Campfiring

I have been to a lot of campfires in the past few months. Six, to be precise: two in Boston, one in Herkimer, and three more in my own backyard. The smell of a campfire always soaks into my clothes, causing morning-after flashbacks when I wake to find that my hoodie smells like summer camp or friends with guitars, or maybe like camping in the mountains with my parents when I was eight years old. Every person must have a different memory associated with the dry sting of inhaled wood smoke and that flushed feeling on your face while the night cools at your back. What's yours?

I don't know what it is about this summer, but the ratio of campfires to other social activities is bizarrely high this year. Maybe it's the economy— I know that I don't have the money to see movies or concerts, or even go out to coffee shops and bars. There's something old fashioned and deeply satisfying about sharing stories and songs around a campfire that I've missed about my "grown up" life these past few years. I can't help but think that if this is what the deconstruction of our lifestyle looks like— actually spending quality time with other people, being forced to slow down— it looks pretty good.

That said, I'm still living at home with my parents and working a very part-time job that uses approximately three of my college educated brain cells... and after scouring the want ads for months, it doesn't look like that will change for a good while yet. I would be happy to combine this new relaxed backyard campfire lifestyle with some degree of financial solvency, but for now I can't complain about the summer as-is. Shows, trips, work, music, campfires, weddings, and friends are all going to keep me too busy to worry— and if the past is any indicator, the next step will become clear when the time is right.

In the meantime, I will drown my sorrows in s'mores.

Rearranging Furniture

I don't have any "before" pictures, but this is what my room looks like after a solid day of cleaning, vacuuming, and rearranging. Over the years, it has become clear that the state of my room at any given time mirrors the state of my life as a whole. If I'm still hanging onto old junk that is no longer useful, keeping costumes from characters I never want to play again... well, you get the picture. A good room cleaning/furniture rearranging session is a statement that I am ready for a fresh start.
Now (for the first time) I have what I have needed for years: two desks. One is for computer work and the other for writing, editing, answering letters, et cetera. The writing desk is inherited from my namesake Eleanor McLoughlin, and it sat in a back room of her Park Slope brownstone for years without ever being used. When I opened it the first time, there was a newspaper folded inside with news about Roosevelt's presidency. Nope, not FDR— the other Roosevelt.

In contrast, the computer desk used to be a peeling, bruised purple color... and I am pretty sure that my mother found it at the side of the road. I finally got around to sanding it down and painting it a much more acceptable dusty green color, and it will now serve its purpose rather well.
I also moved my bed into the window alcove. All of these changes— plus the slow and continuing migration of my books from a storage locker in Frankfort to my 4 bookcases— make the room feel my own again. It was a guest room for the past 4 years, complete with stuffy floral bedding, wicker bookcases, stodgy lamps, and whatever washed up from the rest of the house... as if some strange tide carried all the downstairs detritus up here and then retreated, leaving boxes of unidentifiable electrical cords, paperwork, glasses cases, broken walkmen, lampshades,and a crock pot under my bed. No more! I have now, for better or for worse, put some sort of energy and effort into living at home. Oddly, this makes me feel several steps closer to leaving.

Snail Mailing

I have been making mixes with an intensity untapped since high school, when my double cassette decks were spinning more often than not with music for friends' cars and walkmen and basement rooms. This time, jewel cases with covers collaged from old National Geographic magazines are traveling in their handmade envelopes to Pittsburgh, Somerville, Providence, Binghamton, Spain. On my "salary" of $6 per hour, more than I would care to admit has gone to the USPS.

I go through strange phases when it comes to communicating with friends and family. Some emails sit in my inbox for months, like rocks weighing down my pockets. Other things fly out of my hands to people I have no obligation towards at all. Sometimes it's easier to send letters and tokens of friendship to people who would not expect them, if only because it is then known to be genuine rather than obligatory.

But... writing this makes me realize how many obligations I do have to fulfill in the communication department, and how belated they are now. Was it Franklin who said that the secret to success is never leaving until tomorrow what you can do today? Time to get back to my writing desk.

