Q&A Time

Not to neglect whipartist, who asks:

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Retired.

Q&A II

maliceangst sent these in via email, but offered to let me use them here:

How'd you end up in Oakland? When did you become such a foodie, or were you always one and I didn't notice? What happened during the past ten years or
so?

How I became a foodie:

The year after I moved away from East Lansing, I had a cholesterol test that came back a little high. I knew I wasn't eating well at that point anyway -- I knew how to fend for myself foodwise, but it was burgers and shit like that, mostly. You know, bachelor food. Not a good diet for lowering cholesterol.

And i occurred to me that I didn't like meat much anyway, so why was I spending all this time cooking it? So I decided to teach myself to cook -- more specifically, to cook vegetable-based foods. I didn't turn vegetarian, but I did buy a lot of vegetarian cookbooks.

And so it was that I learned the joys of fresh produce. That was Phase 1.

Phase 2 was when I met my friend Aaron, who still lives in Chicago (and sometimes reads this journal -- hi!). Aaron is one of those people who approaches anything they do with an intense academicism -- not the bad kind, the good kind, the "let's pull this apart and see how it works" kind. He was teaching himself how to cook Asian food. (Later he would gravitate to South Asian cuisines, but at this time he was all about Chinese and Thai.) I ate a lot of his food. He ate a lot of mine. We talked a lot about food -- even food we didn't like to eat, like the roots of Russian cuisine. We talked techniques and flavor combinations and all sorts of shit like that.

Phase 3 grew out of that -- my friend Heather moved into a cooperative house and I ended up hanging out in their huge basement kitchen a lot. Sometimes I cooked dinner for the house, sometimes just for her and Aaron. Being the kind of alternative cooperative types that they were, they sometimes thought a lot about food from a different perspective -- you know, a hippieish one. Not that this is a bad thing, because it makes you aware of a lot of stuff you might not otherwise think about.

And then there was Phase 4, in which I moved to the Bay Area and got hooked up with a CSA farm (CSA=Community Supported Agriculture. This note is for maliceangst in particular, since the rest of you have already heard it all by now). That's a box a week of vegetables for seven years now. It results in intense, seat-of-the-pants culinary creativity, at least for me. I love it.

And that's how I became a foodie.

Q&A II Part Two: The Last 10 Years

How did I end up in Oakland? When last maliceangst knew me, I had just graduated from college, then moved to Chicago. I lived there for five years with imnotandrei. Sometime or other in those five years I made a trip out to the SF Bay Area and loved it. I made the boy visit, too, and then had him hunt for jobs in the area that would pay relocation. This was around 1995-1996, mostly pre-boom, but things were revving up, and he worked as a UNIX sysadmin, so it wasn't much of a stretch to expect someone to bite. He found a job after about a year of looking, and they packed us up and moved us out to the Lower Haight, where I moved in with two old college friends of mine, in a slumlord-owned Victorian flat.

Five years after that, I bought a house in Bernal Heights with two other old friends of mine from Chicago. We had a falling out and sold our share. We moved to Oakland just this fall. imnotandrei is unemployed and looking for a job, I'm freelancing as a writer/editor/proofreader/windowcleaner/whatever -- pay me and I'll do it. We're currently living off our profit from selling the house.

In the meantime, we've adopted three cats and I've kinda carved out a career in publishing-related fields. I totally missed out on any of the dot-com riches, even transiently. But I did edit two anthologies, and I've sold a whole mess of fiction, and hey, I get to work at home and write about music and porn and stuff for a living, and my name is plastered all over the Internet. I'm pretty happy, actually, and I will be ecstatic once I figure out this finances stuff.

I've also done a lot of queer and gender and kink and sex-positive activism and advocacy stuff. Nothing particularly noteworthy aside from making a brief appearance in a Newsweek cover article a few years back.

Hey, maybe I'll throw together a highlights reel for you in the next post. "Lori: A Decade of Excellence."