8:09 AM:

You may have noticed that, in amongst the ramblings about DVDs and grills and Christmas specials, I haven't been saying a word about those final projects I still need to finish for this past semester's classes. For which I have just a bit over a week to go.

[sigh]

Procrastination, thy name is Shmuel.

3:44 AM:

To balance out that last entry, this one's going to be entirely confined to happy thoughts:

• Rather to my surprise, it turns out that "crapulent" really is a word. (It means "sick from gluttony.")
• For the past couple of weeks, I have been a card-carrying member of the ACLU, fulfilling a long-standing ambition.
• The water in my building is back on.
• Twelve-packs of Coke were on sale at Meijer this week, actually cheaper than buying two-liter bottles. Well, excluding the deposits, anyway.
• I'm still finished with Early Modern Drama.
• I have now seen the cartoon version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It met or exceeded all my expectations. It's amazing how well Seuss's style meshes with Jones's.
• As mentioned in the last entry, I saw It's a Wonderful Life shortly thereafter, also for the first time. It was wonderfully wonderful.

Dear Santa:

Yeah, I know, I'm Jewish. But, see, in these journals, not to mention stories and editorials and such, you're just a plot device anyway. And somehow writing to Hanukkah Harry just doesn't have the same ring to it, so what the heck.

You know what I want, Santa? The obliteration of the past semester. That whole stretch from September to December, just take it all back. Please.

I mean, let's see. On the personal front, you have the tangled wreckage of all my classes, and a pretty lousy first impression made at my new school. On the general front, well, you have the tangled wreckage of the World Trade Center. I don't want a "do over"; the same stuff would just happen again anyway. I just want the whole works ripped out of the timeline.

But, of course, it doesn't work that way. I've read enough speculative fiction to know that. Good magic (and other works) can only be constructive; "be not" isn't an option. David Eddings got that much right.

So did Frank Capra. I finally saw It's a Wonderful Life earlier tonight, you see. I suppose the lesson I ought to be drawing is that, whether I know it or not, good things are going to come out of this semester; perhaps they already have come out of this semester, whether or not I've noticed them.

Heck, if nothing else, I suppose if I'd gone straight on to a career in copyediting, I'd have always wondered if I wouldn't have been better off going to grad school. Perhaps it's worth it to find out for sure that I ain't cut out for an academic life.

Not that that last bit is settled yet; I'm just noticing a potential resolution there. Heck, maybe next semester will be better, and a couple of years down the line I'll be counseling first-year students on working through adversity. But somehow I'm less than optimistic.

Anyway. Barring the big one, I guess I don't have anything to ask. I have my health, I have a ridiculous amount of personal possessions... well, actually, if you could buffer the financial crash that's likely to come when I run out of cash at the start of the summer, that would be nice. Ooh, and maybe get somebody to open a kosher pizza shop in Ann Arbor. Although I suppose those two are in contradiction to one another.

I dunno. It's a good thing I don't believe in you anyway, Mr. Convenient Plot Device. It saves a lot of trouble.

Shmuel

11:15 PM:

In the meantime, I have no water in my bathroom, as of earlier today. Apparently, they were installing a new sink in a downstairs apartment, and a water shutoff valve broke in the "off" position. The water in the kitchen still works fine, though, so this is manageable; I can still use the toilet, with the help of a bucket to ferry water over. I'm told that water to the entire house will be shut off at noon tomorrow, and that full service should be restored shortly thereafter. Works for me.

So I just noticed that Christmas falls out on the Tenth of Teves this year, a fast day on the Jewish calendar. This amuses me, in an ironic sort of way.

(That I prefer staying indoors on Christmas in part because I don't feel entirely safe Walking While Jewish on that day may be a contributing factor. A strong racial memory can be a mixed blessing.)

Of course, I'm wildly inconsistent in this. Take my current answering machine message, to the tune of "Silent Night." (Written two years ago, and found at the end of this entry.) And then there's my love for Olive, the Other Reindeer, not to mention my ownership of Mariah Carey's Christmas album. (It's her best work. Which admittedly isn't saying all that much, but, really, it's good.)

