Still Life with Ambivalence

I've had a drink (or two) daily since resigning, again, not to drink on weekdays. A little harm reduction strategy that's vexing me, it seems. As I write this, I'm anticipating the Bulleit rye on the rocks I ordered from the bar. I'm attempting to be gentle, neutral to myself about this, rather than using it as an excuse to lash myself. One or two drinks in an evening is not a grievous offense to my own physical health, after all.

It is definitely something I want to get ahold of, though. It's frustrating, and anxiogenic, to set an intention for myself and feel the compulsion to break it. To feel, and then to gratify, the compulsion. It's the same exact feeling when I stay on Facebook past the time I intend to log off, or put off a task I intend to do. There is a very natural, it seems, feeling of anxiety, shame, and dread in not following my intention, in violating my sense of what's best and most healthful for myself. The gratification of the urge is momentarily pleasurable, sometimes even glorious, but it's eventually replaced by an even greater sense of anxiety and shame, and, then, by whatever consequences follow, like deprivation of sleep, or acidy stomach in the case of alcohol or coffee.

I'm sure this has all been written about before, but it's good to articulate the patterns to myself. I'm successfully feeling neutral and curious while writing this, which is really good.

And then there was one.

I'm ditching the 30 Days Meme. I completed two out of 30 entries, and I've rapidly found that that particular list of prompts just isn't doing anything for me. Scrapped. Gonna try my hand at going back to writing my own free-form narrative, even if I have to write about shit I don't wanna write about. I've been ambivalating enough for the last year-plus. I need to get back to the Breeness of it all.

Two things you probably know if you know me In Real Life, but don't yet know if you only know me via Toothpick Labeling or Limburger, my previous personal blog:

1. I got bit really badly by a dog in September, and now I've got a killer motherfucking scar on my left hand. By the grace of randomness, luck, and privilege, I've got most functionality back, and a family who can help me cover the medical bills.

<--How it looked two days after the bite.
How it looks now.-->

So, there was that.

2. Astrid and I broke up about a month ago. You, the reader, met Astrid nearly seven years ago, when I wrote about our first date. Since then, those tentative and doubtful and sexy beginnings became the longest relationship for either of us, the longest shack up, the deepest intimacy, and ultimately the most slow-motion, excruciating breakup in my life. The last year and a half have been fucking painful. Now that we've broken up, we both feel a lot of relief, release, and freedom to find ourselves in different ways. It's actually been, on the whole, easier between us since we made the decision to end it.

And here's the interesting part: we still live together. Tune in next time for more!

Day 02 - Your first love, in great detail

We were teenagers. J. and I had developed a deep and deeply romantic friendship and it was completely platonic. [Except for that dream I had about marrying her. And the dream she had about me joining her in the bathtub. (I think Tom Petty was there, as well.) And that time we went camping with her mom and stepdad, and I was giving her a back rub on our sleeping bags in the back of the truck, and it was freezing, and it was the middle of the night, and I straddled her, laying my hands on her warm back, and she said,

“Mold me like clay,”

and I was so sexually aroused and so scared that I jumped off of her and had to wait til my heartbeat regained its normal tempo.]

J. was the first friend I came out to. Our heart-and-mind connection was beautiful and hilarious and mutually doting, and she was one of the first people in my life I had those epic conversations with about the nature of the universe and the nature of tiny, seemingly inconsequential things that were actually totally profound. We had been close friends for several years before I woke to the reality that I was utterly in love with her. I existed til then in that liminal passageway between the conscious and unconscious knowledge of my desire for other girls; our friendship and the erotic energy between us lingered in that blurry borderland between fantasy and reality, mutuality and unrequition.

