The Care and Feeding of a Total Jerk Who Doesn't Appreciate a Damn Thing You Do for Her

That will be all

Last year, my partner and I did the whole get married business and then the whole go on a trip of a lifetime business (which you can read all about here if you are so inclined). That trip meant leaving our cat, Circe, a, let's say, less than affectionate three-legged black cat with, let's say, not the most generous personality, with our roommate. The good news is that Circe is not a dog, which means there really weren't a lot of time consuming or rigorously scheduled chores. Basically, you can fit caring for a cat into any schedule. (Which is one of the reasons why I, more of a dog person at heart, have a cat, not a dog.) More specifically, and this is good or bad depending on your perspective on cats, Circe doesn't like you, so once you've taken care of the necessities she'll generally leave you alone. Except maybe in the winter when one of the necessities is your warmth. Your sweet, sweet calorically-efficient-for-her warmth.

Naturally, being responsible adults, we left our roommate, who was graciously watching over Circe, a detailed list of instructions, typed, emailed, and printed and hung on the refrigerator. But, since it was me writing the instructions, I couldn't just give her a clear and concise list of responsibilities. What fun would that be? Since I hear the internet likes cats and 'rissa really likes this and I basically do what she tells me, I've decided to share those instructions with you. Please enjoy...

The Care and Feeding of a Total Jerk Who Doesn't Appreciate a Damn Thing You Do For Her

Circe gets a scoop of dry food in the morning (scoop is on the container of food) in the “mouse bowl,” which is not to say the bowl is made of a mouse, just that it has a representation of a mouse on it. She also gets a scoop of dry food in the evening, because she whines if she can see the mouse in the mouse bowl.

Your intransigence in relation to the "basement full of poison" has been noted.

In the evening she gets a teaspoon of wet food (Cans of wet food are behind the signed Alton Brown poster on the liquor cabinet) mixed with a scoop of the powder on top of the microwave, and a little bit of warm water, in the metal bowl, which needs to be washed out ahead of time. And, because you're made of time I guess, you need to smoosh up the little biscuits of slightly solidified abomination into a paste, otherwise she won't eat it.

She can have up to 20 of the green treats in the peanut butter jar a day. We put some in her blue ball so maybe her royal highness gets a tiny scrap of what could be exercise at some point in her day.

Hallway privileges have been revoked until further notice, no matter how much she cries.

Her water dish should be washed out once a week or so. We use the short, blue brush with the gray and blue handle on the sink to wash out all cat related items.

Her litter box needs to be scooped every day, not necessarily because she is a jerk (though, she, of course, is) but to control the smell. Scoop the clumps directly into the toilet. Give them 5-10 minutes to break down and flush them away, like any hopes of having a meaningful relationship with this being.

You are so fucking disappointing.

If you want to try to “play” with her the most effective toy is the bird on the string which lives in the crayon bank. (Which is not a bank for crayons, of course, that would be stupid, but a piggy bank in the shape of a giant crayon.) Most of the time she'll just watch you swing it around like there is nothing in the world you'd rather be doing than boring her with your tired and almost certainly wasted attempt at meaningful interaction, but, you should still try every now and again.

There is a bag of catnip near the treats. You can sprinkle some on any surface you feel comfortable having her go on a saliva heavy wallowing spree, but I'd recommend the cat tree in the living room.

You can also give her fish flakes from the plastic container near the other food. The fish flakes smell like sin and bad decision making, but she likes them.

Given that Circe was alive and in good health when we returned, and our roommate was alive, in good health, and not demonstrating any emotional damages from Circe's refusal to acknowledge her as a living being of inherent value, I'd have to say the instructions were successful.

