A Week Off...
Here's how I did it. (This should make people who know how to cook laugh and people who don't feel greatly in awe.) First I boiled the lasagna noodles. I know you don't have to do that anymore, according to the chefs on the Food Network, but I didn't want to try to figure out a shortcut. So, yeah, I boiled the noodles and then drained them. That was where I went most wrong. After draining the noodles they all stuck together in the pot and so when I went to pull them apart to layer in the lasagna dish I ended up with torn pieces and a general mess. I added more water but that didn't help much. Refusing defeat I persisted and layered what noodles I could extricate with slices of mozzarella and drizzles of pesto. I did three layers and then topped it off with one more layer of noodles, pesto and then pecorino cheese. Tossed it in the oven, rang my mother for my weekly chat and after 20 minutes the whole apartment smelled lovely of pesto and cheese. As the picture shows, it looked super yummy too.. and I proceeded to eat 1/3 of the whole dish while watching "The Bachelor" - a cheesy movie my Mommy sent to me back when I first moved here and was in desparate need of English language entertainment. Monday I woke and started reading "The Dice Man" - a book given to me by Dario. It was really highly entertaining to read and I got completely taken by it. The story is about a guy who decides to roll the dice and make all his life decisions that way. It has some fantasticly creative chapters, like when the dice tell him he has to be Jesus for a day. Then another when the dice dictate he changes personalities every ten minutes at a work cocktail party. I was laughing out loud. In between reading I darted off to Circus Maximus to do a few laps. Since I'd just talked to my friend Bill in Granada online and he was lamenting the toils and troubles of his Spanish life, I decided to do an extra lap in his honor.
After being stricken with a fierce stomach ache that paralysed me for almost three hours I finally roused myself to go out for a bottle of wine with Marco. Yes, the infamous historical Marco! He is the only person I knew in Rome before I moved here and I only knew him from our four days of play when I visited back in June. I hadn't seen him yet since I moved here.. and I was both dreading and highly anticipating seeing him again... Needless to say I enjoyed seeing him more than I expected... and I believe we are seeing each other again later this week. Too much other personal complication involved to confess anything further on this journal.. Sorry loyal readers. Tuesday was another fun down day. I slept in rather late, ate bunches of "Fitness and Fruits" cereal and then stayed in bed all day finishing "The Dice Man." I decided against a return trip to Circus Maximus as my joints were rather pissed at me for the four laps I did on Monday and so I sat around playing solitaire for a few hours until Antonio arrived. Now I am still hesitant to go into much detail about Antonio. He seems conflicted about his journal exposure. At first he was suspicious and so I've tried to only give him cursory inclusion. After reading about himself last week in the "Kat in the Fountain" episode, I think his attitude has changed. Now he seems starstruck. He emailed me over the weekend and told me he was practising a pose for the journal. He's convinced he's truly a sorcerer of some kind and, as is my loyal duty, I had to humor him and allow him the opportunity to try to put spells on me.
In retrospect I think Antonio's sorcerer talents are somehow connected to this mysterious rum/pear juice mixture. After having a gin-n-tonic and then that shot, I was feeling a little wishy-washy in my head. I could blame the alcohol and lack of food, but I'd prefer to believe Antonio truly does have some magical powers. After beginning to fall under his spell, I convinced Antonio, in my own sorceress way, that we should try this Mexican restaurant on Via Urbana (around the corner from my apartment.) Mexican is my absolute favorite cuisine, as so many of my New York friends know, but it is a very rare ethnic cuisine in Rome. There are only a total of six Mexican restaurants in all of Rome! Thus after six weeks of me not having Mexican food did I finally get to indulge in flautas, chimicangas, tortilla chips, salsa and margaritas! (Two nights ago, I kid you not loyal reader, I was indeed dreaming about Mexican Radio in New York. Yes, it's gotten that bad!) All in all, it was shabby Mexican food compared to New York. The margarita was made with horribly cheap tequila (Cuervo, anyone?) and too much sour mix.. tiny salt crystals on the rim (at least they did the salt tho!) and served up in a martini glass, no ice. But, hey, a margarita is a margarita.. and I knew that if Antonio could cast his spell with rum and pear juice then it'd only be fair for me to use my margarita potion in retaliation. Now it is Wednesday morning and I am listening to "Temperino" - jazz music Antonio brought me before we started our tour yesterday. I am apparently expected to listen to the new music and write a report. How's that for a sorcerer/date? He gives me homework and everything. Italians... they're very curious characters! Nothing Doin' I think I need another near-death experience to kick my ass in gear. Ever since I smashed my head open I've pretty much done jack shit. I only have written one chapter of my theoretical book. Every day I wakeup and think about things to do and then do pretty much none of them. Instead I shuffle the cards and play solitaire 