10 Days In The Desert

I'm going to Burning Man. I'm leaving in two hours.

It feels good to get that off my chest.

There is so much to say about it... but right now, my brain is a messy pile of spaghetti, so bear with me as I try to get this all down in one-pre-life-altering-event post.

I'm all atwitter with nervousness. Usually I would liken my emotional highs and lows to the typical roller coaster ride. But this? This has been more like being vaulted off the end of a see-saw at irregular intervals. When I first accepted the invitation (from my charming, freakish friends) they agreed to pay for my ticket if I took care of paying for things like water and gas and the like. And immediately I began my volley into the stratosphere. My first thought upon seeing my printed ticket?

WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING?

Remember how I loathe the idea of a contrived community? Remember how I hate constant noise? Remember that whole episode in the Flight Path Of An International Airport? Remember how I like to BATHE? And eat fresh fruit? And sleep in a real bed?

Before I saw the ticket though, there was a whole OTHER set of things to worry about . The second I said yes to this whole affair, I became obsessed about one thing and one thing only: sex. All I'd ever heard about Burning Man, and all I knew (from friends who have come back) is that something snaps inside people when they go and they come back wanting to do things like change their names to be more in line with their new-found purposes in life. (Thing like Ruby Greensleeves or FeatherMoonbeam. You know. Totally normal.) They also want to do things like sleep with everyone. EVERYone. Because Burning Man makes them realize how sexually repressed we are as a society. And that we should be boinking a WHOLE lot more. So, why not start with your neighbor? And then your neighbor's girlfriend? And then your neighbor's girlfriend's neighbor?

Did I mention that CLH is not going?

Okay, so I did a little talking with CLH and with my hosts and I think I have calmed down about it. I mean, I didn't say yes to this whole experience so that I could try my hand at polyamory... but I am only human. And I am probably breaking about fifty social taboos right now, but I'm just going to admit that I am human and that I didn't know how resistant I would be to the lure of new ideas about monogamy. I think I can safely say now that, after weighing just how special and unique my relationship with CLH is, and after seriously considering what "experimenting" has done to other couples I know, I am quite sure that my pants are going to stay on the whole time I'm at Burning Man.

So, now that that's all cleared up, there's plenty of room for the next set of neuroses. Enter: how do I live in the desert with no cell phone, no computer, limited resources, and no way to escape the constant visual stimuli? I mean, I have never, ever had to pack, not even on the most "extreme" backpacking trip I have even been on, stuff that would literally make the difference between a good time and a helicopter trip to the hospital. I'm already a Nervous Nelly when it comes to new environments and people I don't know. Add in my-ahem-issues with a certain grain and my intestinal fortitude, a 48 hours bus ride, closed in spaces, and, well, I'm breaking out in hives just typing this sentence. I need to bring EVERYthing I might need to survive (food, shelter, clothing, and a feather boa) for the next ten days. In the extreme heat of the day and the frigid temperatures of the night.

Of course, I love me some heat. But, desert heat? For ten straight days? With no relief except the occasional 75 mile per hour blinding, must-wear-goggles-and-masks windstorm? The kind that has the power to blow coolers and lawn furniture and whole tents into the next state? The tent that is my ONLY PROTECTION FROM THE SUN FOR TEN DAYS?

I've made several dozen packing lists. I've pulled every mumu, every glittery eyeshadow, and every kind of skin lotion out of the closets, stuffed them into four blue totes, and have allowed near-perfect strangers to load them onto a giant yellow school bus festooned in silk butterflies.

Oh. My. God.

I texted my friend Tara yesterday while I shopped for wigs and blinky lights, and she reminded me of my formerly brave self, the self that was not afraid, in 2004, to buy an RV off the side of the road and then drive it home, on a downhill, with no breaks. Tara and I do stuff like that.
We started chatting about what we could have done had that RV actually been drivable.

Tara: I just picture us wicked hot and broken down on Route 66, meeting a guy "selling glass" while he follows Wide Spread Panic or some other jam band. We buy weed off him and then line dance at the biker bar all night. Some guy in tattoos reads us the poetry he recently wrote about open roads and the purr of his Harley.

I hope Burning Man is EXACTLY like that.

The Other, Not As Rad, Lauren Ziemski

Hey, Twitter followers:
It has come to my attention that there is another Lauren Ziemski out there and that she's an actress living in California and that she Twitters. And that you may have thought she was me, so you started following her, and she's on to you. So sorry to disappoint, but I have not signed up for a Twitter account yet. My iPhone is in the shop (on the shelf, unbought) and, well, do you really want to know what I had for breakfast? Oh, wait. You're the Internets. OF COURSE you want to know what I had for breakfast.

