FEBRUARY

All visual and sensory cues indicate that it is spring, but the calendar says it's pre-equinox, so like anyone raised east of the Mississippi I'm still dressed in gloomy winter hues. That is to say, in black. Part of me is starting to feel like a creepy but sensitive and well-intentioned protagonist in a Tim Burton movie. Or like young Severus Snape. Or like a Catholic priest at a Mardi Gras parade. And part of me still feels mourning clothes are appropriate in this early part of a new year, when the loss of the dead-and-gone old year is still being felt. All this focus on time and temporality and neurotic paranoia of aging is partly, I swear, Marcel Proust's fault. If you know me, you might know that for the past two years I've been working my way through In Search of Lost Time, and at the pace of a snail -- for that is, I believe, Proust's intended pace. The reader, mired in the hard labor of digesting sentences of near endless length and detail, grows ever more frustrated by the amount of sand that passes through the hourglass at the turning of a single page. At this point in time, I'm reading Volume 3, The Guermantes Way. I'm enjoying it, despite the mental effort it requires of me. Proust dropping Wagner's name ("Wagnerian sweetness," in Chapter One) as an emblem of musical taste made me smile.

FONDUE FOR ME AND YOU

I first tasted fondue during those strange early years of junior high. This was the late 90s. I was at The Melting Pot in Indianapolis - which is apparently still in business - at my own insistence, with my parents, who didn't think too highly of the experience. To my thirteen year old taste buds, ravaged by so many epic fruit snack and Capri-Sun after-school binges, suburban fondue felt like an authentic fine dining revelation. Before my very eyes, a woman in a white unisex dress shirt with crimped bangs and acrylic nails was melting a basket of cheese into a boiling vat of beer, like some weird heartland magician! Last month we decided to host a cheesy fondue party, pun intended. This was a venture into neither ironic nor post-ironic retronautism. No, what we sought to create was a sincere homage. We were determined to elevate fondue back into the ranks of the American gourmet experience. Did we succeed? Only our guests, as true objective observers, can say. My guess is yes.

BIRTHDAY BOY

Photos from a night I'd remember in full, if I could. But in the spirit of celebration, specifically of celebrating my boyfriend Nelsen's birthday, I had partaken of many large Mason jars of bourbon, like a true lady. I did somewhat dilute those alcohol jars with ginger brew, in an effort to prove myself a responsible adult around alcohol, though not enough ginger brew, it seems, to prevent my fragile neurons from failing to commit some key particulars of what went down the night of the 12th to memory entirely. From these photos, though, I can assume, whatever it was that happened whenever it did, at least I had fun. Photos by Galen.