Existing External Excuses

It's been an unusually eventful several weeks, for one main reason:  My Sister the Blond Artist got married last week!  That's been the other theme of the past year I haven't told you about.  She lived with me for the first half of last year (a big help) and in March got engaged to my pick for World's Bestest Brother-in-Law, G-dot (not Godot) the Semiotics God (I love my interesting family). 

So for the last exhausting week and a half I've been in Dallas-Metro, helping and prepping and wrapping up and hanging out with friends and family new and old.  One upside: I missed the first midwestern snowstorm of the winter.  One downside: I landed at O'Hare in the middle of the second midwestern snowstorm of the winter, and had a heck of a time finding a cab home.  (Thanks to friends H&H, who found me the one available car service in Cook County from the safety of  their warm little house.)  Just now feeling like I'm recovered.

The day was perfect, and actually fun.  The venues were amazingly gorgeous - here and here.  (Though it wasn't something they intentionally planned, it was cool that both places they rented support organizations that do good community work.)  My mom and pseudosister V spent a day arranging all the bouquets, boutonnieres and centerpieces, all of which were STUNNING in ways the photos don't capture.  (My BIL has a thing for cactus and succulent, thus the material selection.)

An aside - the final days before a wedding, or any large event, can be a bit frantic, because there are always a number of things that can only be done at the last minute.  Of course, that means anything else that gets put off to the last minute becomes an additional burden.  The bride, in this case, has any number of aptitudes, but fore-action is not among them.  Ahem.  The day before the wedding, I was standing in the kitchen with my mother and three other bridesmaids and noticed that this whole event was riding heavily on the shoulders of firstborn children (i.e., all of the five of us).  So. 

Highlights:  

1.  My Aunt K let us take over her house for a whole week, fed everyone in the wedding party and then some for days on end (so, so, so many scrambled eggs) and still found time to help me try to fix my career (more on that later).  

2.  L and I managed to throw a bridal shower that was surprisingly not lame.  It was artist-themed. I give partial credit to our utterly amazing apple pies, featuring Aunt K's magic Vietnamese cinnamon.  More on this later too, because I've been thinking a lot about the peculiar sociology of the shower.

3.  People liked my toast.  Yay me. 

4.  Dad seriously spent an hour ironing my dress.  Gotta love Marines.

5.  I carried a bunch of spare handkerchiefs during the ceremony just in case.  Neither the bride nor I needed them, but they came in handy for my father (officiating) and the best man. (Men!)

6.  The only person to ask me a variant on the question, "So when's it your turn?" was not actually at the wedding.

7.  Both kitties have been fawning all over me since I got home, including Bakerloo, who is pleasant enough, but ordinarily less affectionate than a made-for-cable movie depiction of an autistic teenager.

So it's another new year...

Would it be fair to say 2011 was complicated?  I think so, and I'm ready to move on. 

The past month has been appropriately reflective.  Advent - the season before Christmas, and the first season of the Christian liturgical calendar - is nuanced, subtle, in comparison to the hectic, celebratory glare of the secular Christmas season.  It's about anticipation of the coming Christ - a time in which we prepare to celebrate his incarnation, and when, as the prayerbook says, "we await his coming in glory."  It's about the beginning and the end.  And about waiting - really, about liminality, the waiting that happens in the in-between times. Theologically, that's about living in the Kingdom of God that's here-but-not-totally-here-yet.  And that element spoke to me most this year, living in my own liminal state.

As difficult as the past year has been, it's been full of blessing as well.  I'm so thankful for my doctors, for the support of friends and family and colleagues, for the means to take the time I've needed, for having my sister here to help me for so many months.  For my new church (that's another story...).  For getting better, instead of worse.  For the opportunity to consider what I might want to start over. 

I'm getting to the point where I can't help but start thinking about what needs to happen next.  From the beginning of all this, I was wary of going back to work/life too soon and finding myself right back where I started.  That's why I'm not distressed at being off for so long - it's not what I expected to happen, but it's so clearly the right thing.  

But the longer I go, the less I feel like going back to what I was doing before, even temporarily.  That's one of the benefits I can credit to this whole experience.  I've had the urge to make a change for a long time, but couldn't convince myself that it was the right thing to do - that my feelings were real enough to act on.  It's a lot easier to believe that now. 

I have a notion of where I might want to go, long term, but I'm willing to let that unfold with time.  That's something by itself.  Like anyone who grows up tagged as a high performer, I haven't often felt allowed to live without the ten-year plan, but I actually feel ok about it.  I feel more anxious about the immediate next steps.  I really think that, whenever I go back to work this year, I'm still going to need to do something not-so-stressful.  The questions, of course, are, what will that be?, and when will I have to figure it out?

We never really know what a new year is going to bring, but this time I don't even have anything to expect.  And that's hard.  But I've experienced so much of God's blessing this year, and, I hope, learned a little more how to trust him.  Time for more practice.

If there's anybody out there...

Hi.  I'm here.

I really want to start writing again, and to reconnect with friends.  I've missed you!  But I've needed to keep my world small.   Sometimes I still feel that need, but slowly, things are changing. 

Since I haven't shown up here in a long, long time, I suppose I need to update:

In general, I'm doing pretty well, physically.  Especially for this time of year, and very especially compared to this time last year.  I'm still not working, and don't have any particular plans in that respect yet.  When this all started - very nearly a year ago - I didn't expect it to last this long.  But I'm actually ok with it, since it's very clear to me that I'm still in the right situation.  This is what needed to happen, and this is where I need to be right now.  Not that it's been anxiety free - on the whole, things are ok, though I haven't necessarily felt ok all the time.  This, I suppose, is life.

It would be hard enough describe 8-ish months of events and activities in a few concise paragraphs.  Much more so the weirdness and complexity of the mental and emotional realities of the same season - and since there hasn't been a lot going out on the outside recently, the inside feels pretty big.  Again, that's life.  But this has been a complicated bit of life.

