about to start on my xmas shopping, so watch this space for bigger items soon, but first I wanted to quickly muse on the random beauty of the late-night Walgreens run. I am lucky enough to live right next to a 24-hour Walgreens, one of the only things that does stay open all night in this town. This past Wednesday, after my big critique, and after the multiple sleepless nights leading up to it, and a lot of pizza and beer to celebrate with classmates, I found myself hitting the WG with my friend Bethany on our way home.

Somehow through my stupor, a profound appreciation for Walgreen welled up in my heart. Where else can you get protein bars with your cold medicine, cheesy christmas decorations with your toilet paper with your blank CDs? I love the way Walgreens has *everything* from food to electronics, to cleaning supplies to office supplies to drugs. I love how it is all bathed on terrible fluorescent light, and is all terrible beige peg-board shelving and mottled white linoleum. I sort of even love that there is always a drug addict plaintively asking for change outside the door, and a couple of jaded bored salespeople inside, and how when the line gets really long they make an announcement telling you the cosmetics counter is open. I love how they give you cash back, any amount even if you only buy a $.99 pack of gum, and how they sell drug panaceas for all sorts on ailments that are unmentionable in good company – just about one of the only places where you can let it all hang out, be broken. I love their hideous script typeface logo, that they have decided to modernize by rendering in blue and red neon. I love Walgreens because it is so utilitarian (and not in that trendy Home Depot way) so practical, so bell-and-whistle free, yet they always have everything. I love walking out with orange zest kitchen cleaner in the same bag with my Edy’s Toll-House cookie dough ice cream and a new pair of Tweezerman tweezers, and that its next door and open all the time.

Sometimes convenience without pretension is so comforting.

I just paid 3 dollars and 45 cents for a bottle of water.

It does come “From the Island of Fiji,” and is “Natural Artesian Water,” which, when you put it that way, almost makes it sound like a bargain. But, puh-lease, it’s still water! I know reams has been written about this, so I’m probably not treading any new ground here, and it makes me sound like an old curmudgeon. “I remember when movies only cost a dollar!” type of thing. Next I’ll be saying, “Next we’ll be paying for oxygen” blah blah blah. But really, when the whole bottled water thing got imported from Europe sometime in the 80s, did we really know it was going to go this far?

Curmudgeonly-ness aside, my bigger question is, why do I feel better about drinking water that comes in a bottle, and why do I feel particularly good about drinking Fiji water? As a first line of defense, I do think Fiji tastes better than other waters. Then there is its packaging, with that funky 3-d effect where they make you feel like you’re looking through the spring, from the flowers at the front to the palms at the back. Then there is the price – it is more expensive, it must be better! That is crazy, but its also human nature – one of the metrics we use to judge quality is price. Anyway, Fiji makes me feel like I am wearing white and, if I close my eyes and imagine hard enough, almost like a palm frond is blowing a soft breeze on my cheek.

For all these reasons, Fiji is, like, my special occasion water – I drink it when I am feeling particularly excited or celebratory about something. This afternoon, however, was not a special occasion. It was just a bit of a Friday the 13th I’m-overwhelmed-with-work and feel-like-freaking-out occasion. Rather than water, such occasions might normally call for a big chocolate chip cookie or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. And when you think about how much that would cost me – I mean in mental anguish, not to mention lost time as I went to the gym to work it off, or the expense of having to buy new clothes to fit in my new plus-cookie size, well then I actually felt very virtuous about my $3.45 bottle of water. I mean really, water is so insignificant, such a non-thing, that really it was like I didn’t have to buy anything at all to cheer myself up.

This weekend I went to the Durham Fair, in Durham CT.

The Durham Fair is one of the biggest in the area, and apparently the largest agricultural fair in the country totally run by volunteers. Arvind is visiting from London, and I thought I’d take him to see an authentic, Americana experience. I have great memories of going to the country fall fairs when I was growing up – marveling at the year’s biggest turnip, the Junior League’s best pumpkin pie, the most perfect goat, etc etc. The horse pulls were always a favorite, when they brawny horse teams would stamp and snort and foam as they strained to pull the great blocks of concrete. Fairs meant conady apples, carnival games you never win (for big stuffed animals you don’t really want), and those frisbees that spun around as you poured paint on them to and made psychedelic splatters. So it was with great anticipation that I planned to go to the Durham fair this year, and show all the quaint joys of simple country life to my sophisticated Anglo-partner.

