A Seattle Christmas in ten pictures.

I woke up, and this was the view out my front door. It snowed in Seattle, apparently for the first time in ages, and I was in a better mood already. I took a shower and walked over to Safeway to pick up some items with which to make dinner. There were many people at Safeway because it was the only place open.



It looks like a real fire, but it's actually the entire Sunday newspaper in flames. I couldn't get the log burning at all. I had a newspaper, a box of strike anywhere matches, an hour of time; and stood absolutely no chance. If I am ever lost in the wilderness, I will probably die.



Like every Italian-American from New York, I made pizza for Christmas dinner. As is customary, a Hawaiian pie kicked things off. It is a bit misshapen. If you are unfamiliar with Hawaii, I would like to assert that it is an archipelago of eight main islands depicted in stunning accuracy on this pizza using only pineapple tidbits.



Andres Ricardo Ortiz joined in on the holiday cheer. It was a very Hip Replacement Christmas.



We polished that first pie off quickly. Back to the kitchen, Batman!



I used to have a big, long pizza peel but that one would not work in my current small kitchen so now I have a small crappy peel which seriously hinders my creative exploration of pizza form. Unrelatedly, I have been trying to figure out how to use the cleaning cycle in order to get a hotter oven, but alas, I am still unsuccessful and must settle for a mere 500 degrees.



I am like a Chinese Saint Nick offering you New York/Italian food.



This one has tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, gorgonzola, and caramelized onions.



As you can see, the crust is nicely done. Frankly, pizza is probably the biggest benefit of being my friend and/or roommate. If I should open a pizzeria in Seattle, I would call it "Unoriginal Rays." My motto would be: "Exactly like the Original Rays in New York except in Seattle." It's an advertising campaign that can't fail.



Even though we were stuffed, I made a third pizza anyway because I'd already made the dough. Sadly, there was no room left for the pumpkin pie or the ice cream.

And that's that. I hope you had a delightful Christmas.

alt-alt

I should get coffee at Starbucks just to be different.

let there be light.

The winter solstice is upon us and for the next six months, there will only be more light. It is probably the most optimistic day of the year.

Cell phones are winning the war for republicans.

Cell phones are so ubiquitous that a) public pay phones are disappearing, and b) fewer people wear watches, using their phones as timepieces instead.

Yesterday I was on the bus and I heard a ticking sound. I thought bomb before I thought watch. I stayed on until my stop.

I like you the way you are (when we're driving in your car)

I am very amused by the phrase "she's hot though." These three words can be used by any heterosexual male to excuse just about any female behavior or trait (or, for that matter, any related irrational male behavior). It is remarkable. A search for this phrase in google gives results like: "her music sucks ... she's hot, though"; "she always looks kinda cheap ... she's hot, though"; "she's underaged ... she's hot, though"; "she's dumb as bricks ... she's hot, though"; etc. Hot girls get away with everything. On the one hand, it isn't fair; on the other hand, they're hot.

Are we there yet?

My wonderful roommates came to cheer me on at the finish and took this photo of me.


I burned 3000 calories on Sunday in four hours and twenty-two minutes. I will spare my thoughts on running a marathon because I already wrote something about it five years ago, but I'll say that it is still really hard despite having actually trained this time. (And by training, what I mean is I ran a total of 25 miles this month leading up to it.) Still, it was fun.

I want to ask for a raise in this way: "I think I deserve a raise. For all you know, I work really hard."

(I am, incidentally, writing this while at work. Also, is putting incidentally inside parentheses redundant?)

How Not To Ask Out A Girl

Back in college (when I still did quality thinking), I decided that the best girls to ask out were ones I did not know; random ones on the street or wherever. My reasoning was that this: a) made for a better story, b) made rejection less painful because there was less personal and emotional investment in it. Last week, ten years later, I attempted this.

There's this cute barista that works at the coffee shop on my block that I frequent. I used to see her more often but I'd seen her only twice or so the past couple months. She is cheerful which counts for a lot. I'd never spoken to her before. When I went in, I ordered a "a short latte" ... "umm. with caramel" ... "and soy", replace ellipses with half-second hesitancy because cute girls make me nervous. I mentioned how I hadn't seen her much lately and she said she only worked a few days because of school. Above the static of steaming soy, I found out she was in her last year ("finally"). I would have said more but there were customers behind me so I took a seat and pretended to read and write for an hour.

