How to Prepare for an Interview: Four Tips No One Tells You

As I've prepared for interviews over the last few weeks, I've done everything I'm supposed to: I've practiced answering common interview questions, practiced my behavioral interview stories, and learned a great deal about the companies I'm interviewing with.

But I've also learned that, no matter what answers I prep, the most important part of a successful interview is being mentally prepared. Here are my five most important tips for mentally preparing for a great interview:

1.  Loosen Your Tongue: Whether you're an extrovert or an introvert, it's important to get yourself warmed up before the interview. Talk to yourself out loud, practicing your answers to common interview questions again and again. This will loosen your tongue and prepare you to think on your feet. Remember that interviewers will remember your conduct more than what you say: no matter what, being eloquent and quick will make your answers have a lot more impact.
2. Adjust Your Attitude: You should always approach an interview with the attitude that you're visiting the office to meet potential colleagues and friends. If you go into the interview thinking that your interviewer is trying to test you or find your flaws, you can become overly nervous, quiet, and even defensive (and these are never good traits for an interviewee to have!). Go into the interview room wanting to build a relationship with your interviewers; doing so will help you reduce your anxiety and come off as confident and personable.
3. Be Yourself: Focus on showing the interviewer that you're a real person. Feel free to tell a story, tell a joke, and be friendly. If you keep the conversation positive, light, and sincere, your interviewers will see you as more than just a job candidate--they'll start to see you as a real person and potential co-worker.
   
4. Stay on Message: No matter what questions you're asked in an interview, you should have a message that you're completely focused on delivering. That message pertains to why you're different from all the other applicants: do you work harder than anyone else? do you have unique ideas about how you could improve the company? will you do a great job because of talents X, Y, and Z? No matter what questions your interviewer asks, you should take any opportunity to relay your message about what makes you unique and desirable. Not only will this ensure that your interviewer knows exactly what you're about, but "staying on message" can keep you focused during an interview.

If you follow these tips, you're sure to come off as the confident, prepared, and positive employee that your interviewer is looking for!

Learning HTML

When I was in junior high, my gifted class teacher was always trying to make her students into amateur computer programmers. In 1996, she thought that computers were The Future (and she was right, of course), so she thought that all of us smart little kiddies should go out into the world and become rich computer programmers. She made us all spend one period a week writing DOS programs on an ancient green screen Apple computer.

It looked something like this.

I staunchly repressed any memory of this time of my life, except for how much I hated it.

But I've been learning HTML for a few weeks now, and, surprisingly, I sort of love it. HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language," and it's the language that most Web pages are written in. If you've never messed with it, it sounds really impressive and complicated and fancy, but it's really not. It's fun and pretty intuitive, once you know the basics of the language.

I like learning HTML for a few reasons. First, the book I'm using is great. Charlie recommended it: it's called Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML. It teaches you all the basics of HTML, CSS, and XHTML, and it does so with lots of exercises, frequent repetition, plenty of diagrams, and a writing style that's humorous and casual.

The awesome Head First HTML book I'm using.

The Head First books are supposed to be "Brain-Friendly" and to make learning a new programming language intelligible, fun, and easy. Fortunately, their system is definitely working for me--I'm actually remembering everything I learn from week to week (which is more than I can say for all those history classes I took in high school).

Second, learning HTML makes me appreciate the complexity of the Internet. I've used the Web for so long that I take most of it for granted. But the more I learn about HTML and the quirks of Web browsers, the more I respect the people who make really good Web sites. To write a good Web site, I think that a programmer has to be both compulsively detail-oriented and capable of planning ahead and seeing the big picture. It's hard to do, and they definitely get paid well for a reason!

Third, learning HTML is a completely different form of mental exercise. I'm used to crafting words into texts that are flexible and depend on themselves for their internal logic. For example, there are no rules about what makes a good poem; the only rule is that each word and line in the poem must contribute to the whole, that each part must follow the rules and structure that the poem creates for itself. So poetry (and most forms of writing) is about relative harmony, not correctness.

My HTML for one of the Head First exercises.

Writing HTML, on the other hand, is about perfect correctness according to what the Web browser expects. Every element and tag has to be correct and without typos (leaving out a single < or " or = or / can make a whole element fail!). It's strict, and I love that. I enjoy it in the same way that I enjoy doing math: it doesn't come easily to me, but it does make me think in a new way, which gives my mind a healthy workout.

