We've moved

http://sheeli.wordpress.com

to call for hands up above to lean on / wouldn't be good enough for me, no

Planning for the wedding and the move has taken its toll on this blog, which probably can't be called "Urban Sprawled" anymore once August rolls around.

This is the song we chose for our first dance. It's a tad somber for the occasion, but gently, unexpectedly uplifting. I think it captures a lot of what we've been going through lately: transition, uncertainty, and so many slow and reluctant goodbyes.

Bread and Jams

I've been experimenting with Nota:


And here's what happens when you combine Nota and YouTube and what I've been listening to:


And here's what happens when you combine Nota and your personal life:

This is why I'm hot.

Once you've worked in direct marketing, your mailbox never looks quite the same. I constantly try to psychoanalyze the marketers who are targeting me. What was it exactly that I signed up for or bought that led marketers to believe I would be interested in Pottery Barn Baby? What algorithm got me onto the Peace Corps list, or this mailing from the New York Review of Books?

After checking my mail today, I'm more confused than ever about what the Ad Wizards of America believe about me. You can imagine my reaction when I got this little doozy in the mail today: a catalogue for Blair, purveyor of ladies' clothing, including pants with "back-shaping darts" and these lovely embroidered jeans with a drawstring AND an elastic waist:

So according to the marketing powers that be, I most likely need instructions on how to "zoom in" and "zoom out" to evaluate my "back-shaping darts" in more detail. I don't mind being sold stretchy pants, but the computer literacy jab stings a bit. Let's take a look at another item:

Caftans: A long, gentle sweep of easy comfort. Just what you crave after a long, busy day or when you want to spend some time at home. Effortless pullover style with a flattering V-neckline, flutter sleeves; 53" L. Seven lovely prints to choose from. Polyester knit easily machine washes and dries. Imported. One size.

Who doesn't crave easy comfort after a long, busy day? And for only $12.99 a pop?? Easy to machine-wash and dry??? Maybe these marketers are smarter than I thought...

Playing house

I'll be watching my cousins, ages 7 and 10, for a couple hours tomorrow. I wanted to make sure they got an afterschool snack, so I went food shopping today to pick up a few items... the only problem is that I have no idea what kids eat these days. Here's how my basic train of thought went:

I should probably get them something nutritious.
But I don't want to seem like a lame cousin.
They'll probably be thirsty, but do kids even like stuff like Capri Sun anymore?
Propel fitness water... okay! I'll get a six-pack of those. They're not soda and I know they drink that at home.
Now for something to eat...
Hmm, what do I see commercials for on TV?
Totino's Pizza Rolls! Nice, I know Jeff* eats those too so we're golden.
Maybe something sweet? Hmm, I like these mini scones and wouldn't mind finishing off the tub after they're gone.

* Jeff turns 22 this May.

Curiouser and curiouser

Bride-to-be seeks tasteful, affordable wedding favors. Me: planning a Chinese banquet in the summer; not at all excited about favors. You: not useless crap. Plastic swans wrapped in tulle need not apply.

And now a select sampling of the reject pile:

Yes, that bottom one is a giant crystal etched with a photograph. Fantastic.

Urban crunched

We're moving to New York. We don't know where we'll be living (see dramatization below), but we know it will be small and expensive and probably filled with rats and rat by-products. We're scared but excited.

Mo money mo problems

Most of what Eli studies for CFA is Greek to me, but every now and then I like to look over his shoulder and ask him what he's reading about. Sometimes, there are funny terms for things (backwardation and crack spread being two of my all-time favorites), and yesterday, I saw the awesome diagram below:

Garfield minus Garfield

Hilarious, and exactly what I needed on a Friday afternoon:
http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/

It's alive, it's aliiiive!

I've always been way too afraid of yeast to bake my own bread. Any organism that lies dormant for a couple years only to awaken, hungry and smelly, when poured into a quarter-cup of warm water sounds like a science project, not food. In fact, my first exposure to Yeast, Model Organism was in a college biology lab, which I'm sure has a lot to do with my violent aversion to it. And even the word "yeast" is grosser than gross, a squirming Anglo-Saxon belch -- not something I want to usher into my kitchen and eventually eat.