I finally gathered the nerve to write her The Letter in 1991. We were both 19. She was in a relationship with a significant boyfriend, and had a good deal more sexual experience than I had at the time. In fact, my own exploration with boys to that point had been marked by a couple darkened living room gropes and botched attempts at fellatio. J. actually knew what being in a relationship meant, what love meant. Here I was, a 19 year-old who'd never even gone on a proper date, declaring my intense love and desire for J. in a letter laden with angst and written with such urgency and self-absorption that I almost forgot she had a serious boyfriend (a guy I really dug, by the way, and had no intention of hurting). There was urgency on her part, too, because when she received the letter, she immediately called me and we made plans to rendezvous at Denny's in Fremont (a reasonable half-way point between her house in the East Bay and mine in the South) to discuss these Weighty Issues.

I don't remember the finer details of our conversation that night, or if we ordered chicken strips or “Moons Over My Hammy,” but the gist of it was this: she had a boyfriend, and being with girls wasn't what she could do. But oh-my-god-if-she-didn't-have-a-boyfriend...could she maybe, possibly, fall in love with me too?

J. turned out not to be my first girl kiss, to my displeasure, though I was so looking forward to holding her and pressing her lips to mine in the vinyl booth of that most romantic of generic American diner settings. We shortly drifted apart into the adventures of our own early-20s lives and touched base now and again. I'm so happy to say that we reconnected over the years, and that we still totally adore and admire each other. Things turned out exactly the way they should have for us both.

But damn, that would've been something good.

Day 01 - Introduce Yourself

Hi. I'm Bree. Only, I'm not actually Bree; Bree is a pseudonym I've been using since I started blogging about eight years ago. Actually, it's a pseudonym I created around 2000ish when I had a brief and fairly dull foray into cyber chatting in those lonely little virtual chat rooms when people were still on IRC channels or some such shit that I didn't understand then and don't understand now. So I've gone by Bree in some circles for 'bout a decade, plus/minus.

I grew up in San Jose and Los Gatos, California, suburban sprawl about fifty miles south of San Francisco. Most of you reading this blog probably already know that. Maybe I should introduce myself in a more enticing way. Let's see now...well, I'm pushing 40, I'm a big ol' dyke (who makes infrequent exceptions for an occasional boy as long as he's fey, geeky, and submissive enough), I took the Meyers-Briggs personality type test when I was 17 at Jewish youth group camp, and was revealed to be an ENFP, and I think it's still pretty accurate.

What else? I wear two career hats, well, really one job hat and one career hat: my money-earning work is bookkeeping, basically paying other peoples' bills and balancing their checkbooks (something I've pretty much never managed to do for myself) and my career path work, which hasn't quite made me money yet, is as a psychotherapist. I'm an intern working in private practice in Berkeley, and I mainly work with queer and trans folks, and individuals and relationship partners who are in polyamorous relationships or who are identified with alternative sexualities in some form.

I think a lot about death and grief and loss.

I really enjoy the minutia of consciousness and perception and exploring the endless mental and emotional crevices of experience and memory and fantasy and nostalgia and here-and-nowness.

I enjoy documenting things. One day a year, I try to document every single thing I do from waking until slumber on my Facebook page. Hundreds of Facebook friends seem to be fascinated by this myopic, indulgent navel-gazing exercise, or at least are polite enough to make comments every now and then. For seven years running, I blogged about every movie I viewed, every book I read, and every noteworthy experience I had in a series of annual year-end wraps. You can read the last one right here.

I have several friends in the world who I cherish and who I feel deeply emotionally tied to. I really adore my family. My nieces and nephews are some of the smartest, kindest people I know. I live with my girlfriend Astrid and our dog Dorrie, a pit bull-border collie mutt, who I'm totally in love with. Astrid and I have had a really tough year together, and I've scarcely blogged about it. Maybe I'll share more of this process later. Maybe I won't.

My mom died about a year ago, of lung cancer. She was 73. My dad died 37 years ago of a heart attack, when he was just 43. I'm an orphan, I guess. I miss my mom, and I also feel just a shred of a bit more freedom to move about the world as myself since she's been gone. I feel lighter, but also somewhat guilty about this. I can't imagine my life without my sisters.

I'm slutty. Usually more in my imagination than in actuality, but I do get around some. I really enjoy riding my bicycle. I eat a lot of meat. I listen to quirky emotional indie rock. I like excruciatingly cheesy pop culture. I can talk a blue streak, and I often get bored of the stories I tell over and over, but also I often remain freshly amused by myself.

