03.14.06 [uk]

a wedding scout operates with lightning speed and ruthless efficiency. we are seasoned wedding scouts: though it's but midmorning on the third day of our oxford planning mission, we've been through five pubs, two harvey's lunches, and three plates of ahmed's chips and cheese. we've also confirmed that the local stanford staffers don't remember (o happy day!) what we did to the house seven years ago, that oxford florists (like students on study-abroad programs) are lousy penpals and difficult to motivate, and that one should never, ever link to a cheap b&b from one's wedding website before checking to see if said b&b was, for example, nearly named The Worst Hotel in the UK. marriage nonsense aside, it's been wonderful to be back; oxford is just as we remembered it, though the students seem impossibly young. are the british simply baby-faced? this is what i tell myself.

03.08.06

friends, the wedding monster has eaten my soul and rendered me unable to update the 'champ. in lieu of detailed stories about my cats and lunches, please accept ziggy lives (the david bowie comic book).

02.23.06

the dirty dozen [part 1, since i'm too lazy to come up with twelve bullet points in a day]:

001 we've (i've) been on a movie binge for the upcoming academy awards. this hasn't involved actually watching nominated films (with the exception of the constant gardener - very pretty, but i'd be surprised if rachel weisz won for it), but i like to think we're offering broad support to the industry as a whole. we saw one of the greatest films of all time (r. kelly's trapped in the closet, which we both own and watched for the first time with my mother) and one of the worst remakes in recent history (the fog). the latter was such an inversion of all that is right and good that it actually caused a new york post reviewer to say something awesome: "How many out there have nightmares about leprous sailor-skeletons reaching up to grab you through the drain while you do the dishes?"

002 still slumming with wedding books; those listed at right are the tip of a dirty, dirty iceberg. repellent sentence of the day, on diamonds: "For your fiancee's sake, the larger the better, and she probably only likes talking in whole numbers...one carat, two carats, three carats, four." mine is not a whole number, per my request, thanks much. which is not to say that we don't refer to it, in our best sean connery voices, as The Rock.

003 yeah, there's a ring; we bought it (and ordered a wedding band for joe) before the blizzard started the weekend before last. the first flakes were falling as we left the store in soho, just in time to commemorate the freakishness of my liking a diamond.

004 ace young is the next american idol. his voice isn't the best this year, and he doesn't make my own personal liver quiver, but he's species hot - one of those seamlessly, freakishly attractive people who look like they were bioengineered to destroy the earth via mating. freakish is the operative word: even the television without pity crowd is responding to the way he shuddered through george michael's "father figure" last night. i'll keep watching for a few weeks just to see which pop songs are considered most conducive to the end of the world.

02.13.06

fo blizzle, my nizzle. part of me needed to work out yesterday because i'd been slacking, but most of me wanted to say that i'd gone to the gym in new york's biggest snowstorm - and to plompf through this.

new yorkers will go to great lengths for anecdotes;* twenty minutes ago a guy** just north of the carnegie deli offered me $5 to sled down a pile of plowed snow with him. it's now full of exhaust and pee, mind you, and will deposit you in the bus lane on 7th avenue; anything for a story, though. the guy's still out there with his plastic toboggan.

joe and i bundled up for a grocery / rental movie run at ten yesterday morning, when ours were the first footprints and hell's kitchen was completely silent. the streets were waking up by the time we walked home, and the local dogs were clearly having the best morning romp of their lives. three cheers for snow.

*and, yeah, photo sets. i'm only human.

**said guy didn't look crazy, but he did look like a guest host for new york noise. gotta watch out for those.

02.10.06

did anyone see the episode of supernatural with the townspeople who sacrificed sweet-looking couples on road trips to a bloodthirsty scarecrow to keep their apple orchards alive? no? it was pretty creepy. i think the florist up the street saw it.

02.08.06

one turns up odd stuff while planning a destination wedding. of interest today (though not quite right for 'lauren and joe's guide to oxford') are the ten worst paintings hanging in britain (per the guardian). the blurb on julian opie's portraits of blur is rather depressing:

Almost anything in the National Portrait Gallery is irritating, but this is particularly so because Opie's done such a smoothed out, contemporary, stylish painting without any real originality or feeling or emotion. It's not anything that couldn't have been done on a computer. I know it invites comparisons with Warhol and Richter, but with both of those there are great painterly touches and emotions, but not with Opie. And Blur themselves are embarrassing subject matter. They're the quintessence of Britpop and what was supposedly hot in our culture in the 90s. Now they're just deeply unfashionable.

call me anyway, damon. in questionable art news of a personal nature, i'm scoring my first byline in the march issue of the magazine. the name-in-print part is undeniably titillating; the name-in-print-after-stuff-that-isn't-offensively-squidgy-but-only-vaguely-resembles-what-i-wrote part is a bit odd. getting one step closer to writing for fun and profit, now that's unequivocally good.

02.01.06

101 in 1001: 007 go vegan for at least 1 month [completed 02.01.06]
there it is, bitches! no celebratory german chocolate for me, though the thought of the snazzy stuff mari brought me for christmas makes me want to weep; as previously noted, i've folded the vegan thing into Operation Infinite Pulchritude. the good news is that joe reports that i appear to have lost weight; the bad news is that it seems to have fled my face, which is one of the only parts of a bride that doesn't have to worry about getting into a crazy dress.* in a broader sense, i've gotten used to finding critter-free food and eating enough of it that i don't want to kill everyone. restaurants are still a problem,** but i'm learning to pre-party with snacks at home. the skills, they develop slowly but surely.

