Basking in Solitude

Judith Jones kitchen tour

2011-10-13T14:07:00.001-05:00

In this lovely post by Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan, Judith Jones invites the author into her home kitchen and makes her the omelet of a lifetime.

Judith Jones is the author of The Pleasures of Cooking for One (Amazon, $15.98)

Visit the link below to see Jones's vintage NYC apartment kitchen
http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/kitchen-tour-judith-jones-158276

Others weigh in on Elena Kagan

2010-05-22T11:31:00.000-05:00

Maureen Dowd is right on about this -- see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/opinion/19dowd.html -- and so is Nikki Stern -- http://open.salon.com/blog/1womansvu/2010/05/17/an_unmarried_woman

Dowd says Kagan's IQ may have detracted from her social life (ya think?): "It’s a disturbing echo of those Harvard Business School students who said on “60 Minutes” a few years ago that they had hid the fact that they went to Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death with men who were threatened by more successful women. “The H-bomb,” they called it."

The comments on Stern's essay are telling. My favorite: "Maybe if these high-powered and ambitious career women had the spousal equivalent of a wife (the man behind the woman) to do for them what
full-time political wives do for their husbands, that is EVERYTHING, then they could find the time to get married and have children while maintaining their careers."

Dowd also says Michelle Obama oughta fix Kagan up with some smart guys in DC. Yeah, right.

I advise Elena to hire a housekeeper and adopt a couple of cats and call it a day. But then I am somewhat soured on the dating world at the moment. Maybe next week.

more on being the smartest girl in the room

2010-05-14T11:34:00.000-05:00

One of the great loves of my life told me years ago, "Look, I slave away all day in a highly competitive environment. When I come home I don't want to match wits with somebody like you — I want to drink a Bud and watch Laverne and Shirley." The TV reference should give you some idea as to how long ago this was.

My friend eventually married a much-younger woman who, while certainly bright, was no competition for him. Not much of a challenge, either. He wanted a nice housewife who would raise his children and support his career, and that's what he got.

This has become a sad pattern, I'm sorry to say. I meet a man who's clever enough for me, who gets my jokes, who's a great companion, and he weighs his options and picks another woman, usually one who's less prickly, easier to get along with, more subservient. Why? Beats me.

It's not necessarily that they're thinner or prettier, either, though that has often been the case. "She's not as funny as you are; she has less of an edge," one old friend told me about his new fiance, "but she's restful." Another of my great unrequited loves, calculating his romantic alternatives, said to me, "But if we became lovers who would I talk to?"

Sometimes I despair, I really do.

So don't be so quick to assume that Elena Kagan is gay. She probably can't get a date to save her life. Men are often afraid of the smartest girl in the room.

The smartest girl in the room

2010-05-14T00:06:00.000-05:00

Okay, so Elena Kagan spent today visiting members of Congress and schmoozing nicely so maybe they will vote to confirm her nomination to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile various otherwise-reputable publications are speculating about her sexuality. They insinuate that because she's, like, 50 and never-married, no children, she must be a lesbian.

Oh, give me a fucking break.

I know nothing about Ms. Kagan's sexual preferences, but I can assure you that she suffers from the "smartest girl in the room" stigma no matter which gender she'd want to date, assuming she had any time, which she doesn't.

See, here's the deal: if you're the smartest girl in the room, you get to be the best friend, not the lead. The lead has to be just a teensy bit dumb. As one of Rosie O'Donnell's best characters put it in "Sleepless in Seattle," "The wisecracking dame never gets the guy."

More on this tomorrow, when maybe I'll be in a better mood.

George and Gracie

2010-02-28T14:45:00.000-06:00

Here are my two cats, both adopted from the Humane Society. They are very naughty, but I am so attached to them I often hesitate to travel because —while the neighbors will come in and feed them and they'll be just fine — somebody has to sleep with them.

More on rescuing an animal

2010-02-28T14:39:00.004-06:00

An American Animal Hospital Association survey found that three-quarters of pet owners would go into debt to provide for their animals’ well-being. Nearly a third — and almost half of all single people — say that of everyone in their lives, they rely most on their pets for companionship and affection, a Yankelovich survey for American Demographics reveals.

~ Jon Katz

The New Work of Dogs

In fact, a study under way at a major U.S. veterinary school was finding that more than half the married women in its sample told researchers that they got more emotional support from their dogs then from their husbands. (In March 2001, The New York Times reported on a similar survey with almost identical findings.) Their dogs understood them better than some members of their families, they said. More than 80 percent believed their dogs loved them “unconditionally” and would be loyal to them “no matter what.” Almost half said they couldn’t really say the same for their spouses.

