Submission

Classic Wonder Woman is a little odd. If you ever happen to cruise through some of the original 1940s comics, you'll notice a great deal of light bondage and domination/submission themes. The creator of Wonder Woman, William Moulton Marston, was into that sort of thing.

He also invented the systolic blood pressure test. Yowzah!

Even though the sexual subtext is about as transparent as a jellyfish, I can't find it in me to be offended. I don't know if it's ye olde tymey charme, or my postmodern detachment from what used to titillate less jaded audiences, but there's something kind of wholesome about it. It's sleazy, but in a kid-friendly way--like grubbing for presents at Christmas.

Sure, Christmas tends to bring out the greedy despot side of children everywhere, and then the rest of us have to endure a billion Christmas specials peddling the myth that it isn't about the presents. (Kids aren't fooled, by the way. You can turn off those Rankin/Bass demons.) But look how happy they are when they get the presents that they want! Isn't that cute? Look at that smile!

Like I said, sleazy, but wholesome.

Happy Holidays, I guess.

Arbitrary rules for holiday parties

My co-worker A was considering buying a Christmas sweater last week. She called me over to look at a couple of sweaters online, one with reindeer and the other with--well, also reindeer, but smaller.

Dramatized here.

We got to talking about the sense in buying an item of clothing that you can only really wear for about six weeks out of the year: immediately after Thanksgiving up until December 26. Even if the sweater isn't explicitly Christmas themed--snowflakes, for example, instead of Santa Claus or a Christmas tree--it's really only suitable for the Christmas season.

This is holiday party arbitrary rule number 1.

Warming up to the topic, we discussed the context in which one would wear a Christmas sweater. You can wear a Christmas sweater to a holiday party, but you can only wear it to more than one holiday party in a season if the parties aren't frequented by the same people. For example, you can wear it to the office party and then to your family's home for Christmas dinner, but you can't wear it to the office party and then wear it again to a bar get-together with some folks from work, because the same group of people will see you in it. Arbitrary rule number 2.

"No pictures! They'll be up on Facebook!" Matt cuts in at this point.

"And you can't wear the same party outfit to the same party two years in a row," I said, stating arbitrary rule number 3. "You need to wait at least three years between parties to wear the outfit again."

I guess at this point, Matt just couldn't handle any more feminine nonsense. He stood up and said, "I love how you just make up this arbitrary rules, but you say them with such an air of authority and confidence, as if they were real, actual things that people do!"

And we all had a good laugh.

BUT--allow me to describe my wardrobe saga of the holiday season thus far, since I went to three parties this week and will be hosting another one tomorrow. I wore my 2012 Holiday Tea dress at the President's Party last Thursday. I'm going to wear my 2012 President's Party dress to the Holiday Tea on Monday. I wore my 2012 Valentine's Day dress to Thanksgiving 2013. I'm going to wear yesterday's post-Hanukkah party outfit to Valentine's Day 2014, and 2009's Christmas Day outfit to 2013 Christmas Day because it's time again.

Choose, unless you wish to stay here for evermore, To help you in your choice, we give you these clues four: First, however slyly the poison tries to hide You will always find some on nettle wine's left side...

I'm never going to wear last Friday night's party outfit to another party again, because I didn't realize I was going to be the most casually dressed person there, BF. 

I know to some, these rules and distinctions seem arbitrary. Lots of things women have to do probably seem arbitrary to men. Hell, they seem arbitrary to me sometimes! But that doesn't make them any less real. And it doesn't mean that other women aren't watching to make sure you follow the rules. "The Simpsons" did a whole episode about it, so you know it's true.

That's arbitrary rule number 4.

And it's the most important rule of all.

Play us off

Tuesday was our final radio show of the Fall 2013 season. It was also our 50th live band on the show, so like most special occasions and anniversaries, everything went wrong.

One of our sound techs didn't show up. The broadcast cut out completely for the band's first song. There were roaches scurrying around. Some student wandered in and tried to put up anti-fracking posters while the band was playing. The broadcast cut out again during the first half of the interview. The cake wasn't tasty. The cat bit the drummer.

Really, all we needed for the evening to be complete was for the slow cooker to break and leave us with no chili.

But you know what? The band was great. I guess that's showbiz, kid!

Here's to 50 great bands on the Rodent Hour, and to another 50 more.

More than you ever wanted to know about tea

We had our office Thanksgiving party last week. I was doing pretty good, socially--shoes on and everything--and then I got some cheesecake in me and found myself doing the thing. All nerds know what I'm talking about, when you find yourself talking for an inappropriately long time about a topic no one has any interest in except yourself.

