by Leah Finnegan

My baby did so well 🙂

A photo posted by Leah (@leahfinnegan) on Dec 12, 2014 at 5:29pm PST

A few weeks ago, my friend Jenna and I met up to get various parts of our heads pierced. She got a glittery rose-gold hoop put in her septum, very chic, and I got a gold hoop through the conch of my left ear. A new piercing, for the uninitiated, makes you kind of high. We teetered out of the shop, laughing, into the cold rain, trying not to disturb our new jewelry as we went to find vegan tacos to soothe our chosen wounds.

It turns out it was not a very practical idea to pierce my ear. While the actual act of piercing was not terribly painful, the wound soon became swollen, stiff, and seemed to radiate heat. I like to put things in and on my ears, like earplugs, headphones, and hats, because it is winter; with my fresh pierce even the thought of putting implements near my ear induced a spike of pain. Newly forbidden behaviors included playing with my hair, sleeping on my left side, and hugging my boyfriend. All of my idle time became dedicated to icing my ear and draining the puncture wound of pus. No matter that the complete healing time for this body modification is four to nine months.

I see women and men on the street with beautiful diamond cuffs and tiny golden punk studs lining their ears and I think: How? Why? It looks easy, but it is not. Their piercings must be their full-time jobs. I can’t even imagine the pain and bodily fluids that have contributed to the construction of their bedecked ears, and for what? Vanity? Streed cred? Maybe they have superhuman ears. Maybe they have special pillows.

I am twenty-eight years old. Why have I done this to myself? Have I learned nothing in this life? “Do not participate in body modification” is rule number one of How to Be a Successful Man and Influence People. I can’t help it, though. I’m very impulsive. Also, Jenna inspires mischief in me. She’s also part of why I now I have prominent tattoo of a mouse on my right arm. (A note on tattoos: Simple tattoos are the best form of body modification for impulsive people, because the healing process is non-arduous. This is why I keep getting tattoos.)

My piercing does look good, sartorially speaking, now that my ear has returned to normal size and its angry redness has faded to a mildly irritated pink. I look at it each night after I clean away the crust that accumulates on it during the day. It’s going to look great in nine months, which gives me something to look forward to this year. What will my life be like when this golden rod no longer causes me pain? Everything will be different. I might miss the hurt. Now that I think about it, theoretically it’s kind of great to have something next to your brain throbbing all day; it distracts from the agony of the world (this is Soviet theory I’m drawing from). Reality becomes your own festering puncture wound for which you paid a hundred and seventy dollars. No tweet is as bad as a new conch pierce. It’s all-consuming.

This is not an argument for body modification. Do whatever you want! But it’s nice to have a little talisman somewhere on your person to remind you to be careful with yourself, to maintain good hygiene, and also to never get your ear pierced in the winter.

A big, ascending track grounded by a voice that defies every clear cue for more.

★★★ A wash of orange light brightened to clean yellow and came bouncing straight through the windows from the west. Pigeons clattered on the cold wind. Prudence and the long-range forecast dictated restraint — no gloves on yet, no scarf, the down coat left hanging for when it would truly be needed. Big unsmooth cumulus clouds were moving east on the blue. A street preacher rolled a mobile sound unit up Lafayette in the afternoon, telling people to stop shopping, then to stop smoking. Shadow pants bell-bottomed as they thickened to meet each advancing stride. Uptown on Amsterdam, the sun and wind raised tears. Near the river — its surface brown and irregularly gouged by the wind — there was no point in holding out hatless anymore. Blue clouds floated in a pink east out the glass wall by the swimming pool, and then quickly the pool deck lay in nothing but unwholesome artificial illumination.

by Josephine Livingstone

Illustration by Hallie Bateman

When I woke up in the middle of the night that joined Monday to Tuesday, I only had a few hours left to sleep, but didn’t. The rain was back! My body was tired but the night was singing. I smiled into the dark and listened. That night I stayed awake through the real rain; other times, I depend on simulated rain. I incessantly play RainyCafé while I’m working but also need the Rain, Rain app to fall asleep. My favorite setting is “City Rain” (“Harbor Seagulls” is totally awful, “Rain on a Tent” is fine). I can hardly sleep without it.

Actual rain falling on my urban windows was, however, just too good to miss. I have lived on three continents and my family comes from a fourth: these circumstances have forged in me a deep and abiding attachment to environmental constants. At two, the rain in Hong Kong seemed to bounce off the pavement as high as I was tall. At ten, I slept under a slanted window in an attic bedroom, watched over by rough grey London skies. The smell and the sound of rain, you’ll find, doesn’t change much. Hot rain falling on the sea is a bit different from cold rain falling on concrete, sure, but there’s a note somewhere in there that is always just the same.