Now that I've been properly psychoanalyzed, I am proud to say that I bought a package of Fleischmann's yeast (wow, even the brand name is gross) and made something with it! I found a pizza-like tart recipe from the web. I liked the idea of starting with something fairly flat and simple, nothing that tomatoes and basil couldn't salvage. All in all, it worked out fine, although I was unnerved by the warmth and feel of the dough and scrubbed my hands at least five times with soap and hot water.










P.S. I love this commercial. Enjoy.

Mother of all suburban Friday nights

Eli and I went to Red Lobster last night. For those of you from New England* who may be unfamiliar with the restaurant chain, Red Lobster is where the rest of the country goes to eat marked-up New England seafood in a rustic, yet whimsical family-friendly setting (think buoys, wooden trout, and life-preservers).

Sadly, I didn't take any photos to document Eli's first exposure to Red Lobster's famed Cheddar Bay Biscuits and subsequent loss of New England street cred, but we had a good time.

*From the Red Lobster website: "Red Lobster does not have locations in Alaska, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island or Vermont."

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood

It's true. I am one of those petty Californians whose mood and worldview are completely governed by the weather. I get more work done, I take better care of myself, and I feel like seizing the day when the sun is out. Case in point: today, it's 65 degrees and gloriously sunny. I'm writing in my blog, I did a ton of work, ran three miles, and even roasted a batch of golden beets for a salad I'm making tonight for dinner. Golden beets!! How much more Bay Area flower child can you get?

Yes, we can

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant. We've been asked to pause for a reality check. We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

The old man is snoring

It's raining here and I'm totally one of those people who just wants to live in a giant gray sock in a giant cupboard when it rains.

Serena just posted about a cupcake blog which cheered me up with its photos and recipes. This inspired me to put a plug in to you all about a blog that I read regularly, written by a woman who lives in Perth, Australia called Karen Cheng: Snippets of Life. Topics range from her sons to vacations to dresses to cloth diapers, but her reflections on life and parenting are abundantly honest and heartfelt and I've really enjoyed reading it over the last couple of years.

On a total whim, I submitted a poem to Fence Magazine, but who am I kidding... I haven't written anything in earnest since June of 2004. We'll see if anything happens, but in the words of Louise Gluck in her latest collection, Averno:

They write their names in mist on a train window.
I want to say, you're good girls,
trying to leave your names behind.

Under pressure

I don't think I've uttered the word "web two-oh" in about six months, but I went to my very first Yelp Elite event with Eli on Wednesday night. If you're wondering, I'm now up to 91 reviews. I want so badly to review the bridal salons I've recently visited but I'm going to hold my tongue until after the wedding.

I brought Eli with me to my first giant bridal salon. At first, I went by myself, fully prepared for an all-out estrogenfest. When I got there, my resolve melted away. Between the aisles and aisles of tulle and all the squealing and clucking going on in the room (there were three other groups with appointments in progress), I was completely overwhelmed. I wanted backup.

So with the help of the person who is my partner in all of life's big decisions, I did find "the" dress -- it was the first dress they recommended -- and of course, it was way over my budget. Sensing my hesitation, they pulled out every zinger from their playbook. Two of my favorite quotes from my sales rep: "finding the right dress is like finding the right guy" and "yes, you're only wearing the dress for one day but it will be in your pictures forever." And to go out of her way to mock my initial budget (which, mind you, was not an unreasonable budget), she even pulled out a horrifying specimen that was two sizes too big and seemingly fashioned from a massive cotton tablecloth that was "perfectly fine, if that's what you want." Ouch.

I did end up buying the dress (the one I wanted, not the one that made me look like a 25-year-old burlap sack going to First Communion), but I got it from another place that cut 15% off the price.

Downed lines

The power went out for five hours last Friday. During that time, I was supposed to be working, but there wasn't a whole lot of emailing or Excel maneuvering I could do while I was in the dark. I took the opportunity to curl up against our (one and only) window with some books and get some reading out of the way.