Kate Beaton knows.

I could feel it happening--I could see it in the slightly alarmed expression of my listeners--but I couldn't stop myself. I was just--so--interested in the topic!

It was tea. I was talking about tea. I was talking about tea because I love tea and everyone else needs to love tea as much as I do, and if they don't, it's only because they don't know how delightful it is, so I have to tell them.

You see how easy it is to fall into doing the thing.

I'm especially jazzed about tea right now because I went to the Big Island a couple of weeks ago and my sister took me to a tea garden. As far as best gifts ever received, this is now tied for the number one spot with the Christmas 1994 tea sampler from me mum (with 20 different kinds of tea).

Fuckin tea!

Let me tell you all the things I learned at the tea garden! This particular tea garden is located on the grounds of Volcano Winery, the southern-most winery in the U.S. It's about a mile above sea level, near Volcano Village in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Volcano Winery has seven acres of tea plants, which as you can see from the above picture, are basically just hedges. (Honestly, if I hadn't been told that this hedge made tea, I would have been like, Hey Sparky, what's with all the hedge?)

The tea that you drink is made from the new baby tea leaves, and the different types of tea--green, black, white--depend on the maturity of the leaves at the time of harvest. The newest leaves, which are still rolled up and not open yet, make silver needle tea. Just-opened leaves make white tea, slightly more mature leaves make green tea, and the leaves at the last stage of maturity, before they're just useless hedge, make black tea. At Volcano Winery, the black tea leaves are dried with a big fan, while the finer grades of tea are air-dried over a few days.

Tea leaves themselves don't smell like much of anything, even if you crush them between your fingers. Tea flowers, on the other hand, smell exactly like brewed tea. It is the damnedest thing.

Brewed tea. Who knew?

Each different tea grade requires different temperatures of water for brewing. Black tea needs water just at the boiling point. Green tea needs water slightly below the boiling point, otherwise you scorch the tea and it becomes bitter. I already knew about the water, because when I lived in Waikiki, I used to visit this Taiwanese tea shop in the Kings Village shopping center. Kings Village is the kitchiest, tackiest place you can imagine--it looks like Santa's Village, except it's open year round so there's no end to the suffering.

Three years I lived across the street from this.

However, tucked away in a corner of this Block 'o Camp was the Cha-No-Ma Teahouse, an oasis of good taste, simple but expensive sculptures, and orchids that were always in bloom. The only other customers I ever saw in there were old Chinese ladies in Chanel suits.

This place was magical. The experience would begin with charcoal peanuts, which were like little briquettes with a peanut inside, to cleanse the palate and settle the stomach. I'd pick a tea--usually one of the cheaper ones on the menu, because this was a nice place and the tea could get pretty fancy--and the owner would bring out a tea set and a HUGE kettle of hot water. He would brew the first pot himself, filling the tiny teapot and letting it overflow into the wooden tea tray. After a few seconds, he'd dump the tea through the strainer into the other tiny teapot. Then he'd pour the tea into the first set of cups. Those were the smell-good cups. You'd pour the tea out of those cups into the drink-cups, and then smell the residue left in the smell-good cup. Then you'd drink. And then you'd fill the tiny tea pot yourself from the kettle and start it all over again. 

Clockwise from left: charcoal peanuts, tea strainer, first teapot, second tea pot, smell-good cup, drink-cup.

Each round gets you about one full mouthful of tea. It takes about an hour and a half to finish the kettle. And if you can think of a better way to spend your afternoon, you can just shut your filthy liar mouth because there is no better way to spend your afternoon than in Cha-No-Ma.

The second or third time I went back, the owner taught me that tea should be treated as a vegetable. "You don't dry asparagus, do you?" he demanded. No, I agreed, you did not. "Americans only know about Lipton," he said. It's a travesty, I agreed, tea is so much more. We were kindred spirits, he and I.

He would have looked at my pictures of the Volcano Winery tea garden without searching furtively for another party-goer to rescue them from my clutches. Where are you going? Don't you want to see me picking some of the leaves?

I haven't even gotten to the pictures I took of me drinking the tea! I have to explain what my facial expressions signify about the taste and bouquet of the brew at that moment!

It's cold and stinks of pork

This year, Hanukkah and Thanksgiving fall on the same day. It's weird how we can extrapolate holidays to infinity--I could find out the date of Hanukkah for the next 200 years with a nanosecond Google search--but every year there's some temporal coincidence like this and we all have to read lifestyle columns about how to plan an appropriate theme party. Maybe I've watched too much Doctor Who at this point in my life, but do we need to coo and marvel over this sort of thing as if it were genuinely unexpected?