Fourth, I love the excitement of loading a new page into my browser. I never know if it's going to look right or not. I type a change into my editor, click the save icon, open the page in my Web browser, and then wait with baited breath: Will it load? Will the images appear? Will the link be active?

One of my Head First projects. Each image is a thumbnail that links to another page.

Having a page open perfectly is kind of a rush. It's like magic: you write this file that looks like a jumble of half-words and symbols, but when the page loads, it transforms into a real live Web site. I love it, and Charlie (who works full-time as a Web developer) says he feels the same way when he tests a site for the first time.

Right now, I've only made exercises out of the Head First book, and I haven't dabbled in style at all. But who knows? Maybe one day I'll get to experience to rush of making an entire Web site that's functional and pretty!

What I'm Reading: McCarthy, Snyder

Charlie recommended Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian to me months and months ago. He's read it three or four times, and I can see why. It's an amazing book.

It's taken me quite awhile to get through it, though. The language is a little difficult (McCarthy is famous for avoiding punctuation), but the book's most challenging aspect is its violence. Set in 1849, the novel is dark and troubling and casually gory; scalps and blood fly constantly as a troupe of hired killers hunt Indians tribes along the Mexican-American border. McCarthy is preoccupied with war not as an incident but as a natural state of man. His characters roam deserts and scrub lands killing and being killed, caring little for why they do so.

But beyond the gore, McCarthy's imagery is startlingly beautiful, and his characters grow increasingly symbolic as the book progresses. In its final pages, the book transforms from murderous picaresque into something more allegorical, more profound. Even though I cringed my way through all 300 pages of its relentlessly senseless violence, McCarthy's novel provides more than enough intellectual heft to make me love it, in spite of its dark view of human nature.

I've also been reading Gary Snyder's Axe Handles. I've never read Snyder before, and, to be honest, I'm not sure that I will again. The book as a whole was disappointing. There were too many flat spots throughout, and too many poems that felt lazy or sentimental. I don't know if this is just one of Snyder's weaker collections, or whether it is characteristic of his usual work.

But there were a few moments in the book that I loved. Snyder is at his best when describing nature's fine, peculiar details. In his nature poems, the writing is precise, moving, and surprising, and without the sentimentality of his poems about family or the painful baldness of his political poems. I was especially fond of Snyder's long, sectional poem "Little Songs for Gaia" and the charming "A Maul for Bill and Cindy's Wedding."

I also loved "Old Rotting Tree Trunk Down," which I've posted below. It seems to have something in common with Blood Meridian: both works confront death and death's purposes, and revel in the chaos of decay.

---------------

Old Rotting Tree Trunk Down

By Gary Snyder

From Axe Handles

Winding grain

Of twisting outer spiral shell

Stubby broken limbs at angles

Peeled off outer layers askew;

A big rock

Locked in taproot clasp

Now lifted to the air;

Amber beads of ancient sap

In powdery cracks of red dry-rot

               fallen away

From the pitchy heartwood core.

Beautiful body we walk on:

Up and across to miss

               the wiry manzanita mat.

On a slope of rock and air,

Of breeze without cease--

     If "meditation on decay and rot cures lust"

     I'm hopeless:

     I delight in thought of fungus,

     beetle larvae, stains

               that suck the life still

               from your old insides,

Under crystal sky.

And the woodpecker flash

     from tree to tree

     in a grove of your heirs

On the green-watered bench right there!

     Looking out at blue lakes,

     dropping snowpatch

               soaking glacial rubble,

     crumbling rocky cliffs and scree,

Corruption, decay, the sticky turnover--

Death into more of the

Life-death same,

     A quick life:

     and the long slow

     feeding that follows--

     the woodpecker's cry.

                                    VII, '78, English Mountain

Clotheslines

Today, I came across an article about how residents in many areas are prohibited from using outdoor clotheslines. Sometimes they're prohibited by housing associations and sometimes by hostile neighborhood opinion, but the lines are always forbidden because of "aesthetics": neighbors think that the lines look "trashy" (read: they make the neighborhood look poor).

It seems incredible to me that people could be against clotheslines. Sure, if your neighbor has a clothesline, you have to look at his t-shirts and pajama pants, but I think it's kind of homey to see neighbors' clothing; it reminds me that other people live on my street, whether I see them in person or not!  Besides, using a clothesline lets the sun dry your clothes for free, reducing your electric bills and your carbon footprint. Saving money, helping the environment, a more colorful neighborhood--what's not to love?

