What I Learned from Bertrand Russell and Doctor Who

I ran across this quote from Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness the other day:

Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in people and things.

I think that this is fundamentally true. However, I must be honest: my evidence for this comes from a) my personal experience and b) Doctor Who. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Now she's taking life lessons from that silly show?! Well, yes. (And famous 20th-century philosophers! Don't forget about them!)

But, really, one of my favorite things about the Doctor is how excited he gets about things, even when he really doesn't have much reason to be enthusiastic. By most standards, he should be unhappy: he's a 900-year-old time traveler with no family, no home planet, no one to understand his crazy alien ways, a distinctly junky spaceship, a bunch of cranky alien enemies who would really enjoy killing him, and a really rocky love-life with his human lady friends. Oh, and he only owns one outfit, and it happens to be a pinstriped suit, which seems really inconvenient for adventuring. Not to mention the fact that he sometimes has to depend on 3-D specs to save the day. For realz.

But he's really, really, really fascinated by the universe and things and life and people, and so he manages to keep happy on a daily basis. Example: About to be killed by a clockwork android? Beautiful! He thinks it's a lovely bit of machinery and he'd like to meet whoever made it! Has to depend on a half-genius, half-birdbrained human scientist to bring him back through a worm hole and save the world? Great! Randy the Scientist is his new best friend when he's in south London! Meets Satan right on top of an inescapable black hole? Fantastic! It just means that he didn't know as much about the universe as he thought he did!

Pretty much every life-or-death situation turns into a kind of romp of appreciation for the Doctor, and it's contagious. Yes, he's a fictional character, but that sort of indefatigable enthusiasm for life, that giddy interest in our diverse and myriad world, seems like a great recipe for never really getting bored or growing old.

So for the last few months, one of my goals has been to get really excited over something, anything, everyday. It doesn't take much: some article about a crazy new scientific discovery, a mind-blowing Wikipedia article, a good trip to the gym, hearing to a fantastic song I've never heard before, listening to someone tell a crazy story about his/her life, whatever. The topic doesn't much matter. The point is to love something, anything, for the sake of loving, to appreciate something purely for the sake of appreciating anything.

Making a daily practice of loving some bit of the world: this seems like one of the easiest, more rewarding paths to happiness I can imagine. And I I'm glad to hear that Mr. Russell thinks so, too.

Baking a Bitter Cake

In the winter of 2008, I tore a recipe for a Whiskey-Soaked Dark Chocolate Bundt Cake out of the New York Times's dining section. I was so excited to make it. It contained quite literally all of the best things in the world: lots of butter, very dark chocolate, espresso, and whiskey--lots and lots of whiskey! It sounded delicious and exotic and very rich.

But I'd never made a liqueur-soaked cake before. I was a little afraid, so I tucked the scrap of newspaper away in my recipe box and forgot about it until a week ago when I was looking for something special to make for a family holiday party. I unfolded the crumpled newsprint and thought Aha! It fit the bill exactly: it would look beautiful, taste delicious, and feel distinctly holiday-ish--by which I mean sophisticated and special and a little expensive. Simply put, it would be perfect for a Sunday afternoon Christmas party with relatives.

So I set to work. At its core, it's a fairly straightforward butter cake recipe: it starts with creaming butter and sugar, then come the eggs and vanilla, and then you add the dry ingredients at the end. The only quirk is that the recipe ends similarly to Nigella Lawson's classic Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake recipe (which involves beating in alternating parts liquid and dry ingredients to the batter right before it goes in the oven).

The batter turned out beautifully: fluffy and rich and very, very alcoholic. I licked the spoon as I cleaned up and got a little bit tipsy. I mean, the cake itself has a whole cup of whiskey in it, even before it's baked and sprinkled with whiskey again!

Boozy, boozy batter.

