suburban kamikaze

How to get a man to have sex with you during the zombie apocalypse

We've had this conversation before. What suburban couple hasn't? Sorting out who will be responsible for what in the coming zombie apocalypse isn't as easy as deciding whose turn it is to do the dishes, or whether the children will be raised as vampires or werewolves.

But I never expected to be cut from the team.  

It's true that Mr. Kamikaze has qualifications that could further the process of staying alive and rebuilding civilization from scratch and I am good at word games. Does that make me useless?

Like the Apocalypse-ready scrap-parts inventor profiled in the New York Times, Mr. Kamikaze can take things apart and put them back together five different ways using nothing but stuff he buys at Home Depot.

It's impressive, I guess.

But let's not forget that Mr. Kamikaze has the luxury of being able to work uninterrupted, in total concentration, inside an impenetrable force field that makes him invisible to children. Whom he also cannot hear or smell.

I don't even remember how to take a shower uninterrupted. Still, there must be something I can do. 

"You provide perspective," says Mr. Kamikaze, pronouncing "perspective" in the tone of voice people use while fashioning air quotes with their hands. "You could plop down in the middle of the radiation-poisoned road and wail, "You're leading us to our deaths!  What is the point? Let's just die here!"

He laughs because apparently, the prospect of death by radiation poisoning is something Captain Apocalypse finds funny. Do we really want someone like that on the team just because he knows how to take a toilet apart? Also, the whole "plopping down in the road" speech is part of his ongoing refusal to take responsiblity for the navigation failures that left us lost, almost, in the mountains during a hiking trip more than 20 years ago. 

"Let it go already," I tell him. "There is no way that was the right trail. It was completely overgrown. Also, it wasn't even marked. Everywhere else the trail was clearly designated. Which would suggest - to anyone paying attention - that we were no longer on the trail."    

My point is, it's not fair to leave me off Team Apocalypse just because I can't build a working generator out of sticks and rocks.

He puts our Suburban Overachiever neighbors on the team just because they are too lazy to go out and buy stuff like everybody else. Mr. Overachiever builds stuff with tools Mrs. Overachiever grows in the backyard. She makes sushi from stuff she carries around in her purse and kills lobsters with her bare hands, but does that really qualify as survival skill? "She could make bouillabaisse from roadkill," says Mr. Kamikaze.

As if anyone is going to eat that.

"I'm not auditioning on my culinary skills," I say. I make a mental list and come up with ice skating, arts and crafts, punctuation, dirty talk. 

I run my finger around the rim of my coffee cup in what I believe to be a seductive gesture. "I think I bring a few things to the table," I say.

"Ice skating?" he says, refusing to acknowledge that I am bargaining with real currency now. 

"You are going to be disappointed if you think you're going to come across some 25-year-old hair tosser who can do what I do," I say. It is a mistake to try to underscore my meaning with an actual hair toss, but the point is made. 

"The hair tossers will learn quickly," he says."They're going to be pretty motivated I think."

But it isn't long before the powerful seductive influence I still hold over him in the pre-Apocalyptic world leads to compromise. "We can use you as bait," he suggests.

"No thanks," I say. Now that I've got him negotiating, it's just a matter of time before he offers me a real position.

"You do have some diplomatic skills," he acknowledges finally. "We'll send you in to negotiate with rival gangs."

It's only one step up from bait, but it's a start.

Photo: Foraging for wine in the French wilderness. By Rick McCawley

Perfectly fine mojitos

It is the first weekend in forever in which the forecast comes close to ruling out any possibility of snow, rain or gloom, and we are gathered in the backyard of the Suburban Overachievers, where a variety of perfectly seasoned meats and vegetables come off the grill and disappear in a chorus of praise.

There are two grills actually, because solo grilling is for amateurs and the kind of people who buy their spices in jars.

As a native of Bacardi, I am expected to supply the mojitos, a beverage I frequently take credit for introducing to the Midwestern suburbs, but which I have had to relearn completely to meet the standards of the head Suburban Overachiever.

First, I scrapped the lemon-lime soda and learned to make mint-infused syrup, which is so easy it should be called simple syrup. Which, I later learn, it is.

My freezer bag full of last year's wilted produce department mint was the next ingredient to provoke her disapproval, which she signals by pursing her lips, raising an eyebrow and cultivating a patch of mint so beautiful and so fragrant I want to roll in it naked, but she says no.

This time, however, I am on my game.

I stand in her kitchen counting out the precise number of mint leaves (12 per glass) recommended by the Bacardi people. I have prepared my own syrup, I have my Crate&Barrel muddler. I squeeze the freshly cut limes and shake my hips. A few drops fall into the glass.

I add a little shoulder shimmy, but still, the limes fail to produce. I look over to where the Suburban Overachiever is chopping mango into a geometrically perfect dice.  "I don't know what is wrong with these limes," I say. "I  am doing the dance perfectly."

"Did you roll them?" she asks.

"It is not really a roll," I say. "It is more of a vigorous thrusting."

"The limes," she says. "Did you roll the limes?" 

I did not. Also, there is a problem with my lime slicing technique. Good god, I think, it is starting to feel like an episode of Making Tea with the English.

"This is a rum drink," I say. "The important thing is that you spill some while you are dancing."

But of course, she has a trick for getting each lime to produce three times its weight in juice. Also a Japanese lime juicer that Mr. Overachiever probably handcrafted in the garage from materials grown in the backyard.  It does the job. The mojitos are excellent.  But you couldn't say dancing has nothing to do with it.

