Food Porn for Thought

Yesterday BMW & I celebrated our three year anniversary by going to dinner at a four-star place in Tribeca. We both dressed up for the occasion, and he even wore a suit and got his hair cut! He was so smooth that he even had a special flower arrangement delivered to the restaurant and placed at our table. However, people say that after a while, the romance tends to fade; appropriately, we were joking the other day about how sometimes it feels like forever that we've been together, especially when we get into the habit of nagging each other.

"God, it feels like we're married," I told him this past weekend, laughing. I found it funny because that's not at all what I envision my future marriage to be like. I always say how I don't want to have a marriage like my parents did, one filled with yelling and fighting. In fact, AP & I were just talking about wives who gripe about having sex with their husbands. Why the hell would you marry someone you didn't want to have sex with? And if you did want to be intimate with that person at one point, why wouldn't you try to maintain feelings you once had for each other?

It was with this attitude that I went into our anniversary dinner--that is, the attitude of "I'm not going to stop working on something I love." That means I'm going to tell him when he pisses me off, admit when I'm wrong, and try and focus on something I can do for him everyday, rather than focusing on what he can do for me.

So, it is with these thoughts in mind that I give to you some porn--I mean food--for thought, our dinner at Bouley last night:

Warning: Pictures are fuzzy because we had to turn the flash off. I didn't want to annoy our French waitstaff at BMW's plebeian desire to photograph every single course.

Our waiter, or one of the seven waitstaff we had (yes, seven), came around with an antique bread cart and handed us a warm baguette and an apple-cinnamon roll. And then he came around later and let us pick from the cart which type of bread we wanted--he was the modern adult's version of the Ice Cream Man. I stared at the breads as he sliced off a piece for BMW, practically drooling and immediately regretting my "no thank you" to more bread. So he asked me again, and I took a piece of the fig bread over the walnut-saffron. It was orgasmic.

Another waiter brought us an amuse-bouche of gazpacho with shrimp beneath an apple sorbet. It was even better than it sounds, with melt-in-your-mouth flavors both sweet and savory, the tartness of the apple an exemplary of the perfect sweet-to-sour ratio (right).

For our appetizers, BMW shared bites of his chilled Maine lobster, mango, and artichoke mezzaluna wrapped in Serrano ham and drizzled with a passion fruit, coconut and tamarind dressing.

I hoarded most of my hamachi and melon deliciousness, but I gave a few bites to him to be fair.
We asked our cute sommelier to recommend wine for our main courses and his face lit up. He selected a cabernet from Alexander valley in California which was nothing short of incredible.

BMW ordered the baby pig, milk-fed with a diet of organic apples and grass only, the menu claims (shut up, vegetarians--it was juicy and delicious). I had the most perfectly cooked duck, smothered in a honey-vanilla glaze and I wanted to cream my pants, it was so good.

After dinner, a waitress brought us a palate cleanser from the kitchen, a sorbet of pineapple and coconut with passion fruit sauce. With our dessert they brought us lychee ice cream with crystallized raspberry at the bottom. After our desserts (I had the Chocolate Frivolous, a plate of miniature desserts including a toasted hazelnut wafer, chocolate brûlée, a Valrhona chocolate soufflé, chocolate parfait rolled in soybean powder and pine nut praline ice cream; BMW had Chocolate Brioche with espresso anglaise, dulce de leche, a saffron tuile and prune armagnac ice cream), they brought us a plate of mini pastries--in case we weren't already full.
On our way out, they reminded me to take my flowers, and even gave us a load of lemon-tea bread from their bakery as a way of thanking us for coming. I ate it for breakfast this morning and relished the meal and its accompanying resolutions, planning to have our next celebration at another one of David Bouley's restaurants.

I had insomnia last night

So this is the extent of Family CUNT today:

Number 2 and I were talking about him getting a job for the school year when he gets back from Geneva. I suggested tutoring.

Number 2: In what?? I have no experience. I haven't even helped anyone with homework. Except YOU haha!
Me: Hmm. What about Math?
Number 2: I haven't done Math since high school.
Number 2: Do you remember when you were in high school--
Me: Nope.
Number 2: --And you helped me with homework?
Me: NO.
Number 2: And we sat on your bed...
Me: NO. I DON'T.
Number 2: And did Spanish homework?
Me: Oh. I thought you were gonna ask if I remembered the time you tried helping me with Physics and I still didn't get it.
Number 2: No. I'm talking about the time you taught me how to say "tu madre trabaja en la esquina para pesos."

