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Friday, April 18th, 2003
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9:27 am - Look, Jesus has risen from the dead! "Braaaaaaaaainns…"
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There's an Easter Cookout this weekend, so I'm going to try to track down some rabbit for the grill. I've never cooked rabbit, I'm not sure what kind of marinade to use; a red wine or mushroomy kind of thing? Rabbit Fajitas? Rabbit L'Orange? Perhaps jut lightly brushed with olive oil and salt and pepper, and served with mango-ginger chutney.
Couplingchaos gave me the idea for the proper seasonal drink: Peep Martinis! I've got some vodka with blue peeps infusing in my fridge now.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten marshmallow treats.
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| Thursday, April 17th, 2003
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10:10 am - It's the clothes.
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The B&D; Ball performance is really coming together, the swordfight choreography tween Photiq and I feels better and better. The fancy theatre swords and the tight ruffley clothes, you feel totally different in costume. There's a certain confidence, a calmly poised assurance, ok now we're doing this for real. I saw an interview once with Ray Park, talking about getting into Darth Maul character, and he said the first time he put on those robes he was all "Aww yeeeaaaahhhhh." I love costume! Love it love it love it.
We only had the top coats to our 18th century French dandy outfits, we're wearing black jeans underneath and Photiq says "Dude! We look so J-Rock!" and it's true. I still have fantasies about being in an asian goth boy band. I even have the band name picked out: "Euthanasia". Or we might spell it "Youth In Asia", we'll figure that out when we get our first gig.
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| Wednesday, April 16th, 2003
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4:25 pm
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On Monday we went out to The Independent in Union Square, they'd sent me a right-neighborly $20-off coupon for dinner so I said what the hell. I've been there for drinks once, and I dig the décor: dark wood, framed mirrors, big fuckoff light fixtures hanging from the ceiling. It's pub-y, yet modern; yuppie, yet inviting. The $26 prix-fix is a good deal: three battered shrimps on a pile of blackbean and onion slaw with habanero glaze, a thick juicy porkchop with grilled asparagus and herbs that were just a little too salty for my taste, Mexican chocolate crème brulee with macaroons. The menu's quite short, with some decent items but nothing that really leapt off the page at me. My first glass of zinfandel was competent, but the Grenache-Syrah I had after that was not so good. It was flat and heavy, with this odd aftertaste of something...eh. Maybe I just don't like Grenache-Syrahs, I dunno.
I've managed to try hardly any of the restaurants in my neighborhood, for this I am ashamed.
Last night I was all excited for the Buffy, but the accursed Red Sox bumped the show to 11:00. Tuning to UPN a few minutes before, there was a new show called Platinum. I think it's about the rap music business. There's a lot of black people in it.
On at the same time was this fascinating GBH show about the nuclear arms race. I didn't know that, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and Khrushchev were making secret deals; in the end they worked it out that Russia would remove it's missiles from Cuba if we swore not to invade Cuba and removed our missiles from Hungary. So it wasn't such a simplistic "They backed down so we won" scenario that most people think it was. It was also neat to hear as a stated fact that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. I would have loved to watch the whole show, but I could only catch the bits during the Buffy commercials.
Speaking of which, Caleb is the coolest guy ever!
"Xander, when I told you to keep an eye out for the Big Bad Guy, I didn't mean..."
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| Tuesday, April 15th, 2003
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12:03 pm - Gamedorking
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The last time we got together to play Dungeons & Dragons, we more or less walked all over the bad guys. A stern glance from Juliette's halfling cleric makes zombies explode, and anything she misses is soon taken care of by John, our NPC who serves as forward artillery: he's a double-proficiency Archer with a Shortbow Of Speed. "Gee, I didn't know you could belt-feed a shortbow with depleted uranium arrows." I'm a female Cavalier with 60 hit points and +2 plate armor, I'm there to look pretty and soak up damage. Ralph's a half-orc fighter, he, uh, soaks up damage. Ben is a magic-user sneak thief who always gets trap-checking detail (BOOM! "...uuuuugh...found one...") and Nick, well nobody knows what the hell Nick is, he flies and he's got this claw-claw-bite thing going. Don't ask.
