Author: Lauren

I'm a reader, over-thinker, idealistic cynic, and hopeless knowledge seeker living in the wilds of Seattle, Washington. I write, but am not sure I'm a writer yet. I'm blind. I was an activist in my former life for the LGBTQIA etc community and still love reading about and discussing sexuality, queer issues, and living an out and authentic life... plus the constraints our society places on allowing us to exercise that right. I write about what it's like having a disability (I'm blind, you dig?), things I love about Seattle, and my hopeless addiction to all things culinary. Also, I'm on the bus a lot, so I write about that too.

Sometimes it’s so hard to leave my house and I just know it’s going to be hell out there. My own special battlefield.

“Are you blind?”

“Yes.”

“Is that a seeing eye dog?”

“Yes.”

“Can I pet him?”

“No.”

“I’m so sorry you’re blind. How did you go blind?”

“Born that way.”

“I’m so sorry. So you can’t even see flowers. … Can you see flowers?”

“No.”

“Damn it all to hell, son of a bitch; you can’t even see the flowers.”

Son of a bitch, where is the goddamn bus?

“You can’t even see the purples and the reds and the yellows. I’m so sorry for you.”

Thanks, now I feel like crying. Not because of the things I can’t see, but because of your awful, stifling pity. Also, the alcohol breath. It’s stifling too.

“My name’s Damon, by the way.”

You don’t get to have my name. Names are power and I’ll keep mine.

“I couldn’t imagine what you go through, it’s a pain in the ass huh?”

“Especially right now.”

“What? … I’m going to say a prayer for you tonight. … If my girlfriend was blind, you’d better believe she’d be taken care of. … One time, I had an ulcer and I couldn’t talk. That’s almost like being blind.”

I am feeling overwhelmed, like I can’t quite breathe enough. These are times when I’m scared of my own violence, when I think that if he touches me or gets any closer I will completely lose it and in my mind I hear the cracking sound of his fingers as I bend them back and the sound of my screaming at him to get away from me.

“There’s gotta be a way for you to get your sight back. You need someone to back you. I’m an engineer, there’s a fix for everything.”

Sometimes I picture my strength and energy as a force field around my body. No one can get through it. I am stone and statue.

“We should go out for dinner sometime.”

“No we should not.”

“Oh I’m sorry. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Doesn’t matter. You are making me very uncomfortable and I’m done talking to you now.”

“Bitch. I was just trying to be friendly.”

I consider then that I am not talking to a person, but to a disease and an addiction. That makes me want to cry more.

The bus is here. Thank you thank you thank you bus gods. Even better, the guy doesn’t have a transfer or cash, and the driver won’t let him on. I am weak and shaky with relief. I bury myself several rows in, surrounded by as many people as possible.

Destination Doughnuts

Honestly, I didn’t go to Portland for doughnuts. However, in my quest for finding good doughnuts in Seattle, (still searching), I kept running across recommendations for Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland. I had hoped that Voodoo might be comparable to my beloved Glamdoll. The spirit seemed similarly irreverent. After all, their slogan is, “The magic is in the hole.”

So, now that we’ve got that out of the way, and you know exactly what you’re sinking into in this post, (intendre intended), let’s get to it. Weekend before last, Pat and I decided to spend a night in Portland and walk around some parts of the city I’ve yet to see. Which, frankly, is most parts. I trained with Kiva in Portland, which meant trolling a nine-block swath of downtown over and over again; I remember there was a Chipotle and a Starbucks and a very bored Black Lab. I figured there had to be more to it than that.

Certainly, there was. I got to pop into Sock Dreams, and there were socks, as you might expect. We walked around Alberta, with every restaurant imaginable and hard cider samples in the parking lot of a tiny little co-op that made me nostalgic for North Country, the first co-op I shopped at in Minneapolis. North Country, sadly, closed in 2007.

But really people, doughnuts. On Saturday morning, after I slept until 10:00 and then dawdled and dithered way too long after that, we tried to go to Voodoo Doughnuts. They’re normally open 24 hours a day. This day, they were closed for seven of those hours, from 11:00 to 6:00, to attend a funeral of one of their people; I’m not sure if it was an employee or who, but they were closed, which meant no doughnuts. Which I can’t complain much about, honestly. Certainly, paying respects is way more important than me eating doughnuts, and I was glad that they gave their employees time to do that.