With that cynical attitude, I clearly haven't watched enough Doctor Who. Happy 50th Anniversary, fellow Whovians!

Happy Thanksgivukkah, anyway. No reason we shouldn't take pleasure in the simple things. I'm just a little grumpy because I cooked hot sausage for stuffed mushrooms, and now I have to leave the windows open to let the grease smoke out. I already took the smoke detector off the wall (and this time, I'm going to remember to put it back on, because that is how the Great Bra Fire of 2012 escalated so quickly). It's 30 degrees out and windy as fuck, so my apartment is freezing cold and stinking of pork to boot. Days I'll have to live in this pork-stink. DAYS!

Yes, it's that time of year again, when I make my one fancy dish: stuffed mushrooms. Like that guitar player in the park who only knows "Hotel California," I've got one good thing to offer the world and by god, I'm gonna do it!

One time, for the department Christmas party, I tried to make Spanish rice, and no one ate any of it--rightly so, because it was super-bland haole food that even I didn't want to eat. I'll never embarrass myself like that again. Everyone loves my stuffed mushrooms, and why wouldn't they? You can't go wrong with full-fat cream cheese and spicy sausage. I can already tell I'm going to have some of the stuffing mixture left over, and I'm looking forward to having some on a microwaved potato for dinner tonight. I'll shut the windows, crank the space heater, and stuff my gullet with delicious pork while I anticipate the office Thanksgivukkah party.

UPDATE: I ate too much cream cheese and sausage and now my belly hurts and everything is cold and stinks of pork. I'm going to watch more Doctor Who.

Urban Foraging

Uh-oh. Almost everyone who wished me a happy birthday last week said something about my blog. I think I have to start posting again.

My latest adventure in urban foraging is the best one yet. I've found apples, seashells, vacuum cleaners, dishes, and books on the stoops of Brooklyn, but a couple of weeks ago, my stubborn refusal to make eye contact with other pedestrians paid off big when I found an iPod on the ground.

I never wanted an iPod. On the other hand, I never particularly wanted a tablet, and then I got one for Christmas a while back and now I can't imagine what I'd do without it. How else would I be able to watch cartoons AND scroll through my tumblr feed at the same time? Same for my smart phone: what would I do if I couldn't take upside-down videos of  interesting birds I encounter? (Is there a way to flip videos like you flip regular pictures? Because my phone never warns me that I'm shooting upside down, I just have to find out later when I upload the footage to my computer.)

I got an iPod connector from the dollar store across the street from work, spent two hours downloading iTunes onto my rickety old laptop (and uninstalling all the useless toolbars and crap that came with it), hit "restore factory settings," and "Pete's iPod" became "Rachel's iPod."

Poor Pete--hanging out in Brooklyn, having a good time, and just like that, his brand new iPod pops out of his pocket and into the hands of a stranger who replaces his collection of carefully curated 80s dance music with 13 hours of "Star Talk" with Neil DeGrass Tyson.

But enough about Pete! Rachel's iPod also features every episode of "Welcome to Night Vale," and several hours of local music from Brooklyn's hottest up-and-comers. Two years into hosting a radio show and I've finally gotten around to listening to all of those CDs our guest bands leave in the station. And they're SUPER good! They must be amazing live!

Also, I've discovered this new thing, where you stick your headphones in and listen to music instead of paying attention to other people or traffic on the way to work. Have other people thought of this? It's pretty amazing. I haven't been hit by a single bike yet, either. Let THEM get out of MY way.

I've gone too far. This may be too much power for me.

The Mistress and Her Stable

This is a Polaroid picture.

Weird to see one, right? They don't even make Polaroid film anymore, what with the advent of high resolution cameras on our pocket phones. Photography students have all the good shit.

Last night was the last show of the summer season on the Rodent Hour. Our guests were Von Shakes, who are really too good to be on our little dog-and-pony show (they're playing on the Fox morning show next week), but they came anyway and we had a great time.

We didn't plan the photo this way--I was just put in front because I'm the shortest and ended up absorbing the light from the flash like a sheet of white paper. What I like best about this picture is that it looks like Mistress Rachel is showing off her stable of man-slaves for your pain and pleasure.

It reminds me of one of my high school graduation pictures. There was nothing overtly sexual about that picture either, I was just dressed all in white and smiling big at the camera, but Mom and I took one look at it and agreed I looked like a stripper. Sometimes, through no thought or intention, pictures of me are just kind of--dirty.

Or maybe I've just got a dirty mind.