As I was saying, we're a capable band of mid-level adventurers, and recently we've been kicking ass without breaking a sweat. Until Sunday. Ambushed by sleep-dart-throwing Pixies and a Hill Giant we'll call Mr. Fist. We wake up underground, missing our favorite weapons. We fight our way through Quicklings (I hate Quicklings. They're so damn fast, the only way you'll ever hit one is if they basically run into your sword), annoying Pixies, a right crazy bastard of an Illusionist and finally we get to a Will O' The Wisp. Have you ever seen a couple of 5th-level fighters try to hit a monster with a -8 Armor Class? It's not pretty. Me and Ralph are like retards at a Mexican birthday party, with a piñata that glows purple and fires lightning bolts. Swinging at it with my +1 Flame Tongue, I'm all "Obi-Wan, I can't see a thing with the blast shield down!" Bzzaap! "OW!" Catch us next week on The World Of Greyhawk's Funniest Videos. We finally kill the 'Wisp with a bizarre chain of events that goes something like this: While Cavalier and Fighter make fools of themselves, Magic-User finds pile of treasure. Magic-User casts Detect Magic on treasure pile. Magic-User finds magic ring, Magic-User casts Identify on Ring, Ring turns out to be Ring Of Spell Storing. Magic-User remembers previously looted spellbook contains Magic Missle, Magic-User reads Magic Missle spell out of book and into ring, (the equivalent of slapping in a 20-round clip into your favorite sidearm), Magic-User steps up and pops many caps into Will O' The Wisp, shouting "How ya like me NOW, bitch!?!"
We get our weapons back, but our horses are gone. Next session I wanna find that damn Hill Giant.
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| Monday, April 14th, 2003
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10:40 am - It's for you.
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I miss phones. Real phones, the ones with the spiral cord connecting the handset to the base, big heavy black plastic and the pushbuttons that stand unreasonably tall out of the front face. I miss the indescribably satisfying action of dialing the numbers with the same hand you grip the handset in, middle finger extended down and punching those digits with a sort of casual assurance...there's something so oddly businesslike and confident about doing the handset-in-hand-button-pushy thing, I have no idea why, but I love it. You have to be standing up when you're doing it though, you definitely need to be looking down at the phone on a desk. I don't know why, but otherwise the magic won't work, trust me.
current music: 687-5309
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| Thursday, April 10th, 2003
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12:13 pm - more drink more dreams more bed more drugs more lust more lies more hate more love
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There are some women, friends of mine I've known for years, with whom I've always been utterly infatuated and around whom I'm always slightly nervous, though I like to think I hide it well; I know I'd only ever have a shot at them if I were the last man on earth. Hey, that means I still have a chance, right? All I have to do is be the last man on earth. In the meantime I can steal glances and daydream hungrily.
In the immortal words of Charlie Brown, sometimes I just feel so fucking lame.
There are other times I'm absolutely certain that I'm the luckiest sunuvabitch in the world.
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| Tuesday, April 8th, 2003
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9:16 am - These aren't the droids ye be looking fer, ye scurvy dogs, arrrr.
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Walking towards Ceremony and seeing two stormtroopers, a TIE pilot and Lord Vader standing outside by the door, I got a huge smile that never left my face the whole night. How could anyone not love a platoon of troopers, Imperial officers, Darth Vader, Boba Fett, a Twi'lek and a friggin Tusken Raider. The only thing missing was a Snowtrooper, I've never seen one of those. They're the sexiest of all the Imperial infantry, because (of course) they wear skirts. The club decorations were fabulous, the little touches like Star Destroyers hung from the ceiling and the Death Star Disco Ball. Utterly perfect.