Assessing Minnesota for Living Potential

My usual method of discerning whether or not a place is livable is strictly pastry-based. Do I crave the baked goods a month after I leave? If yes, I will consider moving to your city.
Unfortunately, the pastry method has left me with too many possible places to live, not all of which are appealing when judged by non-pastry related criteria. Measured on the cake-o-meter, my home base in Upstate NY is A-Okay. Unfortunately, while its pastries are excellent, Home City Which Shall Remain Nameless does not have the following things:
-Jobs
-Sunlight
-6 Months of Decent Weather
-Smart People Between the Ages of 18 and 33 (With a few lovely exceptions)
-The Ocean
-Public Transportation (there are a few busses, but no one knows what they're for or where they go?)
-Swing Dancing.

That's not to say I don't love this place. But it is to say that at least until I reach the age of, say... 34, I need to live elsewhere to preserve some sanity and momentum. So! New assessment policy. Pastries only count for 10 points. How does Minnesota add up?

Giant Corn Water Tower: 18 points

Canadian Honker Restaurant: 11 points

Medical Museum: 16 Points

Poem-bedecked Bridge/Basilica: 18 points

Seeing Prairie Home Companion Live: 39 POINTS!

Also, the people there are SUPER NICE. So it appears that by the new standards, Minnesota is a lovely place to live. 100 points!

But the Norwegian Bachelor Farmers shouldn't count their chickens just yet. There's more. I went to three different music stores in Minnesota and none of them had a tenor guitar (totally understandable) a bouzouki (less understandable given the Irish music scene in that particular city) or (most surprisingly!) a 12 string guitar. Really?

Add this to the fact that Minnesota is as cold as where I come from and that lakes are not the ocean... well, it looks like I won't be packing my bags for the Midwest anytime soon.

So the "where is Nora going to live" game has a new arbitrary judging criteria: Diversity of Stringed Instruments.

Reader Quiz: Based on pastries, instruments, climate, and culture, where should I live next?

Try This Recipe: Butternut Squash Risotto

One of my favorites, and easy to make.

Ingredients:
*1/4 cup butter
*1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
*1 medium onion, finely chopped (can also use shallots)
*2 cups Arborio rice
*1 cup dry white wine
*6 cups (approx.) hot chicken or vegetable stock
*1 small butternut squash, peeled and diced
*thyme, to taste
*rosemary, to taste
*sage, to taste
*salt, to taste
*1/2 cup grated Parmesan





Directions:
In a risotto pan or medium sized heavy saucepan, heat the olive oil and butter over medium-high heat. Add onion and garlic and saute until just softened, 3-4 minutes. Add the rice and keep stirring with a wooden spoon until the rice is coated in oil.

Add the white wine and keep stirring. Pout in enough stock to just cover the rice, and stir until it has been mostly absorbed. Add squash. Keep pouring 1 cup of stock and stirring until all is absorbed. When rice is tender but still chewy and most of the liquid has been absorbed, turn off the heat, add Parmesean, salt, and spices to your liking.

Enjoy, preferably on a sunny patio with a glass of white wine.

Starting a Cult in My Backyard

If you were my neighbor from 1997-1999, you may have noticed one or more of the following things:

- a pack of gawky pre-teen girls waving broomsticks in a vaguely threatening way

- that same pack of girls, wearing artistically reassembled bedsheets and doing a form of ecstatic dancing vaguely reminiscent of the shakers

- candlelit midnight ceremonies, chanted in a language that fell somewhere on the unlikely spectrum between Japanese and Irish Gaelic

- Frequent visits from the pizza delivery guy.

All of these were (directly or indirectly) related to the rites and rituals of an imaginary country that I made up in the 5th grade. It gathered steam and recruits over a three or four year period, until it was our own little micro culture with language, traditional dress, and a religious calendar.

The group of girls who joined the game were all in that strange liminal space of the middle school years— that time when the fervor that once fueled imaginative play has not yet effectively transferred to eyebrow tweezing, leg shaving, bra-shopping and makeup application. It was the twilight of our childhood, and I think we felt the ground growing cold under our feet. Our feelings about the complex nature of the world we were stepping into were sublimated into this world we would soon have to leave behind.



