Top tens (cont.)

Top ten gaming moments of the decade (in chronological order):

1. My earliest young adult memory of obsessive gaming was being glued to my high school boyfriend's computer, surviving on a diet of honey-roasted peanuts and playing Warcraft 3 into the wee hours of the morning. The undead campaign was my hands-down favorite. A love was born.

2. By now, it's a dude-bro cliche, but when Halo first came out, it was a revelation. My senior year of high school, I spent my entire spring break playing through a cooperative campaign with a bunch of college boys in their communal living room, where the occasional Mississippi cockroach the size of a dollar bill would blunder across the carpet and cause a three-minute stomping frenzy. But even that didn't stop us from playing.

3. During a short hiatus between killing aliens and killing demons, I got really into The Longest Journey, a quirky adventure/puzzle game. The fantasy element was okay, but I was really in it for the proto-cyberpunk. Also, I will forever be a sucker for games with hot, spunky female protagonists.

4. Two words: Diablo 2. I started in high school, and in college I got my own Battlenet account. Ever faithful to the unwritten rule that girl gamers play girl characters, I played a sorceress with a badass frost skill tree. My favorite was the jungle level -- probably because this was the year I was taking my first lit theory courses, and I liked that the cute baddies in tribal masks were called fetishes.

5. Quake 3 was just a recreational hobby until my boyfriend downloaded a Tank Girl skin for me. After that, the hours between classes were mainly spent annihilating things with a rocket launcher. It's a wonder I ever got any homework done.

6. Morrowind returned me to immersive role-playing games. I've probably wasted a solid week of my life jumping around Vivec to get my acrobatics up to 100. Again, when in god's name did I find time to read all those Russian novels?

7. If ever anyone has cause to doubt that I am a tremendous dork, I'd like to state for the record that, in college, I was an active member of a Dance Dance Revolution club. To this day, whenever I hear a J-pop song, I still have the urge to perform a combo.

8. Naaaaa na na na na nuh-nuh-nuh Katamari Damacyyyyy!

9. During the inauguration of Barack Obama, I was flipping between televised footage of downtown D.C. and the city's deserted post-apocalyptic doppleganger in Fallout 3, where my character, a pink-haired gunslinger named Precious, was busy blowing the heads off slavers. Truly, an historic occasion.

10. Tie game! I currently love everything about Borderlands, aka Diablo with Guns -- the spunky girl character with the elemental-heavy skill tree, the slash-and-burn looting game concept, the comic-y Mad Max aesthetic. But last night, as I was playing Left 4 Dead 2, I realized that I'd been to that exact plantation. Neato. Also, what a mind-blowingly perfect FEMA allegory. Also also, I still love the undead.

Top tens

Top ten meals of the decade (in chronological order):

1.  Making truffles and egg nog on New Year's with my high school boyfriend -- my first true gourmet culinary experience.  The ganache stained my favorite pair of jeans, which I continued to wear well into college and only recently threw away.  Every time I saw the stain, I thought about that night: licking chocolate off my fingers, offering sips of spiked nog to my boyfriend's tee-totaling Southern Baptist parents, then staying in his room until three in the morning.  Too, too sweet.

2.  I was meeting my college boyfriend's parents -- American diplomats working in China -- for the first time.  We went to Martinique on Magazine for lunch, and it was there that I was introduced to the glories of the warm duck confit salad.  It almost made me forget my desperate attempt to hide my eyebrow piercing and sound friendly and intelligent.   It was also the first time I ever saw anyone take a sip of the wine that had just been brought to the table... and refuse the bottle.  I didn't even know you could do that.

3.  The defunct Gaia in Ithaca, NY, where, for the first time in my life, I had a three-course, fifty-dollar meal.  I remember the dessert wine the most fondly.  It tasted like the thick, heady mysteries of adulthood.

4.  The first time I had Sonny's, a one-room barbecue shack in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi, run by a four-fingered black man named Roosevelt Nichols (RIP).  I can still smell the smoke under my fingernails and in my hair.  Every subsequent time, I ordered the half chicken, and every time, I gave up using a fork.