Auckland: A Tour Through An Alternative Life

One of the joys of travel comes from the freedom of being someone different. You go someplace where nobody knows you, in part, so you can do things you normally wouldn't do, even if that “wouldn't do” is something as simple as an extra dessert or a spa treatment or staying out late. But another joy of travel for me is the opportunity to imagine a different life. Whenever I visit a new place for any meaningful length of time, I try to imagine what kind of life I might lead if I lived there. Where would I work? What would my home be like? Would this be my go-to bar, my favorite restaurant, where I buy my groceries? Some places are more difficult to imagine myself living in (Cairns, Brooklyn) for sometimes mysterious reasons, while other places (London, Melbourne) I almost feel like I am inhabiting that alternative life by the time I leave.

But nowhere has this sense of living an alternative version of Josh been as strong as it was in Auckland. Part of this is that there is something Boston-y of Anglo cities above a certain size, with a certain relationship with its neighborhoods and a certain sense of urban planning (or lack thereof), so it was easy for me to find the “Cambridge of Auckland” and the “Somerville of Auckland,” and so forth. But the real strength of this sensation came from a very late night that ended in a hotel lobby in Seattle.

I met Jenna at a booksellers' conference (which is even more fun than you would assume) in the lobby of the hotel, along with a slew of other booksellers who had been out on publisher sponsored nights-on-the-town and had collected with the remnants of their energy around the small tables in the hotel lobby. I ended up with Jenna, a bookseller and the manager of Timeout Bookstore in Auckland and a bookseller from Melbourne (who brandished a bottle of whiskey at one point) and, as happens at such conferences, business cards were exchanged.

Fast forward a little over a year and Rissa and I are planning our honeymoon. Initially, we hadn't included Auckland, but once we saw how much time we would have to spend on the trip, we decided to add it. Somehow (I'm going to go with magic) I still had Jenna's card so I emailed her, re-introducing myself and asking her advice for places to stay and things to do in Auckland. And she obliged, sending me a list of priced-out possibilities. A list that she concluded by suggesting we forget all that other nonsense and just stay with her. Of course we said yes, because, when you get the chance to stay with a local in a foreign country you take it. It was strange, the nature of my excitement changed when I got that email. I was already excited of course, but, for some reason, knowing we'd be staying with a person added something, I don't know, palpable to my excitement.

To understand why our time in Auckland was such a visceral alternative life, I need to tell you a little about Jenna and her boyfriend Stu. As I'm sure you already surmised, Jenna is, like me, a bookseller at an independent bookstore. She is also, like me, an artist, though she is a photographer (and videographer, perhaps) rather than a writer. (Though I bet she writes too.) Stu is also an artist, a musician, and, if you can believe this, like Rissa, a homebrewer. (you could see Rissa's jealousy of Stu's brewing garage from space.). Oh, and if an internet connection had been a little more stable, one night we would have met Jenna at her KNITTING GROUP that met in a BAR THAT USED TO BE A BUTCHER SHOP. Oh, and they have a cat with a literary name. (Eleanor the Catton.) Of course, we still are different people and so, Rissa's and my alternative lives in Auckland wouldn't have exactly matched the lives of Jenna and Stu, (especially given that I am way more into rugby than they are) but odds are, if Rissa and I had lived our lives in Auckland, Jenn and Stu would have likely been our friends. I don't know if we'll ever see them again, and I don't think there's much of a chance Rissa and I will make a life, or even a second visit, in or to Auckland, but regardless of potential futures and alternative lives, Jenna and Stu are our friends, now.

We landed in Auckland and arranged to meet Jenna at her bookstore to drop off our stuff and (as is our wont) go directly to a museum (which I wish we had more time to spend in). I'm always amazed by bookstores like Timeout Bookstore who, much like WORD in Brooklyn, can be vital, engaging, successful retails stores, (with a bookstore margin!) with the floor space of an opulent walk-in closet. Our arrival at Time Out, included one of the most satisfying moments of my, to this point, brief career as the marketing director at PSB; one of the booksellers recognized me from PSB's Buzzfeed list about awkward bookseller moments. 