I couldn't hang clothes outside during college or grad school. (Usually, even if an apartment complex gives you a tiny patch of land or a deck, you're still not allowed to actually do anything with the space.) But my parents still have a clothesline that I convinced them to install when I was in high school. I'm a big fan of it.

But it wasn't until I read the article that I remembered that we had a line at all. Ours is a retractable model: you pull the line out of its case when you need it, attach the end of the line to a hook screw, and then let the line whip back up into its case when you're all done.

 

I didn't use the line all summer, and when I went out to check on it this afternoon, I realized why: the retractable line was all knotted up inside the plastic case, and the case itself was about to fall off the shed wall. I couldn't yank the line out, so I resorted to "fixing it" (translation: I broke the brittle case off the shed wall, whacked it with a hammer, popped the case in half, dodged the sharp metal spring that whipped past my head, and then reattached the freed line to the shed via an old nail). As you can see, the fix worked quite nicely.  ;)

I started hanging clothes outside for environmental reasons, but I also like the process because it reminds me of Mrs. Gretencord, my second grade teacher. She lived down the street from me when I was growing up. She had four clothes lines in her back yard that ran between two thick metal T-shaped poles.Whenever I walked past her house, I would see her clothes danging in the wind beside her husband's pants and, occasionally, his underpants. Being a seven-year-old, I always giggled to see them, but I also shivered at the thought of pulling on a pair of boxers that had been hanging outside on a windy January day!

Mrs. Gretencord also had a clothesline hung in her busy little classroom at Central Elementary School. She used the clothesline during our reading units. We'd read a book together as a class, and when we were all done, Mrs. Gretencord would hang a copy of the book's cover on the line with a little clothespin. The books would hang in the classroom for the rest of the quarter to remind us what we had accomplished. I remember staring at the covers everyday: Mr. Popper's Penguins, The Chalk Box Kid, and The Mouse and the Motorcycle. Mrs. Gretencord is probably why I love book covers so much.

I count Mrs. Gretencord as one of my favorite teachers; she never stopped encouraging me and caring about me, even when I was all grown up. Even in high school, I still stopped by her house to chat and to tell her how school was going.

She finally retired a few years ago and moved out of her old house, but I hear that she still volunteers at Central Elementary because she misses being around the kids. I bet she still hangs her laundry outside, too, retired or not, and regardless of whether it's July or December.

"What I Learned From My Mother" by Julia Spicher Kasdorf

There's so much that I should be working on tonight. It's after 10:00 p.m., but I know that there's research to do, a job description to look at, a long blog post that needs to written, and an HTML workbook to spend time with.


But, for tonight, I just can't do any more. There's a loaf of banana bread rising in the oven, and my cat is playing nearby, bringing me bouncy balls so I can bounce them across the kitchen floor.

This scene does not call for work: it calls for a poem!

"What I Learned From My Mother" comes from Julia Spicher Kasdorf's first book Sleeping Preacher. Julia was my thesis advisor at Penn State, and she is just as kind and warm and caring as this poem is. I was lucky to have her guidance as a poet and as a person during my last year in Pennsylvania.

This poem gets republished often, partially because it makes for a good workshop assignment: you read the poem in a group, talk about it, and then each person writes his or her own poem about learning something from someone.

But I like this poem more for its content than for its formulaic possibilities. It evokes a country neighborly-ness that I very much like. Bringing cakes to mourning families and fruit salads to worried wives seems so strange and old-fashioned and foreign to my generation. But Julia's poem gets right to the heart of why these traditions matter: no matter what sort of spiritual nourishment we would like to offer the suffering, sometimes "a chocolate cake you baked yourself" is all that we have, along with "the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch."

---------------

What I Learned From My Mother
By Julia Spicher Kasdorf
From Sleeping Preacher

I learned from my mother how to love

the living, to have plenty of vases on hand

in case you have to rush to the hospital

with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants

still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars

large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole

grieving household, to cube home-canned pears

and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins

and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.

I learned to attend viewing even if I didn’t know

the deceased, to press the moist hands

of the living, to look in their eyes and offer

sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing,

what anyone will remember is that we came.

I learned to believe I had the power to ease

awful pains materially like an angel.

Like a doctor, I learned to create

from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once

you know how to do this, you can never refuse.

