Eat Well, Be Smart, and Play

It's been a busy bunch of days. I was able to catch Ana Sortun doing a reading (with SNACKS!) at the Harvard Bookstore on Friday evening. She stressed that idea of food making you feel good, of knowing what you're eating and buying organic, and debunked the idea that babies like bland food. Her 8-month old won't have any of it. She wants spice.

I have been experimenting with Aleppo chilies after reading bits of her book. I don't eat a lot of hot spicy food, since I'm more genetically built to hole up by a peat fired stove, down a lot of vodka, and snarf some pickled fish. However, Aleppo chilies are like a not quite as hot version of your standard red pepper flakes. And it's a sort of smokier taste. Really nice. I bought mine down the street at Christina's spice market, and did not try the flavor of the day next door at Christina's homemade ice cream for once: White asparagus. I like bean shakes. I like avocado ice cream. But white asparagus. That just wasn't what I was looking for.

Oh and by the way, I went to see An Inconvenient Truth. I don't know if anyone has told you, but this movie is about you. You should probably go see it really soon!

Saturday found me unexpectedly social. A friend I met up at Haystack was in town from Philly doing an airbrush face-painting gig at a bar mitzvah at the Four Seasons. One friend from the North shore brought some friends from art school down from the North Shore as well.

It was a good "girls day." What does that mean? I don't know. There was no secret handshake. We all got to know eachother over Taiwanese food and discussions of sex toy parties (the Tupperware type) and then went shopping. Maybe women are more candid together. One of my friends did after all say, "I didn't know you were that old!" to me and we laughed. My fortune said "Expect something big." (I think it meant my ass. I'm not going back there.)

It was curl-up-and-read rainy weather on Sunday, so of course I spent the day in my kayak. I was doing BCU 3* training. That's British Canoe Union – a canoe being a kayak in the King's English. At least I didn't have sunscreen in my eyes. And at least I was in protected waters. Two people I know who are some of the more experienced paddlers in the Northeast ended up helicopter rescued that day.

Kayaking is a counter-intuitive sport in many ways, and there are a lot of times you have to decide whether you want to do the thing that makes sense for your body or the thing that makes sense for the boat. Luckily for me I grew up screwing around in boats, so some otherwise counter-intuitive things seem natural to me.

I think that some of the best exercises coaches give in kayak training are things we might have done if left to our own devices as kids. You learn a lot about the physics of your boat in the water when as a kid you purposefully dumped it over and tried to paddle it to shore with half a paddle, for instance. If you have kids, make sure they Play if you want them to be smarties. And I don't mean Nintendo (they don't have a kayaking game do they?)