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Last month I was sitting around in the TA office and someone commented, scornfully, that “tilapia” was just a fancy name to make the stupid bourgeois eat catfish. Having been raised relatively bourgeois, I blinked and did not mention that I had never heard that tilapia was catfish. It did actually make a fair amount of sense. Who among us had heard about tilapia, say, six years ago? Not bad evidence of some kind of clever marketing ploy, I thought.

I was so convinced that I even attempted to pass it on to a carful of people on our way to the Victoria’s Secret semi-annual sale over at West Towne Mall,* although I did admit that I didn’t have independent confirmation.

Keely was a little skeptical, although she allowed that she hadn’t heard of tilapia before she moved to Madison, but argued that since she didn’t eat fish before then, why would she have noticed? Other passengers, however, confirmed that they, too, had only become aware of tilapia in the past few years.

So when I got home, I looked it up online and discovered: tilapia and catfish are about as distantly related as it is possible to be and both be FISH. Wikipedia informed me that tilapia are of the family “Cichlidae” while catfish are classified into about 50 freaking different families,** NONE of which are “Cichlidae.” According to the Wikipedia catfish entry–which, sure, take with a grain of salt–5% of vertebrate species are catfish. AND YET. Tilapia? Not catfish.

Being motivated to correct the misconception I had inadvertently been spreading, I brought it up when I called home in the evening, which set Dad off, and led to his confirmation–he, too, turned immediately to Wikipedia–that catfish and tilapia are, as noted, as totally dissimilar as two fish can be. I don’t know if “not tasting like much of anything” would be considered a phenotypical similarity or not; as my friend Crystal says, people fry catfish because they like the taste of fry and the catfish are handy.

By “set Dad off,” I mean that we are both compulsive reference checkers. I may or may not have previously related the story of an argument I got into with some of the girls in my 8th grade gym class, the subject of which I have long forgotten although some corner of my mind is convinced it had something to do with gypsies–I could totally be making that up–and so I went home and looked it up that night and came back in, the next day, vindicated, and told them loftily that I was, in fact, totally right and backed up by encyclopedic sources.

For some reason no one was at all impressed, and I was probably lucky to escape the interaction without being stuffed into a locker. It turns out that citations are not pertinent to junior high debate. So now you know why I’m in graduate school.***

Dad, anyway, had apparently known about tilapia since the early 80s, when they were the hot new thing at the University of Arizona’s School of Agriculture. They can be raised in very densely populated tanks, or, for that matter, in irrigation canals. The internet also tells me that they only require 1.2 pounds of feed to put on one pound of flesh, which compared to 6-8 pounds of feed for one pound of cattle flesh is pretty damn good. Plus, you know, they taste like whatever sauce you put on them.

And goddamn are they cheap. I picked up a bunch of frozen fish at Trader Joe’s this week as part of my effort to get back into shape, and you can get over a pound of tilapia for $4. That’s at least three meals right there. If I had a drainage ditch I could cut out the middleman… but I think I’m willing to pay for Trader Joe’s to handle it. Now the real question: what do I put on it when I bake it for dinner tonight?

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*The sale started three days ago so it’s probably hopelessly picked over by now, plus any time you enter the VS store you’ll be surrounded by 12-year-olds, but the sale seems to bring out the especially inappropriate, e.g. the woman who was dragging her approx. 8-year-old daughter from bin to bin screaming, “Let’s look for some EXTRA SMALLS for you!” I mostly try not to judge other people’s parenting and god knows I am no arbiter of What Is Appropriate, but sweet fancy Moses, someone is going to be telling a therapist about this someday.

***Also, of course, a number of my family members went to graduate school. I don’t know if my father’s father was a compulsive reference checker or not, but it wouldn’t be a huge surprise.

Pre-Thanksgiving dinner:

Thanksgiving dinner, or, once you teach the kids to pose it’s hard to get them to stop:

This is my favorite photo from the whole weekend, taken during post-Thanksgiving dinner:

I have no clue what Dad and Aunt Gerry were doing when this photo was taken. We hadn’t even had that much wine yet. Or maybe we had. Without timestamps it’s hard to say for sure.

I can say that in this photo, we had had a lot of wine:

We’re on the phone with Hannah, demanding to know if her new boyfriend’s family was mean to her at Thanksgiving, and refusing to take “no” for an answer. The conversation went like this a lot, “Well, we really need to go, so–” “NO! NO! Just a minute! AHAHAHAHAHA!”

She will probably be getting us all those breathalyzer-anti-drunk-dialing cell phones for Christmas.

My cousin was there with his kids, who are just adorable. Libby is a total ham:

Possibly it runs in the family. Libby never once commented on my hair that I recall, but when we were setting the table for Thanksgiving, she did ask me what was on my nose. I explained that I had a ring in it, and about five minutes later I heard her exclaiming in the kitchen, “Did you know that SOME people can have RINGS in their NOSES?” I didn’t show her the tongue stud; I find that children her age (5) often find tongue piercings sort of upsetting in a world-gone-mad kind of way.

My cousin’s family has a miniature dachshund. She is extremely cute and hardly barks at all.