That's some of me.

30 Days Meme

I need some writing prompts to get back into this personal blogging thing. My friend Dax is working on this very involved meme at the moment, and I'm thinking I'll follow suit. I've tried to figure out where the meme came from, but can't quite trace it. Anyone know where it started?

So, in 30 blog entries (doubt they'll be written on consecutive days) I will submit to you these mini chapters about, you guessed it, me.

Day 01 - Introduce yourself
Day 02 - Your first love, in great detail
Day 03 - Your parents, in great detail
Day 04 - What you ate today, in great detail
Day 05 - Your definition of love, in great detail
Day 06 - Your day, in great detail
Day 07 - Your best friend, in great detail
Day 08 - A moment, in great detail
Day 09 - Your beliefs, in great detail
Day 10 - What you wore today, in great detail
Day 11 - Your siblings, in great detail
Day 12 - What's in your bag, in great detail
Day 13 - This week, in great detail
Day 14 - What you wore today, in great detail
Day 15 - Your dreams, in great detail
Day 16 - Your first kiss, in great detail
Day 17 - Your favorite memory, in great detail
Day 18 - Your favorite birthday, in great detail
Day 19 - Something you regret, in great detail
Day 20 - This month, in great detail
Day 21 - Another moment, in great detail
Day 22 - Something that upsets you, in great detail
Day 23 - Something that makes you feel better, in great detail
Day 24 - Something that makes you cry, in great detail
Day 25 - A first, in great detail
Day 26 – Your fears, in great detail
Day 27 – Your favorite place, in great detail
Day 28 – Something that you miss, in great detail
Day 29 – Your aspirations, in great detail
Day 30 – One last moment, in great detail

Ugh.

Pain/Pain

Here's a rare thing: a poem I wrote in 2009. Just came across a paper copy in my stuff, and searched on my computer for it; my document must've been among the data I lost when my laptop got stolen a couple years ago. Glad I found this! Enjoy!

Pain/Pain

Breathe into the pain.
"I haven't got time for the pain," says Carly Simon.
P-A-I-N is French for bread.
"French toast" is called pain perdu, to the French.
Frenchy is a character from Grease.
"Grease is the word," but there is no word for the kind of pain I'm in.
I am in pain, I am pained. I am pained to find words for the pain.

Grease is viscous. It lubricates things.
Smear it on your motor bearings, but don't smear too much.
Oil works pretty good, as does butter.
Watch the butter melt and sizzle in the pan | in which you place the pain perdu.

I've lost my toast. Has anyone seen my toast?
$5.00 reward for the recovery of my lost toast.
My toast has been subsumed by a viscous batter of egg and milk.
The batter is viscous, and might as well say it: the batter is vicious.
The batter has viciously taken away my pain, but it hasn't taken away my pain.
My pain is gone.
I am pained to say, my pain is gone.


© 2009, 2011 bree_zip

Death and Birth

Dream last night:

I'm with my mom. We're both naked. We're walking through a botanical garden. The entire ground or floor of the garden is covered in a gelatinous, translucent green goo, and we are sloshing through it with our bare feet. Mom tells me I've been here before, many times, but I remember only one visit as a teenager. She says we used to come here when I was a little kid, but I don't recall it. It seems familiar in a distant way.

The room starts filling with water, up to and over our heads. We're bobbing, swimming through, and then get released into another room, dry, all the water drained out, the floors and walls are all white. We're still naked, but more conspicuous walking around. I'm aware, self-conscious, but still calm. I try to put on a pair of shorts; they're made of sheer plastic, like packing film. Mom recedes deeper into the room.

Obsolesced?

I wonder if I've run the course of personal blogging. Microblogging on Facebook and managing my music blog have subsumed much of my focus and energy for broadcasting my thoughts to the world; but less obviously (or more) my life over the last year, at least, has been in enough private tumult so as to intimidate me from sharing the details in this forum. This is the piece of my experience that warrants more exploration, rather than less, and I hope that I can gather the courage to share some of it with you here at TLab. I don't wanna let the blog go, if possible. I need to nudge myself gently to write here more.

