Digging Through My Oddball Photos, Again

Bellevue Hospital: Offering patients the most advanced medical technology available today

And the red star means spicy

This looks like the cock that was used to flavor the seasoning. Apparently he's not too happy about it, either.

I finally spotted a piano from the Play Me I'm Yours art installation in June. This one was in front of St. Mark's Church near Astor Place. Somehow I missed the other 59 pianos. I'm just now browsing their website and feeling sad that I didn't know about it earlier. My sheet music is somewhere under the bed, collecting dust.

...And discriminating against half breeds

Engrish: Good at stating the obvious...

Thanks for exterminating the red dragons. Now how about the giant rats?

Food Porn Chronicles: The Shakes

One of the few things that I get excited about during New York's stifling hot summers spent inside greenhouse apartments is making fruit smoothies. The weather the last month or two has been straight out of Do The Right Thing, without the racial violence. Every morning I get up 15 minutes earlier to spin fruit in my mini food processor. It's the best thing in the world.

Justina's Recipe for Perfect Smoothies

fresh ripe strawberries, cut into small pieces
fresh blueberries
banana
soy milk

Freeze the cut up strawberries and blueberries the night before. I usually cut up enough fruit to last a week and keep it in a large tupperware in the freezer. In a food processor or blender, add a handful of frozen strawberries and blueberries, half a banana, and soy milk. Blend until smooth. Experiment with portions to get the right amount. Pour into a commuter coffee mug and bring on the train. Note: I freeze the fruit because my mini chopper is too small to handle ice cubes.

Variation: Watermelon, strawberries and apple juice. Don't freeze the watermelon.

Another variation: Half an avocado, 1 T condensed milk, whole milk. Don't freeze the avocado. Add ice.

Avocado shake

Another variation: Dragon fruit, blueberries, soy milk.

A word about dragon fruit: There are two kinds, the ones with white flesh and the ones with purple flesh. The purple ones are slightly more tangy, the white ones taste slightly like fresh cut grass. Neither have much of a flavor, but they are full of water, which makes them popular on hot days, especially after an overnight stint in the fridge. Last weekend I bought them for $4/lb on Canal Street. Not cheap, but I wanted to see how they would turn out in a smoothie. I'm mostly a fan of the texture created by the seeds. I prefer the purple ones but they seem less common; I only saw one stand selling them.

Purple dragon fruit

 Oh, and one more thing. THIS IS THE BLUEBERRY MOMENT OF THE YEAR. I think for the next week or so blueberries will be in peak season, so keep your eyes peeled at the bodega or sidewalk fruit stand. I bought a pint at my bodega for $2 yesterday and they were perfectly large, plump and sweet. The sidewalk stands are selling them for $1.50 a pint. Stock up!

Oh God I Should Be In Bed But First

So a little bit of serendipity has gotten me drawing again the last few weeks. Here are a few from the stashes. Some are actually from a year ago. All charcoal on paper.

Serendipity? I don't think I actually know what that means.

Food Porn Chronicles: Who Needs A Garburator?

But first, Laff of the Day #8, as told by the Eternal Paid Volunteer Temp. He's full of good stories lately.

"This guy went down in front of the ER today. You know those elevators to the right of the entrance to the ER? He went down there.

"There were all these doctors around him, trying to help him. All these doctors, completely surrounding him, right next to the ER.

"And then I heard someone go, 'Should we call 911?'"

This being Bellevue Hospital, the comment could be interpreted two ways:

1. As an example of American robotic stupidity, the same type that makes me devour Popeye's Fried Chicken but get weepy at the thought of the nice homestay hostess at Tiger Leaping Gorge who chased down a fat hen after she asked, "Are there any vegetarians in your group? No? Okay, I go make dinner."

2. As keen insight and a prudent warning from someone who rightfully doubts the competence of Bellevue medical staff, many of whom are on NYU payroll and therefore wear those white coats with the misleading purple NYU School of Medicine patch suggesting proficiency in providing medical care.

And now, onto the porn.
---

I just got back from a long weekend in Texas. The first night home always requires getting reacquainted with the contents of the fridge. Ew, I totally forgot about these mushrooms. Also excavated from forgotten corners of the pantry and crisper: a can of chickpeas, three-month old sun-dried tomatoes, a bag of pita bread. Any normal person would enlist the help of their Garburator. Not me.