What this meant is that at 5:45, we drove back into downtown to get doughnuts for the road back to Seattle, and there was a giant line, stretching way outside the building itself. Really? For doughnuts?

We dutifully queued up, grateful to have gotten there before 6. I, especially, had just assumed we’d waltz in for our doughnuts and be gone by 6:05, but I gravely underestimated the Voodoo power.

Waiting in line gave me ample time to chew over what I was going to order, which was good, because Voodoo has A LOT of doughnuts. There’s the Diablo’s Rex, a “chocolate cake doughnut with chocolate frosting, red sprinkles, vanilla pentagram, and chocolate chips in the middle.” There’s the maple blazer blunt, a “raised yeast doughnut rolled into a blunt dusted with cinnamon sugar. The tip is dipped in maple frosting and red sprinkle embers, prices vary due to blaster mania!” There’s the Tex-ass Challenge, “giant doughnut equals six of our doughnuts in size. If you can eat this doughnut in 80 seconds or less, you get your money back!” Whew.

Everyone in the doughnut line, in front and behind me, was talking doughnuts. Behind, a doughnut enthusiast was texting furiously to a doughnut—hungry houseguest. Should she get the Memphis Mafia? The Portland Cream? Pumpkin if they have it? (They didn’t, much to my consternation.)

The doughnut crazed in front of us seemed to be young college-age kids. They talked about how Voodoo Doughnuts will cater your wedding. Before I could stop myself, I laughed.

One of them turned around. “You want to get married at Voodoo Doughnuts?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, “I’m pretty nontraditional. I could get into that.”

As long as the line was, it moved pretty quickly, and we were in the door much sooner than I’d anticipated. I finally had to decide on my order: Gay Bar, (yeast doughnut full of cream and rainbow); Old Dirty Bastard, (yeast doughnut with chocolate frosting, Oreos, and peanut butter); Butterfingering, (chocolate cake doughnut with vanilla frosting and Butterfinger crumbles); Mexican hot chocolate, (chocolate cake doughnut with cinnamon sugar and cayenne); and Ain’t that a Peach Fritter, (peach fritter with cream cheese frosting and sprinkles). Whew, again.

We ordered it all, and I tried not to giggle like a twelve-year-old during the “old dirty bastard” and “butterfingering” parts.

“Is it always this crowded?” I asked the fabulous doughnut cashier as he rang us up.

“It’s pretty much always like this on weekends,” he said, handing over the giant doughnut box.

So, the final conclusion of this story? Maybe people really do go to Portland just for the doughnuts. I shouldn’t underestimate the Voodoo power.

I have a fever and a head cold, and it’s been about a week since I bragged to someone, (I can’t remember who), that since moving to Seattle, I hadn’t been sick much. Don’t get happy, Lauren.

This morning I woke up with what I thought was a doughnut hangover, (there has been a glut of doughnuts around here the last few days), but quickly realized that the nausea was more a side effect of my head full of snot. (This post should probably come with a trigger warning, both for whining and gross bodily fluids.)

So, I’ve been in the beanbag chair in my sweatpants, alternately under a blanket and kicking it off, depending on whether the fever or chills want to be front and center, in and out of schoolwork and sleep, Kiva pressed in the hollow of my elbow, her head tucked towards her tail. I’ve been drinking lots of tea and shivering and sniffling. Things seem much more tedious when you’re sick.

It’s funny how we view sickness of children versus that of adults. When I was a kid, sick days were the best. Not to oversell, I WAS sick, but I could lie on the couch and watch The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins and Aladdin for the whole day. My mom made me toast and soup in a cup and brought me Saltines and Sprite. I was luxuriously, unconditionally taken care of.

Now, as an adult, the idea seems to be, just don’t get sick. You don’t have time. Keep going. Go to work anyway. Get out of bed. Stop being a baby. The sicker you are and the more you keep moving anyway, the more you suck it up and never slow down, the better stronger more commendable you are. I’ve got a new mantra, and you’re reading it here first: martyrdom is not sexy.