Anywho, I Googled my name and this other Lauren Ziemski showed up first in line. Who would have thought there were two of us? Maybe there is even a THIRD Lauren Ziemski out there, some uber-creative woman with tons of devoted fans who want to know via Twitter what she's having for breakfast. Alas, I am none of these Lauren Ziemskis. And I am definitely not as rad as the actress, Lauren Ziemski. She says so right here:



I am not a stunning actress having a wine pairing party hosted by an amazing chef on Venice Beach. In fact, I am sitting slumped in my office chair, listening to sound of the garbage truck down the street, drinking tea with a moody name like "Earl Grey Skies", or something like it, and Googling my own name. That's right. I am Googling my own name. I don't have anything else to do with my time today. That's what you do in 2009 when you're bored. You try to find yourself on the Internet. That last statement is a hot mess of potential philosophical discussion designed for some we-don't-give-out-grades school, but we don't have time to talk about ideas here. We are busy posting about what we ate for breakfast.

Electric Stove: 1, Me: 0

So, one of the more unpleasant things about living in a rental unit? Having to get re-used to cooking on an electric stove. I have been cooking with gas for four years now (two years in my prior rental unit, and two years in the house In The Flight Path Of An International Airport), and, boy oh boy, what a difference a flame makes! Everyone warned me that once I went pilot light, I would never go back. Man, were they right.

Last week, I attempted to make my first pot of popcorn on our new electric stove. (Sidenote: CLH and I eat, on average, four bowls of popcorn a week. We've been making it on the stove from scratch for years now. CLH loves the classic melted butter and salt kind, but I fancy the more eclectic toppings... things like olive oil and nutritional yeast.... or sesame oil and minced seaweed. If you've never tried making it from scratch, I highly encourage you. It take minutes, it costs pennies, and believe it or not, it actually fills you up. I especially like to eat it in bed while reading. CLH, however, decidedly DOES NOT LIKE popcorn in the sheets. He's fussy like that.)

So, last week, I made the popcorn the way I have for years. Only, that method DOES NOT WORK on an electric stove. Turns out that the popcorn KEEPS COOKING even after you turn the heat off. Because that coil? That heinous heating element best suited for campstoves? That red hot spiral of menace? IT'S STILL HOT even after you turn it off. So, when I "turned the heat off", what I actually did was change the temperature from "branding-ready hot" to "third degree burns hot". Not much change there, you see. So, the popcorn burned. It burned bad. It burned so bad that, even now, seventeen scourings with white caustic powder and a green scrubbie pad later, it is still encrusted with carbonized corn matter. The pot got so hot (and stinky) that I had to put it out on the steps of the porch to cool it down. Which is where I took this picture.

Since then, the stove and I have made peace. It was actually the tea kettle that made this whole cooking-with-electricity thing clear to me. You're supposed to REMOVE the cooking vessel from the heating element when it is done heating! Otherwise it screeches at you! Now I remember! It's all coming back to me. Next week's lesson: Learning which setting means "not scorched" on the clothes dryer.

Welcome Back To The City

(Today's photo is brought to you by the Indignant Urbanites of Seattle, the same folks who brought you the "These Cookies Are As Hard As Dog Biscuits" rant.)

The note states:

"Whoever put this bag of animal feces in my trash can, you need to be a RESPONSIBLE dog owner and take it home with you. Thanks."

My favorite part? Oh, I don't know. There are too many things to love, really. There's the fact that "responsible" is spelled out in all caps. There's the little lesson at the end about how to be that responsible dog owner (take your poop home, dude). There's the fact that the word "Thanks" is underlined. There's the fact that this person DUG THE POOP out of their trash, WROTE A NOTE ABOUT THE POOP, and then STAPLED THE POOP TO A LIGHT POLE outside their house. It takes a special kind of indignant person to handle poop that many times.

I was going to create a post about the joys of walking to work, of how good it feels to not drive everywhere, of how CLOSE we are to everything.... but then (while on a walk) I saw this and I thought: Who wants to read about walking to work on the Internet when you read about my neighbors' unholy rage about poop in their trash can?

The New Face of Terrorism: Citrus Transporters

Among my more redeeming compulsions is my inability to throw away perfectly good food. Sure, I've tossed out my share of soggy bags of rotten lettuce... but I've done so with a heavy heart (and the memory of an elephant) such that when I got the chance to redeem myself later on down the road, no matter how much it made me that weird woman in the restaurant who just wrapped her uneaten tortillas in a napkin and shoved them in her purse, I've done it. CLH usually wants to slink under the table and disappear at times like these, but, to him I say: Look here, financial partner of mine! I have just saved us three perfectly good tortillas! That's at least THIRTY whole cents of food we won't have to buy this week!

Never mind that my fair city's restaurants compost a good deal of their food waste and that anything I don't eat gets turned into luscious, rich soil suitable for growing more food. No, even the most valiant efforts of our nation's most forward thinking city planners cannot stop my Depression Era tendencies.

Which brings us to the lemons.