Then, I had an idea, because I have a habit of working towards ideas more than I do towards success (probably because I expect to fail and wrongly think this makes it better somehow), and asked her if she'd mind if I used a computer for a few minutes as it is an internet cafe. I went over to a computer and opened Word and typed "Dear Miss Barista, Perhaps I can interest you in a drink after your shift, Customer #5, Andy" and I printed it out, and you should know that everything gets sent to a printer behind the counter because you have to pay for printouts, and I went to the counter and told her I had printed something. She, nosy barista, reads the note as she walks over and says she has a boyfriend and thanks me for being nice, and I leave.

I do not know if she really has a boyfriend but I've decided that I'm simply not good looking enough to pull this sort of thing off. And rejection still stinks.

Sweet Bear Vets for Tooth

I went to the post office to try to mail something only to discover that no one was working because it was Veterans Day. I think we've got it all backwards. Surveys show that a third of the homeless population in the United States are veterans. Instead of a day off, we should make everyone, including the veterans, work on Veterans Day. Then we can simultaneously fix the two large concerns of our country: homelessness and the package that sits on my desk waiting to be sent.

Success!

So I have a minor fixation with pizza. Other things I (pretend to) have fixations with: ponytails, pocky, diet coke, the little mermaid, flan. Anyway, New York is the best town for pizza. It's also the best town for a lot of other things, like friends, but let's stick with pizza. Seattle is a crappy town for pizza. Seattle is generally underwhelming when it comes to food, but the pizza is spectacularly bad. People will say something like "the pizza at this place is so good" and then I go there and realize people here have no idea what good pizza is. Thin, with a nice crust that is chewy and not a cracker, not too much sauce, not too much cheese. The only place I've had a really good pie in Seattle is at Serious Pie, which isn't really NY style, but is thin and puffy and delicious.

I have spent a lot of time making pizzas from scratch. They are never really that good. Always too crackery and not chewy. Probably better than the average slice here in seattle, but not necessarily worth the effort, and certainly not better than what you can get for $2 in new york. (Strangely, a slice of shitty pizza in seattle is $3. Bastards.)

This flusters me because pizza can't be that hard to make. This is logically true. At least one person on every block in new york city knows how to make a decent pie.

Finally, this past week, I have made good pizza. Not corner pizzeria, but fancy old-style NY pizza like at Grimaldi's or Lombardi's or John's, etc. I do not know if I'll ever be able to recreate it again because I just eyeballed everything, but hopefully I can; I remember most of what I did, and remember how everything felt. Tonight I made a classic margherita with some ricotta:






My roommate calls it the best pizza she's had in Seattle. I should open a restaurant. I can sell pizza and General Andy's Chicken, the best-selling foods of New York.

Moral truths

Dishonesty, it turns out, is an even better policy.

Baking sorrow to a burnt crisp.

When I am sad, I start to bake and cook. I just got my second Kitchenaid, because it would've been silly to ship my other bigger one all the way here from NY.

Two days ago I made ciabatta. Yesterday, I made General Andy's Chicken. Today I made some bagels, based on inspiration from Heather having made some recently, though I didn't bother with that bitch Martha and went with my trusty King Arthur Flour Baking Companian. I don't know if mine are any better than Heather's, but they look pretty nice.

but if i'm not drunk, how will i speak?

I ought to check myself into an expensive rehab clinic in Utah.
It's my best chance to hook up with Lindsay Lohan.

self-pity rant

I am running out of friends in seattle.

happiness = n^2 + 35.

I've been told before that I don't want to be happy, or that I enjoy being miserable, or something like that. That is absurd. Sometimes I like to make things difficult for myself but there is nothing I want more than to be happy. I just want to clear that up.

I am so smart. smrt.

People are more confident about their intelligence than they are about their looks. I think just about anyone would trade in some of their intelligence for better looks. Any smart person would, anyway.