50 million times, as if at any moment life is going to walk in and say "Hey Laura, ready to go?" But it never does. Maybe life doesn't know I moved to Rome. I'm getting pretty fed up with myself and my lack of ambition, quite honestly. Today I convinced myself I had to achieve something. And like any good girl, the thing I decided to achieve was spending money. I figured I might as well give in to the SMS gods and buy a stupid Italian cellphone. My reasoning is that with a cellphone in my hand I will be more free to roam Rome and still keep in touch with people. Um, yeah. Right. I only know like 4 people here. Who is it I am convinced I'll be keeping in touch with exactly? I don't know. I think it's that neverending fear inside me that something great could be going on somewhere and I might miss it. I hate to miss all that great stuff... although, if you think about it subjectively, you can't truly miss it because, well, you weren't there and it's only really great to you if you were there and had the chance to think to yourself, well, gee whiz, wasn't that just great?! Other than buy a cellphone I also tried to convince myself that I could buy something fun to wear to the Cirque du Soleil show I am seeing tomorrow night with Dario. I strolled through a bunch of fashionable stores and found that the stores here are all stocked full of clothing meant for Italian women. Lots of browns and oranges and maroon reds. These are not the things a palish blonde girl like me can wear. I need pinks, blues, whites, blacks and reds. This color issue rules out 2/3 of the merchandise. Of the remaining 1/3 I am ruled out sometimes by price. Back when I had a job I could justify blowing money left and right but now that I am indefinitely unemployed, I am trying to act fiscally responsible. That means I really shouldn't buy anything that costs more than 75 euros. I did find a super awesome, funky, young Gaultier dress at one shop and despite it's 186 euro pricetag, I just had to try it on. I went back to the little Asian girl and asked for a fitting room. She looked at me and the dress and said "let me see if I have it in a larger size for you." Now, look here. I know I have gained like 10lbs at least in the past month. I blame all the wine and cheese and pasta. But, ugh, stupid little Asian sales chicks in Italy need to learn proper form when addressing customers. Especially customers looking to buy their silly Gaultier dresses. I told her I was convinced the medium would be fine but she took the dress away from me trotted off anyway to look for "something bigger." She returned and confessed that they don't have that dress in large (duh, I know how designer clothes work.. they never come in large..) I insisted on trying on the medium. She looked at me again and said "Okay but if the zipper doesn't go up, don't force it." Yes, she really did say that. I wanted to drop kick her right out onto the street. Thank God for Gaultier. I liked the dress enough to refrain from making a field goal of her. Of course the proof is in the pudding and, as I predicted, the dress fit just fine. She was all chirping outside the door, asking how the size and fit was and when I finally opened the door I think she almost completely swallowed her tongue in a gasp. As soon as she saw that it really did fit, she started fluttering around trying to get more things for me to try on. Thing is I only liked this one dress.. but not enough to pay 186 euros for it. Truth be told, it was a little short. Must have been made for stupid Asian sales clerks who can't afford it in the first place. Not for statuesque 5 foot 10 inch blonde American girls. I trotted off annoyed but amused. Inspired by Elina's recent visit, I decided to forego a whole new dress purchase and just "accessorize!" I went into omai, a store that screams "I'm going through my Ashlee Simpson phase," and I found a very circus-esque wrap/scarf with colorful confetti sewn all through it. It's very "Laura" and so I had to have it. Surely pictures will be online post-Cirque-du-Soleil and you can judge for yourselves. So, yeah, that's about all I did today. I meant to read a book but I didn't bother. I meant to do some laundry, but I didn't bother. I meant to write something, but I didn't. I just played another two hundred hands of solitaire (I tried to play poker with Kaizar but all he does is bluff and purr constantly), had an Italian omelette and wasted about two hours trying to figure out what my new cellphone number is. (The sales guy said I'd get a text message with the number but it never came.. thus I sent SMS messages to everyone I know in Europe asking them to reply if they got my text message, but nobody did. Well, finally I got Veronika in Prague on the phone and I asked her to tell me my phone number and she giggled, said "aren't you cute?" and then gave it to me. Later Marco & Dario both replied too.. but that 1/2 hour wait to hear from them was torture.. particularly for me, who had absolutely nothing else to do..) Thank God Joe is coming next week. At least when I'm bored then I can just convince him we should go get drunk someplace together and let the mayhem ensue. Oh well. Til then, riveting rounds of solitaire it is!
Cirque du Soleil Venerdi (Friday)
Beyond bendy people and jumpy people and silly clown people, there's people flying on elastic bungees, leaping off of huge standing swingsets, riding unicycles on thin tight rope wires and girls hanging from bars in the tent-top. Who wouldn't want images of these types of things deeply embedded in their subconscious?