So, we went on a trip to Canada this weekend. The trip was sponsored by a generous client of mine; he hosted nearly thirty people for dinner, which was prepared from scratch by one of our mutual friends. Mutual friend bought enough to feed a small army. And there were leftovers enough to feed another small army the next day. The sight of these leftovers, filling up an entire dining room table top, lit up the non-food wasting/money saving part of my brain, which, conveniently, is located right next to the part of my brain that makes my arms want to take home uneaten tortillas. Now, we didn't have a way to take home these particular leftovers... though, when we opened the 'fridge to take out our snacks for the ride home, we did discover leftovers we COULD take home. Sitting inside the fridge were pounds and pounds of gorgeous heirloom tomatoes. They didn't get used in the salad the night before and they were there for the taking. I couldn't help myself. Tomatoes might be my favorite food on earth. I love to grow them, eat them, cook with them, and juice them, and I especially like them pulverized and poured over vodka with Tabasco sauce and cocktail onions, extra olives, please.

And what was there in the vegetable drawer right next to the tomatoes? Why, the lemons. And on the floor, still in its grocery bag? A watermelon. A veritable feast for god's sake, all for free. We packed it in the car and headed home, my skin all a-tingle with the frugality of it all.

But guess what you can't take over the Canadian/US border, Internets? Guess what the guys in the scary SWAT team uniforms will search your car for? Guess why I, the non-driver, all sweaty and bloaty with menstrual cramps, had to get out of the car ? And guess why I had to redeem my passport at a building off to the side of the road full of other sweaty, bloaty people?

It was the lemons.

CLH and I had a five second conversation about the fruit in the car as we pulled up to the border crossing. We've been to Canada dozens of times, and we know the routine with food. You're not supposed to do it. If you're going to do it, be discreet, don't carry metric tons of it, and for god's sake, DON'T TELL THE BORDER POLICE YOU HAVE CITRUS FRUIT IN THE CAR.

But, the wait was two hours long, and we decided, just to be transparent and not get hauled off for lying about it and then interrogated by angry men in itchy, hot jumpsuits, we'd better declare the stupid lemons. So we did. And the stern but friendly man in the booth slapped a giant sized orange Post-It onto the windshield and told us to pull off and go to some building to the left, where we would need to surrender our contraband TWO LEMONS and pick up our passports. At this point, I was nearly unconscious with the heat of sitting in a non-air conditioned car for two hours. (Did I mention we were nearly out of gas and didn't have enough to be able to idle/run the A/C for two hours?) The heat, plus the ibuprofen I'd popped to relieve the cramps, makes this next part a little fuzzy. Apparently, we were given bad instructions to get to the nebulous "building to the left", so CLH parked and walked into the building he thought was the leftmost one, the building marked "AGRICULTURE". (Silly, silly man.) When he got inside, the officials were startled and suspicious and asked him how he'd gotten in the building. He explained he was just looking to hand over two lemons in exchange for our passports and had simply walked through the door. They got all edgy and explained that he needed to go to THAT leftmost building over there, the one NOT marked "Agriculture". So, he headed off to the OTHER leftmost building. Once at the desk, the border police told CLH they needed ME to come in the building, along with the keys to the car. Perfectly logical. About as logical as walking into a building marked "agriculture" to hand in some lemons.

I staggered in to the building, my skin flushed and hot, my lower half full of retained water, my face a consummate grimace of hate for all things inefficient, and practically hissed and spat at the overweight lady behind the counter. At this point, I finally caught a glance of the two offending lemons. There were lying on a counter behind the desk, on top of the giant orange Post-It. They looked absolutely ridiculous back there, these two tiny pieces of bright yellow fruit on top of an imposing black counter top where guns and drugs had probably lain hours before. And here we were, stuck at the border, having brought in lemons. That we bought in Canada. That had probably been GROWN IN THE US. And SHIPPED TO CANADA. We told the officer that there were also a bunch of tomatoes and one whole watermelon in the car as well- just in case she was feeling snackish and wanted to speed up the process.

When the border control officer returned, she looked down her nose at us and said, "You know you have tomatoes in there, too, right?" And here is where I had to dig my fingernails into my palms to resist shouting: Ummm..... YES, LADY. REMEMBER HOW WE DECLARED THAT FIVE MINUTES AGO TO YOU? AND TEN MINUTES AGO TO THE OFFICER IN THE BOOTH?

Finally, she scribbled a big "S" on the back of the Post-It, and sent us on our way. And that was it. Our departure from Canada sponsored by the letter "S".

So, the lesson here (and you knew there was lesson in this, didn't you?) is this: You can mosey on in, unannounced and unassisted, to a border control building. You can tell two different Homeland Security Officers what's in the car, but they won't write it down or tell each other (or remember what you've said is in there, either). You can bring in a watermelon, which is large enough to house several pounds of whatever contraband you fancy. Tomatoes are cool, too. But don't even THINK about, don't even CONSIDER, taking TWO LOUSY LEMONS into the country. Lemons are the fruit of the enemy. If the lemons get in, the terrorists win.

I feel more secure already.