Hummus has been on my to do menu for a few weeks, and tonight seemed like the perfect occasion: another greenhouse night in the apartment (but a frigid 85 outside, with a light breeze that refuses to make its way through our windows), no love for any heat-generating appliances with the possible exception of the toaster oven, and plenty of old food to test the limits of edibility.

Sun-Dried Tomato Hummus with Mushrooms

old, sad-looking mushrooms
dried oregano
fresh garlic
1 16-oz can chickpeas
1 1/4 T tahini
juice of 1/2 lemon
olive oil
salt, pepper and chili flakes to taste
2 pitas
garnish: fresh tomato slices and watercress

Sautee mushrooms in 1 T olive oil. Season with oregano and salt. Set aside, do not drain. In a food processor, chop 2-3 cloves of garlic, chickpeas and tahini. Add olive oil and lemon juice, salt, pepper and chili. Continue processing until mixture has the consistency of mashed potatoes - or store-bought hummus. Doesn't everyone know what hummus is supposed to look like? Toast and slice pita bread, if desired. Serve hummus in a bowl, top with mushrooms and mushroom liquid from the pan. Garnish with tomatoes and watercress.

Notes: I didn't have tahini so I used 1 T peanut butter and 1/2 t sesame oil. The hummus has a slightly more Asian taste than it should, but the substitution worked in a pinch.

And of course, it was another Dark N Stormy night.

There is a background story to this meal, for those of you still reading. My mom always packs a ton of food for me to bring back to New York at the end of my visit. Yesterday, as we were leaving for the airport in Houston, she said, "How about this mochi? How about some sticky rice? How about this smoked salmon?"

"All of it," I said.

This evening I stopped at the store to pick up sandwich trimmings for the smoked salmon sandwich I was going to have for dinner. Watercress, a tomato and Laughing Cow cheese because it was on sale...sort of. The hand-written sign pointed to a stack of Laughing Cow wheels that were printed completely in Arabic, except for the part that said, "La Vache Qui Rit," the French name, and "Produced in Egypt."

For some reason, only the Arabic/French Laughing Cows were on sale, at 3 for $5. The ones printed in English with the English name were regular price.

Some interesting facts from wikipedia:

In Arabic-speaking countries (except for Egypt, apparently), it's called البقرة الضاحكة (Al-Baqara Ad-Dahika).

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is often jokingly referred to as 'La Vache qui Rit' because of his supposed resemblance to the cheese's logo.


Anyway, the point of the story is that my mom decided not to pack the smoked salmon, but I only discovered it tonight when I got home. Huge disappointment, with a lonely bunch of watercress and a tomato as collateral damage.

Food Porn Chronicles: It Was a Dark n Stormy Night

So the saying goes that all anyone ever uses blogs for these days is to post pictures of their cat or whatever they happen to be eating. I guess I've been guilty of both. It's not as extreme as the San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll and his cat columns, but I like to think the comparison is somewhat appropriate. Carroll is more brilliant than me, though, so he gets to be more self-indulgent than me.

But onto the blah blah blah.

Tonight's dinner was inspired by a trip to Dallas BBQ last Saturday, when it was about 140 degrees outside. It's a touristy joint with passable barbecue, but we were more interested in the frozen margaritas. My friend inhaled his large plate of steaming brisket, but I couldn't bring myself to have anything hot. Instead I had a shrimp cocktail on a bed of avocado and lettuce. Crisp, cool and horse radishy. It hit the spot.

Tonight, back in my greenhouse of an apartment, I decided it was time for Dallas BBQ shrimp cocktail, redux.

7-9 large shrimp, peeled
1 ripe avocado
1/4 red onion, minced
1/2 tomato
1-2 leaves lettuce, chopped
juice of 1 lime
salt
red chili flakes
shrimp cocktail sauce

Boil the shrimp until cooked through. Don't overcook. Combine avocado, onions, tomatoes and lime juice. Mash together until smooth with a few lumps (you've just made guacamole.) Add salt and chili to taste. Place shrimp along edge of bowl. Serve guac on top of lettuce. Makes 2 servings.

Notes: I didn't have shrimp cocktail sauce on hand, so I mixed wasabi with ketchup. The wine glass turned out to be hard to eat out of so I recommend a regular ole bowl. If you don't like eating sea poo you should devein the shrimp before you boil them.