The batter tasted a little, well, intense to me, but I figured that most of the whiskey flavor would bake out. So I went with it. I threw the batter in my Great Aunt Shirley's burnt orange bundt pan . . .

and baked it up. It came out perfect-looking, moist, and very very fragrant. My entire apartment smelled like rich chocolate with a touch of whiskey and espresso mixed in, as if Starbucks started serving cocktails alongside their mochas and lattes.

I plated it on my beautiful new milk glass cake platter (thanks, Mom!), splattered it with a few hearty tablespoons of whiskey, topped it with powdered sugar, and mourned the fact that I couldn't try it until the party. (Let's be honest: taste testing is the entire point of making cookies and cupcakes. Even if you make them to share, you get to try them right away--I need that instant gratification!)

The completed cake.

But I was terribly disappointed once dessert time arrived the next day. The cake was bitter, unbelievably so. The espresso powder, unsweetened chocolate, and whiskey all worked together to give it bite and nothing but. I couldn't taste the sugar or the butter or anything but char. The cake wasn't burnt at all, but it tasted like a chocolate-covered espresso bean that had spent some time in a fireplace!

I think that public opinion on the cake was split: half the party thought it was fantastic, and the other half smiled very politely and left a big chunk on their plates. As I watched my relatives nibbling away at the cake, I thought about how I'd do it better next time. Melissa Clark, the recipe author, had written that her grandmother had been the originator of the recipe. Clark had taken the recipe, drastically upped the alcohol content, and switched to unsweetened chocolate to add "sophistication" to the dessert while reducing its sweetness.

I decided right then and there that old fashioned was definitely the way to go with this one. Next time, I'm doing it Grandma Clark style: I'll be using semi-sweet chocolate, halving the espresso powder, and replacing half the whiskey with water. And, if it still turns out bitter, I think that a nice glaze (I'm thinking whiskey, cream, vanilla, and powdered sugar) will do a trick.

I may have been bitterly disappointed by this recipe, but I wasn't beaten. Hear this, Whiskey-Soaked Dark Chocolate Bundt Cake: we shall meet again!

The intrepid baker, ready for round two.

Lonesome Literature

When the title of a book has the word "lonely" in it, remind me to pay attention in the future.

I finished Carson McCuller's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter a few weeks ago. I bought it at The Dusty Bookshelf because I liked the cover and because I was in the mood to read a serious novel and because I wanted to read something set in the South. It's winter, goshdarnit, and I want to dream of hazy humidity and mossy trees and thick brambles of green.

I don't regret reading the book--in fact, I thought it was one of the best novels I've ever read--but this really wasn't the best time of year to read it. It's a book whose topic is loneliness. The novel follows John Singer, a deaf mute living in a small Southern town in the late 1930s. His best friend, another deaf mute, has been sent to a mental institution many miles away and, for the first time in his ten years of adulthood, no one can "hear" him speak.

As he copes with this loss, Singer moves into a new boarding house and begins to be visited by strangers who feel compelled to talk to him: Dr. Copeland, a black doctor who reads Marx and Spinoza and is desperately, painfully committed to helping his people escape oppression; Jake Blount, a half-mad alcoholic anarchist and labor activist; Biff Brannon, a cafe owner and recent widower who wants to understand Singer and the people who follow him; and Mick Kelly, the 14-year-old girl who dreams of moving to the snowy north and becoming a musician and who has Mozart's symphonies playing constantly in her head.

All of these characters, particularly Dr. Copeland, Jake, and Mick, and burning with a passion that no one else in the town is able to access or understand. And all of them, the quiet Biff and Singer included, are hounded by loneliness, the desire to be heard and to be understood. Singer follows his mad friend, aching to use his hands to speak directly to someone who understands him. Dr. Copeland and Jake and Mick chase Singer, feeling paradoxically that the lip reader is the only man on earth who understands them. Biff watches them all out of the new emptiness his wife's death has created, wondering what all this loneliness means in the world.