5.  My first crawfish boil, in a tiny trailer-park town on the Louisiana/Mississippi border.  I wore a short red miniskirt and ravenously took down a whole miniature civilization of boiled spicy crustaceans; later, some of the members of my boyfriend's family privately expressed concern that I might "break his heart."  After drinking five Bud Lites and still being sober, we went out for birthday-cake-flavored sno-balls.  Sadly, I never did get to go fishing.

6.  Senior year, oysters on the half shell at Cooter Brown's, after a day of playing hookey and wandering around the French Quarter on the arm of my beloved Southern gentleman.  I bit into one -- salty, cold, delicious -- and spit out a pearl.  The coda to my checkered college experience.

7.  Homemade Thanksgiving dinner with the lady who took me to Gaia.  I'd traveled eleven hours by bus to visit, but everything melted away after the first bite of truffled cheese and the first sip of wine.  I can still rattle off the menu from memory: sausage puffs, taleggio flatbreads, the most amazing sage stuffing, roasted root veggies (that I helped peel, in true soldierly fashion), celery root puree (godly), and goose.  It was then that I started to rethink my disdain for the bourgeois lifestyle.

8.  After being dazzled by Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo, we stumbled upon an alley dive that served skewers of things boiled in a cauldron of miso broth and then seared on an open grill.  The oyster mushrooms were my favorite -- lacy, earthy, salty, and, true to Tokyo fashion, slightly alien but incredibly delicious.

9.  On Valentine's Day, we had reservations for two at Helmand.  Unfortunately, on Valentine's Day, there was an ice storm, so I had to wait while he trudged through the wall of sleet to hail a cab.  By the time we made it to the restaurant, the roasted pumpkin was the warmest, most comforting appetizer I'd ever tasted.  I still wonder if the rumor about the place being owned by Hamid Karzai's cousin is true.

10.  Instead of buying engagement rings, we went out to a 400-dollar meal at Abacus in Dallas.  The scallops were the best main course I've ever tasted -- like biting into the culinary version of a French kiss.  We ordered dessert wine... a whole bottle.  The waiter was visibly shaken.

Open source

By nature, I'm a very nervous person.  Since early childhood, my brain has been a veritable cerebral nightmare factory, breeding hundreds of irrational fears, from the mundane (monsters under the bed, terrors that go bump in the night) to the somewhat more esoteric (robbers and rapists at every corner), to the downright peculiar (leaning back too far in reclining chairs, porch beams splintering and collapsing under a misplaced heavy step).

But by nature, I'm also a person who, as an abstract rational position, hates nature and feels a great deal more satisfaction fighting it than succumbing to it.  Case in point: when I was younger, I had terrible lung capacity.  I'd get winded after a brisk walk, which made my first forays into vigorous exercise a nightmare of wheezing, gasping, and pulmonary incineration.  Now, after five years of teeth-gritting, face-numbing, vision-blurring runs, I'm a member of an elite coterie of individuals who can manually inflate a balloon animal.  This kind of dedicated self-antagonism doesn't come easy, and it can often degenerate into full-blown obsessive compulsion.  See: years 19 and 20 of my life (actually, don't, ugh).  But when done right, and healthily, there's no better feeling in the world.

Case in point: motorcycles.  Exactly one year ago, I hopped on the back of my brother-in-law's bike and clung desperately to his broad firefighter shoulders as he executed a cheeky weaving maneuver.  I was petrified -- with absolutely no control over the situation and vivid mental images, in slow-mo crash-test dummy fashion, of my bones hitting concrete at 60 miles per hour and exploding in a fireworks of  splinters and gore, this had all the markings of a deep-seated phobia.  Today, I hopped on a bike -- my own -- and pulled the same weave on a straightaway of dappled sunlit highway.  My fingers were raw and half-numb under a pair of ratty gardening gloves (naturally, in a house with half a dozen motorcycles and thousands of dollars worth of paraphernalia, no gloves are small enough to fit my girlie hands).  But I could've stayed out there for hours, for days, for weeks on end.  In the most cliched of ways, I felt myself fuse to the bike in a way I'd never experienced before, and every fluid movement rippled through my flesh, infusing the soft vital tissue with an injection of indestructible rubber and chrome.

