Food poisoning. Me. Miserable.

I would never have gone to the place on my own, which somehow makes it worse: when I saw that its health department score was a B and not an A, it should have been a sign. But I was there with seven coworkers who raved about the place, so it's not like I could say, "Whoa, guys, did you see that B?"

Indian-vegetarian-kosher buffer. Never eating there again. Possibly never eating Indian food again. Possibly never eating any food again. Even water sends needles through my stomach.

I am sick enough that I'm pretty sure I just watched a rerun of The Bachelor. I slept through a lot of it, but still. Too sick to get the remote a foot away? That's sick, even when the, ahem, disgusting symptoms of food poisoning are over.
 

Since I am working in a new area of Manhattan now, I've been taking walks at lunch to some new places. It's pretty exciting to see new things, which sounds cliched, but I am still in awe of living in such a vibrant city. Maybe I always will be.

I only let myself buy lunch once a week — I pack a lunch every other day. Eating out is so expensive! Not to mention that when I bring my own, I know exactly what I'm getting and eat healthily. Anyway. Today was the day, so I picked very, very carefully. There are so many intriguing options (I made a list of bookmarks in my browser at work) that I want to eat them all!

Today, I picked a Vietnamese sandwich place and tried the signature Vietnamese sandwich, the banh mi. It was SO good. I can't even really describe it -- there's not another sandwich like it. It has some salty, spicy bacon-y tasting meat and some other stuff I couldn't tell what it was (it looked like cheese but it wasn't, but it was kind of creamy?), then thin sticks of pickled veggies (carrots, daikon, cucumber), and finally fresh cilantro and jalapenos on top. SO delicious. I was kind of blown away. I have never eaten anything like it before, but wow, it was delicious.

The place was kind of a hike from work, maybe 15 minutes each way walking, but I really like getting out for a walk over my lunch hour, so I was happy to do it. (Usually, I eat my bagged lunch at my desk and then walk around over my lunch hour. I used to eat in the park, but now it's too cold for that.) They have a honey mustard catfish sandwich on their menu that also looked amazing, and I will have to get that some time soon, too. The call of the banh mi is strong.

The restaurant is this tiny storefront in the middle of a block in Curry Hill, the nickname for a predominantly Indian neighborhood in Manhattan. (Most of the restaurants are Indian-vegetarian-kosher. Got to appeal to all the people working in Midtown.) I've walked through there many times before — there's this fantastic grocery store, Kalustyan's, that has more types of spices than I've ever seen. I've bought some spice mixes there before, and even when I'm not buying, I love wandering through it. I was pretty surprised to see that the Vietnamese sandwich place was nearby, but whatever works! I'll be back.
 

I've just finished reading Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which was why I picked it up. Critics of this year's list were right: it didn't deserve to be there. It wasn't that good.

It wasn't terrible. The voice was interesting and engaging, and I guess the rich, white British people who pick the shortlist would consider it to be singularly unique. But the problem that I had was that the entire time, I could tell the author was white.

For background, the narrator of Pigeon English is a eleven-year-old boy who recently immigrated from Ghana to a poor neighborhood of London. He experiences the new world he's living in through unique eyes, and it leads to a novel that is all about voice. The voice is generally pretty good; it's consistent and engaging, with some funny things going on. But the problem is that there was never a time I found it totally authentic. Halfway through the book, I actually looked the author up online, because I was so certain that he was a white, non-immigrant.

I was correct.

I am absolutely not one of those people who thinks that authors can't write characters outside of their class, their race, their sex, their personal point of view. I certainly don't do that myself! But when you are doing that, you have an especial burden to make it seem real. You have to have a real and sympathetic understanding of how your character will sound, how he or she will react, how he or she builds a view of the world from his or her past — not yours.

There are lots of writers who do this well. Why is Booker lauding an author who doesn't?

Honestly, I probably need to just stop reading Booker nominees and winners. I didn't care for Atonement. I didn't at all like {i]The Gathering. I hated The Accidental. I couldn't get through On Beauty (although I also couldn't get through White Teeth, because it was just. so. long., so maybe I am just not a Zadie Smith person).

I did really like Never Let Me Go and Notes on a Scandal, so I guess that's something. And Remains of the Day, although that came out like a million years ago.

