damigella | Letter Meme (Reply)

's Letter Meme, Letter B courtesy of

1. Breastfeeding.

Sorry squeamish folks. The one physical activity I'm provably good at. Had I been born one or more centuries early, probably the only job open to me. Also, if breastfeeding weren't physically pleasant, the human race would be extinct.

2. Bistecca.

That's how we call steak (and yes, it's an adaptation of beef-steak). Made with the very special, large race (chianina) that is raised in central Tuscany, a T-bone steak serves a family of four. Grilled on charcoal until crispy outside, raw to the point of bleeding inside, little salt and no other condiment. I can be vegetarian - out of Tuscany. (The red thing below it it's not sauce, perish the thought. It's blood. Sorry again, squeamish folks.)

3. Bread, the saltless crusty bread of my childhood. With Nutella. With walnuts. With butter and anchovy paste. Mid-december, lightly toasted with freshly pressed olive oil and salt and lots of garlic (bruschetta). Favorite in childhood: with water, sugar and red wine. I once broke a tooth on the hard crust, and it was definitely worth it.

4. Berries. All of them. I can't even say which my favorites are because I love them all.

5. Beach, bathing and sunbathing. I was a lizard in my previous life. At best naked, but I accept bikinis.

6. Blue eyes. Don't know what they do to me. This category includes light green and light grey - and definitely both HL's (blue) and my husband's (light grey to light green, depending on light conditions).

I've dated someone who obviously wasn't a good fit for me for four years and begged him to marry me because he was my first blue-eyed boyfriend (I married the second, and those are his eyes).

7. Beauty. Especially the purest form,

the one I get to see and you don't. There's a poem, by Rilke I think, about a man seeing beauty naked and being mad thereafter. Well, that would be me. I've seen beauty naked and nothing compares. No wonder all pure mathematicians are crazy.

8. Backslash. The key symbol of my favorite typesetting system, TeX.

A system created by a man who wrote a book series called The Art of Computer Programming which is still in use, despite having been started in 1962 when he was a grad student. A man who loves computers and typesetting. I stopped using Italian keyboards twenty-five years ago because they didn't contain a backslash key, and I can't live without.

9. BDSM, as in reading and writing about it. Uh, maybe this you already knew?

10. Books. Books. Books. Actually, that should have been numbers one to ten. I learned how to read around age four (I cannot remember, but so I'm told) and haven't stopped since. I'm happy that my whole family likes books.

Bonus eleventh thing: both of them, of course. (Because there's a B in both, as originally remarked by Lewis Carroll).