L u n a t a l k

Guess the gender:

1. Chocolate? Yeah, it’s fine. But it’s just another flavor.
2. Mmmmmm…. oooohhhh… ohmygod….

What is it about chocolate and gender? I hardly know anyone who doesn’t like it, but a mouthful of rich, dark chocolate can create the kind of response in a woman most men wait a lifetime to cause.

Here’s a possible piece of the puzzle: A good friend of mine started life as a man but is now a woman (my song, Switcheroo is dedicated to her). She told me that her reaction to chocolate changed significantly when she began gender reassignment hormone therapy:

“Well, it used to be that chocolate was a very nice treat. It satisfied the sweet tooth. But now it’s considerably more. And the difference between kinds of chocolate have become significant.”

Could it be hormonal?

Most of us can only try to imagine life from the other side. I am happily and undeniably female, but I would jump at the chance to inhabit a man’s body for a few hours. And I’d lay odds most men would be curious to know what if feels like to be a woman (as long as they’re absolutely guaranteed to get their junk back at the end of the evening).

An actual body switch is not a viable option for most of us, but in the area of chocolate, I came across an interesting recipe - a kind of trick chocolate that would mimic for men the appeal of chocolate for women: Chocolate covered bacon.

It sounds vaguely repellent to me, though I’d try a bite out of curiosity. But I ran a test by my husband. At the words “chocolate covered bacon” his face went all soft and his eyes got this misty, far-away look. He murmured the words… chocolate… covered… bacon… yeaaaaahhhhh… Score!

What would be an equivalent reverse recipe? Something guys adore that leaves women scratching their heads wondering what the big deal is? Maybe I’m missing the real lesson here. Perhaps I should start a line of bacon clothing. This could have solved my underwear problem last week.

What do you think I could get for a bacon thong?

Popularity: 1% [?]

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You wouldn’t think you could find the Ends of the Earth in California, but I think it may be there. Is that a good thing or not?

When I arrived at the Sea Ranch for a week’s escape and opened my suitcase I discovered I’d neglected to pack a single pair of undies. There’s a sleepy little tourist town nearby - Gualala. Gualala has not one, but two markets, a gas station, art galleries and several cafes, so it’s no ghost town. But when I asked one of the locals where one might purchase panties, she thought for a looooong while and then ventured, “Did you check at the bait and tackle shop?”

It turned out not to be a bad thing at all.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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• Epilogue, with pictures
• There and back again

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Tokyo was rocked by a 6.8 earthquake followed by a 5.3 aftershock this week. No major damage or injuries were reported, but my attention was riveted anyway, since my son Alan is there now, studying (twister, karaoke and probably some Japanese as well).

Things are a tad different from when I was a 20-year-old student getting into trouble in Europe and the USSR (alone!). I’m sure my parents would have preferred I go with a nice safe group or at least with a girlfriend or two. If I had a lick of sense, I would have given myself a good shake and a firm talking to as well, but I’ve always leapt off cliffs and assumed I’d sprout wings before I hit the ground. I think I called home (with great difficulty and expense) twice over the course of three months. They have no idea to this day some of the, ahem, adventures I had. And it’s probably just as well, though now that it’s in the blog I may get interrogated.

But that was then. Alan blogs regularly and is in my IM window almost daily, so I didn’t have to wait too long to know he was OK. Not that I was worried, mind you - the news reports put even a mom’s mind at rest - but I grew up in earthquake country and there’s always the post-quake entertainment where you contact everyone you know and trade “how was it for you” stories. It’s part of the fun.

It reminded me that we’re still in earthquake country. We looked it up and the San Andreas Fault runs UNDER our vacation house. The San Andreas Fault is the longest and most active earthquake fault in the world. There’s a lovely interpretive trail just down the street. The fault moved 13 feet laterally and 10 feet vertically along 300 miles of its length during the 1906 7.8 quake. If you know what to look for you can sill see the effects.

We walked by, across and inside the fault. At one point i looked up the jumbled slope from the trough of the fault and about fifty yards straight up was a house. On stilts. I couldn’t quite see for sure, but I think it’s named “Hubris House.”

They’ll have a great ride one day.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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The Sea Ranch is a lovely, private community on the rocky, seal-scattered shores of the northern California coast in Sonoma County just south of the Mendocino County line. My in-laws live here and we visit at least once a year. I highly recommend getting yourself some in-laws who live in a place like this rather than, say, Myanmar.

It’s only taken us a quarter of a century to figure out how to do it up right though.

In the beginning, we’d strap the kids into their carseats after dinner, red-eye the 10 hour drive up from L.A. and collapse on the hilly sofabed in the studio downstairs.