Anyhow, I suppose I'll get to all that eventually.  For now I just want to say, "Hello!" and start to catch up. 

Also:  It just started snowing here rather hard.  Happy November, friends.

More on snow, and other things.

So, yes, we survived the snow.  (Actually, it has snowed considerably in the last few days, in addition to last week's dump.)  I suppose the most outrageous thing was that our post office was closed last Wednesday.  The United States Post Office.  Not that it mattered much, because they couldn't deliver my mail anyway.

 

Under that awning is my front door and mailbox.  Didn't get cleared until sometime Friday. Good thing, too, since I don't know how I could have gone another day without my pile of superfluous Eddie Bauer catalogs.

I realized it's been a while since I last dealt with that kind of storm - offhand, I can't recall the last time I had to undertake lots and lots of serious shoveling to pull out the car, but it happened a few times a year when I lived in Boston.  Oh, well, it's colder here. 

And speaking of shoveling, there's no way I could possibly handle it right now, physically.  Fortunately, my sister is here to very generously take care of things like that.  Which requires some explanation in the way of general update.  My Sister the Blond Artist is living with me for the next several months.  This was planned before I discovered that my entire body was going to be down for maintenance - she was needing a home base for one of those transitional life-gap phases, and a way out of an untenable work situation - but, given the timing, having her here has been invaluable to me.  She's taken over most of the food-related tasks and anything with the potential to involve physical labor.  

And she brought with her a fourth member to round out our little household, the Most Handsome Mr. Bakerloo.

. 

It took a while, but he and Lexi have been able to negotiate a delicate truce.  Mostly.  He's younger and very playful.  Under the influence of string, he can sometimes be persuaded to do backflips in full layout four feet off the floor. 

.....

Overall, things are...difficult, right now.  Sometimes exhausting, frustrating, worrying, overwhelming - physically and emotionally, sometimes both.  At times, I think the only thing that keeps me from dissolving into a bout of panic is the fact that I have too many feelings about too many things to know where to start.  

It's going to be ok, one way or another.  I really do believe that.  But it's hard to be here, now.

I'm here. Or I'm back. Or something.

Hello.  Here I am.  I wasn't intending to take a blogging break, but apparently some part of me needed to retreat.  But I've missed interacting with my friends here. 

It's a lovely, icy day in Chicagoland.  Things are ok with me.  Not perfect, but improving.  I've been sick a lot this fall, with one thing and another - in the middle of November my mind and body finally told me they'd had enough.  I'm currently on medical leave, which is a very good thing.  Thank God for supportive doctors and short term disability insurance and the amazing blessing of working for really good people.  My boss has been amazing, to say nothing of friends and family.  I'm alright - just having the time and space and permission to take care of myself has made a major difference.  Been sleeping a lot.

It's been an odd time relationally, too.  Since I've lived here I've been blessed with great friendships and a good season of family dynamics.  Life moves on and changes - but sometimes a whole lot of life changes all at once.  I know *34* women who are or have been pregnant this year.  I'm so grateful that I don't have any degree of baby envy, or I would have lost it a long time ago.  Also, for the record, baby showers are really, really boring.

Anyhow, I'm happy to get to the end of the year with things looking up.  Hope things are well where you are, too.

Things that have made me happy in the past month.

1. Olympics Gossip.  Yeah, it's long over, but I figured I should confess anyhow. 
   Also: a) The final hockey game was possibly the best I've ever seen; and b) My cat likes to watch cross-country skiing, supporting the running joke of unknown origin that she's part Scandinavian.
   
   
2. The very elderly lady at my church who drives an electric blue Prius.  Go Betty!
   
   
3. Arthritis gloves.  I think they're magic.  And yeah, I feel a little pathetic.
   
   
4. It's gotten downright warm around here (over 40F today), and last week we hand seven straight days without a cloud in the sky.  It's very dark and rainy now, which I also like.
   
   
5. The decision to take a real vacation this year.  Strong front-runner is Nova Scotia.

Now, so far, when I mention #5, I tend to get a, "OMG ARE YOU GOING BY YOURSELF?" kind of response.  I have traveled for pleasure alone quite a bit - not for very long trips, and not because I explicitly prefer to go solo - it's just that I tend to be the only one readily at hand.  I've never had the slightest problem with this (nor eating alone in a restaurant, which, to hear most people talk, should send me into paroxysms of generalized neurosis), and it doesn't make any sense to me to stay homebound when I want to go somewhere else, just because there's nobody to come with me, but I'll confess that there are moments when it's maybe starting to get a little boring.   Regardless, I'm really looking forward to it.

A Superfluity of Updates (Part 2)

5. Zeitgeist Photos:

Neither Belgian nor Polish.  I am Siamese, if you please.

Love the tongue.

6. Fashion Anecdote:

I went to the Escher-Maze Mall (it's right across the street...) Friday evening and, in the course of 30 minutes, was mistaken (by other customers) for an employee in three successive stores.  I don't know why.  I was there because I had determined some time ago that I ought to acquire an additional coat, and to diversify my outerwear in general.  I've been living in the Lands of Emphatic Winter since I was 18, and it finally occurred to me that, just as it doesn't make sense to try to wear the same clothes at 20F as at 60F, it doesn't make sense to try to wear the same clothes at -20F as at 20F.  I'd been putting it off for a while, but realized that if I didn't move soon there'd be nothing left in the stores but bikinis.  The problem was finding something that didn't have a hood trimmed in that German Shepherd-colored acrylic fur.  I did buy something down and purple and quite warm.

7. Current fascinations:

• The nature of joy (theologically speaking).
  
  
• Scientific Literacy and Innumeracy (Stay tuned - E-week starts on February 14. Which is also Valentine's Day, Chinese New Year, Presidents' Day weekend, Mardi Gras weekend, and the second full day of the Olympics - so very many things to celebrate!)