L--- used to notice me talking about books say, "Don't you ever worry that people will think you're pretentious for talking about all the books you liked and didn't, like you are an expert?"

No.

I am an expert.

I know zero people who have read as widely as I. I didn't like Pigeon English for a concrete and verifiable reason. I expect more from Booker nominees. So there.
 

A--- and I are watching last night's Republican debate, and there is something that I just cannot get over.

Santorum and Gingrich are spending a lot of time criticizing Romney for being a "vulture capitalist" who pays an unnaturally low tax rate and takes advantage of working- and middle-class labor.

But they also think we need fewer regulations, lower capital gains taxes, and no labor protection laws.

Those things produce more Romneys. They produce more Bains.

It's economics, right? People respond to incentives in a direct causal relationship. If you get rid of regulations, lower capital gains rates, prevent the enforcement of antitrust laws — all things on the Republicans' platform — you get more Romneys.

If you really believe in capitalism, Republicans, then Romney should be your hero. He created a company that does nothing. (Consulting. It's nothing. Seriously, I have friends from Brown who work at Bain now, and it's all bullshit.) He charges companies out the nose for nothing. He rearranges and dismantles other companies with no regard for any consequence except the monetary bottom line. He should be your hero! He does what you think everyone should be doing — caring about nothing but money!

If you really believe in capitalism, Republicans, you have to stop with this faux-populism about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. The United States lost its comparative advantage in manufacturing decades ago. That won't change. And why should it? It isn't fiscally responsible. It's capitalism. Capitalism doesn't care if there are middle class jobs for the stupid but physically fit. It doesn't care about labor, period. Just like Romney.

If you really believe in capitalism, Republicans, you have to accept that capitalism means businesses fail, that people lose their jobs, that the economy fluctuates, that the rich get richer without necessitating the poor getting any richer themselves. That's what Romney did. Why aren't you cheering him?

If you really believe in capitalism, nothing else can matter. You shouldn't criticize Romney for doing what you think people should do in capitalism. He should be your hero! He should be your Dagny Taggart!

(Minus the railroad part, because we all know that railroads blow. Right, Republicans?)
 

There is a Korean bakery near my new work. Today, I dropped in to pick up a mochi donut for A--- and I to try. (We love mochi!) When I saw a red bean donut, I had to get that, too. And take a bite immediately. And gobble the rest of it down immediately. And start considering a second trip in one afternoon immediately.

It was so good. It was like the long-lost Korean cousin of those delicious sesame balls with red bean paste inside you get at dim sum places. Oh man. So delicious. I do think I prefer the Chinese ones, with those yummy sesame seeds on the outside, but this was delicious in its own right.

The problem: the bakery is too close. Just a couple blocks, right in the middle of Koreatown. It is not far away enough for me to say to myself, "No, that's too far to walk for a donut." It is not far away enough to burn off the million billion calories in that donut when I inevitably walk there. It is way too close for me to keep being a size seven when there is red bean paste to be had in a sticky fried donut.

Ohhhhhhh red bean donuts.
 

If only SOPA stood for "Silence Odious Politicians Act."

I feel like people don't even know how drastically the Internet could change if this bullshit legislation passed.

You hear all sorts of things like, "Who would even miss Craigslist and Reddit? What, you aren't going to be able to get your erotic massages fast enough?" But that's hardly the scope of it.

YouTube? Gone. Sayonara. Probably within a day.

Wikipedia? Gone. People post crapola on there all the time. I give it a week, tops, before they are served in a civil suit.

Goodreads? Librarything? Gone. One person posts too long a quote from the wrong book, and some overly litigious publisher — and remember, these are companies with falling profits — takes them out.

Wordpress? Blogspot? Livejournal? Any site that lets anybody start a blog? Gone.

All those hilarious tumblrs featuring screenshots or quotes from TV shows or movies? Gone. I like to think that the people behind "Arrested Development" would leave arrestedwesteros.com alone, but HBO wouldn't, and my life would be emptier without Arrested Westeros in my RSS feed.

Writing.com? Very possibly gone, too. Not as soon as YouTube or Wikipedia, but you and I both know that there are people here who post copyrighted materials, and if you think for an instant that WDC has the funds to mount any legal defense against the high-powered music industry because someone used more than five lines of a song lyric in their BioBlock, you're wrong. It's over. It's all over.