On the other hand, I finally saw A Charlie Brown Christmas the other week, and was mystified as to why anybody would judge it to be even minimally acceptable, let alone a holiday institution. Based on Schultz's Christmas pageant comic strips, I expected much better than this slapdash shlock.

(There was a "making of" special afterward that explained that the show had been produced in a tremendous hurry, and that network executives were initially horrified when they saw the final product. The former explained a lot; the latter seemed entirely understandable.)

What I really want to see (also for the first time) is How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The cartoon version, that is. I'm hoping to accomplish this tomorrow night.

First and foremost, slightly belated congratulations to Mary Anne, on the sixth (sixth!) birthday of her online diary.

In other good news... well, I suppose a bit of background is in order. For the past few months, my kitchen has had an oven, a range (on top of the oven), a toaster oven, and a microwave. The first two of the above came with the apartment. I brought the toaster oven with me, and the microwave was brought up by my brother-- it was a surprise housewarming present from my cousins.

The toaster oven has gotten the most use by far. I use it for my pizza bagels, for soft pretzels, for vegetarian "chicken" nuggets.

Have I mentioned the vegetarian stuff? I know I meant to, but I don't think I ever got to it. Briefly, I have discovered the goodness of Morningstar Farms and their chicken nuggets and pizza burgers that don't actually contain any meat. Actually, they contain dairy, and they're amazingly like the real thing.

I can't quite tell you how mindblowing this is, especially given my frame of reference. The laws of kosher food have two major categories, meat and dairy, and never the twain may meet. (There's also a third category, "pareve," for food that contains neither meat nor dairy, and which can accordingly be eaten with either.) For present purposes, poultry falls into the meat category. A dairy chicken nugget is... well, at the least, very strange.

But they work. And, most importantly, they can be made in my toaster oven. The same does not apply to real chicken nuggets, because my toaster oven is used strictly for dairy food. Cooking meat products in it would not only render the meat non-kosher, but I'd have to pitch the toaster oven and buy a new one, it being impractical -- if not impossible -- to make it kosher again.

Theoretically, I'd be using the real oven for meat, as I did back in my old apartment, but I haven't yet gotten around to making it fit for kosher use. Basically, I need to clean it out really well, scrubbing away every particle of food or dirt, and then find somebody to come over with a blowtorch and use it on every inch of the interior. I have yet to get around to the former, partly because I haven't had time, and partly because the latter will involve requesting help from the local religious folk, and I'm not enthusiastic about the prospect.

(There is another solution, involving wrapping the food in two layers of aluminum foil before cooking it. I tried it once. The results were pretty dismal.)

As for the microwave, in my experience, microwaves are only really good at two things: defrosting food, and making popcorn. Actually cooking in one of the things... well, honestly, why would you want to? Unless you like rubber...

In the meantime, I've had three steaks in my freezer for almost four months now -- courtesy of my brother -- and nothing to do with them, except to consider the state of my oven and resolve to clean the thing.

On Friday, I was talking to my mother, and she asked how I was eating, and I said I was doing okay, basically living on pizza bagels, although I mentioned that, sadly, kosher pizza bagels are a lot more expensive here.

Which brings me to another aside: cost of living. (This is clearly another one of those long, rambling entries.) When I first mentioned to people that I was moving to Ann Arbor, a commonly-offered remark was that at least my rent would be going down. I would generally reply that, actually, my rent was going up substantially, but they would counter that, okay, I'd managed to land an apartment with abnormally low rent in New York, but that surely everything else would be cheaper in Ann Arbor.

Ha.

I regret that I haven't kept very good records -- okay, any records -- over the past few years, but there's no question that my cost of living has skyrocketed here.

Much of this is the kosher food thing. A simple look at supply and demand would predict that; going from an area with three exclusively kosher supermarkets and any number of other kosher stores just in the walk between my apartment and the college campus, to an area without a single exclusively kosher store of any sort, and with corresponding changes in clientele... I'm just lucky that anybody around here bothers to cater to the kosher market at all.

Nevertheless, while I'm pathetically grateful that I can get kosher pizza bagels here, the fact remains that I'm paying just under five bucks for a box of six (good for a meal and a half), where I had previously been accustomed to paying under three bucks for a pack with four slices of frozen pizza (good for two meals). In other words, the price per serving is double.