Perhaps the most touristy thing we did on our trip (perhaps with the exception of the Foodie Walking tour we took in Melbourne, which I totally left out of the Melbourne post. Executive Summary: We ate meat and cheese and bought German spices.) was go on a guided tubing tour of Glow Worm Caves in Waitomo, an area about two hours drive from Auckland. Two hours of driving I did. On the left side of the road. (Achievement Unlocked!) Overall, driving on the left wasn't that difficult, especially once we got through the section of Auckland in which the GPS had not been updated to account for construction, but it was still a strange experience. First of all, because of how the instruments are arrayed, I kept turning on the windshield wiper when trying to put on a turn signal, a phenomenon that cycled back and forth between infuckingfuriated and goddamn hilarious for the entire trip. Second, as Jenna's American roommate warned us, I pulled to the left pretty much the entire time. (I still have no idea what the neurological mechanism at work here is.) The tour itself was an absolute blast. We put on wet suits and road inner tubes through underground caves whose ceilings were covered in glow-worms. (i.e. bio-luminescent maggots) It was all a bit hokey, but the environment was so alien and fascinating it trumped all the tourist-trappiness. The air was different, of course, but, in an interesting, way, so was the silence. After the tubing tour, we booked it about a quarter mile (in the car) to the walking tour we also scheduled. The second cave we toured was actually run by an indigenous family and had been so since the mid-1800s when the first tours of the cave were given. We drove back and had a relatively the quite night. (The night of the aforementioned unstable internet connection.)

Without thinking about it, we were in Auckland for Halloween, so we spent the morning of the 31st kicking around downtown Auckland trying to find costumes for the party we'd be attending that night, eventually finding acceptable vesture in a thrift shop near Timeout. The party had a campfire, a DJ, irrationally angry neighbors and eventually a cab ride back. The next day featured Josh's Great Chili Ingredient Adventure, which was pretty much exactly like The Lord of the Rings, except, instead of bringing a ring to Mordor, I had to hit the area grocery stores for the ingredients to the American style chili Rissa and I would be making that night, and instead of a treacherous guide, my biggest challenge was that the Asian supermarket where I found most of my ingredients did not take credit cards, and so I had to rush to an ATM, assemble the ingredients that supermarket did not have and then come to pay in cash. Very kindly, the clerk allowed me to leave my cart of groceries and skip the line when I got back. The chili happened, as did some excellent BBQ prepared by Stu and then Jenna took us to a bar/club about an hour north of Auckland featuring a musician who was friends with Jenna and Stu and a band that had a range like and whose sound was not radically dissimilar to The Velvet Underground from Loaded.

Before heading out to the Auckland City museum on our last full day in Auckland, Rissa asked Jenna for a recommendation. Rissa wanted to try Pavlova, a national dish of New Zealand and was hoping Jenna had a good idea for where to find some. Jenna said, “There are a few places that serve it, but I'll just make you one, since the real way to eat it is at home.” And so, after a day at the museum, and a fantastic final dinner at a restaurant called Depot, we had Pavlova and celebrated, a little early, Rissa's birthday.

Our last day in Auckland was “Carissa Leal's 40-Hour Birthday” which involved hanging out in Timeout's neighborhood (the Cambridge of Auckland) grabbing a cocktail or two, and, because we are categorically insane, hiking a small nearby mountain, before spending a little quiet time in Timeout's office in advance of 27 hours of plane travel back.

This is the part of the blog series where I sum everything up. Anthony Bourdain usually gets around these moments in his shows by restating the challenge of such statements in a way that gives him some purchase on the places he's discussing. It's an effective technique, one that I didn't really notice until I found myself in this moment, where the big sum up of my trip would normally go. But, in my mind at least, I don't want to sum this trip up, I want it to linger in my consciousness, for memories to pop up at random times, for me to be working on a poem or a story or an essay or something years from now and be stuck until I remember something about this trip. To put this another way, I don't want this trip, or any other, to have a conclusion, I want it to have a presence.

Other Auckland Notes: I flew halfway around the world to end up at a Halloween party to be told by a Montreal Candiens fan from Ottawa that the Bruins are a bunch of goons. Did not get a satisfying response when I brought up Subban's occasionally extremely reckless play or the persistent (though diminishing) diving. Apparently the Montreal media has some pretty stout filters.