Certainly, the intense work culture we have in the United States only reinforces our refusal to take care of ourselves. You have a deadline, no one else can do it but you, this can’t wait, it’s urgent. Admittedly, I get so annoyed with people who come to work sick. Why? It seems so inconsiderate, but maybe I’m just crabby. I can’t help it, I’m sick.

As sucky and inconvenient as being sick is, it’s also a time to be cared for, whether you do it for yourself or there is someone who can do it for you. Mary Poppins and being read to and tucked in with all your blankets shouldn’t be just a kid thing. That’s why I’m sleeping and drinking tea and trying to convince myself to walk down the hill for pho. Self-care is a good thing.

On Abundance

I have a romantic, idealized notion of apple picking in the fall. (Also, pumpkin patches, hayrides, corn mazes, and cider doughnuts.) I could never say no to an invite for a Sunday afternoon at an orchard, with the sun muted and the leaves snapping under my boots. Luckily, I’ve gotten no such invitations this year. I say “luckily” because I foolishly signed up for a fruit share as part of my CSA this season.

The fruit share is from OPMA in Eastern Washington, and brought cherries in the beginning of the summer; a couple weeks of peaches and plums; and what seems like coon’s ages of apples and pears, though I suppose if I’m supposed to be exercising restraint against hyperbole, it actually only started in late August. There were the Boscs and the Bartletts and one week of Anjou. There were Honeycrisps and Galas and Golden Delicious and Granny Smith. Plus, things I’ve never heard of in the apple world: Fortune, Sweet Louise, Cameo. “An apple a day” has fueled me for two months, and I don’t mind that much. It’s only when the paper bags of fruit make a tower on the counter and the table, all in various stages of ripening to rotting, where my panic over abundance kicks in. Some people worry about not having a fully stocked, apocalypse ready larder. My worries are the opposite: of so much fleeting bounty that I forget to slow down and truly take it all in.

It pains me to admit this next part, but I don’t like most baked apple things. I love the idea of apple pie, but can never manage to enjoy the reality. A cinnamon-sugar baked apple is something I dread being served for dessert somewhere where it’s only polite to eat it. Arlie and I made an apple crisp with some of the Galas that was barely passable, only because I put candied ginger, walnuts, oats, and dried cherries in the topping, so you couldn’t taste much cooked apple. Plus ice cream. And I still sent him home with half of it.

So, now I’ve turned to canning. I love the idea of canning, but have always been too chicken to do anything beyond that. Lucky for me, the pounds of fruit on my counter are forcing my hand. I’ve taken all my recipes so far from Marisa Mcclellan and her book Preserving by the Pint. First, I made the Honey Lemon Pear Butter, and was so excited slash nervous about botulism and other canning fatalities that I forgot the cinnamon. Then, Stuart and I made the Winter Fruit Mostarda, which required boiling apples and pears in a honey syrup, then packing the fruit into jars, then reducing the syrup, then ladling the syrup over the fruit. WAY too annoying, though quite good after we finished.

In the later part of the week, we made Apple Rosemary Jam and Chocolate Pear Jam, and we implemented a system. I cored and peeled and mixed and simmered, he prepared the jars and lids and bands for the boiling water bath. I still don’t know if my jam set properly; Marisa says that “you’ll know when it’s done when you pull a spatula through the jam and it doesn’t immediately rush in to fill the space you’ve cleared.” I suppose it’s my calling for the rest of the fall to keep making jam, so I can figure out a non-visual way to accomplish this. I like some texture in my jam, so I basically just stirred it until I was afraid if I didn’t pull it soon, it would collapse into runny pools and I’d have to call it syrup and tell you that, “obviously I meant to do that.”

Of course, this 1950’s housewife jam making hobby doesn’t take in the fact that I actually hardly ever eat jam. I buy jam, because it always sounds so good and wholesome. But then the calendar turns and suddenly, it’s been in my cupboard for a year and I’m panicking because I really should open it up. Home canning commandments say to use your jam within a year. Once again, abundance. It really isn’t something I should complain about.