But now it's a slushy gray morning. The daylight savings timechange, the staying up late, the drinking and the 6:00am alarm clock have all combined to form this fearsome and unrelenting monster bent on my destruction. It's Voltron in hangover form. I'm done for.
current music: Shiver me timbers matey, I've a bad feelin about this, arrr.
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| Monday, April 7th, 2003
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12:44 pm - Moving right along.
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The surprise-theme for Jenna's birthday party was Tiki, and that gave me the opportunity to try something I've always wanted to do: make a coconut bra. With the help of a hacksaw, a power drill and Kevin's vise-clamp table, we quickly had a serviceable, if somewhat husky and scratchy bra. It was a little small, I didn't know my boobs were so big. The party was cute and fun tho I got suddenly exhausted at 3:00 so we left.
Saturday was a bunch of errand-running, the most exciting of which was ordering glasses. I haven't had new glasses since like, college, the prescription is way out of date and the frames are these huge dorky tortoiseshell things, I absolutely hate them. So I found these nifty pewter oval Oakley frames, and, as Oakley is wont to do, they have these queer protuberances and embellishments that serve no real purpose. I haven’t worn glasses out in public for years. Glasses make you look smart, right? I hope they make me look wikkid smaht, because chicks dig that.
Sometimes it seems I spend hours in a bookstore and I can't find anything interesting, other times I find a stack of books and I can't bear to put any of them back. I walk out of Barnes & Noble with: Globalization And Its Discontents - Joseph Stiglitz. I'm almost embarrassed to admit I haven't read this yet, kinda like how I'll be ashamed if I never get around to Guns, Germs And Steel. Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say - Douglas Rushkoff. Media, marketing and manipulation, the cover design and back cover blurbs are a bit strident but it looks like an entertaining read. Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication - Stuart Walton. Sounds really cool, doesn’t it?
I pick up couplingchaos and we get to the Fenway Theatres just in time to catch Chicago. The dancing is good, the songs range from quite good to just mediocre, the direction and cinematography are very clever - I love how the songs are presented in that dream-sequencey alternate reality. I'm thinking about the movie the next day when I realize that the lead characters are all rather despicable, bordering on downright vile. The protagonists are two murderers and the lawyer that helps them get away with it; they are all completely remorseless, contemptible and self-centered, and in the end they win fame and adoration. Which is not to say that characters have to be admirable to be compelling, the main character's long-suffering husband is a decent man but he's simpleminded and dull as dirt, he's just as one-dimensional as the rest of them. The lack of motivational complexity is bad enough, but the sheer baseness of the motivation makes the experience almost unpleasant. It's one thing if your character is cardboard cutout driven by Honor, Justice or Love, it's quite another if the only thing they want is Celebrity. I was surprised and a little relieved that there was no hint of romantic involvement between any of the leads, it would have been as appealing as watching lepers fuck.
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11:36 am - Leave your droids at the door.
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My god, there's a Star Wars theme at Ceremony tonight. What the hell am I gonna wear? If I can actually have a drink at the bar while the Star Wars Cantina theme is playing, I will die a happy man.
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| Tuesday, April 1st, 2003
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4:03 pm
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11:01 am
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From time to time I get party invites that say "No drama allowed" or "Check your drama at the door", and it always strikes me as a rather useless declaration because if some fool really can't handle their shit, they're not going to find hitherto untapped reserves of civility just because an email asks them to. "You know, I was going to make a scene, but since this party's been labeled No Drama I'll just save it for next time." If you check your drama at the door, you get a ticket, right? Heaven forbid you go home with someone else's drama at the end of the night. "I'm really sorry, but I lost my ticket - but my drama's right over there, it's the red one, with the immaturity all over it...yeah with the jealousy issues too...no not the self-deluded commitment aversion, the one next to it, with the insecurity and self-loathing...yeah that one. Thanks!"
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| Friday, March 28th, 2003
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7:46 am - Good night, Westley, sleep well. I'll most likely kill you in the morning.