Asian Food is Better Australia and New Zealand: A lot better. One of the best dishes we had on our trip was a beef stew type thing from a backwater Vietnamese restaurant in Cairns. Spicy House in Auckland was cheap and hands down better than any Asian food I've ever had on our home coast (which is why it ended up in the Where Chefs Eat guidebook) and the noodles we had were also goddamn fantastic. It makes sense when you think about it. Australia and New Zealand are just a lot closer to Asia than Cambridge is and so it is easier to get the necessary ingredients and they have to travel far less to get here. So if you're traveling on the other side of the world, even if you're not in Asia, make sure to get at least one Asian meal.

What I Missed While I Traveled: There were things I expected to miss while we traveled: friends, family, the cat, the Bruins, the bookstore, my writing routine, and I did miss all of those things, but you are most able to learn what is enfolded in your existence when it is removed. Two things I was surprised to miss as much as I did: iced coffee (discussed earlier) and bread. I had no idea how much I missed bread until I picked up a small loaf at a French bakery with the intention of just picking at it while waiting for Riss to wake up. (Which comprised Part One of Josh's Great Chili Ingredient Adventure.) The petit pain did not make it home. Some weird primal joy took over and I stuffed that fucking thing right in my gaping maw. So apparently, bread is an important part of my existence.

Gloworm Caves

Noir Restaurant

Auckland Panorama from Mt. Eden

Christchurch: Rebuilding, Aesthetics, and Landscape

His friends were playing golf. Then the ground started to move like water and it was like waves approaching. There is no escaping the earthquake the nearly destroyed Christchurch. The cathedral itself still sits half-demolished. There are vacant lots. There are buildings with warnings. There is construction. I had formed a perspective on Christchurch when a cab driver told us the story of his friends running for their lives. A hopeful perspective. An energized perspective. An idea, that maybe other cities can learn from Christchurch and apply its lessons without first going through a catastrophe. And though I'm still hopeful for Christchurch, though I still believe in the energy of construction I felt there, and the opportunity to rebuild a modern city to meet the needs of modern society, the story reminded me that I did not carry the trauma of the earthquake itself with me as I spent time in Christchurch, and that everything that felt like construction to me, was reconstruction to everyone else. The result of this experiential distance, is that I was experiencing something aesthetically, the people of Christchurch lived emotionally.

With the exception of Cathedral Square, the Re-Start Mall is the most overt continuing interaction between the Christchurch and the earthquake. The Re-Start Mall is just like any other mall, except that, in order to get things up and running again as quickly as possible after so many buildings were destroyed, the stores are all how housed in converted shipping containers. To me, it was a really cool place, (though, like everything else in Christchurch, it closed surprisingly early) demonstrating an innovative and relatively green solution to a problem. We got some coffee and books (see the Vacation Reading post) and I was really tempted by a food truck selling “American Style Hot Dogs.” (Which might have planted the seed for Rissa's “Let's make a food truck that sells American style chili” plan to facilitate moving to New Zealand.)

As usual, when it's Riss and I running the show, Christchurch was good food, good beer, a museum and a botantical garden, with some pictures of the public art used to reclaim, at least in part, the destroyed and emptied spaces of Christchurch. We found a cool little whiskey bar and had a grand plan for closing out one of our nights at a bar that specialized in local craft beers and was about 50 feet from our hotel, but those plans were dashed upon the jagged rocks of Everything-in-Christchurch-Closes-Early. And then there was Hamner Springs.