I'd like to be better at applying this philosophy to other, less adrenaline driven, facets of my life.  It isn't just fear that I resent as something that comes naturally to me; there are a myriad of other dark complexes I'd love to flush out.  Unfortunately, outside of the Star Wars universe -- Spike was showing episodes 3-6 last night, and you better believe I was glued to that TV -- they're harder to confront head-on.  I'm going to try, anyway, though.  Worth it.  So worth it.

Bragging rights/I am so tired

I made this:

Cream of butternut squash soup

Broccoli-rabe cornbread casserole with ricotta-Gruyere topping

Caramelized Brussels sprouts

Mashed sweet potatoes

Oven-roasted leg of lamb

Buttermilk biscuits

Cranberry sauce

Chocolate and pear stuffed crepes

Lemon meringue pie

Pumpkin pie

I win at Thanksgiving.

Conceit

The morning after the election, I woke up with head pounding from beer and champagne, and stomach churning from pizza and chocolate.  When I stepped outside into an unseasonably balmy, misty morning, it struck me that this felt exactly like Mardi Gras day: damp, swampy air mingling with a sickeningly sugary hangover, a slate-gray sky that eliminated the horizon and merged invisibly with the slate-gray city, and the people walking the streets all looking especially haggard but illuminated from within by some secret energy.  What was most similar was that it felt like the culmination of a frenetic, stressful, and ultimately drunken few days, and that the final and official holy day to which all those minor precursors were leading seemed too ghostly and surreal by comparison.  

Like any good Mardi Gras, scenes from the previous night kept flashing through my mind in detached fragments.  Me watching Fox News all afternoon, while the presentation I needed to be typing languished on a dimmed laptop screen.  A bug-eyed woman screaming something about Black Panthers and race riots into the smug face of Shepherd Smith.  Then, suddenly, sitting in a roomful of lawyers and one Sarah Palin cardboard cut-out, festooned with the Mardi Gras beads I'd brought to liven her up and baring waxy, laminated teeth at us from the corner.  States being called, and the collective cheer when Katie Couric dubbed Massachusetts "the bluest state."  The jaw-dropping moment that was Pennsylvania.  Flipping to Comedy Central and hearing it first not from CNN holograms or MSNBC ticker, but Jon Stewart that Barack Obama is president of the United States of America.  Champagne toasts and muffled sobs.

It didn't seem real that morning, and it still doesn't.  In New Orleans, the weeks leading up to Mardi Gras are about suspending your everyday reality and replacing it with something ecstatic, surreal, and fundamentally unsustainable, so that by the time you get to Mardi Gras day, you've wallowed for so long in the anarchic whims of the flesh that you've finally succumbed to them.  By sheer inertia, I've dragged myself out of bed on that perpetually misty Tuesday for four years in a row and hauled my tired, protesting body to the last parades, Zulu and Rex.  Except I've never made it to Rex -- that's the big one you can always catch on TV and looks just like the glossy postcards sold in every souvenir shop in the French Quarter: all fancy feathers, sumptuous masks, and the snowy white King of Mardi Gras presiding amid his KKK-esque horse guards, hoods and all.  

Zulu for me has always been the real grand finale, the black travesty of the official white carnival.  It comes off badly in frozen stills, which only capture the burnt cork blackface and grass skirts like a flat caricature, some kitschy parade of Little Black Sambos.  In reality, it feels much more menacing, especially when venturing too far into the territory of the Magnolia projects to find parking and a good spot to stand.  Every year, there's a moment when you can look around and spot small coteries of hipsters, progressive college professors, and students from Tulane and Loyola sticking out like awkward blemishes on all-black family barbecues and raucous sidewalk celebrations.  Every year, it was a reminder of how white and non-Southern I am, despite all the years I'd spent living in this culture and thinking of myself as hip and with it.  And now that I'm back up North in "the bluest state," I can't help both liking and resenting those American Apparel-clad kids who biked through the streets of Boston with Obama emblazoned in red, white and blue on their backpacks; or even the waspy lawyers who teared up when he was giving his acceptance speech.  It feels like they can never get the significance of what happened on November 4th if they've never set foot below the Mason-Dixie line, never stood at a Zulu parade, or never even been in a crowd like the one in Hyde Park unless it was a Janet Jackson concert.