Without that constant note, I can’t concentrate or empty my mind. Similar feelings can be found in music, and it is no coincidence that good work-music often sounds a bit rainy. Tim Hecker veers pretty far into the crunchy drone of noise but also likes to punctuate his work with events; snapping, crackling passages that roll across the ceiling of the music like thunder. Slowdive totally sounds like rain. My friend Georgia associates rain with Gnossiennes No. 5. Stan Getz’s Blood Count does it for me. For a whole year I only listened to Wagner’s Parsifal while working, not because I like it that much (I’m not that high-brow) but because my German is so bad that the libretto neither distracted me nor warned me when the terrible screams were coming. Like thunder, screams keep you alert.

Rain sound is like opera because they both have core thematic structures but are also so big and organic that no single moment is characteristic of the whole thing. It takes hours to absorb and appreciate the whole. It is also like opera in that it is music, not noise. A lot of people find brown noise (named for Brownian motion, not the color) or pink noise (named the color of visible light with the same frequency spectrum) soporific, or calming. There are many thousands of hours of these noises to be found on YouTube. But it doesn’t suit me: noise doesn’t vary, it is just a smoothed-out, blanketed audio ooze. Noise has a quality, but not a music. Rain’s musical aspects — the pattering rhythm of its fall, the various percussive timbres specific to its fall on particular surfaces, the sweet modulations of the storm’s thunder-cracks — are particular to it, and special. Noise without dynamics is just silence with a different color.

In honor of the subtle music of rain, therefore, here is a rundown of the five most important types, to me:

Spring rain (London, England)

Spring rain in England happens often. It is a sweet bright sprinkling in the inkling of warm weather, still very cold but landing on blossom rather than bare branches. Attempt to eat in a park and grey clouds will roll over your April lunch break, determined to spatter your sandwich. Watch it through your office window instead, dreaming about your summer holidays and forgetting that this, the green and tender knife-edge of the year, is already perfect. Sleeping under this rain is a bit over-exciting and you may well become tired and stressed. If you have big exams coming up, try to read a detective novel until you get drowsy, then let the imagined pressure of the drizzle bash you gently to sleep.

Summer rain (Hong Kong, China)

It doesn’t rain all that often in Hong Kong, but when it does, it rains very hard. These are my earliest memories of anything. This rain is pummeling, hot, and lands on water and wood and the roofs of the trams. This rain was happening the first time I tried to stay awake all night on purpose and could not manage it. We were too far from the ground to hear the splashing of puddles — inside the cloud, really — so the sound of the storm was deep and structural. I fought the drops coming down the window against the orange night sky and lost.

Autumn storm rain (Brooklyn, USA)

You will be cornered by this rain, which howls at you like a vengeful harpy. Occupy the bedroom accordingly. Make fortifications. Do not let anybody you do not like into your apartment. Danger is everywhere. If there is a hurricane, make sure you have enough red wine and cigarettes in advance. Get ready for thick darkness. Watch Casablanca with one person you trust. Sleep and dream that the sound of stuff smashing on the roof is all about you.

Winter rain (Cape Town, South Africa)

This is driving rain, happening across a grey car park. It is boring, but only because you are a teenager. You try to stay awake to fume about everything but get lulled against your will. You can’t stay angry forever. The rain smothers and traps and soothes you in exactly the same way your big and crazy extended family does, so get used to it.

Total absence of rain (Namibia)

It turns out that after growing up in huge, filthy cities, the general countryside is sort of intolerable but absolute silence is fine. If I was born and raised among traffic and yelling and rain, my dad was born into the opposite. Pressed between endless semi-desert and a huge dry sky, you couldn’t even imagine rain falling on this little bit of earth. But the stars are bright and you are many miles from the people and duties which stress you out. Turns out you can live without the sound of rain as long as everything the rain neutralizes is gone too. Anyway, it is good to visit the places your parents are from and realize that you could live another way if you had to.

Like Klonopin, the therapeutic effect of rain sound lies in its ability to blur selectively. It takes the edge off the silence so that the outlines of your thought (or the purity of your sleep) can stay clear. After I close the rain sound tab I’m listening to now, the inside of my head will feel like your body does after you step off a trampoline: unnaturally hard and heavy, glowing with a kind of swelling and fluorescent anxiety. Empty noiselessness is as horrible as a big, tacky Californian villa. Held in the middle of any ambient cloud of sound — a language I don’t understand, a clattering restaurant, a rainstorm, an airplane’s thrum and rattle — I can sit and work and stay still. I’m not from anywhere in particular, but if I have a home, that’s it.

