Brisket! Brisket! Brisket!

If I've been spending hours in an glassy-eyed catatonic state lately, I have Drew to thank. A couple of weeks ago he burned me a lecture series he'd been listening to. So Heidegger ended up narrating my drive to Minneapolis. That turned out to be pretty prescient.

Best part was the CD folder he rigged up, constructed from an old calendar, with James Dean peaking out from the most amusing places. Crafty! Now with Martha unable to smuggle even nutmeg into Alderson, it's up to us on the outside to keep the flame alive.

Minnesota was relentlessly Minnesotan. For the first half of the week, Pre-Cambrian retro was in, with high temps barely reaching zero. The weather made the streets look eerily post-apocalyptic: silent buildings casting long shadows across empty roads. No pedestrians, or traffic even. Tuesday's family activity was maintaning core body temperature.

Minnesotans were relentlessly Minnesotan. On Christmas Eve day Byerly's was choked with people picking up orders. A woman, wide as she was tall--about four feet--and ancient as a coelacanth, was wielding her shopping cart like a Buick Roadmaster. As she clipped every shin and kneecap in her path, it was the victims that apologized effusively to her. Sorry! Sorry! Ooh, sorry there, then!

And grandma was even more grandma than she's ever been. She defeated my efforts at defensive eating by day three with weapons-grade food that should've been declared to the IAEA.

So taken was she with the idea of cooking a brisket that it seemed to find a relevance to every conversation within her earshot for a day. Brisket, brisket, brisket. She said the word four times in less than a minute, and I only began to count after the comedy of her mentioning it so often became unavoidable. Such was her enthusiasm that she began to cook the thing at 1:30 that morning. The smell woke me up in the middle of the night and sent me to the bathroom, where I threw up for the first time since Mac gave me a case of the nasties after a trip to Philadelphia during freshman year.

The depressing part wasn't that I spent Christmas Eve sleeping in the upstairs bathroom--the farthest possible room from the kitchen in the house--after releasing epic poems of vomit. The depressing part was that this made me feel better than I had felt all year. From anything. And 2004 was not without its moments. So I bear no malice to Grandma's brisket. In fact it reminds me of a line from the gnostic gospel of St. Thomas: "If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you." See! I can do biblical literalism!

But the second coming of my Swedish meatball dinner was not the only Christmas miracle. That I was able to follow grandma's "conversations" was another. They are sort of unilateral, with her doing most of the talking while I'm just along for the ride. Disjointed, abrupt, at times seemingly diagnosable, her conversations can sound like someone calling out answers to a Rorschach test. She looks cheap, oh they used to know how to dress. This was all before They broke the unions. I think all that turkey gave me a case of the gout. "Do what you love"? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Clarence Thomas? He's a patsy. Norm Coleman? He's a patsy too.

These sessions can be like listening to a police scanner, with non-sequiturs and static occasionally interrupted by something really interesting. As when she retold the story of V-E day in Minneapolis, with Louis Prima leading a conga line down Hennepin Avenue. Or her trip to Chicago a year earlier, at age sixteen, drinking highballs and flirting salaciously with sailors on the train. "We were all going to die tomorrow back then, you know" she said.

Oh grandma, like you, or any of us girls in the family, have ever needed an excuse to flirt with sailors.

Out of the Crooked Timber of Humanity, No Straight Thing Was Ever Made

A quote by Kant. I take it to speak to our inherent imperfections and limitations as humans. But really it came to me when my osteopath was straddling my back and kneeding my vertebrae like an Italian peasant would dough. Or a prophet from the book of Leviticus, extracting some Old Testament style justice from my spine.

Five minutes earlier he had told me my back was slightly crooked and it was wrenching my muscles so one side of me was preceptibly lower than the other. I felt like my posture had been worsening, but I thought this had more to do with the last two elections and the intervening four years.

"Yup, your whole body points out to the left. It's crooked. See the nipple line?"

Nipple line! I laughed out loud. But that I'm not straight? That I lean to the left? No revelations here.

