Soggy

I love rainy days—what a perfect excuse to hunker down with a book, or go to a museum, or hang out in a bakery, or have dinner in with a good friend. So....I did all of those things yesterday! I spent part of the morning reading a book called The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson, which is a collection of short stories based around the four humors (sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholy, choleric). I don't know if I quite figured it out—might have to give it another read.

The NYT said: "The effect of Jackson's visceral, inventive details can be gorgeous, or utterly grotesque—as in 'Phlegm,' which presents a world wherein the disgusting stuff is used as a social lubricant." Yes, she spends a lot of time talking about phlegm (I mean, the stuff is everywhere), which seemed to lessen/numb the nastiness of it for me....the whole story turned into a metaphor. For what? I'm not yet sure. Some of the other stories are called "Blood," "Foetus," and "Egg."

I headed into Manhattan to check out a new exhibit at the Morgan Library called Drawing Babar: Early Drafts and Watercolors. It includes sketches of Jean DeBrunhoff's first ideas about Babar, and his son's continuation of the stories. Totally charming! I used to love the tales of the dignified elephant. There's an interesting piece in the New Yorker about the show, too: Adam Gopnik says Babar "...is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination." Hmm. All I know is that the drawings brought back a lot of warm, fuzzy memories, colonialist or not.

Then it was off to the Upper East Side to pick up a number and t-shirt for a training run I'm doing in Central Park on Sunday, followed by a stop at Two Little Red Hens—an impossibly cute little bakery filled with red velvet cupcakes, Brooklyn Blackout chocolate cupcakes, pies, birthday cakes, pecan bars, and, of course, chicken paraphernalia.

I picked up a big ol' cupcake and headed out to Bushwick, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, to have dinner with Julie—soup, made from veggies she picked up at a community garden, along with crusty bread and wine. She shares an enormous old house with a few other people and has enough space in her bedroom to paint huge canvasses. Can't say that about my room! We watched the debates, and had birthday cake for her roommate's b-day. We decided a good drinking game would be to do a shot every time McCain says "Ronald Reagan." Ugh....

Then it was back to Park Slope for the night.