To every house you enter, you must offer

healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,

the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

Aunt Sandra Lee's Simple Dinner Biscuits

Sometimes, the simplest things are also the best things.

I've loved these biscuits since I was a little girl. They're powdery and dense and floury, and, for all their plainness, I can't think of another biscuit or roll that I like better. Tonight, I made them to accompany my mom's delicious chicken vegetable soup.

There's nothing fancy about these little biscuits, and they're so easy to make. You don't even have to roll the dough out and cut it into circles; dropping the dough works equally well, though it does make the biscuits a little more difficult to slice.

 

Mix the ingredients together well, roll out the dough, cut out the biscuits with the top of a juice glass, bake for ten minutes, and there's your biscuity deliciousness, hot and ready for a smear of butter or a squirt of honey.

---------------
Aunt Sandra Lee's Biscuits*

Ingredients
2 cups flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons shortening
3/4 cup milk

Directions
Whisk together the dry ingredients. Cut the shortening into the dry ingredients until the mixture becomes crumbly. Add milk and stir until combined.

Roll the dough into a 1/2 inch thick sheet. Cut out the biscuits using a cookie cutter (or the top of a juice glass). Bake the biscuits at 450 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes, or until the biscuits have risen and turned slightly brown on top.

*To be honest, I'm not sure who Aunt Sandra Lee is. Can any relatives out there enlighten me?

Fifteen Favorite Poets

A few months ago, Charlie asked me who my favorite poets were. I gaped into space for a few moments, confounded, suddenly unable to choose from the wash of names flooding my brain. It seemed like a simple enough question, one that I should have had a ready answer to. But there are so many ways to like a poem and, consequently, so many ways to like a poet. Defining "favorite" isn't easy: are my favorites the ones I read the most? Or the ones I respect the most? Are they the poets I most take after? Or the poets that I wish I could emulate?

So instead of attempting a list of ten "favorite" poets, here are three lists of poets that I love and why I love them.

Poets By Whom I Am Flabbergasted
These are the poets that surprise me, that leave me slack-jawed and astonished as they stretch my ideas about what a poem can do and what poetry can be.

1. John Donne: Donne's poems are taut, gnarly, musical, and absolutely insane. Intelligent and challenging, he makes my brain hurt in the best way possible.
   
2. Gertrude Stein: Most readers can't stand Stein, but I love how she makes me experience language and meaning in a new way. If you give Tender Buttons a chance, the stacked and muddled images start to reveal their beauty and their meaning.
   
3. Edgar Allen Poe: Poe is strange and Gothic and over-the-top and wonderfully musical. "The Raven" especially makes me giddy.
   
4. Harryette Mullen: Mullen works in puns and layered meanings and a sort of razor-sharp humor. What she does seems elementary, but it's incredibly difficult to emulate.
   
5. Wallace Stevens: Stevens's poems are titillatingly multivalent. Their language is hard, and so is their meaning, and, well, his imagery can be a bit of a challenge, too. But, you know, confusion can be a very exciting thing.
   

Poets With Whom I Like to Spend Time
These are the poets that I like to read for fun. They're accessible, smart, lyric, and wonderfully entertaining.

1. Walt Whitman: I read Song of Myself whenever I'm feeling sad or uninspired or empty. He makes me believe in the goodness of all the world's things.
   
2. Allen Ginsberg: Ginsberg was one of the first writers to make me love poetry, and I've probably read more of his poems than any other poet's. I love his sweet enthusiasm and his delicate golden lions.
   
3. Kay Ryan: Ryan's poems are fun, terse, and wise, and there's always more to them than immediately meets the eye. Though her poems poems seem simple, I believe that she works very hard to make them look that way.
   
4. Mary Oliver: American Primitive is full of gnarled, transcendental hymns that are so delicious they run down your chin like blackberry juice. She's a master of the American nature lyric.
   
5. Theodore Roethke: Roethke is a poet of things. His poems are rich and laden with physical details, and I love how they're all mood and connotation. I think that some of my poems have a lot on common with Roethke's.

Poets I Want to Be Like When I Grow Up
These are my favorite teachers. They don't just blow my mind, they push me to be a smarter reader and a better poet.

1. Robert Frost: Oh, the awesomeness of Robert Frost! My favorite thing about his poems is the sounds; he manages to write highly rhythmic, strictly rhymed poems that sound as natural and as unstudied as human speech. On top of that, he's also a master of tone and voice, and he harbors such a haunting darkness in his verses. In a hundred years, I think Frost will still be around when many other famous Modernists are just footnotes.
   