~ Ibid

In Albert and Bulcroft’s 1988 study “Pets, Families, and the Life Course,” the researchers found that pet ownership is comparatively low among widowed people for a number of reasons: physical frailty, expense, housing restrictions, and a desire for autonomy. Many older people in Montclair also told me they didn’t want to get a dog that would almost surely outlive them.

But for those widowed or single people who own one, a pet can be an important source of affection and companionship. “As givers and receivers of affection,” note Albert and Bulcroft, “pets can contribute to the morale maintenance of people who live alone or with few significant others to play such roles.” And, compared to other animals, the researchers found, dogs are the most adept at playing affectionate and emotionally supportive roles.

~ Ibid

Rescue a pet

2010-02-15T23:11:00.000-06:00

Life, Love, And Four Paws

I disagree with Ben Stein on pretty much everything political, but his video essay on 2/15's CBS Sunday Morning brought a tear to my eye.

Check it out:

Ben Stein says "adopt a dog"

He's absolutely right. I would have a dog if I could, but George and Gracie would freak. I adopted them both from the Humane Society -- not siblings, but rescued together -- and they provide much-needed unconditional love. The comic relief is an added bonus. Here they are, doing what they do best. 'Night.

To settle or not?

2010-02-15T12:54:00.000-06:00

I enjoyed this interview by Sarah Hepola. Gottlieb says, "I want somebody who has my back and whose back I have, and I want somebody who, when the kitchen sink breaks, can help with that."

And David Ehrenstein replies, "Get a dog -- and for that sink, hire a plumber." (See the comments section.)

No shit.

Lori Gottlieb on "Settling for Mr. Good Enough"

Nonfiction - Salon.com
www.salon.com
Rare is the book that infuriates and captivates like Lori Gottlieb's latest. From its unapologetic goal -- to help unhappy single ladies get hitched! -- to its grabby, "oh no she didn't" title ("Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough"), women haven't argued about a dating book so ferociously since we first learned he just wasn't that into us. "Surprisingly, unnervingly convincing," wrote Alex Kuczynski at O magazine, while over at the Daily Beast, Liesl Schillinger tarred it as "whining, capricious, corrosive." In the meantime, Tobey Maguire's production company snapped up the movie rights, and Gottlieb has been interviewed everywhere from Dr. Phil to the "Today" show.

Try not to envy the smugly married

2010-01-24T13:34:00.000-06:00

Despite everything, I never felt jealous at weddings. I longed for love, yes, but I never saw that love was in greater supply at weddings than in butcher shops or department stores. The sight of a couple furtively holding hands beneath a restaurant table was more likely to remind me of the hopelessness of my life than any number of ladies dressed in giant christening gowns reciting words to become joined to a man in a rented suit. I do not like public ceremony, not graduations, not weddings; not pep rallies, nor church. Perhaps I simply do not understand trying to share one emotion (love, relief, faith, pep) with a quantity of strangers.
~ Elizabeth McCracken
The Giant's House

As Anne Lamott says, I have loved men so much and am so afraid of what they will do to me. And I look at women who get to have husbands and I think, "How dare they complain about anything," but many of them envy us for our quiet time and our freedom from the demands of others.

About a younger friend:

I felt so sorry for her, with all her buddies getting married and she never did. I think that bothered the hell out of her, frankly. I know it still bothers me. One feels sort of defensive about it; I feel secretly ashamed, like I wasn't good enough to get a husband. And then I see some of the husbands my friends have settled for, and the cats look like a pretty good deal.

“It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.”
~ e. e. cummings

Snoring and farting

2009-04-21T10:41:00.003-05:00

I re-read John Sanford’s Night Prey (the first of his “Prey” series) the other night, and the dialogue made me laugh out loud. Sanford’s hero Lucas Davenport and another cop are standing around talking about a woman who killed her husband with a mallet and chisel. Whack, whack, whack. Practically nailed him to the mattress. No history of abuse, just it was hot and she got tired of him lying there in bed, snoring and farting. If she'd only whacked him once, they'd be able to plead temporary insanity, but three whacks indicated some intent, there. It's not typically a woman, Lucas says. Usually it's some guy standing there half-drunk, scratching his ass, saying, "Beats me, man, she just pissed me off, you know?"