“New York Times deputy international editor Amy O’Leary is leaving for a new job as editorial director of the viral content site Upworthy,” reports Capital New York. A cautionary tale about “digital types” at large media companies: they exist to leave.

On a perfect fall day in a park in the city, three children play on a patch of grass. The smallest one lies on the ground, two bigger ones running in circles around her. “Hey guys, pretend you thought that I was dead,” she says three times.

“Hey guys, pretend you thought that I was dead. Hey guys, pretend you thought that I was dead.”

Finally one of the older ones, without stopping running, without looking her way, says, “We are.”

Chastity Belt, “Time To Go Home”

It’s difficult to identify yearly or even time-regional signifiers in new music, at least until years after the fact. A ten-year-old track paying homage to artists from thirty years ago might still be recognizable as roughly a decade old, but a track from this year playing at a twenty-year-old sound is disorienting: It’s easy to focus on what’s borrowed from the past over what’s shared with the present. Anyway, via Fader, an excellent song.

For some, a grapefruit is an orange gone wrong, a more pleasant citrus with a dash of, I don’t know, quinine. The bitterness is a turn-off. But that’s what makes grapefruit one of my favorite fruits. Bitterness is dissonance, the bad flavor that makes the good flavors taste even better.

The world of citrus is more fluid than most fruit families, subject to constant experimentation and mutation. The grapefruit itself is not all that old of a plant, emerging, probably naturally, in Jamaica in the eighteenth century as a cross between a regular orange and a pomelo. (Pomelos are those giant basketball-sized yellow-green fruits you often see in Chinese markets; they have an absurd amount of pith and taste sort of like an echo of grapefruit). Somehow the cross between a sweet orange and a very faintly bitter pomelo ended up magnifying the bitterness in the grapefruit. (The name, by the way, comes from the fact that when on the tree, the fruits grow grouped together sort of like giant grapes. It’s not a great name.) Grapefruit was only mildly popular until the early twentieth century, when a mutation causing a pink fruit was discovered in Texas. That mutation was exaggerated until it led to the Ruby Red grapefruit, a vibrant bright variety that doesn’t taste as good but looks much prettier than the original white.

Most citrus is in season during the winter, so we’re comfortably in grapefruit season right now, which is great for us sad northerners because citrus is perky and bright and summery and cheerful in flavor and color. To pick grapefruit, they should be very slightly soft — nowhere near as soft as an avocado, but there should be a little give to them. More importantly, heft them in your hand. The heavier, the better. That means it’s converted more of its interior to sugar, meaning it’s sweeter and tastier.

There are a bunch of different kinds of grapefruit. The Ruby Red is the most common, but it’s also the smallest and, in my experience, the most bitter; if you fear bitter, you should avoid the bright red variety and instead opt for the paler ones. The best is called Oro Blanco, a white variety with a bright yellow skin that has only a touch of bitterness and a whole lot of sweetness. An Oro Blanco doesn’t even need a sprinkle of sugar on top; it’s one of the sweetest fruits in the citrus family. Most other white grapefruits lean more tart than either the Ruby Red or the Oro Blanco. Pink grapefruits are somewhere in the middle.

How to Eat Grapefruit

There are several ways that people eat grapefruit. One is by peeling it like an orange. Don’t ever do this. This method is difficult and messy, as grapefruit skin does not tend to pull smoothly away from the flesh, and it leaves you with a very high ratio of pith to flesh. The other common method is to slice it through the equator and pry out the segments with the aid of a serrated spoon. This is an okay method, which is kind of fun in the same way that shucking oysters yourself is fun, but it’s also kind of frustrating and leads to a lot of waste, because you’re smushing the fruit, losing juice as you go. Yes, I know you can drink the juice later. That’s fine. This method is fine. But my method removes that difficulty and gives you the benefit of practicing your knife skills at the same time.

Yes, knife skills. You should prepare grapefruit with a knife. The precise method is called a supreme, which you should pronounce in the French way (“su-PREM”) so people know that you are an asshole. Essentially you are using your knife to peel the segments, which is how you should be doing it because humans are a tool-using species and knives are a very useful tool. This video is exactly how I do it:

The nice thing about this method is that by the end, you’ll have perfect, pith-free grapefruit segments, just the fruit, with minimal amount of loss. You’ll get better and faster at this with a little time; do it a few times and soon it’ll only take you a minute or so. And you’ll be set up perfectly both to eat it plain, which is a very good way to eat it, or to cook with it.