He didnt scribble any muscle relaxants for me though. Back to icing myself with a frozen bottle of Stoli, I guess. Speaking of prescription drugs and vodka, for the first time in three years I have New Year's plans worth mentioning. Mac has invited us aparachiks to his place in NYC. I'll pick up the Jess in Detroit and we'll fly over together. We each bought one way tickets, so I hope the TSA does not intrepret our destination, lack of return flight, and transparent 'hatred of freedom' as evidence that we're freelancing for al-Qaeda.

Last time I flew to Minnesota I was selected for a random baggage search. When the mouth-breathing lady with wooden stick poked my clothes aside and found four books on Afghanistan, religious fundamentalism and political Islam, her eyes met mine. She didn't lift her head or close her mouth. 'Sir, take off your shoes please...' She said.

But between now and a New Year's reunion of the college diaspora, there is that other great secular holiday: Christmas. Typically I love X-mas in Minneapolis. The family. The city. The lefse and cardamom bread. This year though may be asphyxiating. If my uncle insists on playing the Red State-talk-radio-evangelical martyr in our Blue State family, I'm not going to give an inch. I'll be as condescending, elitist and didactic in my leftist manifestos as I have wanting to be with him for years. That or I'll drive to Byerly's and stick my head in the olive bar. No sneeze gaurd will be able to stop me.

My Kind of Town, Chicago

And not just because it is known as the 'city of big shoulders' or 'hog butcher to the world.' Though there is that.

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen the painted women under your gas lamps,
luring the farm boys.

A train is really the best way to get there, unless you like comfort, speed, efficiency and seats that aren't feculent. I kid because I love. The grittiness is actually part of the appeal. The best part of taking the Amtrak is that all sides of the track are the wrong sides of the track. Like taking a way-back machine to the land that the 1950 Interstate Highway Act left behind.

I guess I hadn't realized how industrialized our Midwest is. Or was, at least. Big, beautiful industrial buildings, with exposed viscera of wires and turbines, sinewy tangles of pipes and ducts look like monsters from the Jurassic. I would stare at one for a while and half expect it to roar like a Tyranosaurus.

Once in Chicago I had several hours to kill before my interview. And even after that it would be several more before I rendezvous'ed with Priya since she would be taking the GRE after work.

One of the first things I do when I get into a city is to deliberately get lost, then find my way back. Often you don't know what interesting things you are looking for until you find them. But getting lost was sort of hard when you are bound in on one side by Lake Michigan and the city has a pretty rational grid layout. And when you've grown up in the Midwest and Chicago was treated like an ersatz Paris, or New York, even.

So I just used bus maps to reconnoiter the location of my interview and then bought Priya's oxox--mas present. I had it wrapped by some guys from a charity that does male cheerleading to raise money to care for cancer victims. I wasn't sure how that worked. Maybe the mere threat of male cheerleaders is enough to extort money from people who are terrified of such things. Like me.

I was just one block from my interview--the Northwestern Law building in sight--when a large Nissan Murano turned against the signal and just about hit me in the crosswalk. Instead of doing the sane thing, the instinctive thing, of say running away from the car, I planted my feet. I stuck my arm out, pointing my finger at the incandescent little 'walk' guy in the signal, while looking for, then locking onto the driver's eyes. He skidded to a stop and gave me a look so sheepish I was embarrassed for myself. Things about ourselves are revealed in these seconds spent on the seared edge of life. Turns out I am some sort of asshole pedant. Rather than save myself from possible injury I--quite literally--took a stand for a minor principle, my rights as a pedestrian.

With all my senses widely dialated, I wondered if that itself was the law school interview. Some admissions officer would try to run down candidates, and those who make it into the law school, are, well, in the law school.

The sit-down interview went well. Maybe I was a little deprived of social contact because I couldn't stop haming it up with the interviewer. Actually, had the interview turned combative or adversarial, I had in my folder lots of dirt and less than glowing press on the Law School that I would load, like depleted uranium, into my questions. But that didn't happen.

I was impressed with the school and interview, which may have disarmed me. But I still have real concerns. For instance, NWern makes a big fuss about importing sort of a 'business school' model into its law program. Hence the interview. I tend to think of B-school as a little shallow though. Business bestsellers read like self-help books and pop-psychology, and qualities that are encouraged in business, like trading on connections or contacts, would be unethical in law. Think of Roy Cohn cutting a deal with the judge in the Rosenberg trial.