This is a real thing, people. This is a real problem with a real consequence. I don't want to live in a world without my favorite websites.

There are a lot of people who think SOPA will kill the Internet. That's extreme. All it'll do is make the Internet less inventive, less fun, less useful, less broad, less innovative. Like the Internet now, but a lot less of it.
 

So here's a new thing: it seems that the provision of the Affordable Care Act about women's health prescriptions became effective this month, and I no longer have to pay a co-pay on my endo-specific birth control pill. Pretty rad, saving me fifteen dollars every three weeks.

Now, if only I could knock this cold before work tomorrow morning. Not sure I want to spend my 9:30 meeting nursing a sinus headache with my tea.

My plan is to watch the Republican debate tonight on mute, in the hopes that it'll be bland enough I'll conk out within fifteen minutes. I'd use a book, but both of the books I'm reading right now are actually really great so far: The Visible Man by Chuck Klosterman and The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen.

Now, all I need to do will be shower, make a lunch for tomorrow, and go to the Chat Reviews meeting. Shower, I can do now, but it is so hard to make a lunch when I feel sick: I stare at the food, get a small stomachache, and suspect that I will never be hungry again.

 

...not that she would.

I wanted to come in here and unload about how terrible this evening at A---'s mom's house was, but I realized that I can't even do her justice. It would just sound like complaining, the standard "mother-in-law" bit even though I am (luckily) not legally bound to her, when it is more. Oh, it is so much more. Being in her house is like being in a fucking Sartre play.

I will put it this way: the entire twenty-minute drive home, we both complained. I did most of the shouting and all of the crying, but A--- was right there with me, agreeing, adding details, trying to reassure me that it is not just I who feels this terrible woman should be left in her Hoarders-level house just to avoid all of this.

Usually, I keep my mouth shut. I kept my mouth shut the first time I met her, when she spent an hour and a half telling me how much of a bastard her ex-husband was — A---'s father, whom I had also just met, who had paid for my train ticket and been nothing but kind to me. I kept my mouth shut every single one of the hundred times she asked me to agree that her 13-year-old daughter is a huge bitch. I kept my mouth shut every time she said straight-up ignorant things about the world and the people in it. I would, at the beginning, mention to A--- afterward how uncomfortable these things made me, on that foolish idea that she is the sort of person who might take a small hint from her son and, you know, be welcoming to company. OH 2010 LORIEN, HOW VERY STUPID YOU WERE.

I don't know what it was that tipped me over tonight. Actually, I didn't tip: I still kept my mouth shut when I was there. But the second we were back in the car, bam, it was out. I shouted, and I explained, and I shouted more and cried, and I just went on and on until I lost my breath, because god damn I just cannot be around that woman anymore.

Tonight, she yelled at me for being cold. Now, you have to remember that this woman does not use her heat in the winter or her AC in the summer, because she's only making $150,000 in alimony a year (this is her real reason; she has told it to me multiple times, despite the fact that the very first time, I stared at her, mouth agape, because my working parents together do not make that much money, and they use their AC, like normal people!). So tonight, her house was about 60 degrees. Which is cold, for a house, when you're just sitting still at the kitchen table. When we arrived, I noticed it was cold. A--- commented on it being cold. She did not respond by offering to up the heat at all. She just said, "I feel fine." Of course you fucking do, you live in this fucking house all day and your obese body is used to it. What about the non-obese people? WHAT ABOUT US BITCH?

(There are no commas in rant-land, it seems. Ah, fuck it.)

So, tonight she and A---'s younger sister, C---, had had an argument before A--- and I arrived because C--- and a friend wanted to go to a party about twenty minutes away and A---'s mom didn't want to drive them. Apparently this blew up into a big thing, because C--- is a thirteen-year-old girl and A---'s mom has the maturity level of one, so things were already tense when we got there. When it was time for dinner, C--- and her friend came down to the table and C--- commented on how cold it was in the house. Because, FYI, it was cold. Cold like a house with no heat on in the winter in New York gets cold.