Despite the characters' passions and yearnings and hungers, it's a novel where very little happens. Usually, I dislike plotless novels, but McCuller's characters are so brilliantly drawn, so lifelike and complex and beautiful and sad, that I was rapidly pulled through the 300+ pages of the novel by pure curiosity. I desperately wanted to see these characters' lives become better because I understood their motives in the same way that I understand my own. McCuller's creates true empathy in this novel, and she does so brilliantly.

Mick Kelly especially comes to life. She made me remember being 14, feeling constantly confused and over-excited and angry and hungry and passionate for art--books in my case, music in Mick's. I get the impression that McCullers (who was only 23 when she wrote the novel) modeled the character after her own childhood and, I presume, her own desire to be a writer.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a novel I would recommend to anyone, but not in November or December. It's the kind of heavy reading that's best reserved for the summer months, when there's sunshine and plenty to do and the world feels all fat and lazy and happy and slow. One needs the summer to counteract messages like "deep and soul-wrenching loneliness is intrinsic to human life and is its greatest and most painful motivator." Ack! The winter is just too cold for novels like this.

I thought I learned that lesson a few years ago when I read Ethan Frome and Jude the Obscure, two of the saddest novels ever written in America, in the same week in December. No, thank you! This time, the lesson's going to stick! It's only The Golden Compass and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Tamora Pierce from here until March, people! Loneliness is an excellent topic for excellent novels, but a terrible topic for mid-winter ruminations.

Gifting the Good Life

This weekend, I made my first, last, and only Christmas shopping trip to Wal-Mart, Dillons, and Sports Authority. To be honest, I wasn't really buying any Christmas presents for anyone. I was looking for a yoga mat for myself and a heaping mound of baking supplies. I didn't buy a damn thing for anyone else, and I have to admit, it felt pretty great!

I'm not Scrooging it up or anything, but I just didn't want to this year. I didn't feel like barreling through crowds at the mall or Best Buy or Borders. I didn't feel like agonizing over trying to make the people in my life happy by buying them something they didn't necessarily need or even want for themselves. I didn't want to deplete my bank account for gifts that could very well end up sitting around the house, collecting dust. Shopping just seems like a tiring routine this year, one that benefits corporations without really making the holiday any more enjoyable for me and my family.

So I straight up opted out. I took my dad to a KU basketball game for his Christmas present, which we both thoroughly enjoyed. I'm taking my mom for a short wine tasting road trip in January, which sounds like a blast for both of us. My mom's family does a white elephant-style gift exchange on Christmas Eve, but instead of buying something at, say, Target, I bought my gift from my farmers' market; not only did my gift directly benefit my local economy, but shopping there made for a really fun Saturday morning with a friend! My grandparents on both sides will get a pan of homemade cinnamon rolls, as will my friends (Sorry if I'm spoiling the surprise for anyone!). And that's it! I'm done!

Psychologists have discovered that people are happier when they spend money on experiences rather than things, and I hope this proves true for receiving gifts, too. This year, I'm doing my best to give experiences, not gifts: the experience of a basketball game or trying new things or enjoying a lazy, delicious, properly fattening breakfast on Christmas morning without any effort.

And along the way, I'm working on enjoying the Christmas season more, even as I spend less money and less time doing so.

The Peanuts kids, experiencing the Christmas season.

Happy December

Happy first of December, everybody!

I'm always a little bit excited about December. It's not the holidays I love--I'm not a huge Christmas person--and it's not exactly the weather; I don't usually like the cold, and I hate having to wear gloves to drive my car or type at the office. But I've always liked winter. At the beginning of the season, the cold feels crisp and new and intoxicating. The first snow flakes look cleansing and bright, and roads and cars aren't yet covered in that awful salty, sandy, dirty sludge that seems to epitomize the February doldrums to me. It feels like a new world is beginning each December, and I like that.

Besides, I've been ready for November to be done for awhile now. It was not my best month ever.  :P

In other news, last night, I walked out in the cold and the dark to see a reading downtown. The two authors were local-ish (native Kansans from a town an hour away). One wrote essays and the other poetry, and they were both underwhelming. They did not write excellent or surprising or even terribly engaging literature, but I tried to listen to it with a better attitude than I used to. In the past, I've been a terrible literary hater; I've gotten angry over the success of poems and essays and even people that I don't like or respect. But that's a cheap and miserly way to live, and it certainly wasn't making me any more successful when I ripped on others' work.