Moreover, Dean van Zandt has said that "risk averse students" are the ones that should be "kept out" of the law school, that such students could not understand their business clients needs. That quote really got to me. Lawyers--and our whole society in general--would do well with a healthy booster-shot of risk aversion. We live on risk; and to an unsustainable extent. The major scandals of the last ten years--Enron, Worldcom, etc.--happened because the lawyers advising these companies were not risk averse enough, they were enablers. In the Iraq war and Abu Graib scandal, lawyers have brushed aside voices of dissent and caution, making arrogant desicions that have put this country more at risk: Not appreciating the predictable effects of the law of unintended consequences in Iraq, brushing aside the UN as 'irrelevant' and the Geneva conventions as 'quaint.' Lets not even get started on the budget and trade deficits, or our national savings rate which is less than a penny on the dollar. Risk-aversion I think is appropriate in this increasingly Hobbesian world, one created by risky actions in the first place.

Sorry, but this is easier for me than doing Hatha yoga or something.

The above rant notwithstanding, I left the interview buoyant. I still had some time until 'Ya got through with her GRE. So I headed for Milennium Park and took in Frank Gehry's impressive bandshell, as well as the sculpture Cloud Gate. It is a giant losenge shaped thing with a highly reflective surface and it turns the Chicago skyline into an epileptic fit of lights.

Oh, and walking along Wacker Drive, I saw Tim Curry. Sans his Rocky Horror corset, alas. There is only one appropriate thing to do when you see Tim Curry, and that is to call your friend Alissa. I told her that I'd call her back if I saw Susan Sarandon, or if everybody on Michigan Ave. broke out into 'Let's Do the Time Warp Again!'

Blood on the Amtrak

These short days and long nights are all right. The sun goes down--'goes down'? too Christina Aguilera--the sun 'sets' rather, a little after five. Since I make such a muck of them, it's best that my days are as short as possible.

Like Alicia Bridges, I too 'love the nightlife.' Perhaps in a slightly different way. Not so much because 'I got to boogie, on the disco 'round, oh yeah.' But I do like how the previously daytime hours are now steeped in darkness. Six-thirty's now a little bit sexy.

On these longer winter nights I bring out the telescope. It's a big, clunky, orange affair bearing the name 'Celestron,' which I can only say in a robot voice. It dates to the 1950s when my Grandpa probably bought it to catch a glimpse of Sputnik, or Laika, that dog shot into space by the Soviets. I look at the shadows cast on Jupiter by its moons. Or I train the telescope on a seemingly empty patch of sky then look through the eyepiece to see the galaxy as busy as swamp water under a microscope. I like the liberating feeling of insignificance I get staring at such infinity. George Bush is just an random tangle of molecules that will disassemble soon enough.

Uh. Ground control to Major Tom. I'm back. I'll be going to Chicago Monday. Biznass and pleasure. When through with the biznasty, I'll see Priya. See her? I'll be staying with her. There's a Chinese dish that describes what I'm feeling. Ah, yes, 'Double Happiness.'

So best: I'm taking the train. There's a certain 1830's-to late 1950's romance about that. If my life were directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet I would have a saucy French bob haircut and would spend my spare time hanging out at the station, running after trains, saying tearful goodbyes to perfect and grateful strangers.

I love me the Amtrak. It's perpetually dying, hemorrhaging public money. The bete noir of conservatives, the St. Sebastian of, well, maybe only me. State subsidized inefficiency on a national scale? This is as close as I'll be getting to a vacation in Spain for a little while. And there's the fact that every time someone actually pays to ride Amtrak--or use public transportation of any sort except rickshaws--Tom Delay cries.

Then a job interview on Wednesday. The last time I interviewed for a job I spied written on my evaluator's form: 'He's articulate, but nerdy.' I took that as a compliment. Though since the woman who wrote it was inordinately into the March Madness of NCAA basketball, I doubt she intended it that way.