2. T.S. Eliot: Frost barely beats Eliot as being my favorite poet ever. I love how Eliot stacks his images and the darkness of his vision, but my favorite thing about him is the way he uses sounds. While Frost uses sound subtly, Eliot yanks you through his poems ear first. His obscure references might make him a scholars' darling, but it's the song beneath those images that makes Eliot a great poet.
   
3. John Keats: The odes. [Sigh.] How can anyone ever write anything better? I love how Keats orders his poems, how he mirrors the human thought process by pulling the reader back and forth from yearning to joy to despair and back again. And his images are so beautiful and sensuous and memorable, especially in The Eve of St. Agnes.
   
4. Sylvia Plath: So vicious and so good. Plath is underrated because of her titillating life story and because her readership is mostly female. But despite her reputation as some sort of overly morose women's poet, I think that her poems speak for themselves: they're intensely emotional, relentlessly original, and delightfully surreal, whether you've read The Bell Jar or not.
   
5. Marianne Moore: Moore is also terribly underrated. I love how she uses each line--no, each word--to its greatest advantage. She confuses and intrigues me and challenges me to be a more adventurous poet, to always push my poems further, and to never underestimate the intelligence of my audience.

Why Magazines Matter: The Pleasure of the Unexpected

I've been thinking more about Mother Earth News, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. I've decided that what I like best about their Web site is how it works perfectly with their magazine.

As a magazine, Mother Earth News provides a sampler platter of articles about everything from global warming to how to build a shed out of sandbags. Its content certainly covers the interests of its readers (practical tips for living sustainably), but it also exposes its readers to fresh ideas.

The Web site, on the other hand, allows for personalization. Online, a reader can search for articles or follow blogs on favorite topics. It's a great follow-up resource: if you read something about chicken feed in the magazine, you can always go online and find ten chicken feed articles to help you choose the best grain mix.

I think that Mother Earth News provides a great model for magazines in the digital era; the magazine serves to introduce readers to new ideas while the Web site allows readers to deepen their knowledge of certain topics. And while the Web site is a great resource, it hasn't replaced the magazine.

MEN has led me to think about the importance of magazines in the age of the Internet. I've been hearing a lot of talk recently about the impending death of print journalism. As Conde Nast cuts magazines and magazine ad revenues drop and online publications consider charging readers for content, experts bemoan how people expect to get all their content online for free, how we've all abandoned magazines and newspapers in favor of Twitter and niche blogs and personalized RSS feeds.

This may be true for some readers, but I would never want to give up my magazines in favor of reading online. Magazines provide something that, in this age of personalized, digital media, we don't get everyday: the pleasure of unexpected discovery.

I love magazines and always have. In high school, I subscribed to Seventeen and National Geographic. These days, I subscribe to Vogue, Kansas! Magazine, and The New Yorker, and I buy issues of Mother Earth News, Vanity Fair, Poetry, and Glamour a few times a year.

What I love about magazines is how they surprise me. I always have an idea of what might show up in the pages of any publication, but I never know for certain what I'll find. I expect the editors to give me the regular features I'm used to, but I also trust them to nurture and publish interesting writing on new topics that I may or may not be interested in. In Vogue, one month I'll read about Michelle Obama's favorite designers, and the next month I'll get a feature on LeBron James or an investigation into the uses of duck broth or a record of a reporter's trip to Baghdad.

LeBron James and duck soup aren't topics I would normally go out of my way to read about, but I'll definitely give them a chance when I read a magazine cover to cover. By reading gamely, I run the risk of being bored, but I'm also giving myself the chance to become fascinated with something new. In this way, I've learned a great deal about the world I live in.

The reason that I give every magazine article a chance is that ignorance is never aware of itself; there's no way to know that you don't know something until somebody tells you that you don't know it. That's where magazines come in. For example, I never knew that I cared about CEO compensation until I read a recent issue of The New Yorker, and I never knew that I was invested in the future of biofuels until I cracked a copy of Mother Earth News.