8. Mostly inexplicable subjects of recent dreams:

• Getting fired.
  
  
• Laundering twinsets (with disastrous results).
  
  
• Rear-ending other cars at stop lights every day for a week.
  
  
• Sleeping for six months straight, then waking up to discover it's suddenly August.
  
  
• Earning a second bachelor's degree entirely by accident.

A Superfluity of Updates (Part 1)

Making some formatting adjustments - let me know if anything looks too wonky?

1. Adventures I've had recently:

• Fabulous production of Death of a Salesman on the north side.  Preceded by dinner at a Persian restaurant, during which we got to watch the proprietor physically remove a vagrant from the premises.
  
  
• Office holiday party, which for the first time in my tenure was not concurrent with a blizzard.
  
  
• Book signing for The Happiness Project!  This isn't the sort of thing I ordinarily do, but it was fun.  Gretchen is lovely, and we have the same hair.

2. Office issues:

• Office Tower Landlord closed the bathrooms on our floor for two weeks for seemingly unnecessary, and unnecessarily long, renovation.  An annoyance to everyone except our 39.5-week-pregnant admin, to whom it was more than an annoyance.  But the opportunity to explore other floors has made everyone uneasy about the state of the local economy - if the vacancy rate in this building is less than 40%, I'll be very surprised.
  
  
• At the same time, our corporate overlords four states away decided to remove all our office machines and replace them with units identical in every way, except that they don't work.  Much to the added inconvenience of above-referenced admin.  And of anyone trying to fax us. We've had Xerox techs here for 60 of the last 80 standard business hours.
  
  
• Oh, and, as you may have figured out, our sole administrative support person is about to depart on maternity leave.  Bets are on 3 weeks to full-out Lord of the Flies mode.

3. Assorted arthritic associates concur that the weather is unusually affecting this winter, despite being meteorologically unremarkable.  (I'm tired and my hands hurt. Insert additional whining here.  But it's getting better.)

4. At the moment:

• Most recent meal: Saag Gosht from the place around the corner.  I like lamb.  And spinach.
  
  
• Reading: The Magic Mountain for book group, among other things.
  
  
• Tonight: Doing laundry, because it's beyond critical; watching House, because it's a habit.
  
  
• Today's earworm:

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house...

...a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.

Well, actually, the house arrest was yesterday, when we got twelve fine, fluffy inches. I love the way snow makes everything so quiet.  I'd take a picture, but it's dark out.

Life in the 21st century: I was reading a favorite blogger's new book (Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project - congratulations, Gretchen!) when I felt the urge to flip to the back to read the comments.

Otherwise, the new year hasn't brought much excitement, other than an inexplicable and uncharacteristic craving to wear dangly earrings - I'll see what I can do about that tomorrow.

On the Eighth Day of Christmas

Despite being incommunicado, I've been thinking of my blog friends and sending happy holiday thoughts. Barely checking email  or the rest of the web, though, so insert all appropriate belated greetings here.

I've taken off an entire two weeks for the sake of mental and physical health, and it has been glorious.  Lexi and I spent a whole week over Christmas in Rustingham with my parents and My Sister the Blond Artist, so I missed the great midwestern snow-in. I enjoyed napping extensively every day, and Lexi enjoyed the assortment of laps, and the fireplace, which she misses dearly, especially since it was 3F here this morning.

Phineas can't have all the cute kitty photos.

 

All these pics are from Chicagoland, since for some reason all the photos I took in NY were with MSBA's camera, and she hasn't sent them to me yet.

A few other highlights:

• Unlike the occasion of my last trip home, in August, none of the crazy parishoners stalking my father staggered into church falling down drunk and covered in their own vomit on Sunday morning.  I  suspect there are people who imagine the ministry as safe and boring.  That's so cute.
  
  
• Oh, oh, oh, how I miss Wegmans.  Like I can't even tell you.
  
  
• Also, Tim Horton's should really expand farther in the U.S. 
  
  
• Ohio must be in the middle of a rest stop renovation project, because the Ohio Turnpike has both the worst and the best travel plazas I've encountered in memory.  Seriously - one of them even sold me bland Cinnabons. How do you even do that?
  
  
• Best present: This clock, whose glory cannot be conveyed photographically, made by my amazingly talented uncle.  

He also made this sleigh tea light stand/Japanese vase several years back.

I may have mentioned this fall hasn't been a great one health-wise.  We're heading in the right direction, and mostly free of aches and pains (being able to use my hands more is good), but I'm still feeling kind of ick if I try to do much more than sit around.  But feeling good enough to be tired of doing nothing is a good sign.

Wishing a new year full of health and happiness to all my dear friends!

Look, more kitty.

And Lexi wishes a belated Meow-y Christmas and Happy New Year to: Micky, Sylvia, Megumi, Priscilla, Baker, Archie, Jacob, Phineas, and her favorite cousins, Izzy and Pippi.  And to Betty and Cora, even though cats rule and dogs drool.

Oh, I had homework, didn't I?

I'm finally feeling better and spent the evening decorating for Christmas!  Everything but the tree.

Five more questions:

from Anne in Reno
What do you do to keep from being depressed at the state of the world (as you see it) and the way things are going around you? How do you take control of your environment in a positive manner? 

There is nothing new under the sun.

and

Let us cultivate our garden.

with an occasional dose of

What does it matter?  We're all going to die eventually anyway.

(Which I don't expect anyone else to find as comforting as I do.  Let's agree to chalk it up to, "people are different.")

I take control by shutting out the noise.  I don't always do a particularly good job of it, but I'm learning.

SCB

My question is a three-parter. A) If you could live anywhere at all, where would you live? B) in what style would you live (I don't mean MCM or traditional, I mean opulence or simple or whatever...) C) Why?