This turned into a big fight (because if there is one way to be a good mother, it's having a blow-out screaming match with your teenaged daughter in front of a bunch of company), which ended in a detente of silent eating. It was cold. I finished eating, but I still had to sit at the table (because where else would I go? I'm a good person, a polite person, not someone who up and leaves at the last bite of rice). It was cold. I went and got my coat, both because I was cold and because there were tissues in the pockets, and if you don't recall, her house is infused with a layer of cat fur, to which I am very allergic. (She doesn't vacuum before I come over or anything crazy like that. She does, however, get miffed whenever I start to sniffle. Because I am making it up probably! Because I am a huge bitch faking allergies! Yes! That's the likeliest explanation!)

So I put my coat over my shoulders and come back to the table.

Now, as you might be guessing, this is when the yelling began directed at me instead. You can follow the logic only a little if you are a normal person: C--- said it was cold, and I am fighting with C---, so if Lorien is cold, she must be siding with C---! What a bitch! Time to yell!

You know, like a normal person would do to their son's girlfriend. Yep.

When A--- came back from the bathroom, I pulled him aside to explain what she had done and tell him that I was ready to leave. Beyond ready. There was another big screaming match between her and C---, so that made a nice distraction, I guess. Then C--- stormed back to her room, there was more demanding that we agree how much of a bitch C--- is (which I would not and do not agree with: she's a fucking 13-year-old and she is your daughter, so maybe cursing her behind her back isn't the best form of parenting action). Then there was this whole ordeal because of the five bathrooms in her house, only one works, and she refuses (a) to get them fixed or (b) acknowledge that it is her fault that they have not been fixed. For real. Six months ago, there were two working bathrooms. When A--- and I started dating, which was like almost two years ago now, three worked. THAT MEANS TWO BATHROOMS IN HER HOUSE HAVE NOT WORKED FOR MORE THAN TWO YEARS BUT IT IS NOT HER FAULT THAT SHE HAS NOT CALLED ANYONE. You know! Like normal people do!

This is really the issue. Nothing can ever be her fault. Nothing can ever be implied to even be 1% partially her fault. Say such a thing, imply such a thing, and you are a bastard. It's fucking pathological.

(I should probably change this journal's rating to GC instead of 18+. She makes me want to curse. That's it. It's just her.)

And you know what else? You can't leave. It's his fucking mother. I have already gotten us out of having to sleep over there ever (because it makes me so sick, although A--- was thrilled to have an excuse not to have to be there. His room, by the way, got filled up by her hoarding within months of going to college, and hasn't once been cleaned out in the years since then). Oh and FYI you will be happy to know that I have repeatedly been described as "selfish" for not wanting to sleep in a place that makes me extremely sick. Not to my face. Just to A---, repeatedly, and no matter how many times he explains that I get sick just from being there a few hours, she shakes her head and says I'm selfish and that he should be there with her anyway.

It is like being in No Exit. Hell is other people. Hell is A---'s mother.

So tonight, I pretty much burst. It all came pouring out — way more than this, more details, more things that I just couldn't keep thinking about anymore without saying to him. But he gets it. He understands. He explained that there are things even worse than these last two years' worth, that she's reacted worse to other people — that it's a lost cause, essentially.

Lost cause. Great.

This is what I explained to him: she is not my family. I am not obligated to humor her the way he and his family seem to feel they are. I am an adult with a house and paycheck, and I do not have to take that kind of bullshit from her or from anyone else. He can explain that to her if he wants, or he can just accept that it will not happen again, because I will not let it. I will not be spoken to that way, and if the way that happens is by not ever going to her terrible house again, that I will feel zero guilt about it. Her inability to understand even the tiniest criticism about making people feel uncomfortable is not my fault, and it is not my problem to fix. It's hers. If she won't bother, I certainly won't.

He got it. He squeezed my hand and smiled and said I was right. (Of course I'm right.) He thinks it's a lost cause, and hell, it probably is. But I will not live this way. She is a toxic person, and I have zero interest in kneeling down to her neuroses the way everyone else seems to.

And that's that.
 

Tomorrow's the big day. I already made my peanut butter sandwich for lunch and picked out an outfit. Now, I just need to quell my nerves enough to get some sleep tonight. Tougher than it sounds.

Here's hoping it's just as awesome as it seems!
 

Anyone need something proofread on the cheap?

ID: 1837786   (Rated: ASR) Copyediting/Proofreading Services  Give your short story, poem, novel, resume or other item a professional proofread. by Lorien