raven.

I picked up a half gallon of butter pecan ice cream at the supermarket this weekend. Didn't think much of it. Just a flavor I hadn't tried in a while, taken home. Taken home to wait. I didn't even know if I'd even get a spoonful--I've been eating a reasonably clean diet in recent weeks: whole grains, fruits, vegetables, legumes, seafood. Limited dairy. No red meat or even poultry.

Suddenly I am ravenous.

*****

Standard ingredients in butter pecan ice cream:
cream
butter
brown sugar
pecans
vanilla

Those who make it as a custard will use eggs as well.

*****

I didn't sleep well last night, the culprit being a snuck-in coffee. Even when I'm not eating a clean diet, caffeine destroys my sleep. After weeks devoid, an iced Starbucks transforms the dark hours into delirium--me, mostly conscious yet only vaguely aware; sleep and awake: vicious, violent intertwining, coupling, tossing, wrestling, no one on top of the other for any notable duration.

Lavender seeps through the shades, slight, a drip, a light, slowly, slowly, herald of the hour so familiar this past year: four o'clock to five. When the drip is a pour and the awake finds a hand at its throat, sleep slides in.

*****

A thicker ice cream, a hard and custard-based, nearly begs less a lick and more a firm, persistent sucking. One might think it decidedly masculine, in that preference, were it not sometimes so rich as to engage the teeth.

The beauty of butter pecan, however and of course, is the concurrence of the savory and the sweet.

The Texture of Sushi

Salmon is cool on my tongue, and sweet. No matter how I try to remember, its smoothness is always a pleasant surprise, the creaminess of the fatty ripples a decadent treat.

You can never know what someone else is thinking--across the table, across the street, across the ocean. No matter the glimmers of light that beacon--occasionally, intermittently, consistently--another person's mind is always the darkness over the unbridged chasm. All I can know is the taste of the salmon, and the metallic coolness of my keys as I press my fingers against them to make sure I am there.

If your mind runs away, she tells me, grab your keys. Run your finger along the jagged edges. Look at the keychains. Touch them. Your mind will come back.

It is true. My mind travels, but when my senses call, it comes running.

I can never know another's thoughts, and why would I want to? If ever we could truly share a brain, we'd not desire so blindingly to share our bodies.

Perspective whispers in my ear: even and until then, there's no denying a shared acre of heart. In a world in which all I thought I could be sure of was the texture of sushi, that little assurance is a sweet surprise.

Cupcake

Do you ever just want to write something delicious? Something simple and sweet and... perhaps a little naughty? Something, let's say, not on your diet.

Or maybe you don't want to write it. Maybe you want to say it. You want to sit across the table from someone and swirl the frosting on. Sprinkle on some bits of sugar. Watch as the spring-hued sweets fall across the bed of icing, some of them toppling off onto the tablecloth. Then you'd take a step back and store it in your mind--the colors, the textures, the contrasts. Before you moisten the soft pad of your thumb, press it down onto the sprinkles, make them stick. Lift it to your mouth.

What you do next is up to you.

A mental snapshot... a tiny taste... pricelessly delicious teases.
But not a substitute for the whole thing.

Will you answer to "Cupcake"?

on distance. and color. and candy.

I speak young, but don't sound like a child. I catapult from words to sentences precociously. My mother speaks to me as if I am an adult, especially since my father is so often away on business. Even though her family is just next door.

Each time he goes, we pack for him--the green fold-over that holds his business suits, and another bag for his necessities. My mother gives me candy to hide in the bag--Peanut Chews, Twizzlers, and Chuckles. I separate them so he doesn't find them all at once. Lots of little surprises are better than just one.

In time, I am allowed to roller-skate to the corner store to buy the candy myself. "You know the ones to get," my mother tells me. I tuck the money into a skate. She leans over the fence and watches me go.

I don't like the way the Chuckles are arranged in the package. Red, yellow, black, orange, green: ugly. Why would they do this? It should be red, orange, yellow, green, blue--a rainbow, like my bedspread. But there are no blue Chuckles. There should be a blue one, and it should taste like the blue raspberry in the rainbow Italian ices. But the black one is his favorite. If I can find the black licorice-flavored Twizzlers, I buy those.

