Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

This statement is sadly true. I wish it wasn't. I'm not sure what to do about it. My mom is gone, and that makes me furious. My family has little money and we're not really as close as many other families, and that makes me furious, too. And my dad is limited in a way that makes me feel lots of different things. He hoards things in his bedroom. My sister thinks it's because he has very little that he has control over, so he holds on to what he has.  This includes things it doesn't make sense to hoard, like shampoo and conditioner.  He won't let my sister take them to the bathroom when his are empty; he makes her buy more. On Thursday my sister went into his room and saw that he'd taken some Christmas cards from the large pile in the living room. They were lying on his bedside table, neatly stacked, each one signed with my dad's shaky left hand. Much the way swearing is a remaining reflex of speech, his signature, signed in his non-dominant hand, is a...

When my mom died, I felt completely lost and totally incapable of figuring out what to do next, but I had no doubts about what to do first.  Oddly enough, I knew I needed a journal and a little black dress.  The first was where I was going to write down all my memories about my mom so that I wouldn't lose them.  The second was to wear when I gave her eulogy.  When times are hard, I like to look awesome.  It makes me feel more put together than I really am, and I knew I'd need all the help I could get to make it through the memorial service. That's neither here nor there.  Right after my mom died, I wrote in the journal a lot, as many of the good things as I could remember.  And then I put it aside for a while.  And now I've picked it up again.  Except now I'm writing down all the things I left out before.  Things that in the past I've had a hard time talking about, much less committing to paper.  But the last time I picked up the ...

Meringues are easy to make - you just need patience and preferably a standing mixer because then it does all the work and you just have to show up at the end to sprinkle in confectioners sugar like fairy dust.  So, my recipe: Ingredients 2 egg whites 1 tsp. vanilla extract (or any other extract) 1/8 tsp. cream of tartar 1/8 tsp. salt 3/4 cup confectioners sugar (1/4 cup more on hand) Couple handfuls chocolate chips (or nuts or coconut or peppermint) Here's what you do with them:    1. Separate the egg whites from the yolks fresh from the fridge because cold eggs separate easiest.  However, if you start beating the whites right away, they really don't do their best work. Let the whites sit for about 30 minutes to give them time to get to room temperature.  Use a metal or glass bowl and be sure that it's as clean as humanly possible.  Any traces of oil or grease and you can beat those things to death and they'll never foam the way you want them to....

Last night I hosted an Alie & Georgia cocktail birthday party. We went from 8 to 2 and tried 8 different cocktails. There was also ice cream cake and a hookah bc, well, I throw good parties, and Jeremy deserves nothing less. There would have been a fire pit, but something, something sleet. The fact that we only got to try 8 means there can be more Alie & Georgia parties in future bc there are so many left!  I would have included more pictures, but we were, uh, too distracted to take them.  And now, a review: Drunken Donuts Our first cocktail of the evening, I decided to serve these as little shots with a Spudnut garnish bc they are 2 parts alcohol to 1 part coffee. They contain staggering quantities of espresso vodka, coffee liqueur, and chocolate liqueur. A shot was about as much as you need, despite the recommended serving of a mug! of the stuff. This was our first hint that Alie & Georgia must be lushes with liver related super powers.  On a side no...

No, I did not finish the Tough Mudder.  Let's just get that awkward moment over with.  However, we did about half of it, and then I couldn't bend my knees without crying.  Before that, we engaged in a some outlandish behavior. We trudged up a ski slope I wouldn't ski down.  The hardcore kids were trudging too, so booyah.  We ran across some hay bales.  It was really fun. We jumped into, dunked under, and had to have people help us out of an industrial sized garbage can full of ice water.  That was the dumbest thing I've ever done, hands down.  I remember coming out the other side of the dunk, seeing someone, and saying, "How do I get out?" but I was talk-ing real-ly slow-ly.  I think I froze my brain. We went over a rope fence, and Nj was first.  This was after the ice water and she couldn't really feel her feet, so she was scared to go over.  On the other side, there were two shirtless beautiful Crossfitting men, so in a stunn...