Well. Maybe some things are better left nostalgic memories. The experience started in a parking lot that had been until very recently a corn field – a beautiful bumpy, rutty, once-a-year justification for all the SUV drivers. The lot was right next to a cow-filled barn, the odor of which got us into “country” mood right away. From the lot, we piled into a bright yellow school bus, directed by Dunkin’ Donuts-fed volunteers. In fact, everybody at the fair looked rather Dunkin Donuts-fed, not quite the exemplars of the healthy outdoor life that us urban dwellers might fantasize about as we pound the treadmills at our indoor gyms. And if it wasn’t Dunkin Donuts, it was fried dough, or pulled pork sandwiches or corn dogs, or hot fudge sundays… let’s just say the prize pigs weren’t the only well-fed livestock at the event.

There were some highlights: we saw a pig race, five little porkers sprinting around a track, which was quite sweet; some charming llamas with snaggy teeth shorn like poodles; and a lady hand-cutting those old-fashioned black paper silhouette/ cameo/ whatevers. I think my favorite thing was the baby goats in the petting zoo, adorable as they piled on top of each other on the barrels in their pen, legs that wouldn’t quite fit dangling off.

It all started to go a bit wrong when we made the mistake of patronizing the Durham Republicans food booth not just once (for the Lime Ricky) but twice (on the way back for a pulled-pork sandwich) – before we noticed their subtle political identification and solicitous behavior to the Marine in full dress uniform. Having been out of the country, and for Arvind not being from here, the heaviness of the barn-sized American flag, the stall selling “Baghdad Bracelets” and the country girl group singing about “God Bless the American Housewife” all became a bit overbearing.

Sadly, I realized that my romantic notions of pastoral autumnal bliss are much better served by overpriced farmers markets that come into the urban centers and trips to apple orchards in chi-chi towns like Guilford. I find this is sad on several counts – for urban sylistocrats such as myself who can only take a gentrified pastiche of a rural or foreign other, for the conservative strain gripping much of non-urban America, and for the widening cultural gulf between us.

I just had a hard day day. One of those that in the end will be good, illuminating, insightful, etc. When you hear ‘constructive criticism’, stuff you know is good for you, even though it doesn’t feel so good. I’m sure I’ll turn it around, blah blah blah. But hard, and emotionally draining. I am not woman enough to process it, not able to take it in stride and maintain perspective, right now.

On my way home I stopped at the local and had a:

pint of Hoegaarden. Then I got a big juicy chocolate muffin from the cafe next door. Gross, I know. Totally gross. Now I’m off to take a nap.

So back to me and the bulk food bins at Fresh & Wild… After inhaling some of the farm-fresh whole grain dust, wandering through the gnarly-yet-strangely-appealing cheese section with its rustic eau de la vache, and feeling the fresh mist of the produce sprinklers dewing on my face, I did eventually feel my strength and sanity enough returned that I could face the non-organic world again. I will say though, that for me the health food store is one of my favorite refuges from the harshness of the modern world, a place I go to avoid reaching the stage where I curl up in the fetal position in the middle of the Oxford Circus tube station.

Health food shops have gone through a renaissance in the past 10 years. I remember going to the local one with my Mom, back in the 80s in Connecticut, where I grew up. It had the same lumpy produce and natural cosmetics as the Fresh & Wilds and Whole Foods of today, but the experience was completely different. That health food store (I don’t know if it even had any other name) was in a barely converted storefront in a strip mall, where the fluorescent lights and panel board ceiling somewhat detracted form the ‘natural’ vibe.

Today’s stores are all natural light, rough wood fixtures, and perky staff trained to tell you about the subtle differences between their 20 types of extra virgin olive oil. They have juicing counters and on-site chair massages. The cosmetics have gone from fruit-based concoctions of dubious efficacy to divine-smelling elixirs of organic-farmed essential oils. The gourmet whole food cafes are a place to see and be seen, the bulletin boards a place to spot well-branded yoga centers and nutrition councilors.

More telling, the clientele have gone from sad hippies mourning the loss of 60s utopianism, to young urban trendies happy to get their utopian fix in the form of an organic Fair-trade decaf soya latte on a sunday morning. Much more practical.

In fact, all I bought on my visit to Fresh & Wild was an Innocent smoothie, a real bargain at £1.89 (only about $20 at the current exchange rate). These smoothies may be small, but somehow in their cute, baby-bottled 250ml of pressed fruit they manage to pack in the all the emotional benefits of a health food store: feelings of supportive, wholesome simplicity, and yes… youthful innocence.

I mean, having my mood lifted by a bottle of juice? Obviously a sign of having regressed to about age 10. The age of innocence in a bottle… what jaded city dweller couldn’t use a sip of that?