They both have two first names.

Ron Paul is the current-day Republican equivalent of yesteryear's Howard Dean.

Social Awkwardness

I am far more socially awkward than most people realize. There are a number of reasons for this but I happened to think of one just now while flipping around in bed not falling asleep.

I was fairly shy as a child. Not very shy, but I never raised my hand and didn't usually speak unless spoken to. At some point, I think around the beginning of high school, I began to view my shyness as a weakness of character and a lack of control rather than accept it as the natural and probably genetically influenced personality trait that it was. So I decided to do something about it. This produced a less shy Andy but with a couple peculiarities. Rather than being naturally effusive and gregarious, I tend to speak out in spurts, like my mind suddenly notices I'm being shy and turns something on and my mouth goes off. The second thing is that for some reason I felt compelled to compensate for the shyness by being louder.

I wonder if there is any way I can fix this or if I should even bother trying.

Difference between Seattle and NY, No. 12231

Relative to the size of the populace, there seems to be a much larger number of people with tattoos in Seattle than in New York, especially striking considering that Seattle is full of white people and white people were the second least likely group to have tattoos in NY other than Asians. The difference, however, is that I'm a bit scared of the people with tattoos in New York and the tattoos here somehow makes everyone seem punier. Suddenly, I'm tempted to go and get that Little Mermaid tattoo after all. On second thought, I'd better not.

it's fun time all the time!

Somehow, my internal clock has adjusted right over to Pacific Time with no hiccups. I'm going to sleep, as I always do, around 3am and waking up around 11am. I ought to test the limits of this by going to China and seeing how I fare.

swift movement.

Packing light is always a revelation. You realize just how mobile you really are. Other than my books, I doubt there's much I'm gonna think about or miss (until it gets cold and I'm lacking my winter clothing, anyway.) The things I'll really miss, of course, are the intangible things - friends, places, etc. It occurs to me that we gather excessive physical belongings at least partly because it anchors us down to where we are so we can't just pick up and leave, a somewhat subconscious desire to settle down somewhere.

I do not plan on buying too many things in Seattle perhaps because it's hard for me to fathom staying there an especially long time. It also helps that I can't really afford to buy many things.

At any rate: Watch out, Seattle. Here I come.

Musical chairs.

Where to sit on the subway in new york can be tricky. The ideal seat is usually the one that is at an end, so that you only have to share one side of yourself with another person. (God forbid you are touching someone!) In the wintertime, especially on a train that spends a lot of time overground like the J or the 7, you might be better off sitting in the middle because end seats are near the door and when the door opens, you get a blast of chill air. On older-style trains that have only benches against the sides, there is the long row in the middle, and the smaller two-seaters at both ends. These "love benches" are great for lovers, and slightly odd for strangers, and a little too small for two people. I think they should be reserved for fat people. (Incidentally, these are the best seats to sit in if you want to eat food. But I don't recommend eating because you'll feel guilty when a homeless man wanders past.) On newer trains that have actual seats and are arranged with right angles in them, the seat against the window is the best one to sit in if you want to take a nap because you can rest your head on the window but is hardest to extricate yourself from so it's best for long rides. It is also not ideal for tall people because it has the least amount of legroom. For them I recommend the seat next to it, which has the easiest access in and out of, and is also best for OCD types because you can "sit" on this seat while using the smallest amount of your ass.

Leaning against the door on the side that opens less frequently for stops is the best place to stand if you prefer to, but it is also the hardest from which to get a seat if you are hoping for one.

If you see an old lady eyeing a seat, let her through because she's going to beat you there anyway; they are somehow the most aggressive demographic on trains.

The Most Pleasant People

Here is my latest sweeping generality based on absolutely no fact or experimentation or study: The most pleasant people to be around are the above-average looking. I am going to broadly divide the population into four aesthetic groups: the ugly, the below-average, the above-average, and the beautiful. Interestingly, there are no average people. This is because no one is actually average. The beautiful are snotty and stuckup. The uglies are bitter. The below-average and above-average are mostly interchangeable, but I'll take the above-average because they're easier on the eyes.

