Oh, Hi. I Didn't See You There.

So about two months ago I started a blog because I was (still am!) funemployed and crawling the fuck out of my skin. And, hey, do I understand machines and technology enough to get an RSS feed cooking on my page sans errors and a mess of struggle? No. Just, decidedly no. Hence, I'm going to try to do some hoodrat copy and paste business, and maybe dreams will happen. My blog is fairly tranny, but it's my attempt to kind of lure my less-environmentally-interested friends into various homesteading activities and be like, hey guys...it seriously won't kill you to put some herbs in your window...no, every piece of organic food is not dripping with e. coli...I'm very much a baby homesteader at this point, so much of this is chronicling my first year of gardening, first struggly attempts at butter making, and trying to force feed myself vegetables since my diet is typical Brooklyn abysmal. So I guess I'll just start throwing some entries up?

Episode #1: Newspaper Crumple Racing With Myself

Hey, listen, it's a recession. Or it's not, or whatever, but I'm unemployed, so I'm going to keep using this excuse for why I do the broke ass things I do. Now, when I still had a job, there was once a video on the internet machine that I laughed at. In fact, my mocking, churlish guffaws rang throughout the tri-state area at the expense of this video from a little program called the Reading Rainbow. The first episode, entitled "Tight Times," is not the erotic thriller the title promises, but rather features tips for poor people on how to not bring us all down in the best old school LeVar Burton rap joint of all time, "Cheap Things To Do When You're Broke." This is what I wrote about it approximately two years ago:

"His ideas for cheap things to do are just about the saddest poor people activities I could ever imagine. Like, even the magic of television doesn't make them look less tragically ghetto than what you're about to see. Further, I feel like some of the ideas (bleach container bird house, I'm looking at you) are ecologically unsound, and could lead children down the dangerous path of huffing (wait, can you huff bleach? I've tended to abuse more average substances so I'm not really practiced in this area.)

The most heart-wrenching of these activities, well- I don't even know how I can prepare you for this, but I'll just come right out and say it- is crumpling up newspapers. For fun. That's it. Just crumpling up newspapers in a line with other children who just want to fucking play with their Lite Brites but can't, because the electricity's been turned off, so they just have to smile on the outside at their fibrous rumpling 'merriment,' even though they're dying on the inside. That is just about the most poignantly homeless recreation I've ever seen in my life."

Well guess what. Now I live in that bleach bottle bird house, and I can't even afford the yogurt lid toss. And while everyone is living, laughing, and loving at work all day...

I'm newspaper crumple racing with myself.

Take a moment to let that set in, and visualize it if you can. Because it's happening right now. Like, while you're reading this at work and g-chatting instead of being productive, I'm just sitting, squeezed into a bleach bottle with two cut out holes and inelegantly tacked yarn and paper fringe decoration, sadly crumpling up a free coupon booklet from someone else's stoop because I can't afford the Times, lacking even the heart to crumple in a hasty manner, because I have no crumple competition. (If you like, and you were around for this, try imagining that I am wearing the bird costume Rae was forced to wear when we were in our high school's production of Once Upon a Mattress).

Well, luckily, even a chlorine-saturated bird can get government assistance. Eh...technically assistance that had previously already come out of your paycheck when you were gainfully employed, but why split hairs? Each week, much to Steven's delight, I go to the department of labor website and, in an impertinent manner, I a little bit lie to questions like, "Did you look for a job this week?" by saying "YES" in an abrupt manner, and unnecessarily out loud, as though I am incensed at having even been questioned. I would feel shitty about this except for the fact that as a public teacher in a failing urban school who had, hey, you know, not such a pleasant time at the hands of various other city employees, it's like they're giving me a "Sorry For Stealing Two Years of Your Precious, Precious Youth and Made You A Little Fat" card + guilt relief check, like a wealthy absentee daddy. (I have to admit, I do miss the hooligans quite a bit- I hardly ever hear the phrase "cock meat sandwich" anymore, and maybe I started crying like a pansy bitch a couple weeks ago when one kid sent me his college essay- about the difference. I. made. in. his. life....sobbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb......it's not like Donut's tranny ass ever thanks me for adopting him and taking him off the streets of Queens and moving him to glamourous Bedford-Stuyvesant. In fact, I discovered last night while at Kailin and Brian's watching Mad Men that he had peed a little on the cardigan I was wearing. AND what's more, he keeps trying to steal my liquors at parties. Twat.)

