I'd Like to Go to Turkey

I ate Thanksgiving dinner at a Peruvian restaurant in my neighborhood this year. It was so refreshing to taste fresh lime, hot pepper and other herbs, even mixed into a vile seafood potpourri. That's right, I ate seafood! I wanted to break out of my dietary limitations, and I did, though I could only manage few bites and my companion gallantly ate the rest of the weird, rubbery shards of shrimp and squid (whoever would have thought a human would ingest that stuff?)

The turkey came with rice and an orange and garlic sauce that resembled gravy not at all, but was delicious. I didn't miss the stuffing, the well-meaning but unpleasant requisite vegetables like broccoli and squash, the cranberry sauce or any of it. It felt liberating to eat the food of a South American maratime community (if the mural on the side of the restaurant could be believed). Everything about the experience was fun. The only thing I missed was pie, since the prix fixe dessert wasn't remotely pie-like, and I had to ask for flan instead. But flan was fine.

I do wish I could go to Turkey. Lately I feel trapped in a few narrow settings. It seems strange but I'm finding New York devoid of stimulation. It's probably a result of my weird lifestyle, which involves loads of indecisive dithering and then many uninspiring trips to coffee shops. I keep hoping the next cup of coffee will unlock my creativity, but it doesn't.

I sent a piece on the lack of women in the current comedy scene to Slate and the New Yorker. They both rejected it summarily. Oh, maybe not summarily. But evidently no one wants a scathingly sarcastic response to the New York Times magazine's humor issue, which featured only one woman, and that one a complete non-starter in the world of comedy.

No, see, that's the kind of thinking that exacerbates the difficulty of being a freelance writer. "No one wants my writing" is an easy mood to slip into and it hardly makes new ideas come marching in with freshness and clarity. Clarity! Why is it so hard? But I think if I could go to Turkey, I could achieve clarity. The coffee is stronger there, for one thing.

Peace out.