it's a cornucopia of love

Well I hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving/food day/rare opportunity to use the word "pilgrims." This was my first EVER Thanksgiving not spent somewhere within a mile of my parents' house, so that was kind of weird, but we made up for it with a Smith-sponsored foodstravaganza.

I was originally going to make "Grandaddy Rolls," aka my grandfather's recipe which has appeared at every family gathering at for at least as long as I have been alive, but in an odd turn of events I ended up with a host family who doesn't have an oven. While I personally would argue that this is impossible, I have seen the evidence, and I guess that's one of the differences between French and American cooking - it is apparently possible here to go your whole life without ever needing to bake or roast anything. Huh.

This posed a bit of a problem for me, as my main area of food expertise is bread products, and the rest of my diet could essentially be made over a campfire in the wilderness or picked directly off of plants. But you can't come to a dinner and be like, "I have PLUMS!" No, I needed civilized food. With a recipe.

So, as anyone would do in such a time of need, I turned to The Internest.

My starting point was this: peppers, onions, chick peas, various spices, and... an oven. So not exactly a possible choice. But I am all for adaptation, so I set out to turn this into something I could work with.

First, I left out the chick peas, because there was definitely going to be enough protein in everyone's lives at this point (side note: just before the dinner started, three people were required to carry the turkey across the Boulevard Montparnasse). I decided it would be possible to just do it in a large pan on the stove. And I wanted there to be carrots in it, because, I don't know, it's Thanksgiving, and you need carrots. At this point I ran into problems because I have no idea how to convert from standard to metric measurements, so when I asked Lorraine for advice and was told to buy a kilo of carrots, this wasn't exactly as informative as she intended.

"That sounds like a lot of carrots," I said.

"Well, the carrots are the most important part of the recipe, aren't they?"

"Not really. The carrots aren't actually in the recipe. I just added them."

I get the idea she is the kind of person who follows the recipe religiously. I am not. I proceeded to measure all the spices with my fingers.

In the end it turned out fine. I ate the rest of it for lunch yesterday.

echolilia

These are such lovely pictures.

(By Timothy Archibald, via Mind Hacks)

I've been painting some.

These are acrylic on sealed paper, which is why they look a little like I painted them by dipping my hands into the paint and then flailing vaguely at the paper. I'm used to oil, and I still have a tendency to put large quantities of one color onto the surface and then expect it to still be wet five minutes later so I can mix something into it.

The class is called "drawing and painting from a model" and is taught by a woman with an English accent and the widest pants I've ever seen.

Solomon McAveny

olomon McAveny was a vampire. Everyone knew it. No one had ever seen him do anything, so to speak, or heard him speak of it, but nobody needed to. It was one of those things that was simply understood.

No one knew how old he actually was. He looked, for the most part, like a clean-cut man of about thirty, but somehow, at the same time, there was something about him that felt like it belonged a hundred or so years back. It was difficult to tell what it was—something about the way he held himself, maybe, or the way his smooth voice was so precisely articulated. In any other person it would have been charming. In him it was charming. But it was also vaguely unsettling, and at the same time as you felt yourself being drawn to him in conversation you had an odd feeling that something was terribly out of place.

He was not the kind of person one would call friendly, but he was polite and careful and civil to a degree that, in this day and age, was almost shocking. He had lived in the same city for twenty-four years and nobody had once heard him raise his voice. He was calm and composed to a fault. He was gentle.

Children were terrified of him.

It was one of those things that everyone figured out without really realizing it. There were signals that everyone just got used to before they put them together, like the odd fact that the front window to his bookstore was covered with a heavy velvet curtain. The sign on the other side of the curtain, the one that could be flipped over to show whether the store was "closed" or "open," was rigged with a chain and a pulley so that, when he wanted to flip it over, he only had to pull the chain and the mechanics would turn the sign over in the bright window. There were the slightly strange hours of the store, which ended shortly after dark, even in the winter when it got dark before five o'clock.

Morgan had seen him a few times. The first time was when she was quite young, and in the way of a young child all she had really noticed was that he was wearing a suit. This was not really unusual at all, when she thought about it later, but at the time it struck her as odd because it was a saturday night and he was obviously nowhere near a church, and in her small mind suits and church were somehow synonymous.

The whole event was largely unimportant, and the only reason it had any significance was that she remembered it years later when she saw him for the second time. This time was even more forgettable, and forget it she did, but the third time she saw Solomon McAveny she was fifteen years old, and she turned to the friend standing nearest to her and said, "You know, every time I see that guy he looks exactly the same. I swear he's been in his thirties since I was two years old."

"Duh," said the friend, who would be just as forgotten in ten years, and she snapped her gum to punctuate the word. "That's Mr. McAveny, from that bookstore. He's a frickin' vampire."

"Oh," said Morgan, a little taken aback but growing less and less so the more she thought about it. "Huh."

Years later she thought back on this event and was a little embarrassed, felt a little stupid for having been so stupid herself. She pushed the event into her memory and told herself she wouldn't think of it again.

---------------

Just an oldish fragment. I had a middle school art teacher who was a vampire, you know.