Anyway, so maybe when you used to be someone with dreams who suddenly finds themself not working and living in Brooklyn's beautiful Greenpoint neighborhood, a largely Polish community situated on the polluted Newtown Creek, built on top of, I believe, an old garbage dump, and located a mere two blocks from the waste treatment plant (which I like to think is run by scary, futuristic robots, from the outside looks of the place), you might also discover that Time Warner kind of can't set you up with internet unless they can get access to every single yard between you and five houses down at the same time. You're not going to ask yourself, "How did I get here?" in a manner attempting at Talking Heads but kind of just sounding like a tranny Katherine Hepburn, because you know how- it was through being awesome. And full of moxie. Chock full of it. Hey, so you're unemployed, your apartment is full of mice, the air you're breathing is probably toxic, and you have no TV or internet- does anyone pull off sequined, shoulder padded garments with your special kind of panache? Do any of your friends manufacture yam flavored liqueur? Are they growing tomatoes out their grandmother's old monogrammed canvas purse? I didn't think so. Maybe you struggle a lot, maybe you are so painfully awkward that you flat out cannot talk to gentlemen who don't heavy pet with other gentlemen, and you're kind of sitting in a machine-less apartment all the time, largely unaware of modern technology, using a cell phone from the 1990s, but hey, Carrots Love Tomatoes and Growing Herbs Indoors aren't going to read themselves, and you can work with that.

In any case, to be slightly clearer, over the past year or so I had come to find that making things, which I'd always loved, was a way to calm down from a stressful job, and later, to deal with the awkward stew of feelings you find yourself in when you become unemployed. While I was still teaching I had found a book at my parents' house called Homemade Liqueurs from 1979, and from then on I got pretty reckless experimenting with different eau de vie and liqueur recipes (eau de vie=a spirit that has been flavored by macerating [steeping] fruit, spices, nuts, etc, whereas a liqueur=a flavored spirit that is then sweetened with sugar syrup or honey). Thanks to living with Leah and her love for Carlo Rossi jugs that won't quit, and a friendship that consisted of a lot of enabling in hammocks/my interrupting of her Josh Groban videos with Dr. Hanson's "To Catch a Predator," I had a lot of empty bottles and a lot of delicious, delicious practice. Then, after reading the slew of food polemics that came out in the past few years I started to see the importance of not just buying organic, but buying locally and making foods yourself instead of eating the standard pre-packaged American diet, which lead to gardening. When the school year ended and all of a sudden I had this empty void of days stretching ahead of me, I stumbled into the book The Urban Homestead at Sprout Home in Williamsburg, and started getting crazy notions in my head of raising quail (is it quail or quails?) and making over Bed-Stuy (where I moved in August) with enough edible plantings to feed the neighborhood.

When it comes down to it, I would characterize a lot of this as my trying to live an environmentally sustainable life, if I wasn't so broke and that statement wasn't so cloyingly obnoxious. There's certainly no shortage of published accounts of such things, and when I was able to watch a television recently I encountered a program featuring Ludacris and Tommy Lee doing sustainability challenges, so this isn't exactly new ground. However, in a lot of the green things I've been reading, there's a lot of hippie bull shit, and when stuff is in the mainstream, a lot of the time it's watered down or waaay too expensive for a broke ass like me. Clearly I know environmentalism is generally the provenance of the bourgeois, and as a white NYU type, that's kind of my world- but what if you're not the kind of white person who has the self control to eat salads every day and keep a white coat clean, but are rather the kind of white person who dresses as tranny La Prohibida for Halloween, wins a bump-it while VIP on The Wendy Williams Show, and who would actually motorboat a box of donuts. Because I haven't yet, but you know, I probably would. So what do you do then if you want to be ecologically responsible, but are not a hippie or a wealthy Park Slope mom?