I’ve been lonelier coupled than I’ve ever been alone. Better to enjoy the pleasure of your own company than to be stuck in a bad relationship. There’s nothing worse than lying next to a live-in lover, listening to him snore, and thinking, “Oh, my God, I’ve got to get out of this! How can I make him leave? And he owes me money, too. Shit. But if I have to stagger home after a hard day at the office one more time to find him sitting there in front of ESPN with his meaty fist wrapped around a Budweiser, looking up from the game to ask me cheerfully, ‘Hi, honey. What’s for dinner?’ I’m going to lose it completely...”

That’s worse than being alone. Trust me. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.

When I lived in L.A. with Liam the Irish Prince, his music drove me nuts. He was a wanna-be Eric Clapton, but he wasn’t any good; he couldn’t sing to save his life. He couldn’t really play, either. My idea of guitar is Segovia; he wanted to do Electric Ladyland with the amp up high. He liked to invite his low-life friends over to play their instruments and get high and drink a couple sixpacks of Budweiser apiece. The noise drove me insane. I finally told him he had to practice in the garage because I couldn’t bear to listen to him. Poor lamb. I’d been all for it in the courting stage, before he moved in — even went so far as to prepare snacks for the guys and applaud their awful attempts at being rock stars — but once I had to live with it, the electric guitar got old in a real hurry.

He called a couple of weeks ago. It has been nearly 23 years and he’s still seeing the same stoner buddies and they still hang out and “play” together. I bet his wife doesn’t appreciate it any more than I did.

We interrupt this message...

2008-12-17T18:34:00.003-06:00

... My Salon article (http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/12/09/kit_naylor/) has generated 732 comments so far and an interview on a local radio show:

Click this link: http://www.fm1071.com/ondemand/index.shtml?audioid=862
(if you can't click, copy and paste to your browser)

Show: Stephanie & Meredith
Date: Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 - Hour 2

The piece has provoked quite a bit of controversy and I'm very excited about it; several agents have expressed interest in seeing the book proposal, and I am therefore optimistic about selling my manuscript for "Basking in Solitude: 52 ways to love living alone."

Do leave a comment if you care to.

Old rugby buddies from the '70s era at Carleton say they're taking bets on who's going to be the one to break the 15-year streak. "None of you losers, that's for sure." I tell them. "And whoever does is going to have to pitch me some serious woo."

5. Feed yourself and others

2008-11-25T13:06:00.003-06:00

"What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?"
~Lin Yutang

What did you eat growing up? What was your favorite food when you were a child? What is comfort food to you now; what do you crave when you’re sick or depressed? To me, it’s nursery fare — hard-boiled eggs mashed with butter and salt and pepper, accompanied by buttered toast and hot chocolate.

As to what we ate growing up, well, my mother was a resentful cook. One of her standby meals was creamed tuna on toast; if she happened to be feeling particularly festive, she’d toss in a handful of frozen green peas. I became a foodie when I realized I could taste the difference between a buerre blanc sauce and canned cream of mushroom soup.

Our household was much like that of Calvin Trillin, who says, “The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”

Trillin says thank God for immigrants or we’d still be eating English food — the awful kind served before the English learned how to cook. British chefs used to believe in the motto, “Boil until no further changes occur.” Even today, he says, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth.

Trillin claims to have been first in print with the discovery that the tastelessness of the food offered in American clubs varies in direct proportion to the exclusiveness of the club. The food in such places is bland because the members associate spices and garlic with just the sort of people they're trying to keep out.

More about this later — but here’s the next question: what would you want for your last meal (this is a favorite chefs’ Q&A)?

Flying solo in your twenties, continued

2008-10-16T11:38:00.003-05:00

4. Cook for yourself

“I was outside on my park bench, eating some tragic sandwich I'd assembled from odds and ends out of my fridge — sliced apple, some cheese, pickle relish. Single people eat sadly — they cobble together things left from shopping trips based on dreams of all the meals they'd fix for themselves, all the ways they'd treat themselves to something grand.”
~ Elizabeth McCracken
The Giant's House

So many young single men have nothing in their refrigerators but a six-pack of beer and a package of hot dogs; women usually keep a bottle or two of wine, designer water, and a bag of celery. I should talk — when I was fresh out of college I used to live on peanut butter and cheap scotch.

Most of us dined out in those days, which is of course lots of fun but hard on savings account, or grazed on frozen dinners or take-out or Domino’s pizza (I can’t believe I used to eat that stuff). My idea of a healthy meal was cheese and crackers or hummus and pita. I ate nothing but junk for years.

You don't have to eat poorly just because you're single. You can do better.

Cooking for yourself is healthier for you (because you control what goes into your food) and much less expensive. Something as simple as buying a take-out roasted chicken and using that in a salad or a pasta will save you money and calories, especially when compared to fast food meals.