But hyper-personalized reading rarely interferes with ignorance. Increasingly, people have control over the media they experience every day. From Google searches to iPods to DVRs, we all have the opportunity to experience exactly what we want and to block out whatever we don't want. While this can be a good thing--I've loved my iPod from the first day I wiggled it out of its little plastic box--it also protects us from experiencing new and potentially challenging ideas. By relying exclusively on personalized media, we run the risk of forgetting that we don't know all there is to know

Journalism has always had more than one purpose: it can entertain us and reassure us, and it can also offer us variety so that we stay informed, open-minded, and aware of the limits of our own knowledge. I believe that it's vital for an individual to remember that "There are more things in heaven and earth [. . .] Than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy," and periodicals do an exemplary job of keeping our minds exercised and open.

Besides, reading a magazine or listening to the radio is just so much more textured, more compelling, and more fun. Who wants to re-experience only the media that we already know about? It's like watching The Love Boat every day for the rest of your life, or listening to Neil Diamond's Greatest Hits on repeat for years, or having to re-read the same pundit's take on abortion or health care for decades.

No matter how much we love something, some song or show or idea, everyone has to admit that variety is the spice of life and, more importantly, the spice of the mind. Before we cancel our magazine subscriptions, we have to remember the importance and the thrill of new discovery: there's nothing like finding out that you love salsa music while scanning through radio stations, or learning about water clocks on the History Channel because there's nothing else on, or getting interested in chicken feed because you read a magazine when you're stuck on the subway. Which is why I, for one, hope that magazines stick around for a long, long time.

Making My Birthday Cake: Magnolia Bakery's Vanilla Cake with Buttercream Frosting

So yesterday was my birthday. How did I decide to celebrate, you ask? Why, by baking and frosting for eight hours straight, of course!

There it is: my towering monstrosity of a tiered white birthday cake. I'm in love with it. Which is good, because it's going to be around for a long, long time--it makes about twenty-four servings!

But wait! That's not all I made!

Ta da! Two cakes for the price of one!

Okay, so here's what happened. I decided to make a really delicious tiered cake for my birthday. The Magnolia Bakery's recipe for Vanilla Cake from RecipeZaar sounded just perfect. However, the recipe said it would make three 9" cake rounds. I didn't know if this would be enough to make three tiers using different sized pans, so I decided to make a double batch of cake, just to be on the safe side.

This called for a whole lot of--well, a whole lot of everything . . .

Flour, sugar, butter, milk and vanilla, and eggs.

. . . and it made a whole lot of delicious, fluffy batter.

The cakes turned out beautifully, evenly browned and with very little doming. They had a dense, fine crumb and were very, very vanilla-y.

The doubled recipe made one 10" round, two 8" rounds, and two 6" rounds.

Next, I went out and bought cake decorating supplies with my birthday money.

I got a cake leveler, a set of frosting tips and a set of tip connectors, a package of frosting bags, a Lazy Susan, and a piece of cheap cardboard for cutting into cake rounds. The cake leveler was the real hero of the day, however. It was a cheap little thing but it worked perfectly, cleanly snipping the tops of my cakes and torting them neatly.

Leveling the cakes.
 

Torting the cakes into layers.

 

Next, I made the frosting. This was the first buttercream I had ever attempted. I didn't really know what it would taste like. I imagined it would be rich and thick and sort of stiff, but it turned out fabulously fluffy and light. But don't get me wrong, it's still the richest thing I've ever put in my mouth.

And that's not even all of it--I had to make a second batch after frosting my practice cake!

The turntable was a great help, as were the frosting bags.

 

Still, the frosting process was harder than I thought it would be, and I was glad that I had the small cake to practice on.

 

The practice cake.

 

 

I learned a lot from the little cake:

1. A layer of dirty frosting is absolutely necessary. Otherwise, the frosting will be studded with cake crumbs as numerous as brown stars in a lavender sky.
2. You can't just glob frosting onto a cake with a spatula; it pulls up bits of cake and the frosting won't stick well. It's best to squirt tubes of frosting all over the cake before smoothing them out with the frosting spatula.
3. When your frosting spatula fails, card stock is great for smoothing out gloppy-looking buttercream.
   
4. It is entirely possible to make your piping frosting too stiff. Mine came out like Play-Doh, but I rubbed the frosting bag between my hands for a minute, and the frosting warmed up and flowed much more smoothly.
   
5. Piping a solid circle of stars along an edge takes much, much, much longer than you would expect, and I wouldn't recommend it. My hand is still a little sore!

But the big cake was much easier. I torted the top two layers and used cardboard circles between each individual cake.

A little piped frosting to cement the layers together.

 The unfrosted layers.