Because let's not lie- I'm not so much the picture of responsibility. I mean, really, of responsibility in any sense, but particularly when it comes to food. When I tried to go on the South Beach diet I was notorious for extreme surly outbursts and unnecessarily communicating out loud my daydreams of running through fields of bacon hand in hand with a Honey BBQ Crispy Chicken sandwich from the Friendly's to those in earshot who were understandably unnerved and confused. I've told co-workers of my desire to live in a hut made out of cocoa bread and have to eat my way out, and a gentleman on the street almost succeeded in luring me away with promises of beer and churros. I frightened Londoners on the tube after seeing a KFC sign and declaring, "I BETTER get some biscuits!" and I roll so deep at the bootleg BBQ that they throw free fried shrimp on top of my meal and give me drinks and once offered me a job.

There are a few things that I think can propel a tranny like me to eco-responsibility. One is my gnawing guilt from potentially deforming babies in third world countries because of pesticides and filling up delicious salmon with mercury and fucking up the rain forest which any kid who went to elementary school in the 90s knows we must save. You don't get that endangered animal coloring book for being a dick. You have to earn it, asshole.

Another is the fact that things can get fucked up when you outsource, and sometimes, it sucks, but just just have to do shit yourself to get it done right. If I want a raspberry vodka to be as delicious as I know it can be, I can't buy Smirnoff. I have to make my own. And if I want to have a clean conscience, I can't get the raspberries that were shipped to the bodega from Mexico, I have to force my sister and her boyfriend to drive me to an obscure organic raspberry farm where you look for an old timey milk canister and operate on the honor system, putting the money inside a rusty Sucret's tin, and then picking the berries yourself while occasionally petting a stray cat that might have rabies. Obviously. Or, for example, nutmeg liqueur. I've never had such a delicious nut in my mouth as that, but the liquor store on Bedford next to Liquid Love- A Sophisticated Meeting Place with the bullet proof glass just does not carry any.

The third thing is taste and quality. The Union Square farmer's market can eat my asshole. It really can. I get like, a full on panic attack when I go there and I want to slap the shit out of everyone there. But local fruits and vegetables taste so much better. And buying clothes made in an earlier era at the thrift store when garments were made to last is not just keeping things from the landfill- it saves you from shoddily-made clothes from H&M that will fall apart and kind of look bad anyway. In a lot of cases, things can cost significantly more if they are eco-friendly, which, again, is something that sucks. But the vegetables will have more nutrients, and it'll be better for your health or your skin and all of that shit, or the Mrs. Meyer's will leave your clothes smelling nicer and not irritate your skin. (The tricky part comes when the green product is horrible, like, for example, everything made by Seventh Generation. I don't even know how many butt cheeks have been chaffed by their horrid toilet paper.)

The last is that when you're an awkward on unemployment, sometimes doing and making things yourself is the cheapest option. Making bread is cheaper than buying it. Growing herbs and vegetables can make good quality produce affordable, although part of what I want to work on is how to make doing this super economical for an urban dweller of my means. A lot of the home arts, as I've learned over the years from Mama Flan, allow you to have nicer, custom things than you could afford on your own, like satin dresses tailored to your exact measurements, curtains of the fabrics and style of your choosing, upholstered headboards with velvet mohair covered buttons, and let's not forget Baby Deer bag featuring yard sale baby deer needlepoint and vintage fabric, which is awesome. Um, or gangster antler decoration courtesy of Dr. Stashe. Oh, and I'm sorry, did I forget matching dresses made out of orange curtains for you and your younger sister, or seasonally themed vests with cats? Yeah, that kind of deluxe doesn't just fall out of the sky, you know.

Plus, you know you always used to play surviving in colonial times over the winter before you queened out over the borderline erotic descriptions of how to make butter or headcheese in Little House in the Big Woods, and urban homesteading lets you live out your prairie dreams while still residing in proximity to unlimited champagne brunch locations.

To conclude: start at minute 14:30 and you won't be disappointed. This is the start of something fannypack-level deluxe, ladies and gentlemen. Good day.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/3203646/reading_rainbow_tight_times/