A) Either in a decent bungalow apartment in one of the northwest neighborhoods in Chicago, or back in the Fingerlakes, on a hill.  Third choice would be Vermont, but I know I wouldn't like the social scene.

B) General (but not extreme) simplicity - the straightforward, no-nonsense kind, not the back-to-the-earth kind.  Lots of quiet and privacy (what the city would lack in these respects it would make up for in public transit and ready access to ethnic food). Small house in which everything works properly with only things I like inside it.

C) Chicago is the only large city I know where I would actively wish to live; likewise, the physical setting of central NY carries a lot of the right emotional connotations for me, plus the location is convenient.  Pleasant and easy are good.  My lifestyle fantasy is apparently to be like one of those Victorian poetesses who "lived very quietly" with a rich interior life.

Lorijo
Do you really care what kind of car you drive?

Not exactly.  As with many other things in my life, my affections lie with whatever requires a minimum of attention.  Oddly enough, my 9-year old American car with over 150k still more or less fits that bill.  I fancy a hybrid, once they've been around long enough for someone to do a lifecycle analysis that means something.

If we were to go on looks alone, a Mercedes or a Volkswagen (yes, that does sound weird).

Interpreting the question another way...I was given a PT Cruiser as a rental car on a business trip over the summer, and that felt a bit embarrassing.

Christine in DC

"If you were given $250,000 that you had to spend (i.e. no savings, like that old Richard Pryor movie...), how would you spend it?" Let's assume that's after taxes.

Either:

A.  Giving and some very good travel would account for about 50,000.  The other 200,000 would go to purchase of a residence, if the math made sense.  Then the other things I'd like to do would be taken care of by the change in cash flow resulting from having most of my housing expenses suddenly eliminated. 

Or:

B.I'd take off three years completely to study and travel.

Cookbook

What would you be doing with your life right now if you were free of all present constraints (family, money, geography, time, health, etc.)?

I'd be living somewhere in a pleasant little house in near-complete isolation with my cat and books doing the autodidact thing.  I'd venture into the nearby town once a week to replenish supplies and call my mother.


That's not to say I'd want to stay indefinitely, but it's absolutely what I'd be doing right now.  I have hermit fantasies.

Hi.

Just a quick note to say I'm still alive - last week was slightly evil (everything's fine now) and this weekend I was in NY visiting my parents (it was good). I'm just going to need a little more time to regroup, which won't be helped much by working through the holiday weekend (see "last week was slightly evil," above). But I'm still here. And here's the surprisingly effective cell phone picture of the birthday cake I got at home on Saturday. Apparently, I'm not yet too old to get the correct number of candles. The lights weren't out, it's just that my parents' dining room is the darkest place in North America. It's the only room I've ever seen with a hardwood ceiling.

CT - D4 - Part 1

Heart
Reach back into your memory for a dish that has sentimental ties. Find a recipe, buy ingredients, make it, photograph it, and tell us the story. Unlike your "missing dish," this does not need to be something you've ever prepared in the past.

Sentimental. Obviously that's kind of a hard one for me, but I promise to do my best. I can't think of any foods to which I feel especially strong ties, except for those I particularly like on their own merits.

When I think of food that people get sentimental about, it's generally stuff like:

• Grandma's cooking. With all due respect, neither of my grandmothers can/could cook particularly well. The one who is still living has long been under the impression that you can boil a chicken in plain water and eat the results all by themselves. And you'll never believe it, but I've just this second made the connection to why my grandfather so enjoyed dining out.

• Mom's cooking. I list these separately because I think they're definitely two distinct concepts in the American psyche. There's nothing wrong with my mother's cooking, but I don't have particularly strong feelings about it, and I'd have to guess that neither does she, since she's one of the few people with less capacity for sentimentality than I have (though she's more naturally receptive to it in other people than I am, which confused me terribly for the longest time). I'm sure she cooked with sufficient variety, but whenever I try to remember what she cooked when I was growing up, I can only remember two or three dishes, one being pasta. Oddly enough, the rest of my immediate family, including Mom, suffers from the same amnesia.
  

• Special occasion food. Like Thanksgiving dinner. I hate Thanksgiving, in part because it tries to be emotionally manipulative, but mostly because the collective hysteria over roast turkey (of which I'm not very fond) and the inevitable excess (which I think is supposed to be the attractive part) are maddening. (My father loves the traditional feast, but concedes to my ambivalence by referring to it as "The American Festival of Beige Foods.")

• Nostalgic food from some special place. Ballpark hotdogs. Swimming pool popsicles.

Yeah. I've got nothing like that. But now that I've satisfied my basic psychological needs by analyzing sentimentality, I can move on.

So what do I have? I feel some connection to these, probably because they have their on stories:

Chocolate Pretzels

When you move a lot, really weird things can go missing. Once, it was three of my mother's Christmas cookie recipes. Only three out of the dozen or so in the collection, despite the fact that they're all kept together in one place in the recipe box.

The most beloved of the missing recipes was for "Chocolate Pretzels." - not chocolate covered pretzels (everybody knows those are a form of narcotic that comes from Trader Joe's), but pretzel-shaped cookies. The recipe was complicated and thus not easily recreated, but I knew it contained:

• ground almonds
• ground chocolate chips
• cinnamon and some other spices
• orange zest

The fall I was home after graduating from college, I spent a lot of time on the web searching recipes, trying to find this one. I came up with about 20 variations on search terms to look for chocolate, chocolate-spice, or chocolate-orange-spice cookies that could be shaped (not rolled, dropped, or spritzed). Of course, my mother found my strategy eccentric. "They're called Chocolate Pretzels!" At any rate, I found nothing suitable.

