Things Change...

I had a great time in San Francisco, but I'm a true New Yorker. I'm in South East Asia (yes, AGAIN!) through late April, after which I will be accepting appointments in NY again.

A Plan Is In Place!

Farewell NYC. In less than two weeks I'm headed to San Francisco! I've never been, but have been told most of my life that I would love it there, so...I'm going to try it out.

I never really left...

It just was most appropriate for me to have a low public profile. I've continued to play with a select few clients and friends but am once again ready to add to that roster. I'm excited about playing with new people and am quite curious what the current pro-scene is like. I spent most of the summer out of the US bouncing around Thailand (yes AGAIN--I do love it there!) and Indonesia. I may only be in NYC for a few months, I'll update as my travel plans coalesce. I know that I really am not interested in another cold NYC winter.

the next step

If you are reading this, you are someone I actually know and for some reason or another trust. My vanilla career path has led me to a place where Octavia may no longer exist on the internet. This is an exciting and wonderful time for me.

Really Fun Roof Photoshoot

So...Octavia Arena has returned! I am accepting sessions again. My hair is darker & shorter and I'm embracing the BBW tagline, however my legs are as muscular and strong as ever. I haven't had the chance to update the gallery on my site yet, but here are my favorites from last week's photo shoot.

Tastes like my childhood...

Earlier this evening a friend and I stopped by Russ & Daughters to pick up some caviar cream cheese. Something I missed deeply while I was living in Long Island. She happened to also order some pickled herring fillets in cream sauce. I asked for a bite and upon eating it, I literally exclaimed "This tastes like my childhood!" I'm sure I've blogged about sense memory before, but this experience made me think about what other flavors defined my childhood. The first to come up was chopped chicken liver. Guess those two tastes make it pretty clear that I was raised a New York Jew. Vanilla chocolate chip Italian ices are another one, and I guess that's about growing up on Staten Island (the origin of Ralph's Ices). This whole thought process made me wonder about other people's childhood food memories. I asked my house guest come roommate and her response was gingersnap cookies, her grandmother always had them around. My paternal grandmother always had coolwhip. My maternal grandmother always had tunafish salad, but it rarely reminds me of her. What flavors bring you back to being a little kid?

When the crazies find my blog...

So, after receiving a few stupid spam comments about viagra, etc, I changed my comments section to the "moderated" setting. That explains why sometimes you might leave a comment but it doesn't show up for a few days or ever at all. Yep, I can censor at will. When I received the alert that someone had commented on my last entry, I thought perhaps someone else had also read & loved The Help. Oh no. Not at all. Upon reading this comment I was just about to click the delete button, when I realized this was too insane not to share.

When a really good novel makes me want to write again...

I'm in the midst of a really, really good novel. The Help by Kathryn Stockett. It is one of those books that I'm enjoying so much, I'll sometimes put it down just because I don't want it to end. It also marks the first kindle book that I wish I'd purchased in "real book" form because I want it on my shelves. I currently am carrying about 20 ebooks around via the kindle app on my iphone. Some of them I would have purchased as actual books, but there's a few I probably would rather no one saw me reading. But this one is different. Sure there's a trace of my yankee white bleeding heart liberal upbringing that is angered by the subject matter (essentially the racist white southerners who hire black maids to raise their children & cook their food, but can't deign to share a bathroom with them), but I think this novel goes further than that. To a place or level of emotion that is universal. I was about 13 or 14 when I came up with the theory that at 2 o'clock in the morning, once everyone's usual social barriers are down, we can all relate to each other. And I was probably a bit older when I came up with my cheerleader broken nail theory. (ie: the tragedy of a broken nail for a cheerleader might be utterly laughable to anyone not quite so shallow, but that cheerleader's feelings about the situation are just as real and valid to her as anyone experiencing a "real" tragedy).

This novel reminds me why I had planned on being a writer for my entire childhood. I want to tell a story that hasn't been told before. I want to create characters that are so real they breathe right off of the page and people feel their struggles, triumphs and fear as if they were the closest of friends. I haven't written fiction in so many years that I almost changed the "wants" in the last sentence to "wanted". But the truth is that I do still want to write again. Someday. Yeah yeah I know, writers write. I guess I'm just a reader these days, but this novel makes me want to write.