Hamner Springs is a hot/mineral spa and pool complex a couple hour outside of Christchurch. On the surface, it isn't the kind of activity Riss and I tend to do. Spas involve a fair of amount of lying around and Riss and I tend to avoid lying around on vacation. But, we figured, we were on our honeymoon and if there were ever a time when we could fit a spa day into our packed schedule it would be on our honeymoon. And the day fell just about halfway into our vacation so it seemed to be a perfect time to lie around a bit. And you know what, it was. If the weather hadn't been a bit overcast and if Riss and I had thought to bring magazines (or some other reading material we wouldn't fear dropping into a hot spring) with us, it might have been a highlight of the trip. And the hot springs were rather nice. My favorite pool was the mid-temperature-sulfur pool. (The “fart pool” as Riss with her sophisticated brand of humor called it.) We even each got some alone time as the other received a spa treatment. (I spent my alone time with an absolutely gigantic beer tasting flight (which I warned Riss about), a dish that was not chili fries but was called so (which I did not warn Riss about), and about an hour of writerly anxiety. We had a good time, but Hamner Springs was nothing compared to the drive between Christchurch and Hamner Springs.

Being a LOTR movie fan I have long been acquainted with the idea that New Zealand should have gotten a nod for best supporting actor. So I should have been ready for the landscape of New Zealand. I was not. The words and the pictures will not do justice to the beauty of the drive from Christchurch to Hamner Springs and back. The best I can do is present the pictures and tell you that trying to contain the visual beauty with my eyes made my brain hurt. The colors. The textures. The expanses. With all due respect to 89 in Vermont, I don't know if any drive will ever compare.

Other Christchurch notables before I move on: Dux Dine served perhaps the best vegetarian dish we had on our trip, which was really nice, because the dinner there was gifted to us by vegetarian friends. We saw indoor cricket for the first time, which is weird. At an Irish Bar called The Craic that featured a lot of video gambling, which is weirder, and which we have commemorative baseball caps from, which is weirdest. There was a building with beautiful murals on it surrounded by about two blocks of vacant lots and it was a strip club. I took the best picture of Rissa ever.

Botanical Garden

Street Art

Hamner Springs

Melbourne: Art, Conversation, and the Limits of Google & Yelp

If the first thing that struck me about Cairns was the birds, the first thing that struck me about Melbourne was the buildings. Melbourne is old enough to have a mix of modern and classic architecture, but there was something uniquely exciting about the newer stuff that surrounded us. And Melbourne is a street art city. We were staying near the university, with its art school, so our concentration was probably slightly skewed, but just about everywhere else there were murals and graffiti art. This gave the entire city a kind of pulse or a sense of energy or propulsion. I honestly don't know what kind of art is happening in Melbourne now, but the overtness and publicness of it in their streetscapes made me feel as if the city must be a hotbed of creativity.

Our Victoria Market Lunch

We spent time at the Queen Victoria Market, which was a massive semi-enclosed market that sold basically everything (though we didn't stray too far from the sections selling food) and was the only place in our travels we found that had a coffee shop that made cold brew iced coffee. (Which they served in shot glass portions), the botanical gardens (which Riss would've slept in if given the options. Pictures below.) and the museum (because we always spend time in the museum). The museum was good, though not one that really stood out in the world of museums, but the botanical garden was a real highlight.

Melbourne Skyline from our hostel

As I mentioned in my post about travel, to me, there is something exciting in the simple act of seeing something I have never seen before and a massive botanical garden in the a different hemisphere is guaranteed to be filled with things I've never seen before, even if I, personally, don't have the botanical knowledge to truly appreciate the difference and diversity. Even if I couldn't tell how this type of parsley was different from the type in my fridge, just knowing it was, and that I will likely never see it again, was thrilling. Perhaps the starkest example of that personal and global fragility was the section of the garden dedicated to endangered species. Every plant in that section was threatened, like the Great Barrier Reef, with extinction by climate change, human development and/or invasive species. Humans are a very strange species, often capable of preserving a scrap of something in a zoo or museum because of its importance to us and the world, while we destroy it everywhere else.

As much fun as we had eating and drinking and looking, the three highlights of our Melbourne trip were of a slightly different nature. In chronological order:

Martin Day!