These days, I'm trying to remember that all literature, even literature that I *ahem* disagree with, was written by someone who was doing his/her best to write, to survive, and to be happy. All literature is written by someone who is trying to learn his/her own song and sing it, and their bravery, persistence, and stubborn individuality is something to respect, even if the writing itself irks me.

The Mystery Engine

This week, I've been reading my first Agatha Christie novel: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I've read a few mystery novels before, and I've never really liked them. I either guess the murderer way too early, which leaves me bored and impatient, or I'm completely lost and confused and I just want the author to tell me who did it already.

But Christie is different. Despite the shortness of her novels, her characters are astonishingly complex and surprising and funny, and she colors them richly with just a few deft strokes of very British humor. She also doesn't write straight up "whodunnits," as far as I can tell. What propels the reader through the book isn't solving the mystery, it's figuring out what each character is hiding--it's discovering what each person wants, who each person really is, and what he or she believes that they must hide from the world. It makes for fascinating reading.

I suspect that writers of bad mystery novels tend to think the wrong way about the mystery genre: people don't really care about crime or culpability. Instead, I think that we all care unfailingly about people, the complexities of the human mind and human motivations. As in all literature, people and their personalities, our neighbors and their passions and secrets, are the engines of mystery novels, not the mystery itself.

Nerd Girls

Velma Dinkley from Scooby Doo

Annie Potts from Ghostbusters

Tavi Gevinson, author of The Style Rookie, a fashion blog

Me, newly shorn and be-spectacled

Six Things Worth Knowing About Me

1. I'm the kind of person who has to carry a Band-Aid in my backpack at all times. I used to carry Neosporin, too. If placed in the right habitat, I'm almost comically prone to cuts and scrapes and bruises.
2. I kind of love bad weather. I hate getting cold or wet like anyone else, but there's something I enjoy about a semi-catastrophic weather forecast. Snow? Tornadoes? Big windy electrical storms? Exciting! I think it comes from all those tornado drills and warnings in elementary school. We'd all get to hang around in the basement where the kilns and art projects were kept. We were safe-ish and bored and we got to goof off for an hour or two. When bad weather is imminent, the world seems to sing with gleeful possibility: I always know that true disaster is unlikely but that I'm pretty much guaranteed an hour or so of a break from my regular day.
3. When I was little, I used to run everywhere. I think it's a sign that, deep down, I'm pretty much excited about everything.
4. I really, really, really dislike fake laughter, especially the kind that ineffectually masks anger or displeasure or nervousness.
5. When I was younger, I never thought I would like getting socks for Christmas; having a sparklingly clean kitchen; NPR; or drinking boring old caffeine-free, sugarless herbal tea. Sometimes I wonder what else I'll come to enjoy as I get older. Watching the six o' clock news? Cooked spinach? Sweaters with ribbons and spangles on them? The sky's the limit!
6. I've never particularly wanted my life to be like a TV show or a movie (though I really wouldn't pass up meeting a time traveling adventurer in a snazzy suit, if given the opportunity), but I wouldn't mind life being a little bit more like a novel: it would show more unity, have clearer themes, and have most of the duller parts lopped out.
   

Enamored

I'm having one of those days where all I want to do is lay on my couch and read about a zillion books and do a little writing. Maybe I'm just growing weary of daleks daleks daleks all day long, but it's come upon me suddenly, the hunger for words. It happens. I've added five or six books to my Goodreads To Read shelf in the past few days. I want to read lots and lots of sci-fi and steampunk and cyberpunk and go back to my gloriously nerdy roots. I'm hungry not for high literature or for sentimental feeling or for postmodern ambiguity but for thinking. I want ideas, big, chewy, crunchy ideas with lots of vitamins and fiber and nutrition and maybe some sprinkles on top.