This time we rented our own little Sea Ranch house for the week (called, appropriately, “Moonscape”). The best thing about it, aside from absolute privacy, is the hot tub on the deck. I know I’m probably going to Carbon Footprint Hell, but damn, 105-degree water, bare skin and open sky… Turn the jets up, honey.

There was a waxing crescent moon this week with plenty of earthshine on the dark side. We renamed the constellations. The new ones are: The Mousepad in the north. Straight overhead there is The Pencil, though one of the stars in that one moved over the course of the week, so it was a more like a pencil than we knew when we named it, getting stubbier each day. Just to the south of the Pencil lies the three stars of the Aeron Chair.

I think if we had another week the names would change to happier subjects. The Wineglass? The Hot Tub? The Silk Scarf?

Popularity: 1% [?]

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Just back from a week at the Sea Ranch, California - a lovely and much-needed escape.

There are a number of points where I tell myself “NOW I feel like I’m on vacation.” The first is the ride to the airport, but that’s not really it. The second is after running the security gauntlet, repacking, dressing and finding my gate, but that’s not really it. The third is treating myself to an extra-dark mocha from Dilettante (a latte from Starbucks will do). Closer, but still not really it. Getting on the plane? Wheels off the ground?

We flew down from Seattle to Santa Rosa on a small turbo-prop plane run by Horizon Air. A friend commented to me once that a boarding pass is an interesting device. One moment it’s the single most important piece of paper in the world and in an instant it’s useless. I assert it’s not entirely useless. Boarding passes make the best bookmarks.

One nice surprise from Horizon: Free local wine and microbrew beer in coach. They give refills too.

NOW I’m on vacation.

Popularity: 1% [?]

See more like that one:

• Commando Week
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• Epilogue, with pictures
• There and back again

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There are some combinations that are just flat-out wrong. I found one this week. Both recommendations from the same friend.

First item: a salad. Specifically, the grilled Asian chicken salad from Jack in the Box. This friend, normally a rational person, came under the influence of the salad recently and wouldn’t let the subject drop. “It’s got crunchy things” were words that would come to haunt me. There would be no peace until I tried the salad.

There is a Jack in the Box near me. There was an empty lot on the corner for years and then suddenly, Jack’s sinister bobbing head loomed over the movie-going traffic. I turn that corner regularly, but never noticed any construction. Do fast food places splorp into being like pod people from Night of the Living Dead? However it came into existence, I did not have the excuse of lack of opportunity. In fact, I’m convinced if I had put it off longer another Jack in the Box would splorp even closer to home. And then another. Until…

I got in the car, drove over and, under Jack’s staring blue eye, bought the salad. I drove it home.

The salad does indeed have crunchy things. All in all it was a completely inoffensive salad and reasonable choice on a menu long on grease and dead cows.

I settled in for a munch and a read. This brings me to the second item: a book.

Now here’s a piece of advice I hope you’ll take to heart. “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Viktor Frankl’s heartbreaking memoir of survival in Nazi concentration camps, while excellent and even “must read” is not what you want going into your eyes while crunchy salad bits are going into your mouth.

World War II may have ended over sixty years ago, but the Germans still have a lot to answer for. And now they can add ruination of a salad to the list of war crimes.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Imagine that you, an American (in this example), have uprooted yourself from your home digs and bopped off to live in some pleasant but remote backwater. It’s so remote that you haven’t heard a song in English since you arrived. One day you happen upon a small restaurant and hear familiar music wafting out onto the sidewalk. You peer inside. A waitress is plopping plates of burgers (burgers!) in front of a few patrons lounging at small tables. And just inside the door, in the corner by the window, there’s a band - also locals. But they’re playing American music! Songs you know but haven’t heard for years! But… they’re playing music you HATED back home. You not only hated it, you hated anyone who liked that music. You’d cross the street to avoid being contaminated by accidental earbud bleed from one of them.

But now… you’re far from home. It’s been years. Can you really remember why you hated those songs so much? Would you roll your eyes and walk on? Or would you waft in, grinning and singing along? And those people you hated - the ones who loved the songs you hate - would you turn away? Or would you sit down and shoot the breeze? Even if it was someone who’s favorite song was Achy Breaky Heart, I bet you’d share a drink and a chorus.

I haven’t talked much here about my other band, Balkanarama. We play hot gypsy nightclub music various places around the Seattle area but mostly (monthly) at a local Greek restaurant and mostly for immigrants from Eastern Europe. We played there Saturday night.

I didn’t have high expectations for the night. It was a drop-dead gorgeous sunny spring day here and the sun was still up when we started at 7 pm. Predictably, the restaurant was largely abandoned by hordes hungrier for a little sunlight than a little souvlaki. But things picked up as the sky grew dark and we ended up playing a full four hours.

