always been like this now just more so

Dinnermakings with Couplingchaos was Lobster Tarragon Capellini with Leek Cream Sauce, done it once before way back when for Crystain and Eeyrg; it's the perfect example why I love Food & Wine magazine –straightforward recipes that don't require wacky unusual ingredients, but the flavors combine in ways I've never thought of. Lobster and tarragon is a classic standard, no surprises there, but fold it into the leek cream sauce, and garnish with shredded sautéed beets and it's fan-fucking-tastic. The earthiness of the leeks and beets, the luscious cream and sweet dense lobster generously spiked with tarragon leaves, feels like winter's ending promising spring. And I'm really digging the olive-pitter device I got from Crate & Barrel, now I can make my own tapenades, it's like there's a carnival of olive-y pastes to explore. A pint of mixed olives, handful of shelled pistachios, fresh thyme and lemon zest and liberal pepper grinding ; foodprocess them with a big drizzle of olive oil and you got a bowl of salty heaven. It's the pistachios make it special, wanna try walnuts, and pine nuts, see what happens. This may be the impetus to finally get a mid-sized food processor, the Cuisinart Mini-Prep I been using since college ain't quite cutting it no more.

The drinkinating was a bottle of one of our favorite New Zealand Sauv Blancs – Brancott Reserve, and a bottle of Moutadon Grand Rose I got cuz it was on sale and had a pretty label and it turned out to be really tasty too, and D'Arenberg vintage 2000 port that was good but I still think the actual Portuguese portos show more depth and complexity than any ports I've tried from Australia and California. Full of drink, listening intently to Little Earthquakes - far and away the best Tori Amos album ever, back when her songwriting narratives were coherent and recognizable, the instrumentation might nudge the envelope of overproduction but I don't mind music that sounds clean and level, not everything has to sound like it was recorded in a woodshed and mixed by a first-year Berkeley student.

Where was I? Oh yeah, that Little Earthquakes album. Listened to it constantly my first year in college; remember those years back when everything used to feel so intense, your emotions and desires fever itched to a volume almost unbearable, in the midst of a predicament over some boy or girl or a crisis of your own mind or body, feelings and desire burn so powerfully they were almost crippling. Times I would find myself so overwhelmed with feeling that I would start physically trembling, my chest bathed in heat, sounds of the outside world fade from my ears in the rushing torrent of thoughts and emotion. Times I'd be incapable of action or rational thought or consideration of anything but the crackling electric maelstrom inside myself. That doesn't really happen anymore, by the end of school we find we're never really overwhelmed to such a degree, completely incapacitated by emotion. Does that mean we feel less than we used to, less intense the rush of love, of loss, of desire? That would be the most horrifying thing in the world, I can't bear the thought of feeling less, I want more more more. But I've got this theory, see, that we feel just as much as ever, but there is so much more we know about ourselves and other people and the world that the weight and energy of emotion is balanced by the perspective of experience and awareness. Like, I know that when I love, I love fiercely, purely, and deeply; I always have, just as powerfully now as three and five and a dozen years ago; fascination with the physical and emotional intimacy of love with another person is what powers life's engine. A difference is that when I love now I can relate it somehow to the loves I've felt before (even through the infinite graduations in feeling and color and flavor that make each love unique from all others, duh) and that perspective somehow makes life during wartime easier to handle – less debilitating…it's just as traumatic, but it's not unbearable, because we develop the capacity to withstand our internal chaos without melting down. We hurt and twist and yearn for this other person with the same terrible intensity with which we tortured ourselves when we were younger, but now we know there's a lot more to life we have to deal with at the same time - we gotta hold a job, we gotta pay the bills, we gotta keep things together for all the art projects and travel plans and social happenings and event plannings we got going. We have to be there for our friends and families as they're going through their own roughness. We have a responsibility to deal with our emotions, without self-centered, self-pitying whining, with complete honesty and fairness and an awareness of our friends and their feelings and their situations too. We keep expanding and exploring our friend-circles throughout the everchanging landscape of the cities we live in. In other words, our awareness and involvement in life has expanded way beyond the little dorm room of our teenage minds, so our emotions are no longer such an unbalancing component of our identity, it's just part of this living breathing growing experiencing thing.

I get uncomfortable whenever I talk about age and change and growth because I don't want to suggest that just because you're a teenager you can't handle your emotions; like, what if I heard some guy saying how people are so immature in their mid-thirties, it was only when they turn fifty that they're really able to live like responsible human beings; yeah whatever dude. It's not that at all, I'm just talking about the truths of my own life and my own experience and the things I know about myself. Which is, in itself, uncomfortable, and I guess another thing that's different – the willingness to put all this squishy emotional stuff down into words, whereas ten years ago I would have been mortified at the idea of revealing so much public-spacewise (Fantasy Factory photos notwithstanding - bah-dump-bump), even now I feel the embarrassment twingeness so I'd better post this before I love my nerve ok bye.