I am the best older sister. Ever.

E's Sex Quiz

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

Let Me Tell You About the Time

We all had sex on Bee's bed.

All, as in me, Number 2, Chief and Boss. Next up are Mogwog and Kaggle.

In honor of Bee's birthday that I forgot (technically I didn't; I just didn't realize it was the 26th and not the 25th when I called), this week's Family CUNT will recount the story of how Bee's bed became "the sex den."

Once upon a time, Number 2 suffered a MAJOR lapse in judgment--and we're talking like the time you cheated on your wife with that hooker and took pictures with your camera phone, and left your phone open on the kitchen table. This misfortune befell Number 2 when he was just 18 and met a girl named Moose.

Number 2 and Moose were pretween twat lovers from a distance and couldn't spend a lot of time together, so MM allowed Moose to spend the weekend at our house. I was already in college (read: when MM & Cement Hands bought the new house, they didn't think I needed a bedroom) and didn't even spend so much as the first summer at home, but I WAS there for this weekend.

Scene: Number 2 kills the engine on his Slederon and "We Might As Well Be Strangers" fades out. Yes, for the record, you listened to some pretty gay music. Moose follows his car into the driveway in her--can I say it? She's going to know I'm talking about her anyway, so sure--apple green VW Beetle. At this point I am convinced that the reason my brother had a Brooklyn fade and was listening to Keane was all because of this little fag hag.

Moose wasn't prepared for the visit and didn't have a bathing suit. Cue MM to lend her one of Bee's, even though she is about 350lbs heavier than all of us combined--all of us meaning me, Number 2, Bee, Chief, Boss, Mogwog, Kaggle, MM, Cement Hands, and Nickel. Number 2 claims that she wasn't fat [and a slut] when he met her, but I remember trying on that bathing suit after Moose wore it--and this was after my freshman fifteen--and looking like a Somalian refugee in a tee-shirt from the Good Will bin.

Later on that day, after frolicking in the pool and disappearing for a while, Moose went home and MM called Number 2 into her bedroom.

"Your sister said you have some explaining to do," she said.

Turns out, Bee went into her bedroom after Moose's visit to find rumpled sheets reeking of sex, and a pillow wedged between her headboard and mattress. Number 2 confessed that he shot the Moose with a loaded gun, knocking her out with a bullet between the eyes.

This incident began the tradition of having sex on Bee's bed. The first time I spent the weekend in her bedroom with BMW, I felt bad even thinking about sexing on her bed because of what our brother had done. However, my hands and knees were getting rug burn while on the floor trying to be a conscientious sister, so we joined the bandwagon and christened the bed.

Next was Boss, and then Chief--all before Bee herself finally sealed the deal. We like to say that's because she was adopted, but I'll save that story for another Family CUNT.

Live from New York

We interrupt this Family CUNT broadcast to bring you live coverage from Park Slope, Brooklyn, where your unreliable narrator has just moved and is currently fending off loneliness while her partner gazes out the window of his new office at the Empire State Building.

I can hear kids playing outside at the school next door from the multiple windows of our Park Slope apartment. Su, a Korean-American photographer and tchotchke collector extraordinaire, is in Beijing for an art residency for the summer. In an hour and a half, we inhabited her apartment, shoving mementos out of the way to make room for our own modest supply: a jewelry box, my Vladimir Kush painting, a box from Spain that holds cuff links. Brushed aside were knickknacks of indeterminate significance: a silvery, fabric model airplane that I immediately took down; boxes containing fortunes and buttons; business cards and receipts propped up on the spiky side of a broken hairbrush. A whole lotta shit packed into less than 800 square feet.

I pieced the decor together, retro-modern motifs remaining bright in the foreground--art-nouveau airplanes, heirloom end tables paired with cherry-plastic Ikea bookcases. At first it made me want to vomit, the disharmony of bright colors and synthetic materials mashed with refinished antiques. But since moving in Saturday afternoon it's become nostalgic and comfortable, a throwback to my pack rat days when I was 14.