Back in April, Sociological Images posted about some amazing graphics that very nicely show the level of economic inequality there is in the US.  At the time, I glanced over them briefly - it was a lot of stuff I'd seen / read about before, so I didn't get too blown away. However, given the OWS protests, something made me go back and look at the post more carefully, and I was surprised that the first sentence reveals that the source of the data for these images is The Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality . I was fascinated to learn that such a thing exists and it's a resource worth checking out if you want to know more about these issues than you're getting from the mainstream media, or if you need to explain to someone else what these are. Many of the statistics that OWS protestors are citing have either been generated by the center or are from there originally and there are a ton of additional resources there, including, but not limited to: Quic...

I almost never used to wear make-up, and I'll admit to being conflicted about using it now. On the one hand, it's fun and makes me feel girly and I like the way it makes me look. Also, it's necessary to any kind of adorable 40s/50s look, of which I'm a fan. On the other hand, I live in fear of getting to the point where I'm more comfortable with my face with makeup than without. The embracing of a kind of artificial, post-war, exaggerated feature beauty brings with it its own set of questions. However, given all that, I still gain a perverse amount of joy from watching the Jane Marie How to Be a Girl videos. Her attitude is hilarious and I think I like them bc she seems to be saying, "I'm doing this crap and it's fun and if you want to do it too, that's cool, but if you don't, that is also cool. Also, playing with colored eyeshadow is fun and you can put almost anything on your face, and if you work it, people won't think you're crazy...

Swiffer used to have a series of Wet Jet commercials in which a sad mop romantically (and vaguely stalkerishly) pursued a woman who just loves to mop.  So, like every other cleaning commercial the person cleaning is a woman, which is pretty standardly sexist, but now we have introduced a weird wooing dynamic into how we choose our cleaning products. And now the new commercials have personified dirt, mud, dust, etc. as women who are waiting to be picked up by a Swiffer product.  They've been left behind y other cleaning products and are now just waiting around in cracks and crevices for love to come find them.  Once again, the Swiffer product is the hero, the romantic champion, the alpha male of cleaning products.  It makes me never want to buy another Swiffer product ever again.

I haven't written much lately and it's been because I've been thinking a lot but about things I didn't really want to share with the internet.  I have been thinking about possibility and self-limitation.  While definitely not the impetus, there's a You Are Not So Smart article about the Benjamin Franklin Effect in which you ask someone for a favor and it makes them like you even if they didn't before.  Like most things on You Are Not So Smart, it's about mental limitations, our own and others'.  Which leads to a pre-revelation: I'm 30 and I'm still not really sure what I want to do with my life.  There's not revelatory because I'm not sure I've ever known what I want to do with my LIFE, but the big difference is that I used to feel like no matter what I actually did, not knowing made me a failure.  I mentally backed myself into a tiny little corner where the only options were what I'm doing (i.e. a life) or one path to a PhD an...

Someone yesterday asked me what I wanted when it comes to all this love business.  I wrote the following.  It seemed like the kind of thing I'd want to hold on to. I can tell you what I want, and then what would happen in some fantasy land version of the world. I fret about things, about making people happy.  I want someone who I make happy by just being myself, someone I can be nice to.  Someone who will be nice to me.  Someone who I can look out for and they'll look out for me.  I want to be important to someone who I like enough that they're also important to me.  I want someone I can respect for their values, intelligence, ambition, and good sense.  I want someone to negotiate a life with.  I want someone who doesn't think their preferences are more important than mine and is therefore willing to explain their desires to me while also being willing to listen to what I want.  I want to have kids with someone.  I wan...