Lots of requests. The Bulgarians had their faves and we played every one. Then a table of Albanians trouped in and we played everything on their hit list. Then the Serbs. And so on. I feel like we’ve reached some kind of landmark as a band, that people from any of those countries can come in and ask for a tune and for a whole evening we know every one. Maybe it was just luck.

But even more fascinating to me is that the Albanians were singing along on the Macedonian songs, the Serbians were requesting Bosnian songs, the Greeks were dancing to the Turkish tunes. Back home, these people are at each others’ throats - and worse - but here they are all equally adrift in foreign seas and suddenly the similarities are so much more important than the differences.

(A Serbian woman tucked forty bucks into the pocket of our sax player for playing that Bosnian song out on the floor while she danced.)

Popularity: 3% [?]

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It’s the standard line about weather in Seattle (”the Intermittent Windshield Wiper Capitol of the World”). Don’t like it? Wait ten minutes. Like a city bus in some fantasy world, new weather will supposedly materialize on schedule.

Today was definitely a wait ten minutes day. An hour or so on the road was like watching TV with an obsessive channel flipper. Light clouds, heavy clouds, mist, drizzle, buckets, rainbows!, sunshine and finally a light dust of snow near my destination.

Still waiting for blue ice, oobleck, frogs and pink lizards.

True weather story: Years ago in the southern California desert on a baking, cloudless summer afternoon we were lounging, somnolent around the kitchen table trying to avoid any heat-producing activity. Simultaneously and for no apparent reason we all rose from our chairs as if the atmosphere had bunched itself under our feet and pushed up. Outside, the light grew thick, though there were still no clouds and a directionless wind whipped the tree tops. The hair on my arms prickled. I went outside. Up and down the street, people were coming out of their houses and looking around. The tension grew oppressive and it became a struggle to breathe. Suddenly, electricity arced between two high tension lines overhead. The blinding violet arc traveled along the lines for a moment accompanied by an earsplitting buzz, until it finally snapped and power went out for miles around. The tension immediately evaporated and everyone exhaled.

The memory of this storm was the germ behind the lyrics to my song, Monsoon.

Weather stories?

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Ultra-short fiction seems to be getting bigger.

The experience of reading flash stories is qualitatively different from reading a novel. It’s necessary to be a more active participant in the story telling - and that’s what I find so captivating. Rather than sit back and be a passive observer of the author’s fully-presented vision, we are only allowed a thin slice. A tantalizing, voyeuristic peek through a partly open door. If the author is skillful, the peek is enough to let you tease out the story.

A very fine collection of flash fiction was published by my friend, Mark Budman: You Have Time for This

I came across the podcast of another friend this week, Laurence Simon. He produces a 100 word story every day. Sometimes more than one a day. I have to admire that kind of sheer… throughput. He also has a weekly challenge - with prizes! - to write a story of one’s own on a given theme and record it for the podcast. Funny how motivating prizes are. The theme this week was “Cake” and here’s my entry:

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CAKE
by Eva Moon

Alma bent her legs first one way and then another, trying to find the right fit. In the end, she discovered if she curled up on her side and tucked her right foot tightly behind her left ankle there was just room to snug her hips inside the rim of the round pan. She leaned forward, pressing her breasts against her thighs; left arm beneath her cheek and right snaked into the small space above her feet. It wasn’t easy, but wasn’t her family worth a little sacrifice?

After dinner the kids all begged for an extra slice.

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Listen to it - and all the other stories - HERE

But I hope you’ll vote for mine!

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Two holidays in one week! With National Napping Day hardly behind us, it’s already Pi Day: March 14 - 3.14.

In honor of the occasion, here are a few treats:

Pi in the kitchen

How to Calculate Pi by Throwing Frozen Hot Dogs (really!)

Haiku (piku?)

Three point one four one
Five nine two six five three five
Eight nine seven nine

Pi Hop

Pi in the face?

But is it true? A hoax revealed: One of the oldest hoaxes in history was unmasked today. A group of mathematicians, called “the Brotherhood” revealed that pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, long held to be an irrational number equal to 3.141592…, was actually equal to simply 3.

Cloaked in a green hood, one spokesperson, called ‘Pascal’ said that after years of soul searching and intense debate, the Brotherhood voted unanimously to reveal the hoax to the public… [link]

A friend points out that they can’t celebrate Pi Day in Europe, but I think they approximate it on July 22. I truly wish I could publish this post at exactly 1:59 pm today, but I’ll be out eating pizza pi.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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