Ironically, before we moved into Su's place, we spent the a few days at my family's house. I spent all day Friday rifling through photos in search of one of the Nazi--so that I can accompany my post about him with imagery. Even though my siblings warned me that MM had shredded all remnants of her life with him--half out of guilt and half out of disgust--I continued anyway. With well over one thousand loose photographs strewn across the living room floor, I found a single polaroid of him in the exact position I'd described earlier: he sat on the couch while my youngest sisters styled his hair. Unfortunately, he's more photogenic than I would have hoped, but I have no doubt that my forthcoming details will do justice to his true nature.

While sorting through the pictures, I found one of the few albums ever created in my house. Maybe it was the same need I felt at that moment, the need to organize the chronicles of my youth so that all the memories wouldn't escape, that had inspired me to create the scrapbook I found on Friday afternoon. I'd made it sometime in eighth grade, selecting eight pages worth of photos for the album. In a few pages I orchestrated a visual description of my youth: my closeness with Number 2 shown through various pictures of us together, my arms always wrapped around him; my deference toward my father captured in my body language; my role in the hierarchy of my siblings as leader, exposed in the way I stood behind my siblings in group shots.

Finding my scrapbook reminded me how I used to collage like it was going out of style, covering shoe boxes, prescription bottles, picture frames with decoupaged magazine clippings. And then every month or so, MM would come into my room while I was at school and sort through things she considered to be "trash."

After dragging my scrapbook with me up to Park Slope, I scanned them and made a virtual album. Then when we moved in, I looked around at Su's collectibles, perceiving them as clutter. Immediately, MM's demand for clutter-free spaces kicked in, and I felt the urge to purge.

Despite the instinct to do so, something got in the way; the fact that I couldn't get rid of someone else's stuff simply because at a young age I was indoctrinated to "cleanse" and not simply "clean" was not the only aspect of my decision to keep myself from organizing a stranger's home. As I looked closer, Su's collection of crap took the shape of individual items, like post cards from places she's traveled, the most recent of which was tacked to the fridge--an image of Koh Tapu in Thailand, also known as James Bond Island, as it was the location where The Man with the Golden Gun was filmed. She'd mailed the card to herself with a short description of the things she saw and did there, perhaps so she could hold onto the elusive good times, in a similar way that I had once tried. I took her stacks of notebooks and datebooks and used them as inspiration to rekindle my own impulse to remember, to recreate. I've started carrying my camera with me at all times in an effort to do so.

Some of the highlights, aside from acclimating to our new dwelling:
. Prospect Park at dusk
. 5th Avenue Street Fair
. Meeting Jennifer Connelly at sushi a block away from our house.

When i first saw her it was in the waiting area of the restaurant and we were being seated, so I just glanced at her and was like oh em gee that's Jennifer Connelly. BMW thought I was mistaken, but my brother believed me--after all, it is a known fact that I read the news daily. So I bet BMW $100 it was her, and it was decided that I had to ask her if it was, and get a picture with her.

I went over to her and crouched down like a jackass, and asked her quietly if she was, in fact, Jennifer Connelly.
Jennifer Connelly: "Yeah."
So I said, omgiloveyoucanigetapicturewithyou, only it sounded way cooler at the time.
Jennifer Connelly: "Uhhhh yeah, sure."
(Number 2 noticed that she was on her iPhone, something that my boss thinks was a ploy to avoid people like me).

I told her we'd just moved to Park Slope and she said "Welcome!" or something cool like that. And I said something dumb like, Well I hope to see you around! which was probably the very opposite of what she was thinking.

We went to our table and immediately started talking about her, and then they set the table right next to us and she sat down with her posse of one friend and her son.

Then she went to the bathroom to wash her kid's hands--I'm inferring all this, that's what you do when you have kids, I assume, wash their hands before eating--and while she was gone I guess she asked her friend to move their table (maybe via her cool iPhone technology) because when she came back, as I tried not to stare, I noticed that her table had moved back several tables BEHIND me. Oh well.

But yes, she does look as hot in person. Even without makeup, and for that I hope she dies. Gonna try and run into her again at Union Hall, a favorite Park Slope hangout of hers.

Stay tuned for pictures!

Rain Check for Family CUNT

Yes, I'm aware that yesterday was Tuesday. Unfortunately, this past week has been busy: today is my last day in the office before I start working remotely; my pretween birthday was this weekend and Sixes came down to celebrate with me & Velvie, a day that one of my worthless ingrates of a sibling forgot (AHEM...KYLE). None of them offered to write the Family CUNT, and BMW and I have been packing up the house for Park Slope, so we had a moment of silence for yesterday's C-U-Next-Tuesday. Don't worry--we'll reconvene next Tuesday for more family smut.