Love and Pork Fat

The gift I brought back from Italy for my boyfriend was definitely not on the list of standard European knickknacks or souvenirs. While most people return from Italy with things like rosaries or these obnoxious aprons, I hauled 2 kilos of guanciale in my backpack. Yes, I carried around nearly 5 lbs of pork fat as a gift for my boyfriend. I wasn't sure it was the right choice until I gave it to him. He loved it. This is probably where I should mention, for those of you who don't know, that my beloved is a chef.

We are very happy together and our "rightness" for each other is proven over and over again in the most random ways. I don't recall if I mentioned this while I was blogging about the trip, but A & I got into the habit of taking "food porn" photos at nearly every meal. It was only once I downloaded my 600+ photos that I realized with faint embarrassment how many I had taken of food. When I showed my photos to my boyfriend, he not only was interested in my food pics, he berated me for not remembering some of the ingredients I had photographed! It was just one of those tiny things that make a relationship great. Who else would or could appreciate that my enduring memory of traveling Italy is the absolutely phenomenal food I ate daily?

Good Morning!

It isn't even 7am and I'm fully awake with most of a cup of coffee already in my system. Jetlag? Perhaps, but my alarm is set for 7:30am because (drumroll, please) I'm starting my new job today! I'm so excited and very slightly nervous. I really can't compare how I felt last night and this morning with anything other than the first day of school when I was a kid. I haven't had a job that required I even be awake before 10am in about 15 years. No clue what this means for my availability, I'll be hammering out a schedule later today. I'll never forget being about 20 with a lifestyle that meant I accepted phone calls through six am but woe to anyone calling me before noon. I had signing up as with a temp agency and a week or two later answered an early morning call with "Who the fuck is calling me at this godforsaken hour?" Needless to say, I didn't get offered that gig.

Driving all over

I'm sitting here listening to the sheep in the distance trying to figure out if I can do today justice with words. A and I have always loved to be in a car together. Our friendship is somehow ideally suited to long drives with random discussions on nearly any topic from deep examinations of self to questions like, "what's the origin of the term pothole?" Today we drove around and about Tuscany hitting several towns along the way. We began in Pienza, which though beautiful was really a tourist town, with a delicious lunch at Trattoria Osteria Sette Di Vino. MMMMMMMM...there is nothing quite like fresh cheese literally grilled with bacon. Later in the day we hit Montepulciano, which though it had the same charm of winding hilly cobbled streets, seemed to actually have a local population. We visited Il Casale, an agrotourism working organic farm and tasted some of the most amazing cheese I've ever had. When I inquired about buying some to take home, Massimo explained that it just wouldn't survive the journey. Beyond peeking at goats and sheep and playing with sheepdog puppies, the highlight was meeting Rinaldo. He used to work in automobiles in Germany. Once he lost his job, he went back to school to learn how to make cheese. After shedding our dusty sandals, we donned plastic clogs and he guided us through his cheese-making process. We both just fell in love with him. I will definitely post some pix of this and him. It was so amazing.

We went over to Bagno Vignoni to check out the hot springs and fancy spa, but tired of the experience before we really even had it. Dinner was in Montalcino and though the food was phenomenal, I was a bit preoccupied trying to get a perfect sunset photo. I'll let you be the judge of whether I got it or not.

Tuscany is literally breathtaking. We love the sheep.

So...neither of us really dug Florence. Therefore I haven't had much to say. But now we are in Tuscany. Staying at the magnificent La Bandita. It is so unbelievably stunningly beautiful here. This afternoon A & I were discussing how sensory our memories of this trip will be...the sound of running water & the cool damp air beneath San Clemente, the septic stink that tinged the air nearly everywhere we went in Florence, the scent of jasmine wafting through the windows of our rental car while lost in the Tuscan countryside this afternoon and shortly after we arrived at La Bandita, the tinkling of bells as the sheep grazed just down the hillside from us.



Life seems somehow simpler and purer here. The in house chef laughed as he carried a beer over to a farmer astride a tractor on the adjoining property. He explained that the beer he carried would translate to three lbs of fresh ricotta tomorrow morning.

We're completely off the map (my GPS indicated that we left known roads at least ten minutes before we actually arrived). The decor is minimalist and perfect to me. The house cat is friendly and the staff are just lovely people. I'm so incredibly lucky. I know that my life is amazing and I am so so grateful. Flipping through their (made on a mac) bound photobook of "the Making of La Bandita" I hope I'm glancing at my future.