Fun With Etymology

Due to my nerdy nature, I find much amusement in certain words. One of my favorites is moxie because it sounds good, has good meaning, and especially because it is named after the supposed oldest continuously produced soda. Last summer, I attempted to acquire a taste for it just so I could drink it whenever I felt low on moxie, like a superhero drinking superjuice, but even after dozens of cans, it was still foul-tastingly medicinal. In fact, it was marketed as a panacea of sorts back when carbonated beverages were still called "elixirs."

Another kind of word I really like is one that seems vague but is actually very exactly defined. A dash, for example, as in a dash of salt, is an eighth of a teaspoon. A jiffy is a hundredth of a second. I don't know any more but I would guess that these precise amounts were given after the fact. I bet a foot wasn't always 12 inches, a cup wasn't always 8 ounces, and a penis wasn't always 6.1 inches.

In the interest of my current boredom, I have decided to start giving arbitrary but exact measurements for vague terms. I therefore declare a trot to be 6 miles per hour, tone-deaf to be someone whose pitch is at least a half-tone off, an inkling to be a quarter of an ink, a glance to be a half-second look, and a mouthful to be a cylindrical form of 4.8 inches in circumference and 6.1 inches in length.

The Top 10 Cereals That Leave The Tastiest Milk

Some cereals leave milk so good at the end, that I look forward to it more than I enjoy the cereal itself. My list seems to skew towards cinnamon, but that is only because cinnamon is great.

10. Frosted Flakes - In my mind the epitome of sugar cereal, it is inedibly sweet, but the milk is nicely sweetened. I suppose you could just add some sugar to your milk, but it won't dissolve nearly as well and would require some rigorous stirring.
9. Cookie Crisp - The leftover milk is pretty good, except that, like Cap'n Crunch, it is greasy with puddles of oil in the milk, which is always disconcerting, and so I put it near the bottom of this list.
8. Life - One of the few times when the cinnamon variety is not as good as the original; Life leaves a milk that is a great flavor but too weak. Also, it is difficult not to leave a milk that doesn't have little Life pieces of straw in it, and that ruins it.
7. Special K Vanilla Almond - I always get it in my mind for some reason that Special K is healthy and plain, and therefore pass over it, but it's actually fairly sugary with good texture. The Vanilla Almond leaves especially good milk because it is probably the sugariest one and has a bit of vanilla as well as honey in the undertones.
6. Honey Nut Cheerios - As far as honey-flavored cereals go, Golden Grahams is superior, but the Bee-sponsored cereal leaves a sweeter, and therefore tastier, milk.
5. Cocoa Krispies - I like Cocoa Puffs and Cocoa Pebbles far more but those corn-based chocolate cereals just don't leave as much chocolate goodness in the milk as the Krispies does, which seems to spill into the milk like dripping paint. Just like chocolate milk, but better somehow. (Cocoa Puffs, by the way, is the best cereal of the three if you can time the puff-milk saturation just right and leave a softly-giving epidermis into the firmer, but not crunchy, dermis.)
4. Fruity Pebbles - Similar to Trix, but with more surface area, the resultant milk isn't so much fruity as it is rainbow-flavored, but rainbows are delicious. Fruity Pebbles is, incidentally, probably my favorite sugary cereal.
3. Boo Berry - A highly underrated cereal, probably because it is difficult to find, but its blueberry-sugar flavor dissolves into milk quite nicely.
2. Cinnamon Toast Crunch - An intense and unabashed sugar and cinnamon rush, but sometimes a little too sweet, depending on how quickly you eat the cereal.
1. Apple Jacks - Leaves a delightful pink/orange-hued residual milk that is the perfect balance of sweetness and cinnamon, even if it doesn't taste like apples.


Speaking of cereals and hippies, I used to buy Good Friends cereal now and again. On the box, they profile a pair of friends, one of the silliest ways to sell a cereal. Anyway, they once had a woman on it so unattractive that I couldn't stomach the cereal with the box sitting in front of me. I stopped buying Good Friends cereal after that.

Lost in the Bookstore.