 

The cake with its layer of dirty icing.

Squidging tubes of frosting to the top of the cake. I smoothed this out with my spatula, smoothed it further with some card stock, and voila!

Finally frosted!

Since I couldn't fit a real greeting up there, I decided to pipe my initials on the top layer.

 

My practice letters turned out neater than the cake version, but it's still pretty!

 

The finished product!

Baking and decorating this thing was fun, but I realized something very important afterward:

Gahhhhhhhh!

 

Eeeeeeeeeeeek!

 

Noooooo!

Powdered sugar carnage!

Decorating cakes is really, really messy. Which must be why most people leave this to the professionals.

But after I cleaned up, it was all worth it. I went to dinner with my mom, my dad, and Charlie, and then we enjoyed some very, very yummy cake!

A tiny top slice.

The first cut.

I had a great birthday, and I was so happy to share my cake with such lovely people! I also sent chunks of cake to my grandparents and to Charlie's parents. 

So what do you think, folks: Did I earn the awesome embroidered apron Charlie's mom Anne made me?

My wonderful apron with Willa (kitty at left), Beanie (kitty at right), and me as a saucy blonde baker! So sweet!

The happy birthday baker!

"Cricket" by Lisa Ross Spaar

It's beautiful out, mind-blowing, in fact, for Kansas in early November. So I won't waste my time or yours with a long post; I have a long bike ride to attend to, and I'm sure you have some very important picnicking or perambulating to do. I'll just post another poem that I love from The Best American Poetry 2008.

According to poet Lisa Ross Spaar, the poem "Cricket" is about hearing a cricket singing as she wanders her house at night, battling a bout of insomnia. But because of the word "font" in the second line, the poem always makes me think of Cricket font, so I kind of like to pretend that the poem is an apostrophe to the font instead of a meditation on nighttime chirping.

Cricket.

 

Still, it's a great poem however you want to read it. I love (love love love) the sounds; I can't get enough of reading this poem aloud just to hear how "Apocalyptic knucklebone, / black letter font" and "stiff thicket of broom" and "Hasp of flesh, sear fact" rattle around in my mouth. Beautiful-sounding poems are definitely underrated, and the sounds in Spaar's poem are exactly what elevates the poem's story (insomnia and a dark room) from the mundane and into the stratosphere of poetic awesomeness.

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Cricket

By Lisa Ross Spaar

From The Best American Poetry 2008

First published in Meridian 

Apocalyptic knucklebone,

    black-letter font

so antique among the modern things,

you cause the room to flinch

    at my intrusion,

quaver in corners, trill

in mortised triplets the crowded

    heavy boots,

sodden mat, stiff thicket of broom.

Your ceremonial frequencies

    abrade what I might choose

to forget, lonely scrape of a chair

under fluorescent morgue-light

    of winter kitchen,

wince as the soul divides.

Hasp of flesh, sear fact

    through which your trespass,

your vesper curfew gnaws.

"Faithful" by Dara Wier

I've been reading The Best American Poetry 2008 furiously just so I can get started on The Best American Poetry 2009, which came out a few months ago. I thought I'd post a few of my favorite poems from the 2008 collection here, starting with "Faithful" by Dara Wier.

I like this poem for itself, of course, but I also love how it sparks my imagination. Wier's poem doesn't give us much to work with. There's a speaker, a mysterious "you," some peculiar imagery, and seven beautifully draped sentences that flow sinuously from line to line before quietly coming to their end-stopped rests. ("End-stopped" refers to a line that ends in a period or some other pause-inducing punctuation.) The phrases are lyrical, slow, and pull you through the poem before you can even wrestle with its meaning.

It's not even clear whether the "you" is a spirit or a lover or something else, but based on the title, I like to think that the "you" refers to a lover, perhaps a lover in ghost form. But this isn't even the most confusing part of the poem. Phrases like "By morning by cresting by curving by blazing" and the fragment "Exchanging places in ground fog with black flares" seem disconnected from the rest of the poem. Logically and grammatically, these phrases are confounding and as lonesome as buoys far out at sea. But in terms of mood and associative meaning, these lines fit perfectly with the rest of the poem.

Who knows what precisely is going on here, and, more importantly, who cares? The fragments of language and the unnamed "you" only add to the ghostliness of the poem, to the sense that the "you" is experienced outside of logic and outside of the physical world. From the curtain imagery that appears in the last two lines, I get the impression that the speaker stands close enough to the space between life and death that she (or he) sees more than the rest of us see, perhaps some strange spiritual world layered over our own.

