If You Seek A Pleasant Peninsula, Consider Your Options.
Good afternoon. It seems these days that everyone's started a blog of their own (it seems like thousands in Ann Arbor, Michigan, alone) and I decided to cave in and create one for myself. It'll certainly keep my friends and parents from worrying what's happened to me. And besides, what better reason to do something than the fact that everyone else does it?

I'm a relatively young cook in the aforementioned small city of Ann Arbor, whose merits (and, more often, demerits) are exhaustively discussed at one of my favorite sites. I'm originally a Southerner, though, born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the day Nick Drake died. I recently received a master's degree in history from the University of Akron in Ohio, and plan to apply to a number of library and information schools as soon as I retake my GRE (I took it nine years ago, and since GRE vets automatically grow dumber as soon as five years pass, I have to take it again).

My principal passions include history, film, literature (reading and writing), music and increasingly cooking. I also love cheese--can't get enough of it. I could never be a vegan because it's just so damn good. I'm not a vegetarian, either, but I have no problem with the concepts. I'm spending the next couple of months holed up in my room overlooking a graveyard and writing my tail off. I finished six stories last year, which was a personal record. I also watch a lot of films, and can recommend two recent ones off the bat, both released within a year of each other:

Black Narcissus (1947) is the story of a group of British nuns sent to establish a convent school in the Himalayas, and who fall victim to the erotic mysticism of the "East." Call it Orientalist pap if you will, but it's a visually stunning film from "the Archers," the unbeatable producing, writing, and directing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It also features a sexy-in-so-many-ways power struggle between two unforgivably hot sisters in Christ played by Deborah Kerr and my own personal funtime nightmare queen Kathleen Byron.

Force of Evil (1948) was the great John Garfield's last major role before the House Un-American Activities Committee did for many of his friends' careers and probably killed him by advancing the coronary thrombosis that took his life in the early 1950s. It was also the directorial debut of Abraham Polonsky, blacklisted after this movie. Force of Evil rips open the collaboration between crime and big business as a powerful gangster enlists his lawyer Joe Morse (Garfield) to corner the NYC market on the "numbers" racket and force out all the small-time operators, including Joe's brother Leo. Sleazy, corrupt doings in a classic noir landscape make the movie worth watching anyway, but the scale of the societal rot turns this one into an especially riveting experience, despite the occasionally agitprop nature of the acting (especially Thomas Gomez, who plays Leo). With the righteous, idealistic fury of this movie, it's no wonder Polonsky was blacklisted!

Like I said, I love movies. That's all for now, really. I'm writing this in the offices of the Washtenaw Rainbow Action Project, a transgender, lesbian, gay, etc. outreach program where I work as an "ally" (I think that's the term) volunteer on Saturday afternoons. Hardly anything ever happens while I'm here, so I'm able to deliver this virgin entry. I also frequently volunteer with the local chapter of Planned Parenthood. Both gigs should give a pretty good idea of my political leanings.

If anyone out there's not having a good day, try. I sure as hell am. In any case, no matter how bad life gets, I can be glad this is finally happening.