Of Trying

It’s the season for celebration! Whether you’re toasting in the New Year, Matthew, Laura and me in honor of our graduation, or family and friends on Christmas, these little babies are complex enough to knock your taste buds into celebration mode.

Luck
(Adapted from Katsuya’s “Burning Manderin”)

I am a huge fan of “spice-rack” cocktails, or cocktails that fare on the savory or spicy side. I saw something like this at Katsuya and decided it might be my new favorite. The complexity of sweet, spicy, and sour in this martini is painfully perfect.

Ӣ 2 oz Mandarin Vodka
”¢ ¾ oz fresh squeezed OJ
”¢ ¾ oz fresh squeezed Lemon Juice
Ӣ 1 chopped Serrano chili (I like it with the seeds still in but you decide)
Ӣ splash of cranberry
”¢ Shake and strain into a chilled martini glass with a sugar-coated rim. Garnish with a large’ish jalapeño wheel.

Happiness
OK this may seem like a summer drink, but I had a craving the other day, so it made the cut. The pomegranate and grapefruit combo is fucking beautiful. For a(n) (important) variation, try some crushed ice and a splash of lemon-grass liqueur.

(serve in highball glass with ice)
Ӣ 2oz (not well!) gin
Ӣ 1 oz pomegranate juice
Ӣ Fresh squeezed lime wedge
Ӣ Top with grapefruit Izze and garnish with a lime

Longevity
Everyone needs a booch’ey cocktail every now and then to make their bodies happier(/lives better?). Well I could literally drink this cocktail for breakfast it’s so easy/perfect. For those of you who feel weird about Raspberry-infused vodka (cough, me), try muddling the raspberry with some lemon and using regular vodka to avoid the unforgiving fake raspberry flavor (and let me know how it is!).

(serve in a highball glass over ice)
”¢ 1 ¼ oz Raspberry-infused Vodka
Ӣ 1 fresh-squeezed lemon wedge
Ӣ 1 tsp fresh squeezed ginger
Ӣ Fill with homemade or unflavored raw organic Kombucha
Ӣ Splash of soda water
Ӣ Shake and top with a raspberry

Prosperity
During wintertime, most people opt for thick, sweet drinks that they think make them warmer. It is due to this time of year that we have unfortunate combinations like the North Pole Cocktail. That's so filthy.
When it gets cold in SoCal, the only thing I can think about is something fresh and crisp to match that not-too-cold bite in the air! Something like shochu (which you can get at most Japanese markets, probably somewhere like Whole Foods, and definitely at a Japanese restaurant)

(serve in a highball glass with CRUSHED ice)
”¢ 1 ¼ oz Japanese Shochu
Ӣ muddle 2 cucumber slices and a kaffir lime leaf
Ӣ top with Lemongrass Dry Soda
Ӣ Stir
Ӣ garnish with 2 mint leaves

"Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.

And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, or whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: 'It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.'"

- Baudelaire as quoted in Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night"

Cheers! May you been drunken with wine, with poetry, and with virtue. Here’s to us.

1.3 Experiments:
There have been a number. of .things that keep bringing me back to thinking about Kevin lately.
Near the top of the long (endless?) list of less-than-awesome things about bartending for a corporate bar-and-grill, is small-talking with the saucy, generally inappropriate men who sit at my bar-top every night e x p e c t i n g. And so, I perform: I talk about football; I don't punch their faces for their continual ignorance.
But Kevin, Kevin is my tiny jewel.

Kevin is a kind man. He is hands-down the most devoted bar regular my restaurant has ever seen, and definitely the most laid-back customer we have ever served. But he is also my friend.
Every time Kevin shows up, I get butterflies in my stomach...we all do, I think. He has one of those faces that you could search over every day and still feel as if you could not fully know all of it...like it might shift or swell at any time and you do not want to miss it. He is always kind, always new. He expects nothing and so we offer him everything. Even his drink is programmed into our computer systems under the clever title "The Kevin" (Presidente margarita, extra brandy, shaken, in a frosted mug, no salt, lime squeezed on top) and is made more carefully (lovingly) than any drink in the house. Instead of bullshitting about football and the weather, we literally talk for hours about art (he is endlessly trying to get me to love Dali the way he does), and folk music (Indian, Cuban), and the world in general (we both listen to too much NPR). We exchange novels and discuss the details with each other the whole way through reading. On Sundays, Kevin comes in dressed in his Sunday suit and brings with him a new riddle that he hears on the radio. Some days I solve them, some days I beg and beg until he tells me the answer (after swearing up and down that he never would tell). He is wiser than any of us are ready for. Sometimes I watch him working out responses to questions inside his head for literally hours before presenting them, sometimes days even. He is often the best part of my day and is undoubtedly the best part of my job.
I've concluded that I am in love with Kevin, in every way that I want to know how to be in love with a person. He is more than three times my age. That is so awesome.