We also deep fried a turkey.

I always thought this sounded highly suspect, but I was wrong. It was DELICIOUS.

I told Uncle Ralph that he is inconvenient to photograph because he is a foot taller than everyone else, making it difficult to crop photos effectively; he announced that he could be “self-cropping”:

Next: I will devote an entire entry to Uncle Ralph, who wanted to know all about this “blogging” thing.

I have to admit, I never really understood the (inter)national obsession with chocolate. Sure, I like chocolate, particularly dark chocolate, and used to eat it if it was around, but I pretty much avoided it after I went on WeightWatchers. The problem was that I basically had two modes of chocolate consumption: if it was put away somewhere, I never craved it, so it would end up forgotten and stale; if it was out, I would gorge myself on it and end up consuming approximately 15,000 calories in a sitting and feeling slightly ill. So it seemed better just not to have it in the house at all, and I really didn’t miss it. I never lusted after it feverishly as I did, say, extra sharp cheddar.

Here in California, however, I have discovered: 70+% cacao chocolate. Holy fuck.

I realize that intense dark chocolate was no doubt available in Madison. Here, however, you cannot enter a retail establishment of any freaking kind without encountering a random chocolate display. It’s EVERYWHERE, along with the wine. Chocolate and wine. The Targets here have a WINE AISLE. Nobody smokes here and there are very few overweight people, but I tell you it is a realm of hedonists. There are people at my job who routinely wander around barefoot.*

I really like it. The 70+% cacao dark chocolate and the $5 Yellowtail at Trader Joe’s** and the ubiquitous murder-suggestive oleander and the sunshine and the fact that I can wear jeans unremarked pretty much anywhere I desire to go. I love the Bay Area. I do not want to leave.

Although the kicky suede boots I ordered from the Amazon sale, which turned out, according to their tag, to be “designed and engineered in Canada to meet and exceed the needs of Canadian winters,” are not so appropriate for this environment. They should, however, come in handy in Cambridge this winter. And I am looking forward to working with people at MIT. I just think I would really like to come back to California.

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*When I got the nurse’s information sheet in my intern orientation packet, I assumed that “Wear shoes at all times while in the building,” like “Call your parents! They miss you!”, was directed at the undergraduate interns. So far, however, the only people I have observed flouting this injunction have worked here, I assume, for well over a decade.

**Even if, mysteriously, they carry every variety EXCEPT my favorite vintage, the shiraz-grenache blend.

Last night I was sitting in bed with my laptop, much as I am now, when I heard the familiar sound of a cat horking. I assumed it was a hairball, but heaved myself out of bed to deal with it anyway–a good thing, because it turned out to be actual vomit, strategically deposited in just the right place for me to groggily stumble right into it if it had been there in the morning when I got up.

It was Legba who did it. I don’t know what his problem was; he’s been fine today. Sometimes cats just vomit. (Bart and Dora also do it for revenge, when they aren’t just ripping things to shreds.)

Now Bart is curled up next to me with his head on the laptop, and Dora is lying at the end of the bed snoring like a log chipper. I suppose, having witnessed firsthand the kind of noise she makes when transported in a motor vehicle, I shouldn’t be that surprised. Legba is nowhere in sight. Dora doesn’t like it when he hangs out on the bed–Dora doesn’t like it when he exists, basically, but she imposes particular sanctions when he does it close to her.

I made stew in my crockpot today. As usual, I really believed when I started it at 10:30 in the morning that I was going to be eating it for dinner, but when I got home I was STARVING and it would have taken forever to let it cool enough to eat, so I just adjusted the seasonings and put it in plastic containers to refrigerate and freeze.

It’s beef stew from my father’s recipe, but with sweet potatoes instead of regular ones. (Don’t worry, I left the beer in.) I noticed at the gym today that sweet potatoes were on the list of “ten miracle foods you should be eating” that they have posted in the weight room. Also on the list: oranges and cantaloupe. I guess if it’s orange, it’s good for you, unless it’s Cheetos or something. The list also included broccoli and low- or non-fat milk. I would have had non-fat milk with my lunch today if the damn vending machine on the 4th floor stocked it. There was an entire row of 2%, and one of chocolate, but no skim at all–and no extra space for it, either. Who the hell drinks 2% milk anymore?

In other productivity news: I sewed a button back onto my favorite flannel pajamas (leopard print and roses, how classy is that?) and leveled up my CoH controller Achryn three times–that’s level seven now. I got a tertiary power pool.

Toasted lite wheat hamburger bun + fried egg + fat-free “sharp cheddar” Kraft single = as good as an Egg McMuffin

SO GOOD.

(And only 3.5 WW points, or 8 points for two.)

In other news, my purple hair looks awesome with my pink/orange/purple sweater. Even awesomer than the pink hair did.

AND I got email confirmation that my new tax refund laptop shipped yesterday. DVD burner! Watching DVDs in bed! Stealing the neighbors’ wireless! Bliss.

Finally: how many people know who Marie LaVeau is? Is this one of those things that I mistakenly believe is common knowledge? Because I know I had a weird childhood.