Almost 2011, and a Rap on the Wrap

First of all, I'm still pronouncing "2010" as "Two Thousand Ten," and I think I'll likely pronounce "2011" as "Two Thousand Eleven." What about y'all? For some reason, "Twenty-Ten" and "Twenty-Eleven" sound like marketing copy to me, yet I know it's inconsistent, 'cause I certainly didn't refer to "1999" as "One Thousand Nine Hundred Ninety-Nine or even the slightly less cumbersome "Nineteen Hundred Ninety-Nine." For a helpful look at this issue which is essentially a digression from my main drift today, please listen to Grammar Girl's podcast on the topic. Seems I'm out of the norm on this one, which isn't surprising in the least.

Speaking of norms, it is around this time of year here at Toothpick Labeling that we are all frothing at the mouth, chomping at the bit, ready to jump guns, cross lines in sand, and loads of other appropriate (or not) overused metaphors in hot anticipation of my annual Year-end Wrap. For those of you not in the know, every year for the last seven of 'em, I've written up a summary of how my year has gone, including a fairly detailed collection of reviews of all the culture I've imbibed, films I've seen, books I've read, shows I've attended, yadda yadda. Every year since 2003. Except, I'm afraid to report, for the year 2010.*

Why have I skimped on preparing a Wrap this time? Well, I'll tell ya. In the first half of the year, I had actually planned to continue my tradition of yearly review by setting up a Word document as I normally do with the general categories of the entry all lined up (personal stuff that's happened, books, TV shows, films I've seen in the theater, films I've watched on DVD/online, live shows, music I've acquired, and resolutions for the year). I began filling in those categories as I ticked off events, milestones, and cultural consumption during the first few months of the year. I also set out a new and ambitious plan to begin reviewing stuff in the blog more or less as I finish a book or after I've seen a movie so that my work on the Wrap would be a lot less daunting at the end of the year. I was really happy with that commitment I'd set out for myself.

A collage of images from Wraps-Past. Clockwise from top left: Dorrie the Dog; Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler; some of our friends from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; an ostrich in the Santa Inez Valley; The L-Word dykes; the Van Tussles vs. the Turnblads in John Waters's Hairspray; Gandhi; laughable lotus climax from The Fountain; King Crimson's album In the Court of the Crimson King: an Observation by King Crimson; the cast of Nine to Five.

But then in April, Mom got diagnosed with cancer, and by May she was dead. And, although it seems trivial in comparison, just a few days after Mom died, my apartment got broken into and my laptop was stolen, and along with it, the not-backed-up document containing all my 2010 Wrap info. Added to that, there's been a lot of relationship wrangling and the constant stress of being underemployed and trying to build my therapy practice.

It's hard for me to break with traditions, especially with expectations I set out for myself, but it became clear at length that I would have to ditch the Wrap this time. I've had bigger fish to fry emotionally and energetically this year. I'm sure my readers can understand this breech of protocol, and, to tell you the truth, letting myself off the hook from the exacting task of tracking every freakin' thing I do all year has been liberating in the extreme.

I can't promise I'll get back to doing a Wrap for 2011, but it's possible. It's also possible I'll be focusing my energies on ever-newer, more up-to-the-moment relevant projects that hopefully will feed my soul in different ways. If you're nostalgic for my Wraps of yore, you can check 'em out by clicking any of these handy hyperlinks: 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003

Here's wishing you and yours a happy Thanksgiving, a warm and wonderful holiday season, a fantastic New Year, and the hope that all our energies will continue to be focused on what's important, inspiring, loving, and fruitful. I am, and I trust that we all are, exactly where we need to be.

Peace 'n' love,
Bree


*The author understands if you read that as "Twenty-Ten" and won't like you any less for it.

In pencil, on a paper placemat

This was a list I wrote myself around July of this year. I'm not feeling as unstable as I was then, but it's a meaningful period piece.