A couple of friends recently brought me a bottle of dark rum in exchange for dog-sitting their beautiful, sweet Australian cattle dog while they were on vacation. Perfect for dark n stormys.

The rum, not the dog.

The key to good dark n stormys, according to a quick trawl of the interwebs, is the ginger beer. My favorite is Stoney Tangawizi (made by Coca-Cola??), a standard soda offering available in nearly every inhabited outpost in Kenya. It's not too sweet, has quite a bite and makes me sneeze. A friend visiting from the U.S. even brought a few bottles back to California with him, or claimed he was going to.

Alas, Stoney, like Tim Tams (owned by Pepperidge Farm??) and a limited few other brilliant foreign creations, is not available in the U.S. Would I have to go to Whole Foods to buy overpriced ginger beer?

It turns out that ginger beer is extremely popular in the Caribbean, and that dark n stormy is a Caribbean drink from Bermuda or Jamaica depending on who you ask. Which means that my neighborhood grocery store, which serves a Caribbean and West Indian community, stocks shelves and shelves of ginger beer varieties. There were so many to choose from. I couldn't decide. I finally went with the Diet Goslings. You know, if you're planning to drink as many dark n stormys as I am, you should avoid any sugar you don't have to ingest.

Dark N Stormy

1 part dark rum
4 parts ginger beer
ice

The can of soda expanded in my fridge, resulting in the Tower of Pisa effect you see.

And another thing. Apparently you can suck tea or coffee through a Tim Tam with the corners bitten off, and win contests for your effort.

Laff of the Day #7

As told by the Eternal Paid Volunteer Temp:

"I was at the vending machine today and this fat lady..." [holds arms out to indicate a 300 lb woman] "...was complaining about how everything is too healthy. 'Why's everyone trying to make us be so healthy? Why can't they put regular soda in the vending machine instead of this diet crap?' So I said, 'Well, this is a hospital. They want you to be healthy.'

And she said, well if we were all meant to be the same size, we'd all be a hundred pounds, wouldn't we?

Then she said, 'I'm going downstairs to the other vending machine to get a real soda.'"

[The End]
---
And then I said, "While you're down there you should also try to get a real gym membership."

I Left My Heart In...

It's back to the grind after a glorious week in San Francisco, the greatest city on earth. A friend said tonight that there is a marked difference in my mood and energy since I've been back.

"Even your skin looks different," he said.

"I'm browner," I said.

"No, something else," he said.

Love, probably. And life. Something renewed in my spirit and my soul. Something gently shaken and lovingly reawakened. My head tilted with curiosity, my eyes squinting into the sun, my shoulders dipping and legs zipping around people to get a better view. Showered once again by the love of old friends, the kindness of strangers, and all the things that make my pulse race for the place that I call home only because it resides in my heart.

I reconnected with the people who paint my world there with broad and fine strokes, in vivid and muted colors. I got to know distant connections who are now being recruited to nourish the love and wonder and passion for life that only seems to spring forth when I'm out there. I reconnected with the city itself -- a living, breathing, pulsing mass of rolling hills, crashing surf, dramatic cliffs plunging into deserted beaches and shimmering tidepools, tiptoeing fog, crisp blue skies, sprawling bridges and winding highways and car-free bike lanes.

There have been tiny tiny men who were threatened by the knowledge that I'd never love them as much as I love San Francisco. They have bellowed in their weak, quivering voices that San Francisco is not a living thing and wouldn't miss me if I moved away to follow and prop up their empty souls. They lacked imagination, they lacked self-worth, and they lacked a compelling reason to take up precious space on our planet. So when a tomato truck ran them over while they were wiping their crack with poison oak leaves on the side of Interstate 5, I only mourned for the tomatoes.

So what? I love bloody marys.

In San Francisco, I'm alive. The vitality and passion that were part of my daily wardrobe, tucked into every vein when I lived there years ago, became fiery again. I'm not sure what it is, this match struck against a coarse surface, this beacon through pea soup fog, these hibernating parts of my soul that bound out of bed at the crack of dawn when I find myself sitting on the dock of the Bay, wasting no time.