Anyway. You get the idea. It's lunch time, obviously. Here are some other things I'm enamored with:

• My new iPod Nano, which my lovely parents bought me for my birthday because they are awesome and because they love me
• Putting together lots of new playlists for my new iPod Nano after the gym tonight
• Laurell K. Hamilton's Meredith Gentry series. I mean, the woman can make faeries (faeries?! are you kidding me?) into fantastically creative and compelling mystery novels for adults. She is obviously some kind of genius.
• 70 degree days in November, warm breezes, cool skies, the chilled and rainy days to come.
• My birthday tomorrow. I plan on getting a massage, buying a bottle of red wine, ordering Indian take-out, and settling in for the night with a good book, which sounds like pretty much the best idea I've ever had.
• This brief essay by Lera Auerbach on The Best American Poetry blog. 
• This fantastically textured, moody, profoundly beautiful poem by Claudia Burbank on the same blog.

Enjoy, folks, and have a happy Monday.
---------------

Geranium

Thank you for the dead geranium, red
memory of a short-stemmed city.
For nickel shows, tea rooms, the rotten-egg
mill-smell that crept between the fretted sheets.
For elms that divided our limbs with dusk,
and twisted things in ash trays, girls lit with gin,
long trains moaning, the night in a plum.
Thanks, too, for captured Kaiser helmets stowed in attics,
the Alligator Man and Monkey Woman at the circus,
and rented clarinets, and dented trombones,
ladies in a savage dance, hair bound high.
Thanks, perhaps, for noon, the dark bird’s love call,
being born on ice, out of wolf, wolf.
For the stately progress of capped men
towards a gray chowder, something shaken by the gills.
And all that we devoured, and all that didn’t drown.
--Claudia Burbank

Halloween & Doctor Who

Halloween was a little disappointing this year. It used to be my favorite holiday, but as a grownup, I've gotten a little tired of dressing up for what usually turns out to be a disappointing, bar-fueled debacle. I used to love Halloween because it's about imagination and playfulness and not taking life too seriously. It's about dressing up and taking a chance on being somebody else for a night, and it's about laughing at death and all the other scary things that go bump in the night. I mean, it's a holiday centered around candy--candy, people! It's obviously awesome.

Or, if you live in a college town like I do, it's a holiday about getting schwasted, wearing stripper heels and a miniskirt, and yelling outside my bedroom window until 3:00 a.m.

Ugh. Obviously, I've become that cranky old lady who wishes all those damn kids would just put some clothes on and go to bed already.

Anyway. I went out with a few friends this year. It was a nice time, but I wish I'd had enough time to come up with a costume. Going out as just myself in a bar full of witches and Chilean miners and Anchorman characters was really a drag. But next year, I already know what I'm going to be:

"Party time, excellent, whoooo!" I wonder if I can find a Flowbee to carry around with me . . .

In other news, a friend recommended that I start watching Doctor Who now that I'm done with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm completely addicted now. 

If you don't know Doctor Who, it's a British sci-fi show that's been on BBC since the 1960s. It's about the Doctor (a time-traveling alien "bloke" with a penchant for saving the world) and his travels with whatever lady "companion" he picks up off the London streets. The show's premise (the bored Doctor explores the universe for fun and do-goodery) provides the show's writers with ample opportunity to combine wildly imaginative story lines with strange British slang ("wotcher!") and silly British humor.

Of course, Doctor Who is sometimes serious and dramatic and philosophical . . .

but usually it's just plain silly.

He fights goofy-looking aliens . . .

 

and old fashioned robots . . .

and even Satan when necessary . . .

 How could it not be the best thing ever? 

Feel the Burn

I've been a little out of commission this week. I didn't expect to be, but my car got broken into over the weekend, causing a helluvalot of unnecessary hassle. I think that everything's finally under control on my end, but I'm still pissed about it. I feel like I've been gritting my teeth all week.