*speaking of, settling on a dress has been weird. i'd planned to stick with the one i'd picked out back in 2000, but i befriended an indie pop DJ a few weeks ago whose non-superhero job, as i learned in one of those random streets-of-new-york run-ins last wednesday, is at bergdorf goodman; he hooked me up with a local couture guy who's slowly convincing me that i want to trade lots of money for chiffon, of all things. resisting him (and a wedding dress story that begins with ride's "vapour trail") ain't easy.

**especially the den of asshats we tried last saturday. i know french cuisine is virtually off-limits for me, but i didn't deserve a rude lecture for asking if their salad dressing was vegan. you, bar tabac, can suck it.

01.30.06

01.24.06

according to the welsh, today is the most depressing day of the year. the factors in their calculations (holiday debt, crap weather, broken new year's resolutions, and so on) are solid enough, but let's remember the biggie: it's mischa barton's birthday.

mischa barton quote of the day:

"A friend once said to me that it's a big world and a lot of stuff happens, which really stuck with me because it's true."

(aussie cosmo, fall '05)

01.23.06

v-day 23. thank god for cigarettes. after three solid weeks of cruelty-free eating and nearly two of being an amateur gym bunny (i'm not mainlining protein powder or anything, but i've been jogging 2-3 miles every few days), i'm starting to lose my sense of self; the lung darts are my proof that i'm still in no danger of being a good person. they're also the vice crutch for the next seven months of treehuggin' fun, as i've decided to extend the vegan tour of duty through our august wedding. prenuptial masochism hey!

speaking of masochism, i'm three hundred pages into bill clinton's my life. my favorite digression thus far is his paragraph on wade davis and the ethnobiology of haitian zombies (in brief, they're created with the tetrodotoxin found in puffer fish). zombies in presidential memoirs: i love america.

01.10.06

discussion of the preposterousness of various 101 in 1001 list items (the lottery and casino ones, for example) is having a fascinating effect on the likelihood of my accomplishing them. i bitched in october about 012 write (publish) a mcsweeney's list, and wouldn't you know -

sorry we haven't gotten back to you about this--it's probably going to run in our Book of Lists, which'll be out sometime next year. We'll let you know for sure soon.

hot shit! i don't think it'll happen, of course, which is what one must say to counter-jinx the jinx of talking about it at all. i have, however, hidden the list they liked - just in case.*

v-day 10. the serious newly vegan hunger pangs have subsided, though there was a mini-breakdown last night involving the scarfing of month-old clementines; this i blame on my first trip to the gym in a really, really long time. i've officially lost the ability to eat the aforementioned vegan chicken salad (child: how many days does it take to trigger one's gag reflex with faux chicken and vegennaise? lauren-owl: one, two, three [bleeargh!]. three.), but i've discovered the wonder that is the local better burger. it ain't cheap, but it ain't bad.

*i should also, of course, credit pica and her undercover valencia street activities for this positive development. i think dave eggers & co know better than to get on her bad side.

01.03.06

101 in 1001: 007 go vegan for at least 1 month [ongoing]
v-day 3. the experiment is afoot: since midnight-ish (we were on a plane, so new year's eve / day weren't fixed events) on saturday night, i've been a dietary* vegan. predictably, my respect for people who do this gracefully all the time has gone through the roof; i'm constantly ravenous, my grocery expenses have tripled, and i'm pretty sure i hate everyone. costs will drop when i make a significant shopping trip (as opposed to curiosity-driven impulse buys), but i'm thinking the hunger will get ridiculous when i join a gym later this week. as for hating people, habitual altruism pretty much begins and ends for me with donating platelets; since my hematocrit numbers are notoriously jumpy anyway, qualifying to give blood now is probably right out. in happier news, i can share the results of hippie food experiments.

karen & sisters vegan chicken salad: today's lunch, recommended by a fellow shopper at the grocery store across from the office. texture was chickenesque,** taste wasn't bad after salt and pepper. accidentally bought the "meatless" version of this at another store last night without noticing organic egg in the ingredient list; i'm going to have to get very careful very quickly.

rice cheeze (pepper jack style): billed as aromatic, which turned out to be true - i could smell the jalapeno bits because the 'cheeze' had no smell at all. ditto for taste, and the texture was like nothing god intended woman to eat. per veggieboards.com, though, "It's firm, melts well, and tastes GOOOOD... YAY! No more nasty soy cheese!" hug a vegan, would you?

soy dream (enriched, vanilla flavor): this has replaced skim milk in both my coffee and joe's: we're both fond of soy lattes anyway, and the vanilla is a nice alternative to the equal and/or sugar we usually use. thumbs up.

*one could argue that this isn't truly vegan - since i'm still wearing wool, leather shoes, and so on - but i'm primarily interested in the food restrictions. also, it strikes me as unwise to throw away one's shoes for the sake of a month-long experiment and/or to wear large quantities of canvas and cotton in new york in the winter.

**the beautiful thing about long-term veggie habits is that one does forget what actual meat tastes and feels like; the faux stuff, then, becomes much more believable and/or satisfying than it has any right to be. that said, i'm still painfully aware that most eggless, non-dairy replacement products taste like shit.