From the Overachiever archives: Camelot in the suburbs

Wish they all could be California rolls

Just when we thought we couldn't possibly love them one tiny bit more, despite their long history of misadventures, the girls took over the kitchen and learned to make sushi.

It was their most successful culinary project to date, thanks in no small part to their lovely assistant, Suburban Overachiever, who supplied the nori, the rice, the rolling mat and authentic Japanese know-how. 

Ordinarily the girls refuse all offers of adult assistance, but they made an exception when they learned that Suburban Overachiever keeps a supply of imported Japanese seaweed sheets in her freezer (naturally) and had wasabi in her purse (for reasons which were never made entirely clear).

The results were impressive. And I am not just talking about the fact that no hamsters were harmed, no flooding occurred, nothing was left coated with vaseline, paint or beauty products and no search parties were involved.  Maybe that is all behind us now?

We were served Japanese style, on the low table in the living room, which the girls had converted to candlelit elegance. There was salad and wine and fried ice cream for dessert, a menu the girls put together by watching Food Network how-to videos and calculating the maximum number of dishes they could put to use, which as it turns out, was pretty much all of them. Actual clean-up time may vary.

Ingredients

Juice of 1/2 lemon

1 medium avocado, sliced into 1/4 inch thick pieces

4 sheets nori

1/2 batch sushi rice

1/3 cup toasted sesame seeds

1 small cucumber, peeled, seeded and cut into matchstick-size pieces

4 crabsticks, torn into pieces

wasabi, soy sauce and pickled ginger for serving

1. Cover a bamboo rolling mat with plastic wrap. 

2. Cut nori sheets in half crosswise.

3. Lay one sheet, shiny side down on plastic-covered mat. Wet your fingers and spread 1/2 cup of rice evenly onto nori.

4. Fling sesame seeds around the kitchen, attempting to sprinkle most of them onto rice.

5. Turn the sheet over so that rice side is down.

6. Place 1/8 of the cucumber, avocado and crab sticks in the center.

7. Grab the edge of the mat closest to you, keeping fillings in place with your fingers and roll into a tight cylinder.

8. Pull away the mat and set aside, Cover with a damp cloth.

9. Repeat until all of the rice has been used.

10.Cut each roll into 6 pieces.

 

Sushi Rice Ingredients

2 cups sushi or short-grain rice

2 cups water, plus extra for rinsing rice

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

2 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon kosher salt

1. Place rice into mixing bowl and cover with cool water. Swirl rice in the water, pour off and repeat until water is clear.

2. Place the rice and water into saucepan and bring to a boil, uncovered.

3. Reduce heat to lowest setting and cover, cooking for 15 minutes.

4. Remove from heat, and let stand covered for 10 minutes

5. Combine rice vinegar, sugar and salt in small bowl and heat in the microwave on high for 30-45 seconds.

6. Transfer to large wooden or glass mixing bowl and add the vinegar mixture. Fold thoroughly to combine and coat each grain of rice with the mixture. Allow to cool to room temperature before using.

Recipes: Foodnetwork.com

Camelot in the suburbs

Welcome to the first edition of "Suburban Overachievers," - a new SK feature, where we will mock profile the efforts of the suburban denizens who make the rest of us look bad with their oh really it was nothing efforts.

We begin with E, a woman who makes everything from haute cuisine to algebra look so easy that you will either want to be her best friend or run her over with your minivan.

E is the kind of suburban mommy whose classroom cupcakes are baked from scratch using ingredients she grows in her backyard. Before I met E, I didn't even know you could grow cupcakes in your backyard.  

When E's little boy decided he wanted to be a knight for Halloween, she did what any overachieving suburban mommy would do - she started shopping for chain mail.

Meanwhile, E's husband began the process of smelting iron ore, or maybe it was cardboard, into a realistic blade that would later be attached to a jewel-studded hilt and scabbard in a piece of Medieval craftsmanship that might have earned him a knighthood in another time and cul-de-sac. 

Mr. E is the kind of guy who walks into your house with a couple of nails in his mouth and a few minutes later he has renovated your bathroom. "It was nothing," he will say, brushing the sawdust from a window frame that he has just resized after discovering a tiny flaw in the alignment.  

E graciously agreed to share the step by step process of creating this Broadway-quality knight costume for the SK audience. She also graciously pretended not to recognize that SK readers were about as likely to cut their own hair as to attempt a project like this.   

And so I pretended to take down the instructions as she explained how she converted $10 worth of thrift store finds into a Camelot worthy ensemble. 

First, a woman's green velvet shirt (Goodwill, $4.99) was converted into a tunic with chain mail cuffs attached to the t-shirt sleeves underneath. Cutting carefully along the ...  and  um, sewing?

Then a sheet of something was attached to something else to make a shield and a chain mail helmet was fashioned in a series of steps I would not be able to duplicate if I had two months and a lifetime subscription to Better Moats and Castles.

A realistic crest was copied from somewhere and reproduced on the face of the shield using something. Black tape maybe? I'm not certain. I spilled a pretty good red wine on my notes.

"I'm not laughing at you," I said, wiping tears from my eyes and Claret from my pages.

Here is what I was writing in my notebook:

Chain mail!!!! ? sewn onto t-shirt?! $2.99 pants? Goodwill? Woman's belt converted to scabbard?!!! OMG!  chain mail!

So, anyway. That's all there is to it.