On a related note, I've been going to the gym a lot recently. It cuts into my Buffy time and my writing time, but it's the best thing in the world to do when I'm feeling stressed or angry or frustrated.

I used to think that people who liked to work out were nuts--completely off their rockers. But about two years ago, after six months of daily bike riding through hilly State College, I realized that I was addicted. I needed those endorphins. I needed the release of pushing my body to work through tension and pain, that feeling of reaching deep and steeling myself against that burn in my legs.

So now I work out. I like the gym: I like the elliptical machine, I like free weights, and I think that I'm really going to like yoga, which I did for the first time ever last night. It burned (I can't hold my arms at shoulder height for more than about three seconds today), but it made me feel really strong to settle into a pose and hold it, and hold it, and keep on holding it, even when I was shaking and tired. Somehow, that burn helped put out the burn of anger in my gut. I feel a little less pissed today.  A little.  ;)

Curiosity

As you know, I'm working on putting together a chapbook out of some old poems from my thesis. Most recently, I've been grappling with a poem about Greek water clocks. It's a topic that I find complex and strange and absolutely fascinating, but I know that most people have no idea what a clepsydra is and, to be honest, they don't give a damn.

And that's perfectly fine. The problem is that this poem is dependent upon a knowledgeable audience or, even better, an audience willing to hit up Wikipedia when confusion strikes. It's also a poem that draws my attention to my own knowledge, to my own academic backgrounds. It makes me hyper-aware that I've spent more of my life learning about Greek history and literature than most people care to, and yet I still know so little about it. It's a topic that sounds very learned and obscure, but really I'm only scraping the surface of a whole fascinating field of study that some scholars of Greek archaeology have dedicated their lives to. I'm an amateur at best.

This makes me think about my other areas of "expertise": poetry, American literature, personal essays, baking, etc. But what I know about, say, poetry is just a smattering in a huge field that's bursting with poets and poems I've never heard of. I can name at least twenty people I know personally who know a heck of a lot more about poetry than I do. I know that, even in this, my primary field of expertise, it's absolutely impossible to know everything, and it's nearly impossible to gain mastery over even a fragment of such a wide field. For example, it would take a lifetime of study and reading and thinking to master a tiny category like Post-Modernist Midwestern American Poetry By Women written after 1960.

Sometimes, I find my persistent and unavoidable ignorance to be depressing, but more often I find it thrilling and even comforting. A friend once told me that libraries make her sad because she walks into the stacks and knows that she will never be able to read all the books that she sees. But this is the exact reason that libraries make me so happy: no matter how hard I work to learn, there will always be too much to know in my lifetime, and there will always be some work left for someone else to do.

There is a limit to what one man or woman can know. In a library full of hundreds of packed shelves and millions of volumes, each of us can only read a few shelves worth in a lifetime. No matter how boundless our curiosity is, the world is always much vaster and much greater than our aspirations, and this, I know, is a gift.

Skillz

Fact: Administrative work is hard and scary.

Maybe not in every office, but it's true in mine. Before I started this job, I thought that administration would be fairly easy: somebody else would come up with the ideas and take all the risks, and I would just shuffle the necessary papers. 

But that is absolutely not true. Somebody else does come up with most of the ideas that I implement at work, but I have to make them happen. My job requires a lot of flexibility and creative thinking. When my program director or one of my faculty members has an idea, the onus is on me to follow it through. I'm everybody's go-to girl. I'm the nitty-gritty techno-wrangler, the smooth bureaucracy surfer, and the (supposedly) omniscient fact-knower about how to navigate the university.

When I first started this job, this responsibility scared me. I didn't know anything, and I didn't know how I was going to learn anything. Now I have a little more faith in myself, and I know my most valuable resources: our genius office manager, our dedicated IT guy, the department's knowledgeable HR liaison, KU's Google-based search engine, and the University's plethora of help videos and training workshops.