Recipes

Grapefruit-avocado salad: Grapefruit takes especially well to certain fats, but the combination of grapefruit and avocado is one of those perfect magical pairings that I never get tired of. One of the first salads I really was proud to make is based on that combination. Take a light green — I like mache, but arugula will work, or one of those spring mixes, or even Boston lettuce — and tear into salad-sized pieces. Add in a chopped avocado, a grapefruit’s worth of halved grapefruit segments, a chopped bunch of something crunchy (jicama is excellent, radish and cucumber are both good), and shave some parmesan over the top. The vinaigrette: Chop a shallot and let it sit in some red wine vinegar for 15 or 20 minutes. Squeeze in some leftover grapefruit juice (or, honestly, any citrus; orange is good too), a squeeze of mustard, and a touch of sugar. Mix thoroughly while drizzling in some olive oil until you’ve got the right balance. This salad goes well with grilled or seared or roasted chicken.

Ceviche: When you think of ceviche, the marinated (often raw, or at least sans heat) seafood dish, you probably think mostly of lime juice, but grapefruit works really well too. Here’s a recipe I shamelessly stole from Rick Bayless: Get good quality seafood (I usually do shrimp, squid, and a white fish like striped bass), clean it, and put it in a glass bowl. Squeeze enough grapefruit juice to cover and let sit. In a dry, medium hot cast iron pan, throw in some unpeeled cloves of garlic and a few dried medium-spicy chiles. When the chiles are fragrant but not burnt, put them in a bowl of lukewarm water. Keep the garlic going, turning occasionally, until it has some black spots on it and is soft. After about half an hour, drain the dried (well, now rehydrated) chiles and put in a food processor with the garlic, some of the grapefruit juice that’s been marinating your seafood, and some brown sugar. Blend until smooth and add salt to taste. Drain the seafood entirely and add some chopped jicama or radish (perhaps a winter radish???), some mango if you can find a good one, and some chopped cilantro, and then pour your pureed sauce over it. Eat with tortillas or tortilla chips.

Caramelized grapefruit: You can also cook grapefruit, although not many people do. An absurdly easy one is to just take the typical “add sugar on grapefruit, eat” and add heat. You can broil it — just add some brown sugar to the cut halves of a grapefruit and stick them under the broiler for a minute or two — or you can do it in a pan. Throw some brown or raw sugar in a cast iron pan on medium heat, stir frequently until it begins to melt into a caramel-like substance. Put the cut hemispheres of the grapefruit in the pan, cut side down into the sugar, and cook for a couple minutes. Top with mint and a touch of salt. Ridiculously easy, absurdly delicious.

Another salad: But maybe my favorite thing to make, a real simple dish that’s just like, hey, grapefruit, you’re good as hell, is a citrus salad. Get whatever citrus you can get, leaning towards the prettier ones like cara cara orange and blood orange, plus a bunch of grapefruits. Supreme them all. Toss in a bowl with a little lime juice, olive oil, honey, salt, and chopped basil. Serve.

Grapefruit is probably not for everyone, and I won’t bother with the “you’ve never had a good one” thing. It’s a divisive fruit! Lots of people don’t like bitterness with their citrus. But I think when you combine it with caramel, or avocado, or olive oil, or chiles, it adds a really nice complexity to a dish that would seem flat if you substituted a simpler citrus like an orange.

Also, the first person to mention that “grapefruiting” video will be the subject of an elaborate curse that will turn all fruits into the worst versions of themselves. All apples will taste like Red Delicious from a middle school lunch tray. All melons will taste like pre-cut supermarket honeydew. It is the worst curse I could come up with on short notice.

Photo by TonalLuminosity

Over the break I was talking to someone about those single-cup coffee brewpods and how terrible they are for the environment and I came to the realization that, you know what, we have already damaged the planet beyond repair, there is no way we will, as a country, let alone as a planet, band together to make the necessary lifestyle and industrial changes necessary to in any way diminish, much less solve, the havoc we are wreaking on the climate, and we are basically all just killing time before nature takes its well-deserved revenge on us as a species (sorry to all the other species that are going to be collateral damage when that happens, but I can’t say we’ve been so good to you thus far that you’ll notice much of a change), so, you know what, why not let people enjoy a cup of single-brew machine coffee? (If that’s what they’re into; I personally think it tastes a little thin.) This whole fucking thing is going to come crashing down on all of our heads and there’s nothing we can do about it and even if there were we wouldn’t be able to get it together anyway, so sure, go crazy, litter the land with garbage pods. What difference is it going to make at this point? By the same token, I find it hard to get too upset about the way that our massive vanity has led to the growth of drug-resistant bacteria due to the overuse of antibiotics in the treatment of zitface. If we’re all headed for extinction anyway — AND WE ARE — won’t it be a lot more enjoyable to run out the clock with everyone looking a little more pleasant? Deep down, you know I’m right.