View from Mount Dandenong

Martin is engaged to one of the booksellers at PSB and he lives in Melbourne, so we were able to connect with him for a day of driving around the South Yarra Valley. The South Yarra is something like the Napa Valley in California, a concentration of vineyards and their attendant industries, which I assume involves quite a lot of cheese and cracker making. There were also a good number of brewpubs so were able to sample the wares of man of brewers and vineyards. We even bought a case of wine to send home (which, at time of writing has been returned to sender by someone in Los Angeles for reasons we are having a very difficult time ascertaining), met Martin's parents (who grew up in Poland, before fleeing Communist oppression to South Africa, before pursuing economic opportunity in Australia, and probably have one hell of a life story) and had a pretty solid burger for dinner. But as with so much about, well, life, I guess, it is difficult, if not impossible for me to communicate the most important part of Martin day. Starting when he picked us up, and through a quick snack and drink at the coffee shop and restaurant where he works all the way through till when he dropped us of, was one long, relatively uninterrupted, sprawling, brilliant conversation.

How to Get Drunk in Melbourne

Now THIS is kimchi

Not that we set out to spend our entire time in Melbourne intoxicated, but we did want to try a fair amount of local beer. However, even with the reputation for alcoholic excess Australia has, on our budget, actually getting drunk was fairly difficult. Pints were all at least $8.50 USD and given that it was variety were going for, we usually opted for “pots” which were half pints (I think) at about $5-6 USD. That adds up pretty quickly. And then one night we made our way to a cool looking little place not far from our hostel that turned out to be a Korean restaurant. The food was amazing, including the house made kimchi and the other appetizers we had. But they also served a range of delicious and very potent plum wines and a massive two-person cocktail not unlike a scorpion bowl. Riss and I hadn't really planned on staying in any one place that night, but that's where we ended our night. They also were playing a mix of American music from the 90s, which was weird, but in the perfect kind of way weird can be weird, that paired well with drinking a beverage we couldn't pronounce while eating damn near a pound of kimchi.

The Inadequacy of Google & Yelp

Tasting flight from James Squire

You've caught on about the whole looking for craft beer thing? Well, we searched on Google and Yelp and used the craft beer app Untapped looking for bars that served a lot of local craft beers and the results of those searches were disappointing. What we tended to find were bars with one or two craft beers on tap. As we learned when talking to a brewer, part of this problem was that Australia is still about fifteen years (his words) behind the states in terms of craft brewing and there are some costs and regulations that are constricting the market, but, a bigger part of the problem, as you'll see, is that Google, Yelp, and Untapped rely on metadata and can only work with what metadata they're given. Often, especially in terms of small, local, businesses and attractions, the internet doesn't know enough about them to tell would be customers. However, people often do have that data.

At Moon Dog Brewery

The brewer for James Squire (pretty much Australia's Sam Adams) gave us directs to a place called Moon Dog Brewery, which was near the end of a somewhat sketchy street in an old mechanic's shop, with a pizza food truck parked outside. This (THIS!) was what we were looking for. Given the atmosphere and the décor it could've been a friends garage, if that friend happened to also sell awarding beer. We ended up chatting with one of the bartenders there (Pat) and he told us Forester's Hall was the next place we should hit. Not only that but he gave us a note to give to one of the bartenders there that said to put two particular pots of beer he wanted us to try on his tab. (When we handed the note over, the bartender at Forester's said, “This is totally something Pat would do.”) We had more good beer and more good food. If this had been any other night in our trip, we would've followed bartender suggestion to bartender suggestion until some exhausted and elated versions of ourselves stumbled back to our hostel, but, as this was our last night in Melbourne and we had to get up at like 5 in the morning to catch our flight to Christchurch we went home after that.

The Biggest Surprise on Our Trip

So weird

I bought shoes. Seriously. How weird is that? And they weren't like, shoes with books in them or something. Florsheim is one of the few brands that makes shoes that fit my, essentially square hobbit feet. There was a Florsheim store near our hotel. They were having a sale. Throw in the exchange rate and, in a shocking turn of events, Josh Cook bought shoes on vacation.

The Botanical Gardens

South Yarra Valley, Street Food, & Other Melbourne Pictures