The next fall, I was away from home and got to experiment - I was definitely going to recover these one way or another. Unfortunately, my first-principles knowledge of baking chemistry wasn't good enough to help me go about it in an orderly way. The first few rounds came out looking like something out of the litter box, actually. I finally decided that the texture of the original recipe was probably most like that of biscotti that have only been through the first baking. Bingo. Searching on those grounds, I quickly found something adaptable, and the results pass very well for the real thing, if I say so myself. Unfortunately, the scale at which I achieved success makes...a lot of cookies. You can definitely halve it, if you can figure out a way to add 2-and-a-half eggs.

Chocolate Spice Pretzels

Combine:

• 1.5 c. finely chopped almonds
• 2 c. finely chopped chocolate chips
• 2 t. baking powder
• 2 t. ground cinnamon
• 1/4 t. ground allspice
• 4 c. flour

In a large bowl beat 5 eggs until fluffy.

To eggs, add and blend well:

• 2 c. sugar
• 1/2 c. melted butter
• 1 T. grated orange peel

Stir flour mixture into liquid to form dough.

Form into pretzel shapes (roll small balls into snakes and twist into pretzels).

Bake on greased sheet at 350F 8-10 minutes.

Cool and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Barbecue

My mother is from North Carolina, and in North Carolina there is an extremely important dish called "barbecue." Barbecue, and listen closely, because this is important, has nothing whatever to do with barbecue sauce, the thick, brown, ketchup-based substance revered here in the upper midwest as if it had sacramental properties. No, the proper sauce is a vinegar-based with paprika and cayenne pepper, which is applied to the form of hog meat that anywhere else in the country would be called "pulled pork," a name that, to my ear, will never not sound irredeemably dopey.

Properly, the hog is spit-roasted for two days in a contraption the size of a schoolbus, but that's not a realistic option for apartment-dwellers. So I figured out how to reproduce it in the slow cooker.

Anecdote: Once when I made this, I was obviously not paying very close attention to my grocery shopping, and accidentally purchased a picnic roast, rather than...whatever other cut of roast I had intended. It had the skin still attached. And if that weren't bad enough...the pig had a tattoo. Ew.

Barbecue

Ok...went to add that recipe and it's missing. Fortunately, I know Mom has a copy. Basically, you make a dry rub with cayenne pepper and chili powder and seasoned salt, treat a large pork roast, slow cook it with a little bit of the sauce, which is, I think, cider vinegar, cayenne pepper, paprika, red pepper flakes, and brown sugar... When it's cooked, shred it with a fork and douse with the rest of the sauce.

This must be served with cole slaw, but only if you make your own dressing, and you must use cider vinegar, not white. Ahem.



Veggie Curry

This is something I made a lot my first year on my own, and I think it started my cooking-with-yogurt habit. It's not the only thing I ever ate, or the only thing I tried for the first time then, but it's sort of emblematic of that period for me. It's also really, really good. It comes from Beans chapter of the the much-reviled 1997 edition of The Joy of Cooking - though I concur with many of the criticisms levied against that version (to wit, that it forgoes the start-at-the-top-and-back-to-basics detail characteristic of the earlier versions in favor of an attempt at a different sort of comprehensiveness and that just yields over-complication) it does have some excellent recipes.

I'll try to make this next week - if I do, I'll post the recipe then.

More later.

Bonus Gastronomical Narcissim

Filling out the CT questionnaire has of course triggered all sorts of additional self-reflection as regards food-related issues. This being the internet, of course, tradition dictates that I must transcribe and publish my every stream-of-consciousness for posterity. See below.

Stuff I really, really like.

• Spinach. Including creamed.
  
  
• Mushrooms (on a business trip a couple weeks back, the colleague I was traveling with noted that three of my four dinners were portobello-based).
  
  
• Sandwiches. Big fan.
  
  
• Including hamburgers.
  
  
• Chocolate chip cookies.
  
  
• And ice cream.
  
  
• Veggie pizza (see mushrooms, above).
  
  
• Most shellfish, though I basically don't cook seafood, for no discernable reason.
  
  
• Avocados. Could live on these. Good with shellfish.
  
  
• Hummus. Could eat it with a spoon.
  
  
• Artichoke hearts.
  
  
• Lamb, though it's also something I never cook, I think because I don't know how to eat it other than as "chunk of meat next to some vegetables and potatoes," which is very rarely how I cook or dine.
  
  
• Eggs, all ways. Try them with oregano.
  
  
• Black beans.
  
  
• Indian and Thai cuisines, though I take both mild. I don't really see the attraction of the flavor of pepper/capsaicin spicy - horseradish/wasabi-type spice I much prefer.
  

Stuff I won't be eating, either often or ever.

• Fish. Not shellfish - those are fine - but fish-fish, with scales and fins and gills and whatnot. Tuna, salmon, trout, etc. I don't know if I'm actually allergic in a clinical sense, but I feel ill after eating it, so I don't. Correllary: even when it's very fresh, all fish smells like cat food to me, so even before I started to notice that it disagreed with me, I didn't care for it much.
  
  
• Ham (mostly). This one is weird - the affect on me is similar to that of fish. Other forms of pork aren't implicated, including things like prosciutto and Canadian bacon, which technically are ham. I don't know what the deal is, but it's not my imagination.
  
  
• Pickles. I love them, but they don't agree with me. I guess it's the cucumber factor.
  
  
• The smell of overcooked green beans has always made me gag.
  
  
• Tart fruit. That sour bit under the skin of plums makes my jaw clench up involuntarily. I only buy sweet apples.
  
  
• I'm pretty indifferent to bell peppers and passively avoid them, though I'll eat them if they're put in front of me.
  
  
• Generally speaking, I don't like soup. I feel somewhat self-conscious about this, because if there's any catgory of food so broad that it should include something acceptable for everyone, it's soup. "I don't like soup" is a very different sort of statement from "I don't like green olives," or "I don't like Safeway's house brand soy milk." Soup can be...well, basically anything. Yet, with a very, very small number of exceptions, I never want to eat it.
  