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So, I got laid off in October, then they called me back to work through the end of the year. In early December they said I could work through March. Now my boss has just told me that I can stay till the end of April. Go, me!
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| Thursday, March 27th, 2003
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4:18 pm - The failure's in here, somewhere.
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It's been about three weeks since I sprained my knee, and I'm getting better, albeit slowly. My recoveries usually border on miraculous, so the fact that I still feel occasional pain walking or taking stairs is unexpected and infuriating. By far the worst part of it is that I cannot dance. I've gone to ManRay or Ceremony a few times to hang out and get my social fix, but after an hour I see all my achingly beautiful friends dancing with the abandon I wish I had, and I get really fucking depressed so I go home. I could say that I leave on my own and I go home and I cry and I want to die, but I won't. The thing is, I can feel myself interacting differently with people at the club, I'm not as happy or hyperactive and I sense it in the way I talk to people. I'm not as funny or pleasant as I flatter myself to think I usually am. I can't go onto the dance floor, and that disability informs my entire mood at the club and, to a certain extent, everywhere else. I certainly didn't expect a pissy little thing like compromised mobility to affect my normally sunny disposition. Dammit.
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10:03 am - Our hero enters, stage left.
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One of my favorite things about springtime is when it gets warmer outside in the sun but it's still chilly in the windy shadows of tall buildings so I wear my long winter coat unbuttoned over jeans and a t-shirt. I'd almost be a little hot under the thick wool, but then the wind blowing through my open coat cools me down. The constant temperature variation from warm to cool and warm is really pleasant, I suppose that's why people like it at the beach where it'd be blazing hot if it weren't for the breeze off the ocean.
What's really stupid is how much I like it when my long coat billows out and flaps around behind me, I start imagining that I'm some badass movie anti-hero. I think I might even walk differently - a longer, slower stride I'd like to describe as "casually dangerous" but is probably more like "dorky and idiotic". Swear to god, sometimes it gets so bad that I'm almost trying to walk in slow motion, because you know how much cooler and badass those guys look when they're walking towards the camera in slow motion. That scene at the beginning of Reservoir Dogs, you know the one I'm talking about.
So why is it that people look so cool and purposeful in slow motion, and even cooler when they're walking in slow motion with a wind-machine blowing their coattails around? What's up with that? Is it just because we've all grown up on movies where those scenes in the wild west showdown, post-apocalyptic wasteland, and harsh concrete city jungle were all filmed by guys who went to the same Dramatic Badass School Of Cinematography? Or is there really something hardwired into our brains that makes us equate slow-mo wind-effect with Serious Protagonist?
It occurs to me that I've had this slow-motion-windy-days obsession for a long time, and I've likely written about it in this livejournal before, but I really don't have the stomach to go back through a year and a half of entries. So I'll just take a walk outside with my big coat.
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| Monday, March 24th, 2003
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2:15 pm - Democracy At The Point Of A Gun
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So when this war's over, if we win and install a new government that's not just a puppet for the US, if the new Iraq ends up being a true representative democracy, with freedom and justice for all...well then my reason for opposing this war will have been proven false. We will have overthrown a foreign government for three pretty compelling reasons: it's threat to it's neighbors, it's crimes against humanity, and to make a the lives of it's citizens substantially better. On their own, none of those reasons feel quite enough to justify the Last Resort of war, but taken together, I think military action is warranted.
Personally, I find the human rights issue to be the most compelling reason. The Responsibility To Protect…the successes and failures to protect human rights have marked the highest and lowest points in the history of the United States and the international community. Somalia...Rwanda...Bosnia...those are the easy ones, where it had been clear that swift action was needed to prevent disaster or ease suffering. Those situations are easy to judge because there is the breakdown in civil society and/or the obvious persecution of an ethnic or religious minority. So, let's just say, theoretically, that the US was going to war to solely fulfill it's Responsibility To Protect the Iraqi people, why would I be even mildly conflicted about supporting it? Is it because Saddam Hussein, however brutal and oppressive, does not represent the anarchy and chaos of Somalia and Rwanda? Is it because Saddam's regime is not systematically murdering an easily recognizable ethnic or religious segment of the population? Would I let Saddam get away with it, just because he's never openly declared a plan for ethnic cleansing, or announced on his state-run media that the Shiite Muslims are cockroaches that need to be wiped out?