Our kingdom was a matriarchy. Magic was a matter of course; not spells and wands and razzle-dazzle but a disciplined way of interacting with the natural world and its possibilities. The broomsticks were part of a staving martial art practiced only for defense— there was an internal police force but no offensive army.

I had a recurring nightmare during these years that I was looking out my kitchen window on a flowering mushroom cloud, in a world that had gone totally silent. In the dream, in that moment after the world had stopped and before everything I knew would disintegrate into dust, I turned to my mother and said simply, "I couldn't stop it." The kingdom I escaped to when I woke up was agrarian by choice. They had the resources and the intelligence to develop technology, and chose not to. They sailed wooden ships into the horizon and painted the eyes of beautiful women on their giant hulls.

It was a little like a cult, looking back. But it was kinder than the indoctrination that we would face in the years to come. In the Tioreh ceremony pictured above, we swore allegiance to a country that cannot be located on a map. I still carry two passports in my wallet and one in my heart... and sometimes wonder if I will always be caught wandering between three countries and two worlds.

Dating a Fictional Character

Okay, so Richard III isn't fictional— but he is dead. And the version of Richard III that I fell for and subsequently dated (as the result of a queer series of events that raises very interesting questions about how "real" any of our relationships are in a world of virtual communication) was not the actual historical figure, but the version of him written by William Shakespeare somewhere around the year 1591.

This fascination began in DeWitt Henry's Shakespearean Tragedy class in the fall of my junior year of college. I don't know if it was something about my complicated personal life at the time or just the natural result of my social life being limited, more often that I would like to admit, to the exclusive company of fictional characters... but something about Richard Gloucester reached through the centuries and the tiny typeface of my Complete Works to send an adolescent tingle of lust up my spine. It wasn't that I was attracted to his bitterness or his violent, scheming nature. Nor was I moved by his ability (despite his own modest protestations!) to "prove a lover—" I was not seduced alongside Lady Anne. No, it was neither of these facets of his thrillingly complex character that made me love him. I loved him because I was convinced that I "knew his heart" in a way that no one in his own small world could. There he was, trapped inside a play, surrounded by people who would never understand the pain and loneliness and self-loathing that lay beneath his twisted wit and his talent for pain and power. Why did no one else seem to see so clearly to the real Richard that lay beneath? I knew that Shakespeare could, and yet wrote him to his inevitable conclusion with the same compassionate indifference with which the author of us all drips ink on our dearest dreams. It was heartbreaking.

So there I was, in love with this collection of moldering ink blots, the product of a brilliant but long deceased imagination (which, in my mind, never inhabited the body of Joe Fiennes... but that's another story.) What could I do? First of all, every girl has to have a confidante for her unrequited love stories, and my friend Jim happened to sit at my right hand side throughout most of the semester. Though I'm not sure that he ever fully understood my fixation, he was sufficiently amused by it to spend spare moments reaching over to cover the back of my notebook with heart-encrusted doodles reading:
Mrs. Gloucester
Mrs. Richard Gloucester
Nora Gloucester?
Mrs. The Third!

During the weeks that followed, I went the way of many an overly infatuated 13-year-old girl and managed to work the object of my affection into almost every conversation. This is an important plot point, as it explains why the "contemporary" identity of my literary lover is still a mystery to me. Everyone knew that I had a crush on Mr. The Third, so when he friended me on Facebook I was clueless enough about any "real person" behind the charmingly constructed profile that I could conveniently ignore the logistical difficulties and imagine myself into an actual relationship with the object of my schoolgirl crush.

The next year and a half or so was idyllic. We played games of internet scrabble peppered with Shakespearean vocabulary, exchanged the occasional witty missive, and generally participated in virtual relationship behaviors appropriate to two people separated by time and distance.

Alas, however, our relationship eventually suffered from the same complaint that ends many such couplings— lack of physical incarnation. And now I can only dream that one day he will find a way to walk out of those cold pages to make the winter of my discontent into glorious summer once again.