Stuart suggested I save the jam I’m making for holiday gifts, (here after known as Giftmas or Solsticemas in this blog). He insisted my family would love it. I recalled all the family celebrations where my aunts would bring jars of pear butter and preserves as their gift exchange offering, and my parents would dutifully take them home; then, I’d be home sometime in the summer and see the jars in the fridge, top-crusted and sad-looking. I totally get it. The first toast-and-jam goes down easy, then I go back to dinner leftovers or skipping breakfast entirely.

Maybe, though, my abundance, and the preserving of that abundance by my own hands, will help me enjoy eating it more. Abundance is teaching me more about gratitude, and jelly points and headspace, than I could have imagined back when I was only eating cherries. For that, I’m thankful.

I left Minnesota after my friends did. First, Rose moved to Berkeley; then, Elliot moved to Philadelphia; finally, Aurora and Noelle moved to Austin. Each time, I said, “I’ll come visit.” Dear reader, my intentions are always good.

I never visited Philadelphia or Austin, and those three moved back to Minnesota after I moved to Seattle. And, I still haven’t visited Rose in Berkeley, despite now living in the same time zone and on the same coast.

Certainly, a large part of my non-travels has been lack of funds. Yet, I’ve had a handful of my favorite people visit me here, and I’ve been here less than a year.

I enjoy living alone. I’m an introvert, one of those “gets her energy from being quiet” types. When I live alone, no one moves my favorite coffee cup or leaves their clothes on the floor. When I clean, I’m only responsible for my own, particular mess. I get to eat all the leftover pizza and the salted caramel gelato and the tahini sauce.

But, I’ve loved having visitors these last several months. I’ve amassed to-do lists for people that stay with me who’ve never been to Seattle: the cider bar, Theo Chocolate, the canal, Market Spice at Pike Place. I’m not tired of doing them over and over again yet. It seems each person I introduce to Seattle has a different reaction and brings something new that I’m just seeing for the first time, too.

Then, there’s something to be said for just having an extra person in my home. Someone, if they’re so inclined, to take the dog out when it’s raining, to make me eggs and toast when I’m working, to help me scout out and clean up dog vomit. This is my glamorous life, people, don’t say I didn’t warn you before you come to visit.

A few nights ago, Stuart and I walked down Fremont in a slow drizzle to get pho for dinner. I sat at one of the small tables in the steamy, dim restaurant, and, suddenly, for no particular reason at all, I felt so glad to be in Seattle, so lucky to be carving out my home here. Sometimes, when I think about my life, my struggles for employment especially, I’m amazed that yes, I did manage to move out of my parents’ house, to go to a different city alone, not once, but several times, and if I needed to, I could do it again. I could start over again, if I had to, but just now it seems enough to be here, to live in this neighborhood with soothing, delicious pho and a good co-op, the smell of pie crust and ice cream cones, waiting to cross the street as the bridge lifts to let the boats through. Certainly, I wish I had a job. Certainly, I feel great loneliness sometimes, mostly for familiar people and familiar things. But familiar is beginning to include walking in the mist up the hill to my apartment, where there are candles to light and hot tea to drink and a place for me to land, no matter what has happened to me in the rest of the world. That seems incredibly, incredibly lucky.

What I’m saying is, you should come visit Seattle. I’ve got cider and walks by the water and a vomit-free apartment, (for now), waiting for you.

I can remember being a senior in high school and having arguments with my parents about applying for “blind scholarships.” By that I mean, scholarships awarded to blind students pursuing college degrees, or students with physical disabilities in general. My parents were pro, I said no. I was determined not to get money just because I was blind. I was seventeen and silly and really stubborn and I was having none of it. I didn’t want my claim to fame to be that I was the best, smartest blind person. And, I suspect that I also feared NOT being the best, smartest blind person. I feared losing. I feared rejection.

What a difference 13 years, many of them unemployed, and a sizable cache of student loan debt can make. Forget buying a house, I now have a student loan mortgage. Maybe I should have tried harder to be the specialest snowflake blind person and gone for all those scholarships. “Maybe I should have”, I suppose, is a staple of getting older. In any case, there are far fewer scholarship opportunities for blind MFA grad students than there were for undergrads. “I should have” known better.