Reasons to be kind to myself:

I'm in mourning.
I feel lost and abandoned.
I'm hungry and haven't had time to take care of myself today.
I'm worthy of love.
Astrid loves me.
I'm a good person.
This is temporary.
I'm okay.
I have a family and friends who love me.
I deserve kindness.
I am learning how to be a good therapist, and it's okay not to be perfect.

Wishes, Goals, Bookshelves

Astrid and I are navigating a lot of complexity together. We're doing well, moving through it, communicating our feelings and our needs to each other, and above all, trying to balance the here-and-now with the yet unknown future, or trying to manifest in the here-and-now the kinds of futures we desire for ourselves as individuals and for our lives together. To that end, beyond the verbal processing, the treating each other with extra attention and kindness, the connecting and reconnecting through talk and touch, we are engaged in a goal-setting exercise which we've been refining over the last week or so. We outlined our life values as individuals, listed our wishes. What does each of us want to manifest in our lives, the materialistic and the altruistic, the personal and the professional, the creative and the logistical? Today, we organized our wishes into goals, identified the areas of our lives the goals fit into, and assigned a timeline to each. Mine run the gamut from the microscopic-mundane:

Clear out the bookshelf in the dining room (personal goal). Timeline: immediate

to the long-ranging and grandiose:

Write and publish a nonfiction book (career goal). Timeline: 5 to 10 years.

I'm pleased to say I've already knocked out the bookshelf. It was a catch-all that caught everything from random shoelaces to no less than three bike U-lock mounts (never used) to a baseball mitt (last touched nearly three years ago) to my grad school readers and binders that had been collecting dust since graduation in 2008 to outdated telephone directories (why do they still make those things?) Now it's cleared out, dusted, virtually empty, waiting to be filled with objects that are more relevant to our lives now, useful and in use, a dynamic space rather than a dead one.

'Cause that's the point, really, to occupy the space of our lives with vitality and movement, rather than stagnancy, dust, the dead-end of inattention and the taking for granted that we just move from day to day without sight of our dreams, what we really want from this life: bookshelves of our own and bookshelves to share.

The Wrath of Lacan

I'm very excited to present to you my first attempt at an animated sketch. This dialogue is based on a recent conversation among friends over a few glasses of wine and/or whiskey.

Tech brought to you by xtranormal.com. The URL for this video is at http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6811497



Shouts out to Nan, DJ, Astrid, and April. Thanks Astrid for editorial feedback.

Mundane tasks, you know, like making life insurance claims...

Today's a pretty typical day for me. Mondays are my days off, and so I often do stuff like walk the dog, do the dishes, pay bills, goof around on Facebook, work on the blogs. But I had a task on my list today that was layered with immense pain, even though I ended up executing it with a reasonable level of business-as-if-it's-usualness. As the title of this post alludes to, the task was to start the process of filing the life insurance claims for the policies my mom left my sisters and me. I took this on as one of the many tasks that the three of us are sharing in the shadow of Mom's death. The phone call was surprisingly easy, even though what it symbolized is not. All we need to provide is the death certificate and some rote forms, and then we've got some money to use to pay off Mom's creditors and make the arrangements to sell her mobile home. Hopefully the house won't suck up too much money, so that there'll be some left over for the three of us to use, but the truth is, mobile homes don't sell quickly, and we have to pay space rent on it every month til it sells. The enormity of the meaning of these perfunctory business transactions is that I will never see my mom again, I will never hear her voice again, I will never have to hear her say, "Why don't you ever call me, you rotten kid?" again, whether she's joking or not.

If you thought April was rough...

...May's been no cake walk either. Most of you who know me in "real life" already know what's been up with me since my last blog post. But those of you just tuning in for the first time, or for my blogospheric friends out there, I have some news to share with you. On May 14, less than a month after her cancer diagnosis, my mom died in San Jose, California. She was 73 years old. This entry might come off as clinical or cold or glib; forgive me, but I'm not in a melancholy mood today, and I'm interested in staying that way. This isn't meant to be a cathartic entry for me (although one doesn't know the outcome until one goes ahead and writes); rather, I'd like simply to let everyone know what's been up, so that I can move on to more nuanced posts if I feel like it, or more trivial posts if I feel that way.