Other

• My mother is from North Carolina; therefore, "barbecue" has nothing whatever to do with "barbecue sauce." This is one thing I find deeply annoying about the midwest, though I recognize the problem is entirely mine.
  
  
• Also, because my mother is from North Carolina, oatmeal is savory, not sweet.
  
  
• Speaking of hot cereal, I believe that grits are underappreciated because people don't know how to cook them. They should be cooked enough that they're eaten stiff, not runny.
  
  
• I remember, when I was a child, bringing grits with us whenever we visited my grandparents in Ohio, because at the time they couldn't often be found that far north. (This was southern Ohio, very near Kentucky - my hillbilly ancestors actually migrated from Kentucky to Ohio because of feuding, like the Hatfields and McCoys. Seriously. And not that many generations ago, either.)
  
  
• I bought grits on my first grocery run when I moved to Chicagoland. The cashier, who was from Louisiana or someplace, raved to us (My Sister the Blond Artist was with me) that she'd never before sold grits to anyone in all the time she'd been working at this particular grocery store.
  
  
• My first year or two living on my own, approximately 90% of the new recipes I tried contained plain yogurt. It wasn't intentional. There are only a couple I still make.
  
  
• I can't turn on my oven in the summertime, even a coldish summertime like this one. My apartment retains temperature extremely well, for the most part, but baking anything, even briefly, heats the entire place to an intolerable degree. This should be my hint to roast chickens all winter, since my heat is electric but cooking gas is included in the rent.
  
  
• I've loved cheese my entire life, except from ages 6-12, when the very thought of it made me sick. I've never known why.
  
  
• I'm not fond of cooking meat, though I'll do it.
  
  
• I've been thinking of this piece I wrote a few years back about grocery shopping in Greater Boston (formerly known on the book blog as "Selfimportantville"). Yet another aspect of life that's easier here (though I do miss being able to pick up a lobster roll in the prepared deli case).
  
  
• I've long had a strange desire to make a batch of bagels from scratch. I doubt I'd ever want to make a second batch, but it's one of those weird things I'd like to try for no particular reason.

Ok. That's enough.

More Childhood

The kid meme breeds.

What childhood habit or passion now seems most absurd?
The most problematic preoccupation was certainly the paranoia about childhood itself.

Related was my near-obsession with enhancing the stupidity of my peers. I wasn't (and still am not) particularly competitive, in the way of having rivalries with the other kids who were up at the top of the heap with me, but I delighted in making the chasm between us and the proletariat as wide as possible. This culminated with a brief period in high school during which I was letting people cheat off me and intentionally feeding them the wrong answers. (Speaking of dumb, they kept coming back. Sadly, my education featured little in the way of academic tracking, which was why I had classes with these people.) This is the sort of thing I should be ashamed of...

What was the first thing you wanted to do when you grew up? Did you do this thing?
I don't recall having a very specific desire one way or the other until high school, when one's thoughts on the topic are expected to become serious, and when I started thinking in the math and science direction in more than a vague sort of way. When I was asked about it as a younger child (Because children always are asked - why is that? Most kids are only aware of maybe a half-dozen professions.) I think I must have claimed "teacher," for lack of a better notion. I do remember people independently suggesting that path, and some of that may have been recognition of native talent that I do know exists and which I exercise in church and volunteer activities. But schoolteacher would probably be the worst possible job for me, as people under 18 still give me hives.

What did you most value doing with your opposite-sex parent? How did this influence you?
Walking and talking. I've always been close to my dad, and of my parents he's the one to value ideation and introspection, so I think I've always made more sense to him. Not that there's anything wrong with my relationship with my mother, but it's significant to their respective characters that his profession (pastor) involves dealing with ideas and life, while hers (librarian) prioritizes categorizing them, wrapping them in plastic, and putting them on shelves.

What's the remark you most resent having had made to you?
Nothing I recall with particularly enduring effects. During childhood, of course, the worst was anything that aimed to pin me with standard expectations for children, as discussed below.

Also in childhood, I was pretty easily crushed by any sort of criticism - I put an awful lot of stake in impression management - and the worst was being criticized for not taking criticism well, which actually happened rather often. This is something else that I more or less just outgrew on a reasonable schedule.

Trend in child-rearing today that annoys you?
This is the kind of question I think is pretty treacherous for childless people to answer - one can't help but have opinions, but chances are high that many of them will be naive. That said, the hyperindulgent helicoptering is troubling...though I would still stand by the truth of this assessment.

Childhood

Wende's community-generated Kidness Meme.

What were you afraid of as a child?

Frogs. They still repulse me.

I also have an irrational terror of being in the same room as someone who's using a knife (like for cooking). Actually, that may not have developed until adolescence (though I don't know why), and I can control it enough to seem normal.

Other than that, I don't remember being afraid of much specifically, in terms of things like the dark or monsters under the bed. I have a dim memory of being afraid of the neighbors' dogs when we lived in South Carolina, but I think my parents might have engineered that, the dogs actually having been dangerous.

A few years later, I recall being slightly afraid of the Soviet Union, of all things, because it seemed mysterious. (The Cold War was pretty icy by the time I was old enough to have global awareness.) And though it was never a fear exactly, I did have the occasional thought along the lines of "I wonder if China's going to carpet bomb us with nukes tomorrow." Or Iranian paratroopers going to infiltrate the Capitol, or whatever. I realize that sounds completely psychotic. But it did puzzle me, after 9/11/01, to hear adults say things like, "I never dreamed this could happen here," when it had seemed to me a perfectly reasonable topic for speculation when I was 8 years old.

Ok, we should move on right now to something that makes me sound less than completely insane...

What were your favorite books as a child? Do you ever reread any of them? If so, how do they hold up? Were there ever any that gave you nightmares, but you had to finish them anyway?