In other news, my mother is now signing her emails as "MM."

I sent her this e-card for Mother's Day:

To which she replied:
Thanks LOL.
--MM

As if the lolspeak isn't enough, she already has a fan club in my office--my coworker, who frequently comments as "Anonymous" always suggests that I blog about MM on Family CUNTday. People are googling "MM" and "rabbit." I'm not surprised if a Facebook Group pops up celebrating her large, American breasts--uh, I mean her honor.

Family Nemeses, Part One

There has been a lot of good news lately. First, my birthday is Saturday. Second, my birthday is Saturday. Third, my office is going to let me work from Brooklyn this summer. BMW is taking me to St. Maarten's this summer, and next summer we're moving to NYC. That's right--the best news of all is probably that I am not going to AU for grad school.

In light of all this good news, I've been distracted. My friends have been quick to point me back to reality, though; one friend has been cutting people out of her life like they were malignant tumors, ridding her body of the cancer. In listening to her dilemmas and giving her advice, I thought about the people whom I've cut out of my life; and then, the people our family has cut out of our lives!

Family Nemeses, Part One: Aunt Tina

My dad's youngest sister. After 9/11, the Red Cross offered aid to family members who lost someone in the attacks. Tina thought this was a prime opportunity to collect a free ride. After all, she'd been conning others her whole life: she threw herself down a flight of "icy" steps and sued her landlord for negligence, going so far as to have surgery on her "injured" hip. Tina used the settlement money for coke and time in a recording studio, playing her demo tape of tone-deaf entropies on the cassette player for us when I was nine. She showed us head shots and (unfortunately) body shots that she'd had taken--a pink leather suit was painted on her, and her hair stuck out in white-blonde tufts at all angles. I will never recover from seeing those images.

Tina was fond of visiting us in the summer, and by visiting I mean slathering oil on her cellulite and smothering a raft in our pool, yelling at one of us to bring her more Hawaiian Tropic. Sometimes she'd take us to play mini golf, but not before asking my dad for money in her fake Bawston accent.

"C'mawn, Jawn," she'd say, "I haven't been able to work because of my hip."

When we got to Blackbeard's Cave, though, she'd rush us through the holes so we could make it home in time for her to tan her lardass out back.

She thought she struck it rich when she met her first husband, a rock star who played guitar in some garage band without a real job, living off unemployment. They'd clean out her cottage and lug garbage bags full of concert t-shirts down to our house, passing the clothes off as vintage classics. We wore them as pajamas for a few weeks before we got a better idea. We took them outside and tied them together to fashion a rope ladder from the high branch of the apple tree.

Naturally, when Tina realized the Rock Star wasn't going to make shit, she dropped his ass, but not before making sure she had collateral: her son's name was Harrison John Richard Michael Scott Paul the Fourteenth, or something stupid like that, and he became a source of guaranteed income for Tina after she got divorced. The judge allowed her to keep her house, which was a poor excuse for a bungalow and was perched on the top of a hill, quickly sliding toward the lake at the bottom. The house reeked of cat shit and cigarettes, with swamp gases wafting through the windows from the backyard.

The floors of the house were sloped at a thirty-degree angle AT LEAST, with bi-fold doors every forty square feet to form "rooms." The methane alone is probably what caused her to jump at the chance to upgrade as soon as 9/11 happened.

She filed a claim with the Red Cross, indicating that my dad provided for her (with the forty bucks he'd lend her to take us golfing). As a result, they gave her money and aided a fraud. Not sure if she's been sent to jail or not--the last voluntary contact we had with her was almost seven years ago. The last indirect contact we had was when she appeared on the evening news at Moussaoui's sentencing, with the endless pout on her face and professional tears in her eyes.

She mumbled some bullshit about not trusting planes, but we weren't fooled. We heard that she'd started seeing a shrink, whom she'd told about the time she mooched off of my dad and came to Disneyland with us. She told the shrink that she saw Arabs following us around, because what could pay out better than filing a suit against the government for causing her to develop a paranoid disposition as a result of September 11th?

So, yeah, she's on our shit list.

To be continued.