I got all excited about this girl , rocking her bodacious bod in light of American Apparel's condescending and insulting call for plus size lady models.  And then today, I was all happy with Rolling Stone for an excellent article about voting, and this is the bullshit I see: I get it!  He's supposed to regret it because she's fat.  Right, right, obviously.  Fuck you, stupid product I'd never use anyway.  As my friend Becky said, "She should regret it because he's a douchebag."

Normajean and I were mermaids this weekend.  Here's a preview of the edited images.  The talented Guillermo Ubilla did the picture taking and editing.  Normajean did makeup and many of the props/jewelry.  I made the costumes and was responsible for hair.  The full edited set will, at some point, be posted on Guillermo's blog , which is, I think, moving here soon.

When last we left our heroine, she was waiting for her bread to rise.  Rawr.  After 2 hours, the dough had expanded into this somewhat gooey mess:  I took that, split it into four small balls, and sprinkling generously with flour, you sort of fold the edges in on itself a bunch of times.  The dough at this point was a little fragile.  I pulled on one of the balls a little too vigorously and broke the dough on the outside, but it seemed fine.  These go onto oiled baking sheets, where you let them sit and rise for another 2 hours. Pre rising: Then into the oven.  Halfway through you get to open the oven, releasing the smell of HEAVEN ON EARTH, so that you can brush them with olive oil and sprinkle them with rosemary and kosher salt.  After a scant 20 minutes of baking, you take them out and you, well I, have bread. I would have taken a picture of the bread when I sliced it, but the first boule disappeared fairly quickly into my gaping maw....

If I had known how satisfying this whole process would be, I'd have done it a lot sooner.  I remember liking baking bread in Nicaragua, but I haven't really done it since I've been back, so I've decided it's the fall of bread.  It will also have to be the fall of the gym, but that's okay, as I've discovered that doing things with my hands and body is about the best thing for my overactive mind. I used this recipe: Almost-Famous Rosemary Bread , because I love rosemary bread, no special cookware was required, and the "makes 4 small loaves" meant it would be easy to give some away. The ingredients: Your first step is to let the yeast get started doing its thing.  Yeast is, well, amazing.  You give it some sugar, a little warm water and it starts respiring and the next thing you know you have CO 2 foam and rising bread.  I had a conversation with someone yesterday and it was apparent they'd never seen yeast.  This is what yeast looks like: ...

The next time I decide vacations aren't important, I need to find this post and read it.  Five days of beach camping has set me to rights in a way that I could not have anticipated.  Part of it was the truly wonderful group of people I had the good fortune to be camping with, who made all the other things possible. We were at First Landing State Park, which is on the bay and lovely.  We had mimosas, coffee, bacon and eggs for breakfast, assorted delicious things for lunch, and grilled things for dinner.  Burgers, hot dogs, bratwurst, beans, veggies, smores.  I felt like I was eating happiness.  Normally the feelings I eat are less positive. There were some games, the beach every day, sand burying, mud throwing, a bamboo and towel lean-to - even dolphins.  Yes, dolphins.  And we were there for the earthquake, lying in the low wet sand and it turned into jello under us. At night we sang around the campfire, talked through whatever ailed us, an...

I think this may have something to do with my general failure as a person, but anyway... I was working my way through the July-August Utne Reader, and I have to say that it never fails to make me think, which is, I guess, the point of reading it.  I'm not done yet, but I have some thoughts.  Really, one thought, two articles.  I express ire at the first one here.   The first, which is simpler to explain, is about to Matt Sutherland's Spirituality and Health  article, "You're Grounded: Connecting with the earth can cure chronic pain - and stop insomnia."  I don't generally read Spirituality and Health , as I feel that it is filled with woo, but the Utne is an aggregator, so you get all kinds, which I usually like.  However, I am very angry at this article. The general premise is that Clint Ober discovered that we are exposed to electromagnetic fields (EMFs), and that the only appliances that do not create these fields are grounded appliances. ...