In New York, those parts of me have fallen asleep. At some point in the last three years, complacency took over. Things started to seem good enough. Monkey dancing for lethargic bureaucracies seems good enough. Doughy, unchallenging, clown-like men seemed good enough. Being surrounded by plodding vapid lifestyles seems good enough, as long as it comes with eye contact and a vague semblance of customer service.

There's an equally valid flip side: The friends I have here are priceless. I'm glad to have a job, and a lovely bike, and a kickass living situation in an endearing neighborhood. I'm young, healthy and don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me.

In this silly thing called life, I'm constantly faced with the dilemma of which reality to use to realign my perspective, how finely to tune my patience and my discontent, exactly what constitutes opening my eyes so I can feel gratitude and what constitutes spin. It's not East Coast vs West Coast, it's Eastern vs Western.

Practice: Sitting still, breathing in until your Buddha belly becomes impressive. Now shed your desires. This is how to achieve happiness. Want creates dissatisfaction. Accept what you have and be grateful, instead of feeling entitled to more and trying to reach for things you don't have.

Versus: How many million times did I want to shake my Kenyan friends in the village and say, "Stop complaining about what you don't have and do something about it. Say out loud what you're thinking and ask for what you want."

There's no right answer to my dilemma. Or rather, the right answer is different every time I ask the question.

There's something missing when I'm not in San Francisco. It's that thing that I know exists, because I remember seeing it somewhere before. Not just seeing, but holding it and breathing it and living by it. Now I've gone for years without tending it, and then it reappears joyful dancing frolicking in the form of the place that feels like home, the place that holds my heart. It's so obvious. But sometimes it comes in other forms. Like in the form of another rich, rare soul revealed to me through uncontrollable laughter, through vocabulary words I never knew, through a conversation full of brilliant ideas I completely disagree with. And then it's all of those things held up to me as a mirror reflecting the beauty of my own soul. Yes, I've seen you before.

It's my lifelong love affair. Like all true love, the feelings ebb and flow. But kind lovers forgive each other for being absent, for taking each other for granted for long periods of time. They do this because their love still lives and breathes and kicks and scratches. It's not going anywhere. They know they've been fools for pretending otherwise.

Back to the complacency. It settled in when I wasn't even looking. It slowly, silently smothered me, stubbed down the embers in my soul's campfire. But I'm still wearing my headlamp. I can see that the s'mores I made awhile ago have cooled too much, the graham crackers are a little dry and uninteresting. Don't worry though. I'll wrap and save them for later. Tonight I'll retire to the tent, bring in my hiking boots so they stay dry, zip out the biting critters. I'll get a lot of sleep, and dream courageous dreams.

I wake up to the sun these days, and it rises early.

Laff of the Day #6

I share an office phone with Joe the Banker. It's a pretty ghetto setup. One office, two phone lines, five people.

Also, our phones are just phones. They don't have speaker phone, mute, hold, voicemail or volume control. They look like this:

Technically if you turn the phone upside down there is a knob that you can slide to adjust the receiver volume. Or maybe it's the ringer volume.

Either way, the knob doesn't work.

Why don't we have modern day phone technology? It has something to do with the grinding bureaucracy we work for at NYU, and how it's also woven into the grinding bureaucracy of Bellevue Hospital.

Today someone called for me, and Joe the Banker picked up.

"Hello, Peds I.D.," he said. We work in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, or peds I.D. for short. And it's pronounced "peeds I.D."

"Sure, one moment," J-the-B said, and motioned for me to pick up the line on my phone. Yes, the old-fashioned one-phone, two-lines setup.

"This is Justina," I said. It was the other project coordinator, the Noob. She was giggling.

"Just...wanted...to...let...you...know," she gasped between giggles, "...you...forgot...to...include...an...attachment...with...your...last...email."

"I know, I'm sending it out again," I said. "And stop laughing at me. It's not funny."

"I'm...not...laughing...at...you," the Noob said, still giggling.

"Whatever. I'm resending the attachment," I said. I was sort of annoyed that she thought it was so funny that I had forgotten to attach a file to my email.

A few minutes later she emailed me the following note:

Sorry, I wasn't laughing about the attachment; I've done that a million times. I was laughing because the person who answered the phone said, 'Hello, this is P. Diddy.' 

Don't you have your own phone line?

---
And that's how Joe the Banker became P. Diddy.