When I started using public transit after moving to the Twin Cities, I was determined to pay the full fare. It was $1.50 then, and the disability fare was 50 cents. There was no reason, I thought, that I couldn’t pay as much as everyone else.

“It’s only 50 cents,” bus drivers would tell me after I plunked in all my change. “You get reduced fare.”

I remember feeling annoyed and insulted by their comments. They didn’t know anything about me. How could they be so presumptuous and try to tell me what I “should” be paying?

Now, I pay the disability fare. If I made a ton of money, I tell myself, I would pay the full price. I would support public transportation. But, for now, I’m glad I have the option to spend less on the bus. It’s helpful.

I have EBT, aka “food stamps.” Every time I have to go reapply or update things in person, I cry. It’s embarrassing, and I try not to do it, because I know better logically. I know I’m not “just sitting around taking from everyone else.” I know I’m not lazy, or at least, that I’m not lazy about the big things. (I do put off doing laundry longer than I should is all I’m saying.) My economic situation is not because I haven’t just “pulled myself up by my bootstraps”, “buckled down”, or “worked hard enough.” It’s a systemic problem. But I still feel ashamed because of what society says about people like me.

I remember the first time I applied for EBT, my dad mentioned there was a sign in the DHS office that said something like, “No angry or violent outbursts.” I thought, at the time, that that sign was strange and kind of funny.

To be honest, I understand it now. I’ve seen people on the bus, on the streets, at the Department of Services for the Blind, just lose it because scarcity, disempowerment, poverty … all of it is freaking hard. I’m not supposed to lose it, so I don’t, but sometimes I envy them. I’ve seen older people, completely beaten down by our systems, who are bitter and unable to see what’s beautiful any more. I don’t want to get that disillusioned.

Pride is something I have less of now. But I don’t want to lose my compassion. I want to be kind to people, especially the people who understand the brokenness of our systems and think about what it would take to change them. I’m putting this here, so I don’t forget about compassion and kindness.

The Moon and Restlessness

I had a rare moment of “sight want” yesterday when I thought about the super blood moon eclipse thingy. I wanted to see it. I thought, “I wish I could see that!” I had a vision of going with a bunch of people to a lake or the Sound, spreading out a blanket, turning off our phones, lying on our backs, drinking mead, watching the sky. Maybe singing. Come on, you’d sing to the moon with me, wouldn’t you?

I’ve had a long love affair with the moon. I’m a garden variety Pagan type, so I’ve become fascinated with moon cycles and moon culture. I love the names for the moons of the year, each one representing a different month and season. Strawberry Moon in June, my birth month. February’s Hunger Moon, when crops are scarce and green scarcer. In December, the winter solstice brings Long Night’s Moon. Egg Moon in April, for new life.

The Emily Dickinson poem I remember most: “The moon was but a chin of gold, a night or two ago; and now she turns her perfect face upon the world below.” Because of this poem, I always picture the moon as a face, liquid lunar pools for eyes, bright beams like a smile, sometimes covered over in angry clouds.

I think about the moon a lot this time of year, too, with the changing of summer to fall. It’s the time of year I feel itchy and restless, even more than usual. Sometimes I like to blame it on the Hunter’s Moon of October, also called Blood Moon, also called Dying Moon. Life feels fleeting this time of year, and in turn, extremely precious. I want to travel, move to another city, do something big to prove that I’m living while I can. I find myself googling cities all over the world: New York, Sofia, Zanzibar, Capetown; looking at their weather patterns, their city scapes, thinking of what I would hear and how I would feel on those streets with my feet tired but rejuvenated. I pull up old language-learning files from college: German grammar, Spanish poetry, my clumsy attempts to emulate Chinese phonetics. I look at job boards in other states, wondering if someone there would hire me. I don’t apply. I reject myself before they can.

I used to wonder if I would always be restless and wish not to be, wish to be happy and grounded where I am. Now, I’m coming to accept my restlessness. It pushes me when nothing or noone else will. I will probably never satisfy it. There is too much out there to experience and understand. It will keep waxing and waning, like the moon, but like the moon, it will always be there.

I hope you saw the eclipse. And if you sang a little bit, even just in your head, you and I are kindred spirits.