I don't know. A deciding factor would definitely be if there were many other nations along with us, not just the governments of course, but the people of Europe and the Middle East. That, of course, raises the question: do human rights only matter when lots of people agree on the course of action? Of course not, I'm just deeply uncomfortable with one nation invading another. But I also believe that Saddam would never shape up or give up power. So should the US have done a better job of convincing the world community to form the sort of coalition that kicked Saddam out of Kuwait? Obviously it should have, but what if other nations would have blocked those efforts, no matter what the justification? Russia and China would veto any UN action, but could we have convinced the rest of NATO, and worked with Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait, and gotten them to mollify Iran and Syria?
Irregardlessly, here we are. The best I can hope for is that we're fighting to Liberate The People Of Iraq...really, I swear, Scout's Honor, cross my heart and hope to die, and I'm still not comfortable with instituting democracy at the point of a gun, and I'm a little disgusted at all my hand-wringing. I'm off my moral balance here, and I don't like it one bit.
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| Wednesday, March 19th, 2003
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8:41 am
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Ok, so if I go out to dinner with some chick, and she's wearing garters and stockings, does that mean she wants me? That brief flash of garters through a skirt slit, or if a short skirt hikes up a teensy bit above the stockings, it's not like that's ever accidental, right? If you're a cute chick, and a boy's taking you out to dinner, would you wear garters if you don't wanna jump him?
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| Thursday, March 13th, 2003
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11:07 am - A thousand monkeys
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Liza37337 posted about a free concert at the New England Conservatory, something about Claude Debussy’s The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian. I don't know much about classical music, but St Sebastian was that pierced-by-arrows-guy, right? That's so cool. I don't know much about Debussy either, but some of my favorite words end in "-ussy" so it couldn't be too bad.
Debussy was the first piece and it was absolutely amazing. The music seemed alive and everywhere, the sound was so clear, the music so pure I thought oh my lord this is why we have ears, this is why we have souls.
The second piece was a classical and Balinese composition with Gamelan Galak Tika, it was written as a memorial to the Sari Club terrorist bombing last year in Bali. The composer spoke for a little while about it, warning us that the mixture of European and Balinese musical elements may sound dissonant, but I didn't think so at all. From the very beginning the European violins and cellos served as a base, a grounding for the bright and hypnotic Balinese percussion and bells, that low flowing string sustain seemed to work perfectly with the xylophonic Balinese instruments, their scale progression repetitive like a mantra. The piece moved from a mournful lament to a crashing invocation to a quiet and thoughtful benediction; I was captivated by the spirituality of it, which is weird because I'm one of the least spiritual people I know.
Liza's boyfriend is in Gamelan, and he looked cute in a skirt and turban.
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| Wednesday, March 12th, 2003
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8:22 am - Hellooooo nurse!
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So I got this email from a cute little chickee and she offhandedly mentioned "nurse's uniform" and for the rest of the day I'm going mmmmmmmm nurses uniform…. It's really distracting, I'm trying to debug code and my eyes would kinda unfocus and I'd totally lose track of what I'm doing, thinking about this girl in a white PVC nurses uniform, you know the kind that's short sleeved and collared with a deep button down v-neck, the skirt ends like six inches above the knee, the little white PVC hat with a red cross on it that she has bobby-pinned to her hair in a bun. The Nurse fetish is my favorite, because there's that thin veneer of the nurse-patient professional relationship, yet part of that relationship is the intimacy of touch and exploration of the body. Nurses have this delicious balance of knowledgeable authority and the duty to serve. Doctors are not so sexy, the doctors are about pain and surgery. Nurses are all about making you feel better.