But that's just the elitist in me, the part that uses the "foreigner" label to clamor for a special, objective understanding of this country.  The sharp self-righteousness has been gradually sloughed off of me every time I realize that most of the people I meet have an equally valid claim to outsider status, and that this willingness to see oneself in opposition to, rather than the essentialist product of a society is something uniquely American and undeniably appealing.  It started with the Puritans and continues to this day in fundamentalist Christianity, animal rights activism, environmentalism, radical feminism, LGBT, and BDSM.  They're all working off one model: if it's broke, we can fix it, even if it means redefining the definition of "it."  Or, as it was perhaps a bit more eloquently put: we'll never stop trying to make a more perfect union.  And, to wit, those skinny white kids in DNC swag have just put Barack Hussein Obama into the highest office of the great U.S. of A.

I wasn't thinking all of this on the morning after election day.  I was leaning against a cold concrete wall to stifle some queasy hangover shakes, waiting for my bus and barely noticing when it pulled up to the stop.  Hurriedly, I scrambled to pull out my wallet, but when I reached into the front pocket of my backpack, what I pulled out was a handful of Mardi Gras beads.  Laissez les bon temps roulez.  

Revelations

Walking through Midtown Manhattan on an unseasonably warm October Saturday afternoon, there is a moment where the sun is still up a few dozen miles in any direction, but it's already dusk inside the walls of the high-rise fortress, and the sky is a weary post-apocalyptic pink, and the glass and gold storefront windows cast vermillion reflections on the flushed faces of tourists with backpacks, and Eastern European teenagers with Macy's bags, and black-clad businesspeople shouting into their headsets...

"You went to New York this weekend?  What did you do there?"

"Well, it was only a day trip.  Just a lot of walking around."  

... and the sewers emanate a humid fog that reeks of feces, which gets caught in the oily yellow glow of the food carts that illuminate the treasures of the street vendors' wares -- gleaming bronze pretzels with diamond-chip salt flakes, obsidian leather purses, the cheap glass beads that Manhattan was bought with, copper shawarma nuggets studded with pockets of raw garnet...

"How nice!  Did you go to any museums?"  

... and gradually, gradually the sky darkens and we hit Central Park, and the only light is the paltry stream from the street-lamps and the brighter feverish neon glint on people's skin that obscures their features, sharpening only their waxy, vampiric pallor and the hungry hollows of their cheeks, and it is in these moments that I know how the ruddy peasant of the pre-industrial world felt as she took her first timid steps onto this concrete Babylon and shuddered with horror and delight.

"No, unfortunately.  I wanted to go to MoMA to see the Kirchner exhibit.  But by the time we'd walked from Chinatown to Times Square..."

... and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast full of blasphemous names, having ten heads and seven horns, and the woman was clothed in purple and scarlet and adorned in precious ornaments and pearls and precious stones having in her hand a gold cup full of abominations and unclean things of her immorality. Upon her forehead was written a name, a mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and of the Abominations of the earth, and I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints of the earth and the blood of the witnesses of Jesus, and when I saw her I wondered greatly.

Vanitas vanitatum

The other day, I found out that the infamous 16th century ascetic monk Ivan Vyshenskij -- the Girolamo Savonarola of Ukraine, who spewed bile at Renaissance learning, vainglorious Catholics, and other worldly vanities  -- lived in the town where I was born.  In his honor, here is a short poem:  

Chasing tongue with vodka,

cognac and Akon at a disco called Versailles....

Rubber tubing cramps as the nurse administers the glucose,

useless, and days later my stained clothes sprout moldy tumors --

Lutsk.