Today P. decreed it was berry-picking day, and he is sort of like a human Farmer’s Almanac that someone drew porno comix on part of and another part got some fish sauce on it, while part of it is torn out and replaced it with a stack of free recipes they give out at the grocery store. But if you can find the right page, you’re golden.

We were out for about an hour and got enough for two pies and a mess of jam. He is laying in supplies for the long, hard, 45-degree winter that we will have here in the middle of the city with a store within two blocks.

Later I fucked off with Ruby and we watched Julie & Julia. When I was on blog break this spring, Ruby had a one-off book club/dinner party wherein we discussed the book and ate an AMAZING five-course meal that was recipes from MtaoFC. I can say, YES, braised cucumbers are incredible. And I like aspic, which, I am pretty easy sell on cute animals being shoved into molds, so that was nice. As a result, attendance at this movie was fairly compulsory for us.

It is tempting to flippantly dismiss the movie the way many people have by saying, “Well, it is half good.” This is true, but the Julia half is REALLY good. I tend to think the other half is not the actors’ faults, though the script has some explaining to do. I really think they should have gone for gold and done the Julia bio. All the other half did was reminded me what an insufferable whiny brat the author is, which Ephron’s script really downplays, especially in regards to her job.

It was fun to watch a reenactment of Julia’s relationship with her husband of many years, whom she was madly in love with. Of course there is a bunch of revisionist type history out now, saying well, no, Child wasn’t a saint, in fact she was a homophobe, and I think it’s pretty shit that Child denounced Julie, saying that she was not taking the book or the practice of cooking seriously. It’s fairly lame to make a statement like that about how one’s cookbook is used–it’s not like Julie was using it as a doorstop or something. Has anyone else cooked their way through all of MtaoFC?

BUT as I was enjoying the interaction between the onscreen Childs, Ruby leaned over and whispered, “Julie is divorcing Eric, you know?” I did not. It kind of colored the whole rest of the movie, in a way, which was no big deal. At the end the little wrap-up text rolled by saying when the Childs died and that the author lived in Queens with her husband. “Why does it say that,” I demanded. “They broke up after the movie,” she replied. Ah. Well, the first divorce is always the hardest.

Ruby always makes me laugh with her crazy ideas.

“So the back-to-school thingie is happening soon,” she said, by way of feeling out whether I was at all interested, and specifically, interested in going to the party with her.

“Wait, you want to PAY MONEY to go to an irritating party with assholes we hate?”

She started laughing.

“Hey, misery loves company,” said our other lunch companion.

“Let’s just go back to Gainsbourg that night,” I said.

I love September and am actually looking forward to it.

It is also important for you to know that my short-term memory has returned, after taking a year off.

In Other News: “There is Nothing Between Us and The Grave Except Food.”

Strudel is very fixated on the idea of death lately. I can remember being in the backseat of my grandmother’s car at her age and being struck with the realization that everyone I knew was going to die, and my grandmother was probably going to go first. My eyes filled up with tears at the thought.

Strudel wants to talk about it a fair amount now, and I sense she is looking for some kind of hedge to get us out of it. “What if I do this or that? Do we have to die then?” She looks for assurances that I will be very old when I die, and I tell her yes, yes. This is a more worthwhile lie than Santa.

“Would you rather die, or become a tree?” Strudel asked me, as she was putting one of her puzzles together on the floor of my room.

“I would rather become a tree.” I replied.

“Me too, but I am going to be Stoic.”

“What does “stoic” mean to you?” I said.

I recalled I had used the term earlier while we were berrypicking and her father was whining about getting small blackberry slivers in his hands. “How do you stop that from happening?” he said. “You just have to be stoic about it,” I said.

“I don’t know what it means!” Strudel said. “Some day we will all be below the ground, and no one will know where you are, or where to find you, and you could be under a sidewalk and people would not know.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I will never NOT love you, but when you are dead I can not call you.” she concluded.