Picture me now, lying in my hammock as I copy out the recipe for what we ate from the New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant cookbook. I would be happy to eat this every warm day all summer long.

Summer Sauce for Pasta
Serves 4

On those hot, lazy, sultry summer days, when, like a character in a Tennessee Williams play, you haven’t got the energy to do much more than lie around the house in an old tattered slip, try this quick, uncooked sauce. It’s fragrant, refreshing, and light.

6 ripe tomatoes, chopped
2 cups sliced mushrooms (8 ounces) [500 g]
6 to 8 ounces [200 g] mozzarella cheese, grated or cut into thin strips
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon salt

1 pound [500 g] spaghetti or linguini

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese (1 ounce) [30 g]

Mix all the sauce ingredients together and let sit at room temperature for an hour or so, for the flavors to mingle.

Cook and drain the pasta. While the pasta is piping hot, serve it in well-warmed bowls, topped with a ladleful of sauce and garnished with Parmesan cheese.

Of course I don’t make it exactly like that. I use fewer mushrooms, less olive oil, more garlic (which I crush instead of mincing) and I hate Parmesan so I use Romano instead. But you won’t make it exactly like that either.

Enjoy!

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Here’s some cached text from youngadultcancer.ca. It’s Alston talking about going on the “July 11-23, 2009 – Owyhee River Kayaking Expedition, SE Oregon, USA” trip organized by YAC and the subject of the film Wrong Way to Hope.

Until May 1, 2007, I led a trite and meaningless existence. Just kidding. Until that date, life was pretty great in most ways. I had just started a new and interesting career in video games. And then…well, you know what happened then. The details: esophageal cancer. One of the worst ones, and unusual for someone that was only 32.

This is a bio, which normally means that it is very much of a compilation of who you are and what you’ve done. It’s part character sketch and part CV. But unlike many other major events in life such as marriage, first child, etc., this one tends to obliterate your life B.C. (before cancer). The effect of this is that UI and many others focus much less on the past and put more emphasis on the future, but especially the present. And that is why I am going to travel for 2 weeks on the Owyhee River with others like me.

This trip is an opportunity to make an impact in people’s live right now. Instantaneously. People around me are organizing themselves in order to realize something they believe in. I personally am reminded of my vitality and ability to contribute to something important to society. And it gets me out of the limbo of uncertainty that surrounds people my age hit with some serious disease.

I am a man, alive, relevant and vital. I am here, right now.

I’m home now, but “Let your love flow” is still coursing through my brain.

Not very lesbian at all. 

Any better suggestions? In 1985, Bechdel/Wallace identified Alien as a prototypical lesbian movie because the two women in it get to talk to eachother about the monster. Has there been anything since then? 

*The Bechdel test [from Wikipedia]

The [Dykes to Watch Out For] strip popularized what is now known as the Bechdel test, also known as the Bechdel/Wallace test, the Bechdel rule, or Bechdel’s law. [Alison] Bechdel credits her friend Liz Wallace for the test, which appears in a 1985 strip entitled “The Rule”, in which a character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:

1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.

The citizenship judge was Croatian-born and gave a moving speech about how difficult emigration and the process of building a new life in a new country is, and warmly wishing all the candidates well in their common but individually difficult endeavours.

Mark, in front with the candidates, and I, behind with the well-wishers, each wept a little, moved.

For his citizenship present, Mark and I are taking the train two-thirds of the way across the country, east to west. We’re leaving Tuesday March 10. It’s a four-day trip, and we’re getting off to stretch our legs for an extra two days in Jasper. Then we spend two weeks in the Vancouver area and fly back.

Normally transportation for this trip would be on the order of $4,000 to $5,000. But I have a bunch of travel points from travelling for work and Mark is an excellent shopper, so we’re doing it for less than $800.

They say it’s spring on Vancouver Island: the cherry trees are budding, crocuses and daffodils are blooming.

I can’t think of anything else.

When I was about ten or eleven I was sitting at the dining room table working on a craft and dropped something on the floor. I was about to lean over and pick it up, when I realised that I didn’t have to. I didn’t need it right away and it was perfectly fine sitting on the floor until I did need it. All I had to do was remember where it was. This epiphany was accompanied by a worried suspicion that I was going to regret my insight.

Anyone I have lived with has, with a single exception, complained about my messiness. With that single exception, none has cheerfully accepted my other contributions to the household as adequate compensation for needing to pick up after me.

When living with that single exception, who did not, after all, pick up after me, rather the opposite, the house was so filthy that when a pregnant friend we were chatting with on the sidewalk needed to pee, we lied and said the toilet didn’t work. I think that was when I faced the fact that there was something seriously wrong. We never discussed it.

In Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, there’s a scene where a pathetic, dependent character breaks something and there’s glass on the floor. This is one more contribution to a discouraging sequence of events, not because she attached value to the broken thing but because “now she would have to remember.” As in, it doesn’t occur to her to sweep up the shards; instead she will need to spend the rest of her life trying not to cut her feet by not walking in that spot. I was shocked to discover that I was a type.

For a couple of years one of my annual objectives at work in my performance review was to clean up my desk. I never really got around to doing a complete job. My boss eventually gave up. For the past four years or so my bosses have been elsewhere — Winnipeg or Mississauga or Toronto — and have not seen my desk.

It’s not that I like being messy. I don’t even like ordinary cheerful clutter; I love a stark, open, spare space. One of the first things I did upon getting a regular job was to hire a cleaning lady. It’s more that it seems too complicated. I like doing laundry, and do it diligently even if it means hauling it to a laundromat, even if it takes all weekend. Laundry is self-limiting. There is not an infinite amount of stuff that could theoretically be put into a washing machine. Once it has been washed, it needs to be folded and put away. Very simple. Not only that, I know where laundered things go. Clothes have drawers and shelves and hangers; sheets and towels have closets; dog blankets go back on dog beds; soft furnishings go back where they came from. If I start to clean a house I never know when to stop: there’s always something I didn’t get to and feel guilty about, always a decision that I don’t know how to make.

Mark determined that part of my problem is that not everything has a place to go. I feel bad when stuff is lying around in heaps, but it’s not as though changing the situation is always a simple matter of putting it in its place. There often is no place for it, so more radical intervention is called for. When he moved in he put a lot more storage in. It helps. 

Still, the other day someone said that if I were an employee, she’d fire me; that if I were a roommate, I would be out on my ass in two days. She doesn’t even know me that well. It’s just that obvious.

My boss is in town for a day. I cleaned off my desk this morning in preparation, which mostly consisted of stashing papers and the binders into which they are some day to be filed, into drawers and bins where they will be invisible to the casual visitor. Still, I feel better.

Mark has been stomping around crossly for the past few weeks, issuing dark warnings that we both need to change if we value the relationship. I’m not sure I can change, exactly. But perhaps I can put “cleaning off the dining room table every Saturday” into the same doable category as “laundry.”