A few months ago, I participated in an accessible technology study where, for two hours in a tiny, windowless back office, I schlepped my fingers around a touch screen trying to set up an email address and read an ebook. Even though there was a screenreader, it was still difficult for me. I re-typed and deleted, and everything I touched seemed to whisk me away to somewhere else, never where I wanted to be. It seemed like the technological universe was trying to tell me something. Get with the touch screen program, Lauren. It’s not 1965 any more.

When I bought my Samsung, about two and a half years ago, it was the last phone in the store with a physical keyboard. Everything else was touch screen operated. That made the choice of what phone to get an easy one, but did not bode well for the future I had hoped for, where there would always be a physical QWERTY keyboard with physical buttons.

The accessibility study was the kick I needed to get myself an iPhone. Since I was due for a “free” upgrade anyway, and since I’m unemployed so ostensibly have nothing else to do, (except grad school), I took myself on an Iphone acquiring date.

The guy who helped me tried, right off the bat, to sell me a case. I was fairly amenable to this, because I have a history of, somehow, cracking my Ipod screens irreparably. Still, I let him give me the pitch anyway.

“Do you drop your phone a lot?”

“Not really.”

“Have you ever gotten it wet?”

“Hmm. No, not noticeably.”

“Well, if you bought this case, you could drop it in the sink and it would be fine. Heck, you could throw it across the street if you wanted to and it wouldn’t break.”

I wondered why anyone would be so ridiculous as to throw their phone across the street, but still, I got the case anyway.

And, a few days later, I realized why some perfectly un-ridiculous person might, in fact, throw this phone across the street.

Before I figured out how to “fix the orientation” of the phone, the keyboard wobbled all over the place. I’d be merrily typing along, and suddenly the phone would make a little “whoop” noise and the keyboard would slither to the other side of the screen. If I physically turned the screen to catch up with the keyboard, it would slither somewhere else. I finally started Googling and learned about the two “modes” of the phone, landscape and portrait, which, as far as I can tell, have to do with how the icons on the screen arrange themselves to fit the space allotted on the screen. (Or something. … Oh, hell, I don’t really know what it means.)

I finally figured out how to lock the phone in portrait mode so that there is no more keyboard slithering. But it still takes me several minutes to write a short text message. To text, I slide my finger around the keyboard and listen for the letter I want, then tap it. Sometimes, I’ve heard so many letters that I forget where I am in the word I’m typing. Or, I forget what the word I’m typing is. Or the whole message, I have no idea what I’m doing, who the message is for, what day it is, what city I’m in. The only logical thing to do, at this point, would be to throw the phone across the street. If I could find the street.

It’ll get better. Right? In the meantime, if you feel like the texts I’m sending you are uncharacteristically grumpy, (even for me), it’s not you, it’s the phone.

I’m Only Gonna Ask This Once…

If you’re a fan of This American Life, you know this scenario well. Pre-show, Ira Glass lowers his voice and tells you about all the content they’ve been bringing you recently. How much it costs to make shows about who-done-it murders and segregated schools. And, really, if you wouldn’t mind donating to This American Life, he promises he’ll only ask once. This is the last time you’ll hear from him. Promise. He tells you this softly, intimately. You want to believe, yes, yes you do, but you know in a few more months, it’ll be the same thing all over again. “I’m only going to ask once … until the next time I only ask once.”

I love This American Life, and I actually don’t get annoyed by the donation requests. I’ve developed a keen appreciation for the work that must go into those podcasts and all that reporting and storytelling. I’ve also seen, firsthand through my writing program, the hard work and low pay that goes into writing, a profession that people do because they love it and it feeds them in ways that aren’t financial.

But a varied diet, creative, financial and otherwise, is also a good thing. I think with the explosion of podcasts and blogs, people are slowly starting to take content creation seriously, and realize that it is, more often than not, a free labor of love, but that just because it’s free doesn’t mean it doesn’t take time, care, patience, and persistence.