The Legend of Poor John Terrace

ohn Terrace was maybe twenty years old, almost unnaturally serious, the son of a family of wealthy investors who entrusted their money to a company of undeniably brilliant scientists who had dreams, and even a bit of physical progress, in the area of great giant machines designed to be operated by the human mind. He was strong, solid, and famously taciturn, with the kind of smooth-edged face that made him look younger and maybe stupider than he was. He was soft-spoken and soft-handed, and this is how the legend starts, no matter who happens to be telling it.

The legend is vague, of course, as every good legend should be, and though the story is more specific than the legend, both come to the same point through the kind of accident horrific enough to be censored by the passage of time, the kind that can tear the arms and legs off someone as strong and solid as poor John Terrace. And this, of course, is what happened to poor John Terrace, his shoulders turned to gaping, red sockets and the near-indestructible bones in his thighs snapped like sugar glass, leaving him unable to do anything but stare at the rafters above the concrete floor where he lay, the shouts of the people panicking around him growing fainter and the lights dimmer with every spinning, passing second.

"Jesus Christ!" shouted John Terrace's incredibly wealthy parents to the team of overworked scientists who stood about in their white lab coats. "Do something!"

"What do you mean?" said the scientists, who honestly didn't know.

"Our son's been ripped apart!" cried the Terraces, understandably hysterical. "You've got to do something!"

(“Oh God," said John, quietly, from across the room where he lay on a table, a hastily rigged machine pouring his blood back into his body. No one heard him.)

The scientists looked uncomfortable. "Well," they said, shifting nervously and looking at each other, giving each other the kind of looks that make it clear that There Are No Guarantees. "We can try."

And when John woke up he had new arms and legs, ones that were five times stronger than his old ones, and sized in proportion to their strength but not to his bruised, mended little body, having been taken from a machine that was made to do all the things people are too small to do. And they were wired into the torn ends of the nerves of his shoulders and hips so that he could move them with the remainders of his battered musculature, and so that every single time he did he would get blinding, searing, excruciating pains that went all the way up his spine.

"Oh God," he said again, and like the last time his parents didn't really hear--this was the first time he had been awake in two days, of course, and all they heard was the sound of him being alive, and instead of particularly listening they cried and hugged the little bit of him that wasn't made of chrome tubing and thanked God for not taking him from them.

If you have heard the legend of John Terrace, you will know already that he had a girlfriend. In the legend she is never given a name, being at most a sympathetic minor character. In the real story her name was Poloma. Her parents, as one would expect, called her Polly, but John had always called her by her full name, making him sound oddly serious in a way that sometimes made her laugh. And in both stories, after two days of tearful waiting, she was brought into a weirdly sterile room, and after a moment the door opened and John's father led him in by the hand, and she took one look at him and screamed.

And when he stepped toward her she screamed again, even though she didn't want to, and backed up until her back was against the wall and she had to lean her head back as far as it could go just to look him in the eye.

"Poloma," said John, very seriously, and very, very quietly. "It hurts."

"Get away from me, John," she said. She said it calmly, but the truth was that there wasn't much of John left between all those wires and pistons, and what was even more horrifying was that he was crying, plainly and openly as if he wasn't even aware of it, the tears just streaming down his face even though it was as blank as ever.

"Poloma," he said again. "It's hurting me. It hurts so bad."

"Stop saying my name!" she said, and she covered her face and sobbed.

John watched her for a few seconds. "Poloma," he said finally, "I want you to kill me."

And she screamed again.

"Kill me," said John Terrace.

"No," said Poloma. "Don't you dare tell me that. I won't."

"Kill me," said John.

"No!" Poloma screamed.

And then something sudden happened, like something that had been stretched too tight had suddenly reached its breaking point, and by the time the police got there there was nothing left but broken beams and broken bones and a lingering haze of pulverized concrete, fragments of glass tubing that crunched underfoot and dark smears on what was left of the walls. They didn’t even find poor John Terrace.

It was cleaned up well, of course, not least for the benefit of the poor scientists and their unfinished machine that had made its unknowing and unfortunate sacrifice, because despite what some may say there is nothing quite so devastating to a business than having its name connected to a vague and mindless rampage. And that was how he became a legend—not even a proper legend, but the sort that parents use to idly threaten disobedient children. “You close that window, or John Terrace’s going to come in in the middle of the night and get you!”

He never did, obviously. By the time most children were old enough to have heard the legend they knew that John Terrace had never existed anyway. But there were always a few odd characters who claimed otherwise; who maintained that they had seen him in the ruins of the old mansion that everyone called the Terrace estate, despite their knowing that there had almost certainly never been any such family. They went out there on dares and with young delusions of adventure and came back slightly quieter, scraped up and covered in dust and rambling about that monster John Terrace. They said he was nearly twice the height of the average man, with legs like stone columns and arms like tarnished silver tree trunks stitched into shoulders far too small. They said he never spoke, but there were tracks down the cheeks of his empty face from crying and he could deal out destruction to brick walls and windows and the brittle inner framework of the fearful and fragile human body without blinking, without hesitation, without change of expression or bringing one awful hand up to wipe the thin skin under his eyes.

No one ever tried to kill John Terrace. One can only make so many sacrifices, I suppose.

---------------

A rather old one. Thinking about legends, the kind of things where the story finishes and you just sort of stare and go, "Was that supposed to teach me something?" And the person telling the story look confused and says, "What? I don't know, it's just a story."