Starting tomorrow I am doing this thing where I don’t drink for a month; I will admit now that I may be about to make a serious mistake.
(OK, also this, because that skillet was a present from my mother, who I know will want to see it in action. Sorry about the state of my stovetop, everyone.)
The post-party bacon in Z’s enormous cast iron pan was restorative to say the least, not to mention the biscuits and bacon fat-scrambled eggs.
January 15, 2012, 10:48am
Reblogging for posterity, and to mention that NSH forgot the most important dish of the evening: alcoholic whipped cream from a can, which she & CL picked up on a beer run as a special present for me.
Z’s first East coast birthday party was the best, from the caper-and-breadcrumb deviled eggs (basically these two recipes mashed together) to the oysters Z shucked in no time at all, to her amazing (and vegetarian!) French onion soup, to the bread and cheese. And that’s not even mentioning her two birthday cakes — this red wine one and T’s fudgey flower-topped one.
January 14, 2012, 9:53pm
In high school, AK would sometimes find me in the hallways and give me things: mix cds, printouts of poems or stories he thought I’d like. Once, memorably, a chocolate ganache cake with how strange it is to be anything at all written across the top in pink frosting. At some point he gave me a burned copy of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the title written on in blue Sharpie, his cramped handwriting looping and dipping. We spent a lot of time getting stoned and dancing to Holland, 1945 in the living rooms of everyone we knew; my first night at Yale that song came on in some smoke-filled room and I was relieved to learn that I was well-prepared for college, after all.
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For a while that year I thought I was in love with a different A. On the last night before Thanksgiving break we met up in a friend’s dorm room; I was wearing my favorite kind of impractical outfit, cutoffs over tights, red thrift store heels, a long white down coat with a fox-trimmed hood, the fur fallen back around my shoulders, meant to mix in with my own glossy pelt. Everyone else drank whiskey out of the bottle and danced to The Smiths while he and I argued carefully on the couch: I think you like me, I said, and he told me that he did, but that he didn’t want to date me, and that he was sorry about it. I don’t really care if you’re sorry, I said, and then he left so I left too. It had rained and frozen over while we talked: I walked outside into a world slicked over with a quarter inch of ice: steps, sidewalk, railings and gates glassy black. I almost broke my neck walking home in those heels.
The next morning he texted to ask if I’d come over and help him pack: it was sunny and warm and the world was in a melt. I sat on the floor of his spare, quiet room— I’d never been there before— and we didn’t talk at all while he played I Love How You Love Me from Live at Jittery Joe’s and I wondered whether he was going to kiss me goodbye.
(He didn’t; I downloaded the album, which I’d never heard before, and listened to it at the airport and on the the plane, the whole way home.)
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A year later P found out how much I liked Jeff Mangum and promised to burn me a copy of When It All Caved In; it took him something like a year to do it, and he handed it off with a note and a drawing acknowledging how long it’d been. I don’t listen to it very often; I couldn’t tell you why.
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Last night I sat in the dark next to AK, the two of us thrilled, absolutely rigid with joy, while Jeff Mangum sat on a chair and played song after song, each one rippling and resonant. “I didn’t realize how well I knew those songs,” he said afterwards, and it was true: the tunes meander and the lyrics are knotty and surreal but we could chant right along with him, and water rolls on off the round captain’s belly who’s talking to tigers with his cafeteria tray.
It didn’t occur to me then how much of it had been given to me, all these boys saying here, take this, and my own unquestioning acceptance. M & I talked recently about remaking yourself in the image of the man you love, or hope to love, adopting his tastes and attitudes; certainly there’s a little bit of that in this. But mostly it’s that I got lucky: that what they handed me was so good, and that I love it so fiercely as my own, now.
M & N & teacup martinis & all the patterns at my birthday party on Saturday night.
(Also at some drunk point on New Year’s Eve KK convinced me to join Instagram, where I am also Zanopticon, if you want to find me.)
C & A, January 1 2012, Los Angeles CA
Taken with B&W Impossible Project Polaroid Film, which I’m still not totally sold on, though that may be the shitty 600 I’ve been shooting with so far.
My friend A, yesterday: “Sometimes people ask me what going to high school in LA was like, and my response is, well I did let an itinerant sixteen year old coke dealer live in my house for a couple of days senior year.” More on that on EmilyBooks!
by Zan Romanoff
J was a curly-haired sophomore who drove what we called the party car: whenever he showed up he would unload an enormous duffel bag of hookahs and weed and terrible alcohol, for some reason usually electric blue bottles of Alizé. There were other drugs, too, but I didn’t partake so I couldn’t tell you what all he provided. It was never clear to me where it all came from, how my prep school classmates scored their ‘shrooms, E, coke and meth, or who met the actual drug dealers so that my friends could distribute in the parking lot before first period.
J’s parents found out about his habits and the company he was keeping and sent him off to boot camp rehab out in Utah, which sounded like it was as much a scared straight punishment program as it was treatment for any actual substance abuse issues.
After J went other classmates peeled away in short order, five or ten more pulled from class mid-week, leaving us with rumor and speculation: he was in the psych ward at UCLA before they would let him get on a plane; she was doing heroin in her bedroom by the time her parents figured it out. These rumors ought to have served as a cautionary tales, but seventeen year olds experimenting with hard drugs are not exactly looking for the lesson in things. It seemed like every time one of them went, those who remained would redouble their efforts, hellbent on proving to everyone just how untouchable they were.