Circa age 3, the being-read-to-from-the-same-picture-books-repeatedly stage, my favorites were:

• Richard Scarry's Picture Dictionary. I was so insistent about this one that it became my parents' go-to baby gift for new parents that they didn't like.
• The Sweet Pickles Books. This was a series available by mail order in the late 70s and early 80s, and featured anthropomorphic animals, most of whom suffered from some sort of pathological compulsion: Very Worried Walrus, Me Too Iguana, Goof-off Goose, Fix-it Camel. These were the ones I recited from memory in the bathtub.

There were also golden books and Dr. Seuss and so forth. Always lots of books.

At the chapter book age there were also always lots of books, but from the early days I especially remember Pooh and Paddington, and The Wind in the Willows, which I call my first favorite book. Mom bought a set of Laura Ingalls Wilder around 2nd grade, which I found to be torture and abandoned after the first two or three - I'm going to blame inborn temperament, because simple-folk and country-folk stories have never managed to gain appeal for me.

I also had a soft spot for how-to books in the elementary years, and for the sort of books that were put out by organizations like National Geographic and were basically the equivalent of a science museum between hardcovers.

As a child, how did you feel about other children? Were your friends mostly your age, mostly older, or mostly non-existent?

Well. As a child I was moderately, though not debilitatingly, shy, something I outgrew in a more or less linear manner over time. I do recall being chastised (or that's how I took it at the time) for hanging out by myself instead of playing more with other kids during recess - that was 1st grade. I also recall that most of my series of "best" friends - in series mostly because of all the moves - were about a year older than me and/or a year ahead in school. I preferred the company of adults in a lot of cases, particularly when in groups of people I didn't know. "There will be kids your age there!" was never the reassurance it was meant to be. And I always wanted to be an only child - it just seemed like it would be so much more convenient. (It's a testimony to the quality of our adult relationship that My Sister The Blond Artist understands me well enough that she gets why I felt this way without being tempted to take it personally.)

I never liked the amount of noise and activity that other children generated, nor the general child-ness. Generally speaking, I hated childhood. Not my childhood, which was basically perfect and completely trauma-free. But childhood in general, and as a concept. It seemed obvious to me from a very early age that being a child was simply inferior to being an adult, and I deeply resented that spending 15-or-so years as (what I perceived to be) a second-class citizen was completely outside my control. So I lived through my entire childhood in a state of low-grade panic about being perceived as a child or being caught engaging in childlike behavior. At the same time, I realized that since I was a child, it was perfectly reasonable for adults to notice the fact, but that didn't make it any more palatable.

I hated asking for things, out of a fear (so maybe this part belongs under question 1) of the answer being no; what could be more childish than not knowing better than to ask for something that your parents wouldn't choose to give you/let you do? (Speaking of parents, this quirk drove mine crazy, and it wasn't until I was much, much older that they found out why I never asked for anything.) I was frequently incensed at being offered something because "all the kids love these." My grandmother was bad about this - I knew she was trying to make my day with something special, but I couldn't help but still be insulted that she would lump me with, and push me to be like, the group of people that I explicitly regarded as the scum of the earth - i.e., those my own age.

And being one of the smart ones, I also knew I had to keep the precociousness under control - certainly precocious wasn't exactly the same as childish, but in my childhood accounting method, they were just two parallel paths to getting oneself laughed at by adults, a.k.a. Real People. So the goal was to be mature and brilliant, so as to minimize the general child-ness of my persona, but not too mature and brilliant, so as to be cute. If I could have come out the other end and landed on actual savant, that would have been ideal, but I knew I wasn't that good, and hated it.

Ok, so much for that whole not-making-Mella-look-crazy thing. For the record, no, I don't know why I didn't turn out to be any more neurotic than I currently am.

What was your favorite toy? Do you wish that you still had it? Do you still have it or have you bought another off eBay?

Toys...I'm sure I had favorites in various seasons, but none stands out to me. I still have my teddy bear, Clarence.

Maybe the next meme should be "What were you like as a teenager?" - that could be scary.

Cars, Car Repair, and the Answer to Last Week's Puzzler

Ok, not really. Just a brief dealership story.

I took my car into the shop yesterday for a number of odds and ends - oil change, break job, a once-over on the AC (which always loses freon over the winter), bad turn signal. Everything that needed to be done totaled up to a bit more than I was hoping, but considering it's an eight-year-old American car approaching 150k with (knock on wood) no engine or transmission problems, ever, I'm not really going to complain.

A colleague drove me back to pick it up and graciously waited in the parking lot to be sure that I would, in fact, be able to get my keys. When I came out of the office, some guy standing on the steps pointed to my coworker in her car and said, in a painfully Chicagoland accent:

I think your daughter is waiting for you.

Coworker is about 25, though she could pass for quite a bit younger and drives an absurdly adorable red hatchback. But, to look at it from an even more traumatic perspective, I can't imagine how delinquent I would have to have been in order to currently have a child old enough to drive.

WT for the Feline-Americans

My parents came to visit me this summer and became infatuated with my cat. Well, perhaps that's overstating it, but certainly they were approval-seeking in the way one does with animals and very young relatives with whom one wishes to cuddle. Anyhow, I knew I'd lost them when, mere weeks, nay, days after meeting her, they bought her a present for my birthday.

Before you suggest it, no, I don't think it's transference of some longing for grandchildren. On the contrary, I think they've embraced the fact that both of their children are entirely too stubborn to get married as reassurance that they're not old enough to be grandparents. As My (little) Sister the Blond Artist is nearly 26, this is obviously not true; additionally, by the unfortunate sociological standards of Rustingham, New York, where they live, they're plenty old enough to be great-grandparents of a fourth-grader. (They're under 55. It's just that kind of town.)

Cuter than a grandchild, and no diapers!

