Two Dinners and Born to Run

My friend took me to Wegman's today; my roommates and I hadn't been shopping in way too long and I basically bought the entire store. I'm still in my time of High Summer Expectations, and bought all this stuff to make different chicken meals, even though I'm a bit challenged in the kitchen.

When I got home, I made a salad with feta cheese, onions, and apple cider vinegar and then tried to make sesame chicken, only to realize I forgot to buy sesame seeds. But I made it anyway and, fun fact, sesame chicken without sesame seeds is just chicken with honey on it. Delicious, but not the same.

Then I went over to a friend's house and we made another dinner-- Jambalaya with chop meat, cornbread, and then rice pilaf mixed with diced tomatoes and chicken. It was pretty good, considering it was a makeshift meal of all the shit left in my friend's apartment since his lease ends tomorrow.

After dinner we sat around and listened to Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run and for a second I felt a pang of homesickness. If anyone read my post about summer albums, that was my number one. The summer album to end all summer albums. I always thought that album was great because it was an album that people from my parents' generation and my generation, and the generations in between, could drive around and listen to when it was hot outside. It's a trans-generational album.

And I guess it's a trans-state album too. Part of me will always associate Bruce with Jersey and my parents and family and friends there, it was great to have the album make that jump: to have it go from being a Jersey album to an upstate NY album. To the summer album no matter where I am.

Even though I missed home a little tonight, it was nice to be living a life of making dinners with friends in our apartments and not in our parents' kitchens (although I acknowledge that all of our parents help us pay rent on some level at least, if not paying for it flat out... so financially our kitchens in our apartments belong more to our parents than they do to us). There are things about Jersey that I miss, but things about upstate NY that I can't have there. It's a give and take.

At one point tonight we looked up what a "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" means. Turns out Bruce doesn't even know. But if I had to take a guess, I think a Tenth Avenue Freeze Out takes place during the summertime.