If your mother and/or grandmothers are still living, you are fortunate indeed. Call all of them and ask for family recipes. No matter how strained my relationship with my mother was (and believe me, we didn’t speak for years at a time), she was always delighted to be asked for a recipe. It was wisdom she possessed that I (Miss Know-it-all, here) didn’t, and a way for her to be of help. We bonded over food the way some mothers and daughters do with shopping.

My dearest friend Judy, who lives in France now, taught me everything my mother didn’t about how to cook. It is still a pleasure to call or email her to ask about what to serve with what, or how I might modify a recipe.

If you have cable, you can watch the Food Network; if not, go online to http://www.foodnetwork.com/ or to http://www.epicurious.com/.

My favorite cookbook author is Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa (http://www.barefootcontessa.com/). She is just delightful; she jokes that all her recipes start out with “take two sticks of butter…” Her food is hardly low-fat but I have had consistent success with her recipes.

Celebrity chef/author (and long-time crush) Tony Bourdain hosts No Reservations, a show on the Travel Channel. An interviewer asked him how to learn to eat better, and he replied:

“Find some foodies, befriend them and let them take you by the hand and feed you well. There's nothing wrong with not cooking. But finding good food isn't that hard. It's a lot like finding drugs. You know: find others with similar appetites and follow them to their source.”
~ Anthony Bourdain

More about food in my next post. Cheers.

Flying solo in your twenties, continued

2008-09-23T11:25:00.003-05:00

3. Experiment with your own tastes in architecture
and design

Most of us furnish our first apartments with cast-offs from our parents’ basements. That’s fine, but eventually you will grow weary of knotty pine.

You may begin to notice that your friends differ in their decorating styles. One lives with a treadmill and a giant screen TV and not much else, another has collected so many knick-knacks you feel suffocated when you sit in her living room. Pay attention to the way you respond to these spaces.

You might want to look at some decorating magazines to see what appeals to you, and start clipping images you like. Eventually you’ll come to prefer a particular look, whether it’s modern or country or shabby chic, and will find color schemes that feel right to you. You can build your own bookcases, but head to IKEA for a couch and second-hand stores for lamps and side tables. Stuff doesn’t have to match, it just needs to be comfortable and pleasing to you.

Over the years I’ve noticed that we tend to surround ourselves with the same colors we like to wear. A redhead may be drawn to autumnal oranges and browns, or someone who looks great in dramatic colors will paint her living room electric blue. Go ahead and experiment, but keep in mind that if you want your security deposit back you may have to repaint before you move out.

I remember that my friend Linda’s very first apartment — a one-bedroom in a vintage building with high ceilings and hardwood floors — looked like something out of House Beautiful. Her towels matched her shower curtain. She’d slip-covered an old couch from her mother and made coordinating throw pillows. Everything was spare and clean and smelled like fresh lemons.

I thought with shame of my dingy efficiency in Washington, DC and vowed to do better.

I have done better, I guess, in that I’ve accumulated better rugs and more valuable antiques, but Linda, who has a wonderfully minimalist sense of style, still uses me as bad example. Whenever her husband complains about Linda’s (hardly noticeable) clutter she tells him, “That’s not clutter. If you want to see clutter, go visit Kit.”

Flying solo in your twenties

2008-09-15T09:52:00.009-05:00

“Never become romantically involved with anyone
who has more trouble and less money than you have.”
~ Classic advice

1. Ditch the roommates

"The postponement of marriage has led to a substantial increase in the
proportion of young, never-married adults," said Jason Fields, author of
America's Families and Living Arrangements: March 2000. "For example, in
the past three decades, the proportion of those who had never married
doubled for women ages 20 to 24, from 36 percent to 73 percent, and more
than tripled for women ages 30 to 34, from 6 percent to 22 percent."

When you are young and just starting out in life, it’s likely that you will share an apartment with others or rent a room in a group house. Eventually, unless you are remarkably tolerant, living with other people and their messes will drive you crazy.

You will long for your own refrigerator, so that you can come home from work reasonably confident that the chicken breast you planned to have for your supper will still be there. You will grow weary of stepping over prone bodies on your way to the kitchen in the morning. You will insist on a bathroom that is more or less up to code.

It’s time to find a small space you can call your own.

When I moved into my first apartment, many years ago, my best friend Judy sent me the advice you see above. The only thing I could add to this would be: buy a plumber’s friend and keep it handy because if you ever need it (and this will probably happen at some odd hour) you won’t feel like venturing out to Target or a hardware store to buy one.

2. Live in the city

What a great time of life — to be in your 20s, independent and fancy free.