Unfortunately my will power did not get the better of me and I broke down at 6.30p and poured myself a bottle of wine and started lightly snacking on the cheese. I also was sitting on the computer chatting with Jesse, Jacob and Jennie (some of my best friends) and downloading new music from the Apple iTunes store while watching Paolino on MTV (my favorite Italian VJ). Life really couldn't get much better than right then. Great wine. Orgasm cheese. New music. Paolino. Jacob. Jennie. And a cute Italian boy coming to take me to Cirque du Soleil in less than an hour. Swoon!
Now I was in charge of getting tickets and Dario was in charge of getting us there. Both of those things worked out quite well. We got there in a quick taxi ride, grabbed our tickets, bought a box of popcorn and settled into our seats. The show was as fantastic as ever. Like I said, bendy people, funny people, flying people. All good stuff. I also got to see Dario wearing glasses! (Sorry I didn't take a picture for all you Dario fans.. Will work on that.. but suffice to say he looks very distinguished with them on.. Yes, a whole new side to him!) Now the problem of the evening is that while Dario was in charge of getting us there and I was in charge of getting us tickets, we forgot to put someone in charge of getting us home! This is how it came to pass that Dario and I wandered the streets of via Cristofo Columbo for about an hour and a half trying to hail a taxi. We actually managed to hail about half a dozen of them but then there were always these families with children or old people waiting nearby and we, being the kind hearted fools that we are, let them take those taxis first. As I told Dario, we were really racking up the good karma points. Finally, just when I had conjured a new taxi service number, a miracle taxi showed up and we made our way back to my street. At this point it was 1am and Dario and I were in serious need of sustenance. The problem with Rome, at least my area of Rome, is that by 1am the kitchens are all pretty much done cooking for the night. We decided to check out La Barrique up the street (yes, I'm becoming a regular) and they managed to serve us some cheese, ham and a nice bottle of vino. Thus we chatted about life and love and books and film until 3:30a. The biggest frustration I had was that my head injury seems to have made me permanently forget certain critical film facts. I could not, for the life of me, remember Cahiers du Cinema when talking about Dreamers and that it was De Sica who directed The Bicycle Thief. I really hate it when my brain farts like that. Needless to say that in the middle of the night I wokeup for no good reason and had these things strolling about my brain. Just imagine what it's like to have dreams of Cirque du Soleil, Vittorio de Sica, Micheal Pitt and Dario all at once. No wonder I couldn't sleep through the night! Days of Happy Isolation After the circus, I really couldn't expect any of the rest of the weekend to compare. I think it knew that because it didn't even try. Saturday I did more laps at Circus Maximus. Speaking with Rod after the feigned chariot race, he told me I should really talk more about what "doing laps at Circus Maximus" means. I don't agree. Like I said weeks ago, it's just me walking past the Colosseum, the Constantine Arch, the Roman Forum, the Palantine Hill and then in circles around the space that once was Circus Maximus, where chariot races were held in front of some 250,000 people back some 2000 years ago. Whoopee. Saturday was also "I sort of miss New York" day. I went onto MLB.com and bought a day's worth of Yankees game to watch online. I turned on the Twins playoff game from Friday and watched it while drinking Diet Coke and eating homemade, Italian style nachos. (Tomatoes, onions, chips, lime juice and shredded mozarella.) It's not that I necessarily wanted to be out of Rome, but I was sitting around missing the great Sunday afternoons in October that include watching baseball playoffs, NFL games, eating junk food and generally cuddling around on the couch with a warm blanket and no ambition whatsoever. After recreating New York life, I decided to jump head first back into Rome. Went up to the Spanish Steps and met Chris and Austin for a cup of wine. There was a mass of German teenagers drunk and sprawled everywhere on the steps and so my tolerance was short lived. After Austin departed Chris and I made our way down to Piazza del Coppolle to meet up with Dario, Paul and John, who were finishing up dinner. We had a rousing carafe of wine and told our most embarassing drunk stories. (Dario started this, mainly because he was proud of himself for once believing he was a fish and thus stripping naked and swimming out into the ocean where he proceeded to bite some poor girl's leg. Yet again, another Dario moment we're glad not to have on film!) Sunday I was trying to rouse my friends into an evening of poker, but there was some talk of the Porta Portense market and playing tennis with the Pope, so I ended up spending Sunday writing my book, playing the Sims and taking myself out to dinner. I proved to be a great companion and I took me up the street to have that yummy mushroom, truffle and cream pasta that I fancy so much. I also took myself down the street to see a little bit of the loud concert going on, but I found myself sleepy and so I escorted myself home, kissed me sweetly goodnighty and fell asleep reading a book left by Elina on Alma Mahler. Not sure what's in store for today, but first thing's first and I've gotta go do Circus Maximus laps. Tomorrow Joe arrives. I plan to go out on the town tonight and have a drink or two someplace, somewhere, with someone. Will let you know who and what fits the bill. << back to where it all began... Content & Photos © 2004 Laura Laytham, laura@girlsaresmarter.com. |
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