Yeah…nurses uniform. Hoo boy. Is it getting hot in here?
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| Thursday, March 6th, 2003
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12:42 pm - Pura Vida
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If I hadn't mentioned it before, the coffee in Costa Rica is really good. It should be, you can see it growing on the sides of the mountains1 that ring San Jose. All the coffee is grown on small family farms, most of the beans are bought by the Britt coffee company and roasted in their plant downtown, which I tour my last afternoon in the city. The three tour guides are professional actors, playing the roles of two coffee pickers and a plantation owner, they take us through a small field of coffee plants growing in neat rows at the back corner of the property. I take a ripe red coffee bean and squeeze the skin off it, there's a clear sweet liquid inside, coating the two halves of the inside pale beige bean, which are very bitter if you bite down on them. The actors are really good, they ham up the roles of wiseguy slacker fieldhand, his exasperated girlfriend and their good natured, long suffering boss; the performance wouldn't be out of place in Disneyworld. I learn lots about the coffee making 2 and a thousand years of coffee history3 in song and dance.
After the tour I've got a few minutes before the bus leaves, I wander around the property to a hill that overlooks the neighborhood and there's a gorgeous view of the mountains to the north. The air is warm and gently humid, a breeze rustles the leaves and the late afternoon sun seems to drench the entire valley in idyllic daydreams. The clouds crawling over the mountains are bright white and contentedly thick, the tops of the mountains rise above, richly green and imperious against the dark blue sky. A lot of expatriates retire here to Costa Rica, and I can see why; I can imagine spending years here, and never getting tired of this view.
1. That clichéd coffee-marketing phrase "mountain grown" is actually quite relevant; coffee plants growing at high elevations produce beans that are tougher and better able to stand up to the roasting process without burning.
2. It takes 9 months for a coffee bean to ripen, and the beans have to be picked by hand because they don't all reach the right stage of ripeness at the same time, so a coffee picker may go over the same plant 3 or 4 times. The sweet liquid coating the inside bean is called mucilage, and it ferments and goes bad really fast so the bean are taken from the field to the processing plant in the same day. The beans are inspected and the red skins and mucilage washed off, and the thin pale brown skin or each bean half is also removed. The red skins are mulched into fertilizer that goes back for use on the plantation, the light brown skin is called parchment and is used to make paper. After the skins and mucilage are removed the resulting beans are less than half their original size and weight, these are laid out on mats and dried in the sun. After drying they are inspected and sorted, and then they're roasted to medium or dark espresso. A few batches are sent to Germany for decaffeinating, since there's no demand for decaf coffee in Costa Rica. If the locals mention decaf coffee you can almost hear the quotation marks they put around the phrase - decaf "coffee". They feel the same way about light "beer" and soy "meat". Anyway, you see Britt coffee everywhere in Costa Rica, I'm usually too snobby to consider buying coffee at the supermarket but that rule so does not apply in this country.
3. Coffee originated in the ancient Arab world and made it's way north and west through Europe, converting kings and popes to the Way Of The Bean. It was smuggled to the New World where it found lush, perfect conditions in the high volcanic soil of Central America. Costa Rica was built on The Golden Bean - "El Grano Oro" - the early government gave plots of land, coffee plants and tax-free status to any farmer willing to homestead the steep mountainsides. The small family farm model persists to this day, as well as strict quality oversight and management.
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| Wednesday, March 5th, 2003
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10:06 am - You're Gonna Carry That Weight
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My flight back to Boston leaves tomorrow morning and I can't bear the thought of returning to the killing winter, so I'm going to go jump off a bridge. That's the best part about bungee jumping in Costa Rica: you can do it off a bridge, none of that lame ass jump-off-a-crane shit like back in the States. Stupid public-safety officials.
( Waaaaaaahhh-hooohooohooohoooie...! )
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