The travel section in Barnes and Noble is terribly disorganized, or perhaps just very illogically done. There are the two main subdivisions, which are fine: US and World. I did not look too closely in the World section, but within the US, it seems haphazardly alphabetical by both city and state, but after you go from A-Z, somehow it starts up again at A for another go around to Z, again haphazardly with both cities and states. (Washington DC mingles with Washington State, and then Yellowstone National Park, which is inexplicably next to Alabama. or something.)

If I were to redesign the section, I'd have a large shelf made in the shape of the United States and put the books where they belong geographically. Then people could learn some geography while they're at it. (Though it might take the uninformed longer to find what they're looking for.)

conversation I had today.

Andy: I somehow gained nine pounds in the past six weeks.
Emily: Jesus. What the hell were you doing?
Andy: Eating.

The Second Greatest Toast

I thought it was lost forever, but I've recovered the index cards on which I wrote the toast I gave for Jason's wedding. Here it is:

I would like to preface this by saying that when Jason asked me to be best man, he said it was on the condition that I be nice. I had no idea what that meant. So I tried to reassure him by saying that I would give the greatest toast ever and strangely this only worried him more. So let me just say that at best, this is only the second greatest toast, and we can all thank Jason for that.

I first met Jason in the first week of college almost nine years ago and I said, "you look like Alex James," who is a good-looking popular-with-the-ladies British musician. I did not speak to Jason again for a year, but I saw him again, he remembered me, and we started hanging out. It is funny because I imagined that Jason must know all the pretty girls, must be really good around them. Turns out I was absolutely wrong. See, Jason and I would go to parties and end up talking to each other. It was hard to tell which of us was actually worse around girls, and it was like we sat around trying to figure it out to no avail.

Well today, Jason got married. It would seem that he figured it out before I did. This is not true. I'm pretty sure Jason did everything wrong and I can prove this because Jason asked me for advice. What happened was that Jason got extremely lucky. That is honestly what I think. Jason got very lucky because he met Sunny and Sunny was a girl for whom none of the games and posturing mattered, and she saw Jason for the great person he was right away. The two of them realized very early on that they had something special not even my bad advice could deter.

I was there on their first date, for part of it anyway, with some others at a bar in Ithaca. I wish I have an amusing anecdote, some snippet of conversation, to report, but I don't. The two of them were sort of off to the side whispering to each other, and if you saw them at any point tonight, you'd know what I mean because they do exactly the same thing now.

I think this tells us two things. The first is that from their first date, they knew they'd found someone to confide in. The second is that they still constantly find new and fresh little secrets for each other today just as they did when they first met. I know them both very well and I don't think they'll be running out of things to whisper to each other. So please join me in a drink for Sunny and Jason, both of whom I love dearly. I hear they're going to Costa Rica so instead of cheers let me say: Arriba, abajo, al centro, para adentro.

expectant tragedy

Whenever I hear a car skid or screech from braking suddenly, I am always so disappointed when I don't hear it crash... all buildup and no release.

so i kicked him off, you know, at the next stop

It is very cold and the bus is very late, as evidenced by the massive number of shivering people that no longer fit on the sidewalk. Finally the bus comes and what pisses me off isn't that the bus is late but that there doesn't seem to be a hint of remorse or guilt on the bus driver's face. I walk in all miserable. He greets me with a fucking smile.

Doritos

Frito-Lay has been busy with their Doritos line of chips. They have dropped Nacho Cheesier and Cooler Ranch back to just Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch. (One would've thought they'd logically follow with nacho cheesiest and coolest ranch.) But now there is a huge assortment of flavors:
Spicy Nacho, Blazin' Buffalo & Ranch, Black Pepper Jack, Salsa Verde, Taco, Ranchero, Fiery Habanero, Salsa, Natural White Nacho Cheese, and our favorite, Toasted Corn. Toasted Corn! That's Doritos-flavored Doritos! About time.

A few weeks in south dakota.

In Gregory South Dakota the entire town shows up for the high school basketball game and everyone fits in the gymnasium. The two middle time zones are weird because the ten o'clock news is on at nine. Deer walk right by the window. Bald eagles are really majestic. And it is goddamn cold. Sadly too cold for the corn palace. Alas!