All that to say that dear Lexi has been invited to the family estate for Christmas. Though we haven't traveled together for any such distance, her temperament has settled such that I don't foresee it being a problem. In preparation, though, I did buy her a collar and ID tag, figuring I'd better give her a little time to get used to wearing them. And with that last idea, I was decidedly on target. Two problems:

1. She's very small, even for Siamese, who run lean. I'm not sure of her exact weight, but it's under seven pounds. I thought I might have to go back to the pet store for a kitten collar, but the one I bought adjusts down just small enough.
   
   
2. She is also, by vehemently held personal conviction, a nudist.

She was not enthusiastic about this collar idea. Not at all. After a great deal of vigorous head-shaking, she tried to back out of it by marching backward around the entire navigable perimeter of the apartment. In the coup de grace, she managed to slide her jaw under the collar, but then couldn't get it any farther off, and so was wearing it as a gag. This was a crisis. I was on the phone with my dad at the time, and had to tell him, "Hold on, the cat is ramming her head against the wall." (I did manage to adjust it down smaller after that, so I think we can avoid that problem in future).

Pictured: Cat, Torture Device.

Fortunately, we've had better luck since then, so I think that in a month we'll be all set to drive across Ohio.

Election Reflection

The only reflection I care to make about the current election is, "Thank God, it's over!" (Specifically referring to the campaign season, in case there was any question.)

But I can reflect with some nostalgia, related only to the marking of time, on some past elections:

• The first current event/news item I recall being aware of and (nominally) understanding was the 1984 presidential campaign. I turned five a couple months before the election. I knew who Reagan was, and, rather morbidly for a kindergartner, remember knowing that he had been shot at some point.
  


• The '88 election happened when I was in the fourth grade, and we did an election cycle simulation in class. The candidates were dinosaurs. The parties were Carnivore and Herbivore. I campaigned for Triceretops (A Cabbage In Every Pot). I don't recall who won. I do recall that my teacher wore yellow eye shadow.
  


• We were living in Italy at the time of the 1992 election, and our Italian landlord and his, erm, dubiously connected family showed up at our front door at around 7:00 the morning after, bewildered and asking how on earth Bill Clinton had won the election. I still don't know what he found so puzzling about it - they were definitely expressing confusion, not disapproval.
  


• 1996 was the fall of my senior year of high school. We were living outside San Francisco at the time. The political climate of that part of the universe really can't be accurately described using only the written word. I got into a mischievous habit of rhapsodizing about the brilliance of Joseph McCarthy in my civics class just to horrify my peers. Fortunately, the teacher, who couldn't have leaned any farther left without actually standing on his head, got a kick out of it. At the same time, I was driving my mother's '67 Mustang to school each day. Great car, but it had a dinky AM radio that only received KSFO. Let me just tell you, if you've got a taste for the utterly bizarre, you must sample San Francisco-based conservative talk radio.
  


• The first presidential election in which I was old enough to vote was in 2000. One of my iconic memories of my college years is of sitting on my roommate's bed (she was from Florida, ironically), watching the NBC news on her computer until the small hours of the morning, cooing maternally over how pathetically exhausted all the poor anchors looked in rolled-up shirt sleeves and tie-less.
  


• I watched the late coverage of the 2004 election in an empty hotel bar in Cambridge, where I'd gone to meet up with a college friend who was in town on business. All ideological considerations aside, I'm absolutely certain, that, had Senator Ketchup won that one, I would have been driven certifiably insane within two years by the news media's incessant crooning over how young John Edwards is! I certainly hope I receive that kind of affirmation when I'm 51...
  


• Speaking of Mr. Edwards, the gentleman he succeeded in the Senate has the Best Name Ever.
  

• 2008, it seems, will go down in history as the year I got sicker than a dog, left work at 10 am, and therefore got to vote with all the senior citizens, hoping my vision was straight enough that I actually voted for my intended candidates. On the other hand, I stopped being able to tell most of the candidates apart months ago. (My dad's line: "McCain is the guy who hangs out with that lady who looks like your mom." Which hadn't occurred to me before, but...she kinda does.)

Happy election day. I'm going back to bed now.

Guilty

In retribution for comparing her to John McCain, Anne has tagged me to report on my guilty pleasures. Oddly, I found this kind of difficult. So if my guilty pleasures don't sound guilty enough, please put it down to poor memory.

Music: I don't think I have a deep passion for anything especially humiliating, but I have a higher tolerance for stuff like ABBA, The Carpenters, Barbra Streisand and Air Supply than it's generally thought advisable to admit. My real guilty pleasure is a tendency to listen to the same song as many as 100 times in a row when it strikes my fancy. I love living alone.

Food: My guilty pleasure is "easy." And chocolate chip cookies. Also, I'll occasionally develop obsessive cravings that last for days. It could be for hot chocolate or macaroni and cheese, but it could just as easily be for hummus or creamed spinach. But it's probably not good to just eat spinach for days on end.

Movies: Honestly, I've got nothing. I can't watch action movies because all the noise and motion annoys me. As best I can tell, I don't like bad movies. I'm probably forgetting something.

Books: This will sound obnoxious, but if I feel guilty, it's for reading literary criticism rather than actual literature. I don't do much in the way of genre fiction these days. I used to read The Cat Who mysteries, because the early ones were reasonably good, even with a few truly bizarre plot twists. But they turned awful a good long time ago and are certainly ghost written now. What I read now for unadulterated fun is Alexander McCall Smith and Wodehouse. Not Tolstoy, but not especially embarrassing either.

TV: Ooh. Um. I watched the second half of American Idol this year. I only have basic cable at home (and only that because I'm right under an O'Hare flight path, and would only get reception every other minute with an antenna) so my options aren't that interesting. But when I'm staying at a hotel or my parents' house, I tend to gorge on HGTV. I don't know what that tendency would look like if I had regular access to that programming, because it all starts to look the same really quickly.