My mom was admitted to the hospital after her very first meeting with the oncologist. The cancer doc called in the bone doc, because he was very concerned about a mass that had spread to her left femur. The orthopedic surgeon and the oncologist agreed that surgery to implant a rod would be the best insurance for my mom's comfort in her last months of life. Her cancer had metastasized, spread to her bones, and she was terminal, but also in danger of shattering her leg. We all agreed it was the best course of action to get her the surgery, but she was terrified. The surgery itself went as planned, and she was healing up on morphine, by turns out of it and cranky. At one point, she told a nurse that she didn't like her voice, that it was grating to her, and then she turned to the other nurse and said, "I'll talk to you instead." Her orneriness was kind of a good sign, though. Unfortunately, the bed rest and immune system weakness led to pneumonia, the pain drugs further weakened her breathing, and on top of that, her chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, from the smoking, also depleted her ability to get enough oxygen into her blood and increased her carbon dioxide output. A particularly know-it-all-like respiratory therapist put it this way: "her lungs are not allowing her to exchange gases properly." He offered this pat description every time we asked him a different question about her condition. After days on a bipap machine, which forced air into her lungs, the fluid wasn't clearing out and her oxygen and carbon levels continued to plummet/spike respectively whenever the mask was taken off. She was verbally unresponsive at this point, basically just sleeping, occasionally grabbing at the mask to take it off. So C. and J. and I made the decision we knew Mom would want us to make. We decided to take her off the bipap machine and wait for her to die.

Imagine that: I'm feeling more emotional than I'd wanted to at the outset of writing this entry. I'll say one more thing. We held the memorial for Mom two days later, at the funeral home and cemetery where my father and my grandparents are interred, and where my cousin is buried. I enjoyed the ceremony, as much as it's possible to enjoy such a thing, and I think Mom would have enjoyed it, too. Several friends she'd known for thirty and forty and more years spoke, and some dear family friends played guitar. I hope she would have liked it. She was well-loved, my mom.

I'm writing this. Does that make it real?

April Overload

April was incredible: more than I asked for, in good ways and pretty terrible ways. Here's a handy-dandy timeline of my life over the last four or five weeks:


April 1: I ran into my ex-girlfriend N. for the first time in nearly four years. It was sweet, and it was bitter, and I don't really know what to say about it.

April 2: Astrid and I took a guy home from a bar together. He was Quebecois, and quoted Baudelaire in bed. Astrid and he had outrageous chemistry, but it was damned fun for me, too!

April 3: Astrid and Montréal Boy had a second glorious date together while I hung out with pals for the evening, then dropped from exhaustion.

April 4: My mom called me in the morning. Her doctor found a mass in her lung. As I adjusted to this news, Astrid and I joined pals for an invigorating hike in the freezing rain on Mount Tam.

April 6: Astrid and I celebrated the fifth annual Orbit Day: the anniversary of our first date!

April 11: A dear friend of astro-b's was in town for the weekend. He's geeky-sweet, just what I like in a boy. I suckered him into bed with me, eventually. I guess April was the month for my latent bisexuality to emerge. Grin.

April 20: We learned that the mass in Mom's lung isn't the only one. She's got "suspicious" masses in or near her liver and kidneys, in her bones, between her shoulder blades. Everywhere. We're still waiting for the biopsy results.

April 29: Evidently my clinical supervisor had an intense April as well. She informed me that due to a personal crisis in her family, she would need to resume seeing clients on Fridays, which has been one of my two full days to use our shared office space. In other words, my internship and my weekly schedule are going to be altered in a major way.

Shit howdy, I'm glad it's May.

Both/(And)

The undulations of my moods lately aren't severe, just ripples riding sometimes higher in anxiety and sometimes lower in listlesness. There are some good days too, to be sure.

