Timing. Timing. Timing.

Right now, I'm a woman with no home -- wandering between the purgatory of not entirely moved in/not entirely moved out. The facelift isn't finished at the new place, but the old place is slowly migrating over. I split my time between the two.

Unfortunately, life moves on without my permission. People expect to drop by. They must be fed. The fact that you have no shelter to offer them is irrelevant. (All my parents have visited copiously in recent weeks.)

Socializing does not stop.

Boys keep asking me out, and the temptation is to say No, give me a week and I'll be all settled ..... then I notice how extravagantly tall some of them are and I reconsider. I already got burned in January by not gettin' while the gettin' was good and Bobby Donuts disappeared , only to turn up a week later Drinking-for-Charity with the girl who had enough sense to say Yes when he asked her out. (I am still mad about that.)

On the other hand, where do they pick me up? Where do I live? There is no operating kitchen. "May I offer you some raw meat and an Ale 8?"

As my gay husband points out, our lives are based on the ILLUSION of spontaneity and unpreparedness (while neither one of us is capable of either).

What on earth do I put in the fridge of a largely empty house that doesn't seem contrived? I've asked this several times lately.

There were a LOT of recommendations.

Chef Tom's response was "chic, or homey?" My answer was "Marxist." His instant return text was: "pellegrino, white wine, a good block of cheese, Mexican coke, baquette strewn haphazardly on the counter, thrown there as if bored with it."

Yes. I  have been able to plausibly pretend that's how the new and empty kitchen looks --- just as soon as I threw away the moldy pitcher of Sangria leftover from Easter (triple bagged and hidden at the bottom of the Herbie) -- which comprised the entire contents of the fridge before it was staged, aside from the Ale 8 (for the interns) and raw meat (that's mine).

Beverages? It was agreed that Beer's more butch, but I don't drink it so I don't know what to buy. I think I have interns who buy PBR, but I'm pretty sure they're being Ironic... I don't know what the proletariat drinks, and I am the proletariat. (I know it's not Crystal Lite. Not if you ask my mother.) There's copious amounts of bourbon, but it just doesn't seem quite ... casual enough. Most everybody who drinks bourbon drinks it like they mean it.

Chef Tom added, "Maybe a cured meat of some kind...as if an unplanned picnic on the Left Bank could occur."

I typically don't even let a prospective gentleman caller see where I live for months, much less mid-move, but sometimes it's unavoidable, and it's one of those insane game-changers where the chaos and accidental intimacy somehow vaults you past first date straight to the fourth month of living together. Underwear on the floor. Three stages of drying laundry stretched across two bathrooms. It's savage really.

It's been so overwhelming, I've barely had a spare second to even write any of this up -- for every date I've actually mentioned, there've been half dozen that have had to go unremarked (in fairness, I usually stop after first dates, before the material gets very entertaining)-- which, everybody has agreed, is a good thing.

As one of my girlfriends observed, at some length, "Don't blogiterate these guys prematurely!" When I point out that they're not avid readers and that I purposely keep it vague, she accused me of poking the word "Lucky" in the eye Three Stooges style, adding, "they will FIND your blog. Their GRANDMOTHERS will find your blog. And unless you start writing in Farsi about endangered marine mammals, you need to remember: it's the Internet, NOT an encrypted C.I.A. file."

In my experience, it's all a negotiation -- better begun early than late. My willingness to negotiate increases in direct proportion to the hotness of the prospect, along with the depth of my affection and/or attraction. If I'm not getting material, I must be getting something  better in return. Like, snow shoveling in the winter.... lawn mowing in the summer... Herbies hauled to the Curb.... that kinda thing. I am more shockingly easy than one might imagine.

In Vino Veritas

Last night was "nibbles" at my neighbor Kate's house where we all got to meet her childhood pal Wendy, and taste her her wines from Australia. "Hers," as in: Wendy made them. (I think her husband helped, but still....) She's a winemaker, and they have about 100 acres (or 30 something hectares, or 130-something hectares... I got kinda lost in translation).

I was especially impressed that Wendy managed to get our tasting supply into the country, because I recently saw Bottle Shock and had the impression you could only transport two bottles at a time. (Alan Rickman shoutout to Rachel -- I consider Alan Rickman to be Rachel's property, sorta the way Sam Shepard is mine.) I had the Pinot Noir and found it precocious, but not pretentious... sporty, yet insouciant... sardonic, but not smug -- much like me. All I know is it held up very well to the plateful of wasabi tenderloin biscuits I ate.

I am trying very hard to take up drinking. I don't wanna end up face-down in a gutter or anything, but I do consider wine to be culinarily significant and if you're gonna take food seriously, you oughtta know your way around a bottle or two.

A fellow guest at the party was trying to give up smoking, and I felt bad for her, because it's my understanding that wine makes you want to smoke (so I expect I'll be taking that up around 2010). She said it was getting easier with the help of ..."Vitamin X," to which I expressed inadvertently loud incredulity. "Really? Ecstacy helps you give up sssssmoooooking?" That stopped the conversation for a few minutes til she clarified that "Vitamin X" is just Xanax, and that I'd probably learn about that when I was her age. (She didn't know I woulda ground benzodiazapenes into my childhood Cheerios if I'd been allowed, but I really did think "X" and "E" was what "the kids today" called Ecstasy.) I also felt sad cause she can't watch Mad Men while she's trying to quit smoking. Then another lady said she can't watch Entourage cause she's trying to quit smoking pot. I assumed most people had given it up cause it got so douche-y.

There were about a dozen of us girls last night. Kate and Wendy are English, but if I'm remembering correctly went to Catholic school together in Bahrain. Wendy had a scholarship to Cambridge in the Classics, but got married and had 4 kids in Holland with her husband before moving to Australia. Another lady was Swedish; another married to a Brit... and so on.

The only thing I could think of to conversationally fall back on in such a transcontinental crowd was, "What do your roosters say?"

[I got that from David Sedaris, in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim: "'What do your roosters say' is a good icebreaker, as every country has its own unique interpretation. In Germany, the rooster greets the dawn with a hearty 'kik-a-riki.' Greek roosters crow 'kiri-a-kee,' and in France they scream 'coco-rico,' which sounds like one of those horrible premixed cocktails with a pirate on the label. When told that an American rooster says 'cock-a-doodle-do' my hosts look at me with disbelief and pity."]

Now, I'm not a total dumbass -- I didn't ask this completely out of context. We were talking about one of the ladies at the party who raises chickens in her backyard downtown -- which I thought was illegal (awesome, but illegal)-- and it turns out it isn't. You can raise chickens downtown, but not roosters. (Everyone else was far more up to date on the city livestock ordinances than I was, which was kind of embarrassing.) The problem is, when you order up baby chicks, you can specify hens, but inevitably, a rooster or two sneaks in. When they're babies, they look pretty gender-indeterminate (now this, I did know, having been raised on a farm and been disappointed by many a crop that grew up to lay no eggs, which was just one of many of my failed brilliant get-rich-quick childhood schemes).

So, I thought "what do your roosters say?" was a perfectly natural conversational segue... but it was initially greeted with uncomfortable silence, as if I'd asked somebody how much money they make. I didn't know it was so personal, or maybe just stupid. And I was just starting to awkwardly explain about David Sedaris, when the Swedish lady gamely stepped right in and said, "Kookly-Oooo." I think there was maybe an umlaut or something in there somewhere, but you get the idea.

She also reported their dogs say "voof, voof." How great is that?