Depending on your career aspirations, you will find employment where the jobs are. Great cities for young professionals include New York, Washington DC, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, L.A., Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, and (yes) Minneapolis. Smaller university towns are good bets, also — Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill, Charlottesville, Madison, for example.

Even if your workplace is in the suburbs, find a place in the city. You’ll have a reverse commute and you won’t be stuck out in the boonies with all the married people and their bratty children.

I know several single women who bought (admittedly, affordable) houses in developments so far away from the rest of us you have to take a light plane to get out there, and I think they were out of their minds. Nobody wants to go visit them and by the time these women get home from work exhausted the very last thing they want to do is get back in their cars and retrace their commutes.

The ‘burbs can be lonely places for the unmarried, so go urban. Ask your friends where other young people live. Twenty-somethings tend to congregate in cool neighborhoods close to restaurants and bars. Chances are you won’t have a car so you’ll want to locate within walking or cab distance of your friends and their hangouts. Have a great time.

Introduction

2008-08-27T10:42:00.002-05:00

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the proportion of households consisting of one person living alone increased from 17 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 2000 — and the number of householders living alone in 2000 was 27,230,075 — or 25.8% of the population.

Other than a couple of unfortunate experiments in cohabitation — and even more disastrous attempts to share space with roommates — I have lived alone for most of my adult life.

In the process, I have created quite a nice nest for myself. When people come into my home, they usually exclaim, "Oh, it’s so cozy!" and it is; it’s like a little Hobbit cottage, appealing to all the senses. Visitors cross threadbare oriental rugs and dodge the books and piles of magazines stacked everywhere; they may notice the scent of freesia, my favorite flower, in a vase on the coffee table. Classical music, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio, plays faintly in the background while my two cats snooze in the wing chairs beside the fireplace. My house is cluttered and untidy, but it feels inviting to guests, who usually arrive confident that they’ll be given a cup of tea or a drink and a nice snack while they’re here.

I do make it look easy, even though I don’t have any money — I’ll scrimp on supper in order to buy a bunch of flowers, instead. I have arranged my life to please myself alone, figuring I might as well be comfortable since God knows I don’t get any sex.

It seems to my friends that I’ve always been alone, largely because I arrived in Minneapolis by myself nearly 20 years ago and have flown solo ever since. People here have never known me as part of a unit.

But I was coupled once or twice, when I was young, and still yearn for that sense of belonging. My friend Linda calls it attachment hunger, when you don’t so much miss the man himself as you do having a partner. So I know what it feels like.

And I am able to be sympathetic to the women who have collapsed in my living room over the years, in floods of tears because they’re suddenly alone and afraid. I know what that feels like, too.

They seem to think I have a secret, that I know something special because I make it seem so effortless, so natural. "How do you do it," they wail, "how do you get through the days?" Long practice.

I give each of my friends a 10- or 12-point plan, and with every sobbing advisee, I realize that maybe I have something here; maybe I do know a few tricks. They’re pretty simple, really — turn on the radio, adopt a pet, reach out to your friends, find some nice gay men to play with, worship at a welcoming church or temple — none of this is rocket science, but it can seem incredibly daunting when you’re just starting out.

Believe me, I know how terrifying it is to be alone, and arriving finally at this place of peace has taken me many years and many tears. Even now, when something goes wrong with the furnace or my car breaks down or I’m driving alone at night, hopelessly lost because the people giving directions assumed somebody would be along to navigate from the passenger seat, I can experience a real meltdown. I get lonesome, too. Like Bridget Jones, I worry that I’ll die here alone and they won’t find me for days and I’ll be eaten by Alsatians.

But I had a real epiphany one morning, standing at the kitchen sink. I realized I was annoyed that I hadn’t got around to having the dripping faucet fixed, and calculated that I feel irritated once or twice a month about being alone. Then I had to laugh, because each of the men I nearly married used to piss me off several times a day.

"You were such a pretty girl," well-meaning friends have said over the years, as if that had anything to do with my forlorn attempts at love, "Why didn't you find a nice husband?" I used to cringe at these questions, flailing away in vain to come up with some reasonable, non-pathetic explanation about how the ones I could catch I didn’t want and the ones I wanted I couldn’t catch, or I’d shrug and say, "I’m still looking, sugar; you available?" Or, as Gloria Steinem observed once, “I don’t mate well in captivity.”

But now, when people ask me how it is that I never married, I reply simply that I’ve had several lucky escapes.

“Enjoy your cats, house and peace, and don't go asking for trouble.”
~ Cathy Madison