I write about my mom a lot, primarily because of how close we were and because it's easier to write about someone who you know can't read what you're writing.  Also, my relationship with my dad has always been... complicated. Yesterday I was scrubbing a grill and baking ribs and doing yard work and I had one of those moments when I thought my mom might be really proud of me.  She gave me a kind of independence that lets me believe I can do just about anything that I can Google instructions for.  And I also realized that being perpetually single is made infinitely easier by having had a mother who made it clear that I don't need a man to clean the gutters. Today I've been thinking about the ways having my dad in particular made me who I am.  I'm watching baseball, which I love because of him.  I played softball specifically so that we'd have something to talk about other than fishing.  He and mom are both responsible for my ability to fix things, for my ...

★★★★ Loved it.  I read The Girl Who Stopped Swimming  and felt kind of meh about it, but this book won a number of awards, so I decided to give Joshilyn Jackson another try.  I'm so glad I did.  The characters in this book are so incredibly real, so real that the whole time I was reading the book, I kept imagining the characters as people I know.  I couldn't help myself.  In one particular instance, it's a bit painful, but more on that later. Our heroine, Nonny Frett is between things, in about as many ways as you can imagine.  She's not quite divorced, but definitely not single.  She travels back and forth on a regular basis between where she lives in Athens and Between, where her family lives.  She loves Fisher, her great-niece like a mother, but hasn't really stepped up to be like a parent to her.  I identified with Nonny so strongly.  She's so torn between all these different places and things and parts of herself, ideas abou...

★ Why is chick lit so annoying?  Why are books aimed at women or about women usually about them coming into themselves or of themselves or with themselves or any of these things in the company of other women in such a way that you are immediately supposed to feel a camaraderie with every other woman over how awesome women are?  That's why I don't normally read this stuff. I think I have a healthy appreciation for female friendships - I'm not very good at making them, so when I have them, I try to treasure them.  And I also have an incredible respect for the self-journey, the one you have to go through to grow up.  However, how hard is it to write a book in which a woman is just a person that stuff happens to?  In books about men, they go on adventures, and at no point in the book does the man stop to think, Am I awakening?   No, because he's awake.  While thinking of his friends, does he stop to ponder, Dude, I am so happy to be here and ...

The books I've read that fulfill the Southern Lit Challenge: The Mermaid Chair - Sue Monk Kidd Between, Georgia - Joshilyn Jackson

★★★★ I couldn't understand what the big deal is about this book, right up until I read it, that is.  People who love it, really love it.  Now I'm one of them. Yes, the characters are rabbits, and that might lead you to believe it's a children's book.  Assume that, and you miss out on some really amazing fiction. By making the characters rabbits, Adams has the option of giving them their own history and mythology.  It also makes it somewhat magical, in that it forces us to think about what other layers of existence are occurring alongside our own.  However, having rabbits as heroes and villains doesn't limit the story in any way. The rabbits are real characters from the very beginning.  There are leaders and followers, bullies and friends, prophets and warriors.  Some rabbits are as ingenious as others are stupid.  Throughout the book (which comes in at a healthy 476 pages), you really start to identify with the characters.  I think Bi...

★★ It's not that it was bad - it just wasn't much of anything.  It's reasonably witty and entertaining.  The satire of zombies seeking "human" rights, is clever, but Zombies doesn't really delve into anything deep enough to be more than a quick light read.   This counts toward the 100+ Challenge .

When I was married to Olivier, I was really unhappy.  Depressed, unsure of who I was, not sure how to find out, in over my head doing things that were unsatisfying and leading to dead ends and more places I didn't want to be.  I was miserable, and only part of it had to do with Olivier.  We'd get in these fights, and he'd say, "Why can't you just be happy?"  His voice was pleading, laden with confusion and anguish.  As my husband, he thought it was his job to make me happy, and if I wasn't, then surely it was all his fault.  Our marriage was part of the problem, but it was symptom, not cause.  I had a lot to figure out. I'm much happier now.  Even when I hate my job, there's value in what I do and what I'm learning.  My family always seems to be on the brink of disaster and I often feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders, like if I let the tension out, I wouldn't know how to pick everything back up again.  But I also don'...