Lots of the money stress, still. Still. Some relationship ennui has come and gone, the way it does with long standing love. Dr. Mario has been brought out of its 1 1/2 year slumber in order to nurse Astrid and I through our collective anxiety about not accomplishing real things. My private practice is finally turning a "profit" if that's what you call around $400 per month. This is truly a good, good thing. But with just one tiny bookkeeping gig in addition to the therapy work, I'm still making just enough to pay rent and that's absolutely it. I've blogged enough about all this before, so I should get on to other things. Like that I'm hungry, and I should probably eat some lunch.

xo
Bree

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) **½

There were certainly some laugh-out-loud gags, and fun cameo/supporting cast choices (particularly the meta choice of Crispin Glover as a bitter bell hop), but for the most part: tired plot, tired homophobic and sexist humor and characterizations, and an utter lack of creativity in utilizing the time travel premise. And the most cloyingly conventional and predictable resolution ever. This movie gives us one gift: a prominent role for Clark Duke, who plays 20 year-old straight man to a bunch of sad-sack 40-somethings. I'll look forward to seeing his career develop.

Don't Hang Noodles On My Ears

Here are some English idiomatic expressions and what I believe to be their Russian equivalents. At least, these are my guesses. I'll have the real answers, if they differ from mine, in a bit. Venture your own guesses at Dave's blog.

Super-Quick White Bean & Tomato Veggie Soup

Have to share this recipe from last night's dinner. Astrid and I had a long day at Fort Funston with the dog and were too exhausted to cook something elaborate, but are also too broke to treat ourselves out right now. We stopped by Arizmendi to get some yummy bread for sandwiches, but ended up with a crunchy, crusty sourdough loaf instead. Astrid said it'd be good with soup, and thought of the combination of white beans and tomato. This was the inspiration for the following totally ad-hoc recipe, full of shortcuts (canned beans, canned tomato, bouillon cubes). We had delicious soup in about an hour.

Ingredients:

1-2 T oil (olive, canola, whatever)
1 yellow onion, chopped
2-3 stalks of celery, chopped
1/2 a red bell pepper, chopped
2 garlic cloves, smashed and minced
8-10 mushrooms, coarsely sliced
1 turnip, diced
2 veggie bouillon cubes dissolved into about 6-7 cups hot/boiling water
small handful of fresh marjoram or other herbs (about a tablespoon dried)
2 cans butter beans or cannellini beans, drained
1 large can of whole peeled tomatoes, coarsely chopped, with juice
fresh parsley for garnish*
fresh-milled black pepper to taste

* (This is a totally Throw-All-the-Old-Veggies-You've-Got-Into-the-Soup situation. I think the onions, garlic, and celery are essential, but otherwise anything goes. Zucchini or dark leafy greens would be fantastic.)

Method:

In a large pot, heat a glug of oil on medium flame. Throw in the onions and move them around while they cook to milky/translucent. Add the garlic, celery, red bell, mushrooms, turnips or other veggies. Sautée all.

While veggies are sautéeing, boil water separately for the bouillon. I used the kettle - it's a quicker boil than a pot. Place the bouillon cubes in a large glass bowl or measuring cup that won't crack from the hot water. Add the water to the cubes and mix around to dissolve, then pour the broth over the veggies in the pot.*

Add the herbs, drained beans, and tomatoes with juice. Turn the heat up to high and boil. Then turn down to simmer for as long as you want. At least a half hour.

Garnish with some fresh parsley and dunk some crusty bread! I didn't add any additional salt besides the bouillon cubes. Salt to your liking - it'll depend on how much water you add. The flavor of this soup is very similar to minestrone. If you wanna go that extra mile, add some cooked pasta and some grated Parmesan, then mangiare!

*If I'm not making a veggie stock from scratch, I prefer to use a good bouillon cube or paste than one of those ready-made liquid stocks in the aseptic-pack cartons. Three reasons: 1. cheaper; 2. less packaging waste; 3. I find that a bouillon imparts a clearer, more pure stock flavor than those thicker liquid stocks. Most of the vegetarian ones are high in carrot flavor, which provides more sweetness than I like.