All this to say, readers of BlindinFlight, I’m only going to ask you once … until I ask you again …

I’ve set up a Paypal button on the front page of this site for giving one-time donations, if you are compelled to do so. My intention with this blog was NEVER a monetary one, and it never will be. I will write it regardless, because it feeds me creatively. But, if you’ve felt my words to be worthwhile, if there’s something in these snarky, silly posts that has spoken to you, the Paypal button is there if you want it. No pressure, no questions asked. That, at least, I can promise.

Generating the HTML code for adding the button took a few hours more than it should have, so if you’d at least LOOK at the button and admire it for a minute, that would also mean a lot to me. My screenreader is not a fan of HTML.

More soon, and thank you for reading and for your consideration. Most importantly, thank you for admiring my Paypal button. I am forever grateful.

Vicarious Transport

Only in the last few years have I had the (super awesome and exciting!) privilege of getting to read some books on the day they are released to print-reading folks. Notice I say “some” and not “all.” I still dream of a day when everyone will have equal access to print media at the same time, with no corners cut and for no extra cost.

The prime reason that I can now enjoy some books on Release Day is Bookshare. When I joined in 2003, they had a much smaller catalogue and books had to be scanned entirely by hand. Now, thanks to ebook culture, I think they’re able to produce Braille digital copies much faster. You can now read most NY Times bestsellers at the same time they ARE actually bestsellers, whereas just a few years ago you’d be waiting for someone, (most likely a volunteer), to scan printed text.

All this to say, that I am a happy, happy reader, because Bookshare had a copy of Heidi Swanson’s new book, Near and Far, for download on the day of its release. I had been crossing my fingers, but wasn’t hopeful. Heidi’s cooking, though popular in the “foodie” world, might be a little eccentric for justifying its Bookshare release on the same day as its print release. (The more mainstream the book, the better the odds are.) I love Heidi and have loved her for years because of her blog and because I’m just a big giant cookbook nerd. I think food tells stories, and the food that writers choose to include in their cookbooks is important because it shows us an individual life and aesthetic. And food is important not just for eating but for culture and seasons and learning and comfort. I’m fascinated by what other people like to eat. I’m one of those people who, if it were socially acceptable, would look in all the fridges of my friends’ houses, just to see what kind of pickles were there. (If I’ve fed your pets or watered your plants while you were out of town, I may or may not have done this.)

It helps, too, that Heidi has a lovely way with words. She’s a photographer, too, so her blog holds many photos, which she also describes in words. I love and appreciate that. Her aesthetic is very Northern California, very full of avocados and oranges and microgreens. I learned how to cook Brussels sprouts in a way that people actually like from her. I learned about spelt flour and cilantro-pumpkin seed pesto and how San Francisco feels on the shortest day of the year. (There’s Fog and rain, and all you want to do is put on a sweater and stand over the steam drifting from a pot of pozole.)

Near and Far has a travel theme. Heidi begins in Northern California and then cooks her way through Japan, Morocco, France, Italy, and India. Plus, some recipes for “en route.”

Heidi is one of those people who seems like everything is perfect, like she’s always so put together and has it all. Part of me kinda hates her. Food writer, indie shop curator, owner of a beautiful house in San Francisco with a chandelier in the dining room, has the means to travel and eat in places we view as “exotic.” Lucky! What brings me back to her is the humility I feel in her prose, her off-beat recipes, and the fact that I’m sure life sucks for her sometimes too.

Even though the book’s been out since Tuesday, and I got it on the FIRST DAY, it’s been a crazy reading week for me for school, so I’ve barely started tucking into it. Here’s the very first words of her intro, talking about the produce of CALIFORNIA: “JANUARY 25: Long, thin whips of deep green puntarelle, a swarm of tiny yellow key limes, dried persimmons with downy skins, red-skinned hand-cracked walnuts, chickpea flour, sprouted mung beans, a friendly giant pomelo with twin glossy leaves attached, stubby bouquets of nameko mushrooms, little yellow pom-poms from snipped branches of acacia tree.” I’ve already felt transported, and started thinking about the food I’ve been lucky to eat in places I’m lucky to have been: hot chestnuts in Spain, warm-spiced couscous in Morocco, tiny corn-speckled arepas in Ecuador, pierogis with cranberry sauce and kasha in Poland. Here’s to many more delicious traveler meals, and some serious snuggly reading time over the weekend.