Tonight I'm thinking of human children as small animals raised in the packs we call families who eventually grow up and set out on their own.  They seek out new territory, interact with members of strange other packs, meet potential mates, and start new packs of their own.  In this respect, I feel like I've gone feral.  I have friends and in that sense I have a pack of my own, but it's more like I have my own territory (my house) and we venture into common social areas to visit and provide emotional respite.  I forget what it's like to have people living in close proximity to me, in my territory.  I forget how satisfying it is to let your guard down, to learn and teach from each other, to provide the type of companionship that only time and familiarity make possible.  When I visit our family's territory, curl up with a pack member or two, and we take the time to lick each other's metaphorical wounds, I realize how much I miss it. Today was a great day. ...

This is to keep track of my Foodie Book Challenge.  I'm supposed to read 7-9 books. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake  - Aimee Bender

★★★★ I loved it.  Love, love, loved it.  The narrator, a girl named Rose, can taste the emotions in food.  Any book that starts with an usual idea like will have to try hard to screw it up.  Aimee Bender does the opposite.  She turns it into a tremendous story, not just of Rose, but of her entire family.  Her brother and father, who have their own strange powers, her sort of love story with her brother's best friend, her mother's affair.  The central fantastical premise becomes a lens through which the story of an otherwise normal family is told. The writing is lively, the characters are sympathetic, and the story moves at a pace fast enough to keep you interested.  I also like that you root for Rose, not because she's special, but because she's likable.   One of my favorite parts of the book was when she discovers her ability, she performs a series of experiments to find out if what she's experiencing is real.  She tests foods. ...

★★★★ I'm a sucker for any book by a Deborah (my momma's name).  Even so, I'm happy to be hooked on this series. It reminds me of the Outlander series somewhat.  There's time travel.  There's fantasy.  There's romance. The supporting characters are interesting, too.  The vampire characters have a kind of world weariness that I've always imagined people who've been alive for hundreds of years must have.  The witches are regular people, and the fact that there's a lesbian couple doesn't get any more attention than it deserves, which is refreshing. This book counts toward the 100+ Challenge , and the Chunkster Challenge .

This post is to keep track of the Haruki Murakami Reading Challenge.  I'm on the hook for 3 books. After Dark  - Haruki Murakami

★ ★ Nothing spectacular here.  It was a quick, fun, easy read.  I liked that Marcy ended up starting her own business, but that was about the only positive I could find in terms of messages about women in general.   I hated that in order for Marcy to be happy, she had to end up with a different Mr. Right.  But even so, whatever, that's fine.  The worst was that she met him, slept with him, and they broke up.  Then later she ran into him again, "but this time [she] didn't jump straight into bed with him."  I can only presume that her holding out was the secret to her relationship success this time around.  Well, okay.  See also: gross. It wasn't painful to read, but it definitely reminded me why I don't normally read this kind of stuff. This counts toward the 100+ Reading Challenge .

★ ★ ★ The first Murakami I read was A Wild Sheep Chase , and I really, really, really didn't like it.  It just seemed absolutely ridiculous to me.  I've revisited it, and it's still not my favorite.  However, I think I get more about what he's going for now.  He's used a similar technique in all the novels of his I've read: he has two worlds, one that is real and "normal" and another that is surreal and otherworldly.  The other world is not imaginary, but rather a realm that we don't usually get to see.  In After Dark , the imaginary world is one in which Eri Asai is asleep and we are somehow watching her sleep.  Well, more specifically, we are watching someone watch her sleep.  I had kind of a problem with the way he set this scene.  We're supposed to be almost like a camera on a boom, whizzing around the space, changing angles.  I think he does this to make the situation seem stranger and more foreign than it is, but to me it just...