Emchap's Shit from the Internet 3/14/18 🍠
This last Saturday was my 27th birthday, and I was a little afraid it was going to be a somewhat lonely affair (my 25th was, as a result of having just moved, and I figured the same might follow through). But it turned out not to be, and it was glorious, and I'm so, so happy about it.
As I mentioned approximately 100 times on Twitter, I started the morning at Spa Palace, a 24-hour Korean spa. There's a similar setup in Atlanta, and many in New York, but in both cities they were far away/I was depressed and so I never made it out. But! Finally I have done the thing!
Once you check in and get your towels, you're let into the locker room for an approximation of your gender, and given an ugly gym short + large t-shirt uniform, and not a ton of additional instruction. I made my way to the shower room, where there is a VERY serious sign about not being clothed, and had the somewhat disorienting experience of trying to figure out how naked it was okay to be in the main locker room portion given that everyone else was clothed. (I eventually settled on a clothed walk to the shower, with furtive unclothing in the vestibule.)
Once you take a shower, you get to go soak in the three jacuzzis (one hot, one VERY hot, and one an ice pool that I refused to go in) in the shower area. There was also a wet sauna (felt like I was dying) and a dry sauna (did not feel like I was dying, did feel like I was being dehydrated) to hang out in. Me and an assortment of other women hung out in the pools (highlights: two older Korean women who managed to convey vague alarm that I was sitting in the jacuzzi without any jets, and a Very Los Angeles woman doing naked jacuzzi yoga) until I was called in for the body scrub + massage treatment that I'd booked.
The way that this works is that a nice woman in a black sports bra and gym shorts comes out and shouts for you, and then you wander back into the treatment area naked. And while of course you're aware that this woman scrubs dead skin off of naked women all day, it's still a very weird business transaction to be undergoing. But then you lie down on a vinyl table and the woman wears a big exfoliating mitt and scrubs all of your skin off you with a cheerful enthusiasm. (At various points I rolled over on my back and my sides, and she dumped warm water on my to clean the canvas of dead skin balls.) This was followed by the same procedure with soap (nearly fell off the table), a mid-scrub shower, and then an oil massage (also nearly fell off the table) and face mask. At the end she washed my hair, which was enjoyable. Afterwards I took my eighteenth shower of the day and wandered back into the locker room area, where I proceeded to put on my uniform and enjoy the co-ed hot and cold sauna spaces.
From there I went to seafood dim sum with a friend, where I got to eat pastry buns shaped like little swans and where I got to relish finally being in the company of someone who is worse at chopsticks than I am. (I'm so bad, y'all.) I inhaled many pounds of shrimp in various dumpling forms and it was lovely.
The first stop of the Merry Spinster book tour was in my neighborhood that evening, and it was wonderful, and the author (Daniel Mallory Ortberg, formerly of the Toast) was so completely lovely and charming and likable, and the book seems like it will be just wonderful, and I ran into two different people that I know at the reading (and I don't know that many people here!) and it was just a really nice note on which to end things.
Except that it turned out that I'd received an invite from an old Atlanta friend who lives here now asking if I might want to see improv with him that night, and it turned out the improv theatre was literally across the street from the book store, and I had enough time to eat a leisurely dinner and then I got to go see an improvised episode of Star Trek.
It was great and I'm very happy and I hope the rest of 27 lives up to its start.
Shit to read
This piece on playing video games with one's child is sweet and good and worth reading.
I am primarily familiar with Ken Layne from his time at the Wonkette, and had not realized he'd moved out to the desert to make some sort of desert version of Bitter Southerner. It sounds very good and I am excited to pick up a copy at the bookstore mentioned in the article (also the site of the reading!).
The author mentioned above did apparently a shitload of press for the book (possibly spurred by the transition, maybe he just likes talking to people, I don't know) and every single interview has been a delight. Read this one on the Rumpus and this one on Extra Crispy and this one on The Cut and this one on LitHub. There's a line in one of them (too lazy to figure out which) about the embarrassment of being seen to want something that has stuck with me for a few days.
A Twitter friend referenced this old Verge article on AirSpace, the design aesthetic that permeates hip coffee houses (where I hate it) and WeWorks (where I like it very much) and causes a weird, flat sameness in those spaces that is depressing or comforting or both. The article is great and well worth reading, particularly if you spend any time in those spaces regularly.
I was not familiar with Deana Lawson's art and enjoyed this article about it.
The Nib does great news-via-illustration, and the point that this particular piece made about how all the children participating in demonstrations today were born after Columbine, and how they have been so consistently failed by organizations that were supposed to protect them, struck me.
Shit to eat
Order a new food processor. It will not be the one Wirecutter recommends, because that one is $200 and multiple people in the comments hate it. But this will set you up to think that $158 is reasonable.
(Seriously though it's completely silent basically, and has so many grating disks, and is SO much easier to clean than your old cheap one.)
Peel five potatoes, which you bought at Ralph's after bursting into tears at the post office.
Peel an onion, which, same.
Toss the onion into the food processor and watch it turn into satisfyingly small pieces.
Hook the grating disk onto the food processor and grate the five potatoes, too.
Dump everything into a bowl. Add in a third a cup of flour, three teaspoons of sea salt, and a shitload of pepper.
Toss it with your hands.
Add three eggs, and do the same.
Heat a cast iron pan with a quarter cup of olive oil in it until the oil seems very hot.
Dump everything into the pan. It will begin to brown. It will be satisfying. It will not look as good as it did on the recipe site, which will be expected but a little disappointing.
Put the pan in a 350 degree oven for 80 minutes (which will be 30 minutes past when you get hungry).
When done, cut a wedge out and eat it with as much sour cream as you can justify (sour cream: also purchased during that Ralph's excursion) and eat on a tray on your couch while feeling very content.
Adapted entirely from the Smitten Kitchen potato kugel recipe, it is great.
Shit to listen to
Spotify has decided that I enjoy female vocalist rap, and tossed me this track last week, and I enjoyed it, so I suppose the borg isn't wrong.
Shit to buy
I'm not kidding about that food processor. I hummed with joy when using it.
Same about Merry Spinster.
One of my friends bought that goofy cat water fountain from last week! I'm a cat influencer!
Have any of you bought the Universal Standard jeans? My Warp + Weft jeggings gave out in the thighs again and I think I'm just going to buy a new pair rather than re-patching. I'm also considering these W+W straight legged ones but I'm worried I won't like the weird distressing on the dark wash.