Midwestern Hospitality

Spent the weekend in St Paul, MN for a Peace Corps friend’s wedding, mostly marveling at how nice all the people working in the service industry were. I expected everyone to be rude and abusive to me, and no one was, except this one lady at the open bar who growled, “NEXT ORDER!” without looking at me.

“Can I get another glass of the zin?” I said, pushing through the nasty the way I always do in New York.

She looked at me, startled, and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, honey. I was talking to my assistant back there. But here, let me go ahead and get that wine for you.”

Brad was standing next to me and said, “Well, in New York she would have been talking to you.”

I was also amazed at how many trees and other green things were growing all over the place, and how all the empty spaces in front of houses were real parking spots that no one needed because they had already found a parking spot.

And, I was amazed at how many fake blonde women there were, mainly middle-aged, using the same honey blonde shade of hair dye.

“I even noticed it on my flight into St. Paul,” I said. “All the flight attendants had the same color hair.”

“The fake blonde is not a Minnesota thing,” Tim said. “It’s a most of the rest of the country thing, except for New York and certain parts of California.”

“Really? Where have I been all this time?” I said.

“In New York and certain parts of California,” he said.

“I do remember bleached blonde hair being all the rage in Chicago back in the 90s,” I said. “But now it seems like the thing to do is be a dyed brunette with long straight hair.”

“Well, you’ll probably start seeing the brunette thing in the rest of the country in another 15 years, because that’s how long it takes for everyone else to catch on,” he said.

Fashion predictions from a water and sanitation engineer from Phoenix, ladies and gentlemen.

Having every single service industry person be totally nice, helpful and competent towards me, and every other person I met be friendly, made me realize that many New Yorkers are just not nice people. I mean, there’s really no excuse for that level of nasty, hateful abuse towards everyone around you when you don’t even know them. In fact, there’s no excuse for it when you do know someone. It doesn’t take any more brain cells or calories to be courteous, although most people who are distasteful are also able to spare a few thousand calories and not need a snack afterwards.

It is true, according to my Minnesotan friends, that Minnesotans and Midwesterners in general tend to be non-confrontational and polite, which I’m told leads to passive aggressiveness since it’s not natural to be that nice all the time.

It was my first trip to Minnesota and I definitely arrived with certain expectations of back-woodsiness. I’m not even sure why I came toting such strong biases. It might be because I’ve befriended quite a few Minnesotans and adopted-Minnesotans in the last five years or so. I felt a bit impatient with the lack of fresh vegetables and non-fried options on the menus, and assumed that the only beer on tap anywhere would be American mass-distributed brands like Bud and Coors. And well, those were on tap, but there were a few local microbrews as well.

I also noticed that so far Minneapolis has been spared the scourge of the skinny jeans fashion craze that is tragically sweeping New York City and traumatizing me and my disturbingly flat ass these days. And I’m referring to the women’s fashion. I doubt skinny jeans for men will ever make it to the Twin Cities, since the entire weekend I didn’t see a single gay man, which is only to say that I didn’t get out that much while I was there. But if I had traveled the same social trajectory in New York, more than half of them would have been gay and/or wearing skinny jeans.

So, thank you, Minnesota, for a wholesome Midwestern weekend full of reminders that the entire world is not New York, for good (mostly) and for bad (a teeny tiny bit).

New York Moments and Laff of the Day #5

Jetting over the amber waves of grain on my way to St Paul, MN.

Today has been a constant stream of examples of why New Yorkers should be banned from working in the service industry: They possess the evolutionarily impossible combination of incompetence and a nasty attitude, which you’d expect to eradicate itself from the gene pool by virtue of having no social or biological value. And yet, here we decent people are, putting up with this crap while Nature laughs in our face and spends eons trying to get it right.

I went to check in for my flight and there was no line at all. In fact, all of Terminal 4 at JFK was eerily empty except for rent-a-cops and a few people traveling to a Carribean destination. I had my choice of two equally bored-looking check-in counter staff, and chose the woman because she was young and pretty. Or maybe because the dude was young and ugly. How’s that for successful marketing by Sun Country Airlines?

Any evidence of prudent hiring ended there because the woman rolled her eyes at me when I approached, presumably because it meant she had to do her job. No smile, no fake greeting or fake wishes for a nice flight.