Like I said, I like how my imagination plays with this poem just as much as I like the poem's language and eddying flow. I hope you enjoy it too.

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Faithful

By Dara Wier

First published in The American Poetry Review 

You come as close as the skin on my face,

As if you were a sure enough wind for me to walk into.

In woodgrain on a doorframe of a door I walk out of

You wander and I wander with you.

With luciferin, luciferase and oxygen you light the way.

A mid-summer's late evening scatters you so

That by midnight all of the stars that surround us

By morning by cresting by curving by blazing,

You are light that has passed through my eyes.

I see you in profile as if sharpened and stenciled

Examining creases in the palm of my hand.

Exchanging places in ground fog with black flares.

What is this translucence you've dropped between us,

When will a sure enough wind arrive to blow this curtain aside?

How to Make Chocolate Kiss Cookies

Half-price Halloween candy, anyone?

Usually, I don't eat Hershey's Kisses. They taste sort of ashy and buggy and sour to me. But they were on sale the day after Halloween, and there's no better way of disposing of them than the Chocolate Kiss Cookie.

Yum.

They're perfectly lazy little cookies, too, so easy to make! All you do is combine your wet ingredients--

Oh, wait . . .

[rattling through the fridge--a shuffling of pickle jars, a brandishing of wilting lettuce heads]


Where's the milk?

[the fridge door swings ominously shut]

Well, shucks.

First, you beg your poor, long-suffering, sainted mother to go to the grocery store to pick up the milk that you thought you had when you preheated the oven.

While she's gone, you really get down to business. Cream the shortening (butter works too, but shortening keeps these nice and puffy) together with your white and brown sugars. Then beat the peanut butter in the mixture until the whole thing's a little fluffy. Then you add the vanilla and the egg and wait for the milk to arrive.

In the meantime, you mix your dry ingredients (the flour, baking soda, and salt) together in a separate bowl, and take a few minutes to unwrap precisely forty-two Hershey's Kisses.

Once your sweet, kind, cookie-hungry mother returns, you can beat the milk, egg, and vanilla into your dough. Add the dry ingredients to the wet mix in a couple of installations until everything's well combined. After that, use your fancy schmancy scooper to form dough balls. Roll each ball between your palms so that it's kinda round-ish.

Roll these in white sugar and throw 'em on the pan.

Bake for ten minutes or until the cookies start to turn golden brown on top.

Now here's the really important part: once you pull the pan out of the oven, never, NEVER wait to smush your room-temperature Kisses onto your oven-hot cookies. Not even to take a picture for your blog!

Well, okay, so maybe you can wait ten seconds for your camera to turn on. But if you wait too long before putting the Kisses on top of the cookies, the Kisses won't stick. You'll end up with wonky little peanut butter cookies with dents on top and a handful of naked Kisses rolling around in the bottom of your cookie jar, and that's a sad sight.

Let the cookies sit on the pan to cool for a few minutes, then move them somewhere to finish cooling. Be sure to play with the liquified Kisses by smushing them into funny shapes and twirling their hard tips and generally behaving like a second grader and getting chocolate everywhere.

(This is a very important step.)

Obviously, these cookies are simple, fun, and great to make with kids (or a twenty-five-year-old who enjoys playing with her food). And you get to discover that Hershey Kisses are much improved when melted and smeared all over a peanut-buttery, sugary, chewy little cookie.

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Easy Chocolate Kiss Cookies

From the kitchen of Janet Hammer

Ingredients

1 3/4 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup shortening

1/2 cup creamy peanut butter (or crunchy, if you're kinky like that)

2 tablespoons milk

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 egg

extra white sugar for rolling

42 unwrapped Hershey's Kisses

Directions

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.

Mix flour, baking soda, and salt in one bowl.

In a second bowl, cream white sugar, brown sugar, and shortening together by beating until the mixture is well-combined and fluffy. Cream peanut butter into the mixture. Add the egg, milk, and vanilla and beat until combined.

Add half of the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and beat until combined. Add the rest of the dry ingredients and combine.

Roll dough into balls 1" in diameter. Roll dough balls in white sugar and place on a cookie sheet. Bake for 10-12 minutes. Remove from the oven and press one unwrapped Hershey Kiss onto each cookie's center.

Let cool for as long as you can stand before eating.