So then there's her. A few months ago a girl so similar to my own self that I have more than once confused her face (her words, her irrationality) for my own, told me that she hated me so fervently that it made her physically ill. I still don't know what to do with those words. As I read them printed out permanently in front of me, all I could think about was driving to her filthy, smoky apartment and pressing my face really close up against hers until we saw something, ANYTHING in the pores of the other to convince us that there were lovely things there. I never said a word to her in response, and I know I will not now.

1.4 Conclusions:
In the (probably butchered) words of my sweet friend
"Maybe it is not that there are no old men and only girls, but that I am supremely envious of old men and girls. I want their kind of category and placement...a place to fold my legs up into my chest, like age."

There are periods in life when it seems that the cosmos are laughing hysterically in your face. Maybe that is what this is all about, not about a little boy on a train, or loving an old man, or a woman reminding me of me. I have classified the young and the old and the somewhere-in-between because I do not know what else to do with them, and because I myself feel somewhere lost in that middle. To overcome age, and convenience. To be timeless and transparent. What would that even look like? There is this theory about human connection that has been made popular recently by Dr. Fred Alan Wolfe (who I find brilliant and wonderful a lot of the time, and a kook the rest of the time) and a whole swarm of "collective-joy" scholars, which basically states that human beings can be thought of as separate wave-producing bodies that, when resonating in harmony with another body of waves, produce exponential amounts of energy between the two. This is to say that our bodies, the chemicals and movements and reactions inside of us, are already defying (all ready to defy) the constraints of time and age and "love." Now that is awesome.

So let's just say, it would be really nice to meet up...in the train, my bar, your smoky apartment.

I have always thought of myself as a scientist.
As a little girl I can remember wanting so badly to walk on water that I spent two entire afternoons figuring how much salt needed to be added to a beaker of water to make a marble float (how much for a bouncy ball in a plastic cup. for a bowling ball in a bucket. me, walking across my bathwater). Even though I ran out of salt long before that bowling ball was floating, I can remember acknowledging- maybe for the first time- that I had discovered something that I thought was “real.” As I get bigger and learn more about the Everything, I keep revisiting that mind-blowing moment of touching the fringe of “truth”- where for a moment you know something in the world:but maybe nothing at all. Perhaps the reason we are so in love with the scientific process- that meticulous attempt to prove something- is that it has never lied to us:because it has never claimed to have all the answers. Science lies on the fact that truth is relative, that no matter how many times I walk on salty bathwater, salt and water may one day drown me.

Wait, I’m also talking about something bigger than that here.

I’m talking about collective observation. I’m talking about experimentation. I’m talking about us helping each other into the warm lap of truth and nuzzling our faces against its huge, transparent knees. The Nobel laureate in Chemistry John Polanyi talked about you and me in his love story about the scientific process:

“Science, by contrast, is story-telling. This is evident in the way we use our primary scientific instrument, the eye. The eye searches for shapes. It searches for a beginning, a middle, and an end. What we see is as a consequence, culturally conditioned. This is open to misunderstanding. It might be construed to mean that our conclusions are simply a matter of taste, which they are not. Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal. It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience.”

I am privy, too, to your science. I see you observing your subjects, tallying your little findings. You pour over pages and pages of human expression to find some constant, some gloriously simple equation proving (finally!) that you are as much me as I am you. What you do not know but have always known, what I have been scared to tell you for so long, is that I love your trying. Observing your attempts is my experimentation. Climbing into your skin through your back, pressing my face into the mold of your face, looking at the color that your eyes think is green:THIS is my phenomena.

I’m so glad that you’re here. This is for Us.