I add notes and drawings, pages ripped out of my coloring books, carefully shaded with my Crayolas. The blues are my favorites. Blue, blue-green, green-blue. My best friend in kindergarten, Marie-Elena, decides we must each have a favorite crayon, but we can't have the same favorite. She gets blue-green; I get green-blue. Blue-green is really my favorite, but I let her think it can be hers. I don't bother to tell her that she can't change my mind.

I don't ask my father if he gets mad at the black Chuckle like I do, for taking the place of a blue one, though I want to. His eyes are blue. Maybe that's why he doesn't seem to care that there's no blue one. Maybe he thinks it would be like eating his eyes.

"Oh, Westley!":The Princess Bride and Comfort Food

Yesterday was a hot, sticky day. It's been like that all week. August in New York is one of those experiences that you erase out of your consciousness after every instance, and the next time it happens, you're blind-sided. I've been living on Gatorade, fruit, and random salty things all week. The air conditioning in my car gave up again. And yesterday, at rush hour, I had to drive through Manhattan, up to Kim's, for a quick run-through of the show in preparation for our final performance.

The West Side Highway was like a parking lot. It took me 47 minutes to drive...8 miles? I had forgotten to recharge my iPod, so I couldn't use the transmitter. But, because it was rush hour, all the radio stations were trying to be supportive. And because Bryan had taken the time to pre-set all the good rock stations on my radio the last time I'd been staring out at the Hudson wishing I could jump in, there was very little searching for me to do. For some reason, every rock station in NYC became obsessed with Joan Jett and Van Halen between 4:30 and 6pm yesterday. This, of course, was not a problem. In fact, it made me very, very happy, even though I was sitting in a pool of sweat and un-triumphantly watching the Carnival Triumph sail by. I opened all the windows, sang along, and tried not to bang my head against the steering wheel.

By the time I got to Kim's I was starving, but so was everyone else. For some reason, they allowed me to pick the take-out place that we would order dinner from. I think it had something to do with the passionate way I was reading menu selections aloud. With mashed potatoes...oh my God... Barbecue sauce was sounding so damn appealing, and I'd been fantasizing about those sweet potato fries since I'd first laid eyes on that menu two months ago. So yes, we went with the barbecue chicken sandwiches (all white meat, kaiser rolls, unbelievable sauteed onions) and those orange orgasms.

After we ordered, we sat around in the living room, staring at each other. There was just no way work was going to get done until we were fed. That was abundantly clear. So we did the only thing a bunch of reasonable people wanting to goof off could do--rifled through Kim's DVD collection. We decided on the cinematic equal to the comfort food we were eagerly awaiting--The Princess Bride.

Now, I love this movie. Everyone I know that has seen the movie, loves the movie. (Amazingly, Ingrid had never seen the movie. We all tried to not ruin it for her. We tried.) But you've got to admit, Buttercup is a priss. What Westley sees in her, I have no idea, especially when she's standing by letting him get his ass handed to him by a Rodent of Unusual Size. Jump in, birdbrain! Westley, don't you want a woman who's got your back? Come on! Incidentally, I am not the only woman to feel this way. The other three females who were there and had seen it said exactly the same thing. The lone male...well, Bryan is smart enough to keep quiet when he's outnumbered, even if he agrees.

When the food finally arrived, the fries were slightly soggy, and of course they weren't accompanied by the fancy-pants sweet chili sauce & crème fraiche that Eight Mile Creek does to perfection...but what they didn't offer in crispness, we all made up for with our voracious need for fat & carbs. And the perfectly sauteed onions earned the place brownie points in our takeout rolodex. Then we had frozen Snickers bars for dessert.

Joy, my friend and a super editor, just called. I've got to run out to meet her (so she can give me a guilt trip about how I called one of my essays "The Final Draft" even though I knew it was no where near finally done.) I told her what I was writing about, and by freaky coincidence, she also watched The Princess Bride last night. Really freaky coincidence. I didn't ask her how she felt about Buttercup and the Rodent. I'll just keep that up my sleeve until I need to change the subject from the revising guilt trip.

My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.