It's hard to directly compare in other areas, because I've had to adapt my diet to fit the available food. The fifty-nine cent packs of pita that used to be the bread I bought most often don't exist in Ann Arbor; what pita I've been able to find here has been thicker, yes, but at least twice the price. My favorite bread, this sort of thick flat slab, ninety-nine cents at the all-night fruit stand near my old place, is nowhere to be found. Instead, I've been eating a lot of matzoh, which I never used to do back in New York. But both Meijer and Hiller's carry it, and it can be stored forever without going bad. (On more than one occasion, I've had matzoh on Passover that had been saved from the previous Passover. One would never know without being told.) And then there's the Morningstar Farms stuff, which is actually priced fairly reasonably, but not when compared to the price per serving for the jumbo-sized sacks of chicken nuggets I was accustomed to buying back in New York.

When I wasn't just raiding the freezer at my parents' place, that is. Come to think of it, this is another factor, especially when it comes to meat. I tended to pick up a couple of steaks every time I visited, and that was occasionally the main reason I visited in the first place. (There is a long story relevant here, but I am going to show some restraint in this entry and not tell it.)

As for my daily two-liter-of-Coke habit... well, that depends. It's invariably 99 cents a bottle at Meijer, which is about what it would be on sale in New York, or ten to twenty cents cheaper than the non-sale price. Well and good, but I hit Meijer about once every week and a half on average, it being a bit of a trip. The rest of the time, when I run out -- and I always run out; I can't very well pick up ten bottles of soda at a time, especially if I'm taking the bus back -- I have to go to the local overpriced grocery, which charges $1.69 plus deposit. (The first time they rang this up, I was sure this was an error, that they'd thought it was a cold bottle. Nope.)

Don't even ask how much kosher meat costs here; it may be just as well that I haven't had it as an option until now.

Anyway, so I mentioned the food situation to my mother, downplaying the downsides as usual. She read between the lines as usual, in particular noting the lack of meaty intake. (I think she was a bit taken aback that I had actually been driven to trying vegetarian alternatives. "Vegetarian" is generally the very last word one would associate with me.) So I explained the whole oven situation, and she suggested that I get myself a George Foreman grill.

Yet another aside is in order here: my parents got a very large George Foreman grill as a present about a year ago. Shortly thereafter, I tried a burger made in the thing. Very skeptically, because I've always hated burgers. (And, unlike with some other foods I've professed not to like, this was not a position founded on ignorance. I've tried 'em. I haven't liked 'em.)

But, no, it was quite good. I even went back for seconds. And I've been silently yearning for a grill of my own ever since. (And do note that this yearning predates the lack-of-oven situation by many months, starting back in New York.) I have lost track of the number of times I've pored over the listings at Amazon.Com and Epinions, looking at the various models, deciding which one I wanted, and coming close to buying one, but never actually doing so.

I haven't done so for two reasons. The first is the cost: the model I wanted was sixty bucks. Cheaper models do exist, but they're too small for my purposes, only big enough for one burger or perhaps a chicken breast. If I'm gonna get a major kitchen appliance, I want it to be more useful than that. The second is counter space: I haven't had any.

My mother had been entirely unaware of my grill lust. In fact, she's still unaware of it; rather than grant that I'd had similar ideas, I simply pointed out the two above objections. She said that the counter space wasn't really a problem, because the grill could be stowed under the sink when not in use. I agreed that she had a point, the conversation moved on, and I figured that was that.

Then, a minute or two later, she said that I really ought to get one, and that she'd buy it for me. I pointed out that it wasn't necessary, as my current lack of an oven could and should be remedied. She countered that a Foreman grill is much better at what it does than a regular oven is, and that even with the latter, the former is quite worth having. With which I was hardly about to argue.

So earlier tonight, I picked up the George Foreman grill of my dreams at Meijer and charged it to her. And as soon as I got home, I test-drove it on one of those steaks mentioned much earlier in the entry. And while I think that next time I shall plan ahead and perhaps do some marinading, it was good, and I am a happy carnivore.

[Soundtrack for this entry: for the past two hours or so, "Wig in a Box" from Hedwig and the Angry Inch has been playing in the background on endless repeat. Thank you, spiffy DVD player, and thank you, Netflix.]