“How many bags are you checking today?” was the only thing she said to me, in the same voice that someone would use to say, “My brain seeped out of my ears years ago, and then I used it to make muffins for my neighbors so I’m incapable of feeling anything but entitlement and disdain.”

Peet’s Coffee in Terminal 4: I ordered a regular Earl Grey from two reasonably friendly baristas. My tea came in a paper cup placed inside another cup placed inside a third cup, which seemed like overkill protection against my burning my hands. She had also put one of those paper rings around the last cup, which sent the burn-fearing buffalo over the cliff's edge.

Then I realized that she had given me two teabags, which made me happy until I started sipping the bitter, tannic, acidic hot drink that would never burn my hands.

For a company that prides itself on being green, Peet's Coffee sure knows how to hire employees who mindlessly ignore their corporate values.

I passed a second Peet’s Coffee on the way to the gate, and stopped to ask for more hot water in my tea because it was too strong.

“Can I get a little more hot water in here?” I asked the barista, pointing to my cup. She stared at me with no smile, no reply, and no firing synapses. Then she dragged her inexplicably heavy yet empty soul to the pastry case, heaved her 1 lb arm with all her spiritual might, and pulled out a pastry for another customer.

After ringing up the other customer as fast as a snail might, she stared at me with the same slack-jawed, mouth-breathing look of hatred, which I had earlier mistaken for low IQ. I still didn’t know whether the answer to my question was yes or no, even after she took my cup from me.

“I’m too lazy and entitled to muster the brain cells to answer your question,” she pantomimed with her lack of a will to live.

After all this, I was left thinking, “Aren’t there health codes that say you’re not supposed to refill a customer’s already-used cup?”

Who knows. I could start an entire blog of stories of dismal customer service in New York. I could call it New York Moments.

There was the one time I was at that sock store on St. Marks Place. They have a huge variety of socks and other apparel for your feet, but everything is overpriced.

I asked the cashier if there were any discounts for buying several pairs at once.

The answer choices are:
a. Yes, or
b. No.

The cashier was a big, ugly, hairy bridge-and-tunnel-type, which is odd considering he works at a sock store on St. Marks, a block packed with touristy tattoo parlors, head shops and Japanese restaurants.

Anyway, the ugly cashier’s butt crack said, “GRUNT HSSSSSSSS.”

Then his ugly face got uglier as he scowled at me and said, “There are people who come in here and buy ten pairs of socks and never ask for a discount.”

So now a customer doesn’t even have the right to ask if a store policy exists that might encourage her to develop a favorable opinion of the business and perhaps come back and spend more money.

Instead, she gets grunted at by an ugly guy’s ass crack and then told to shut the hell up for trying to be a savvy customer in a store whose existence depends on people who are willing to shamelessly consume unnecessary products like overpriced socks.

Apparently this moronic business model works in New York.
---

Wow, I just came across this story:

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/01/29/2009-01-29_nastiest_retailer_in_new_york_barks_at_c.html

Based on the article, this could be the same guy. But I'm not sure because I swear the one I talked to was older, fatter and even uglier than Marty Rosen. You'd have to show me a picture of his ugly grunting butt crack, then I could tell you.

Imagine, two nasty people working at one sock shop.
---

Laff of the Day #5, from Cindy with an S. "I was flying with a friend once and she fell asleep. They came by with snacks and left hers on her tray table. The cookies were so good that I decided to try to eat hers while she was sleeping. She’d never know the difference. But when I started reaching for her cookies she woke up.

Darn it! I wanted those cookies!”
---

Gypsy Cab Charm. “Where you come from, honey?” he asked.

“Texas,” I said. “You?”

“Bangladesh,” he said.

“Oh, where everyone got arsenic poisoning from contaminated wells all over the country thanks to the worst public health disaster in history,” I almost said, calling up the only thing I know about Bangladesh.

Instead I said, “Oh, nice.”

“I want move to Texas, start good business. My friend have gas station in Texas, make so much money,” he said.

“You don’t make good money driving cabs?”

“Ha! No, no money from this. I work so long, then go home and sleep, then go back to work,” he said. “No good money. You married?”

“No,” I said.

“Let’s go to Texas, you and me, start a business,” he said. ‘I’m not married, no girlfriend, no wife. Let’s go to Texas.”

“Oh, no that’s okay,” I said. I had better things to do, like slit my wrists.

“Think about it, honey,” he said.

I already had.