Oddly enough, the first thing I read was a John Updike short story called "Outage" -- Updike's not my favorite, but I was charmed by the synchronicity of it all.

For sale

I've had bioethics on the brain recently.

1) I heard an NPR report about surrogate mothers in India a couple of weeks ago, and I had the same reaction Judith Warner did about a woman named Julie, "an American thirtysomething who’d come to India to pay a poor village woman to bear her baby." On one hand, this is a transaction that transforms two lives: the one of the woman desperate to conceive a child of her own and the one of the surrogate mother who can turn her nine-month transaction -- ethics or no ethics -- into a house. At the same time, this arrangement couldn't exist without an underlying structure of unequal protection under the law and unequal wealth. Surrogate mothers in the U.S. ask for 8-10 times more compensation than those in India and would never agree to the degree of policing and surveillance the mothers in India must agree to in order to participate. Here's a link to the NY Times article: http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/outsourced-wombs/

2) Last night, I read a New Yorker article about "guinea-pigging," or participating in clinical trials as a healthy subject and risking injury and illness to make a quick buck. Again, new options for income are great, but the idea that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere" (MLK Jr.) makes the moral calculus pretty murky.

Cooking is fun!

I am a huge, huge fan of Nigella Lawson's and Eli got me her latest book, Nigella Express, for Christmas. I made these cider & mustard pork chops for dinner on New Year's Eve (with my new AllClad skillet!!). There were only two of us at dinner and Eli was pretty buzzed off the leftover bottle of cider I used for the sauce but I think it was a hit.

Here's Nigella demonstrating the pork chop recipe in all her vampy glory:

I get knocked down, but I get up again

Happy New Year, everyone! I thought I would start the year off right, with a blog entry that is personal, confessional, and embarrassing. One of those posts that I will totally laugh at a year from now. So here goes.

My half birthday is January 2nd. I think most normal people stop noticing their half birthdays after the age of eight. But since mine is so close to the start of the new year, my half birthday inevitably becomes a period of constructive self-evaluation or mid-year/new-year crisis, depending on how you look at it.

I have a weakness for slicing and dicing my life into small goals and projects, then getting a little bored of them. This is evidenced by my on-again, off-again relationship with learning Mandarin Chinese, the books I've put down and only sometimes rediscovered, my short but brilliant affair with scrapbooking, and my tendency to push multitasking to its breaking point.* The good news is that life is abundant; the not-so-good news is that I need to make sense of it all.

Making sense of things and plotting out plans are what I do for a living, but I have never successfully applied that degree of rigor and structure to my personal life. I've always felt that there's something suspiciously sterile about regarding your life as you would an organizational process, but the issue I've struggled with most is that the objectives in my personal life are never as obvious or as constant as they are in the professional world -- personal goals are never as clear-cut in why they're important and to what degree they need to be achieved.

So my current experiment in answering the question "how do I live better?" is to step back, way back. I know this is going to sound incredibly silly, but my plan is to evaluate myself and plan for myself as if I were my own pet. I am going to buy a 2008 planner and prescribe to myself everything that I need to be cared for, groomed, healthy, hydrated, debt-free, well-read, sane (this is the descriptor I'm using to rationalize my daily dose of reality television) and conversant in Mandarin Chinese.

The reason I think this might work is that combines the rigor and accountability of the corporate world with the TLC of a normal human relationship. No judgment or blame when I fall off the bandwagon, just honest self-scrutiny about why that original approach in scheduling or prioritization failed when it came into contact with who I am and what is important to me. An example: I know I go through phases with my projects, so why not build in some variety into my schedule, studying Chinese on Mondays and Wednesdays and alternating with something else? It may well be the desperate pop psychology of a home-office hermit, but I have nothing to lose and everything to gain (or at the very least, "hydration").

* I find that bystanders who choose to comment are especially horrified by the number of minimized documents, folders, and programs I keep at the bottom of my Windows desktop. To their credit, the carnage can get up to three rows deep, not counting the number of tabs I have open on Firefox and definitely not counting all the feeds I have open on Netvibes.