Walking Home

Readers, let me tell you, life continues to surprise, but I think that's the point. Walking home on a warm and humid and close night in England, with unlimited options opening up before me and nearly unlimited, if misplaced, faith in my own ability to solve problems, and literally no ideas about goals or nascent goals or how to make a life out of all the options, and it's okay. It's actually better than okay, and it's better than before I knew I had no idea. Walking home I peeped through some windows and saw some girlie posters and some disembodied arms holding cigarettes and thought back to a few minutes before when I'd had a frank conversation with my onetime greatest nemesis and it was still alright. The summer is opening up before me, full of safe adventure and fun with my oldest and dearest friends and no pressure and no progress and no ideas for afterwards, and everything is in flux and I'm at peace.

Offal

Readers, I had a fascinating meat weekend. On Friday night I went to St John for some getting in touch with my inner carnivore. It's all white, set in a former smokehouse, and the space certianly wasn't made for a restaurant, creating all sorts of funny angles as the dining room wraps around the kitchen. Some have called it the best restaurant in the world. It was pretty great -- bright, airy, classy, and, well, adventurous. The theme of the place is "Nose-to-tail Eating" and we set out to order things we hadn't ever tried. Our selections included marrow, chitterlings (intestine), salt pollock, and kid. The kid came with this green sauce that knocked my socks off -- parsley, mint, anchovy, and caper, and probably some other secrets. The chitterlings were layer of intestine upon layer of instestine, but somehow they had the consistency of yummy meat and some yummy flavor. The best quote of the night was from the friend I ate with when he pointed out that "Halloween is a coming out party for diabetics". We laughed at that then scraped marrow out of a piece of veal bone and spread it on toast.

The next day I went to the Saatchi Gallery in the London County Hall, a turn-of-the-century massive celebrating local government. The setting was pretty dramatic, but so were the preserved, sliced-up cows and pigs and sheeps and sharks decorating the entryway and the exhibition rooms. I got to see the other night's offal close up. The gallery was cool for reasons that don't fit with the pig-part theme of this post, too: an artist whose schtick is painting places he's never seen or seen pictures of, like the queen's bedroom; an enormous pillar of individaully-cast, hand-painted resin mice; and a room filled waist-high wall-to-wall with motor oil, wich reflected like a mirror and disoriented as you walked out the jetty into the middle of it.

Achievers

Readers, I spent part of the weekend in Oxford, mingling with the world's future elite. People who know that Yale Med School sends backits replies later than all the others even if they've never considered applying themselves, simply because that's the idle chatter in the hallways. People with truly amazing social skills, as if they've been training for 20 of their first 25 years on how to best entertain their guests at the embassy. I'm not sure what the difference is between these people and me. I think it's that their drive is much more focused than mine. I've always been able to solve the problem right in front of me, but have never been able to summon much energy to seek out the next problem or to make sure that the next problem is a good one. These people don't have incredible consistent focus -- they may flit from scientific to philanthropic to literary ambitions, or even to temporarily slovenly unproductive ones (these must always be temporary, and probably have to be the right kind of unproductive breaks) -- but I think they've always had incredible consistent focus on achieving. Doesn't matter what they do so long as the application to the next level is in the mail, so long as there is movement forward towards something new and admirable and objectively valuable. And though it was at a dinner party, the people I've met on this and my other trips all seem happy and self-directed. They have something figured out, I think. I'm pretty good at the happy, it's the self-directed I need to work on.