Now I can hire a new lecturer in three days flat. I can school a scanner so that it doesn't flip pages. I can track down a student ID based on little more than a misspelled first name and a department. I can tell you how to enroll in or drop a class at any point in the semester. I'm good.

It's pretty great that I can do this stuff, but the most important skill my administrative job has taught me is how to problem solve, how to take a question that no one else can deal with and track down the answer. My new greatest skill is my dauntlessness, my confidence in my ability to take an idea and make it into a reality.

My 15 Albums

Have you heard of this? It's a facebook trend where you write a note listing 15 albums that "will stick with you" or that  "changed your life." My Aunt Janet tagged me in her facebook note, but I thought it would be more fun to share my list here.

The only constraint is that you have to write the list fast, in no longer than 15 minutes. My self-imposed constraint is that I have to pick albums that are personally important to me, that carry a lot of emotional weight with me, not just really excellent and obscure albums that make me sound cooler than I really am.  ;)

So here it goes!

1. This Fire, Paula Cole--Great music for dealing with 14-year-old feminist-ish anti-establishment rage. And (let's be honest) 26-year-old feminist anti-establishment angst. I still listen to it!
2. Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morisette--Could any female who grew up in the 1990s *not* include this in her list? I feel like I grew up with this one.
3. Blood on the Tracks, Bob Dylan--I'm pretty sure I listened to this every night of my freshman year of college. This is my official Favorite Album of All Time.
4. Astral Weeks, Van Morisson--Something about Van Morisson makes me feel more okay with life. It also reminds me of driving to Lawrence in my dad's truck.
5. Stunt, Barenaked Ladies--I listened to this album non-stop between the ages of 14 and 16. Don't judge me--"Light Up My Room" is amazing.
6. Moulin Rouge Soundtrack--I learned a lot about classic pop music from this soundtrack. If you want to judge me, see above. Also, how cute is Ewan McGregor?
7. Want One, Rufus Wainwright--I bought this album because I thought the cover was pretty, and I was completely enchanted. It holds up to zillions and zillions of listens, and it's still my favorite Wainwright album.
8. Everybody, Ingrid Michaelson--I started listening to Ingrid Michaelson really recently. Every song is awesome *and* useful.
9. Nashville Skyline, Bob Dylan--Connected to summertime and old boyfriends. 'Nuff said.
10. Dawson's Creek Soundtrack--Hey, I promised honesty, didn't I? I really liked a lot of the songs on this album. Thank goodness for cross promotion and The CW.
11. I Am a Bird Now, Antony and the Johnsons--Heart-wrenching. Antony goes after death and gender. Reminds me of KJHK and driving home in the rain.
12. Portions for Foxes, Rilo Kiley--I probably listened to this on the way to class every single day during my first year of grad school. Up-tempo and super-dark.
13. Bat Out of Hell, Meat Loaf--I can sing you every single song on this album word for word. Just ask.  ;)
14. O, Damien Rice--Another college favorite. Pretty, melancholy tunes. Good for rainy days and dorm rooms.
15. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams--I like all of Williams's albums, but this is the one I've listened to the most. Every single song kills.

Runners Up*

• ???, Steve Miller Band--I listened to a couple of old Steve Miller Band albums when I was in junior high about a million times, but I can't remember their names for the life of me. But they made me happy.
• Sky Blue Sky, Wilco--This didn't make the list because I'm passionately in love with about three songs on this album, but the rest are only okay. Those three carry a lot of weight, though!
• A Love Supreme, John Coltrane--This is the only jazz album I've ever loved. It makes my brain feel all buzzy and profound.

*Is this cheating? If so, it's pretty fortunate that I do not care.

Random Five for Friday

1. Dead Tired. I've been planning to write a blog post all this week, but I didn't expect for my travel hangover to last quite so long. I have been beat. My trip to State College was fantastic, as was my family reunion in Marion, but they made for a whole lot of traveling and not a whole lot of sleeping. So my post in praise of Susan Orlean will just have to wait until next week!
2. Spicy Food. This week, I attempted vegetarian chili, which is basically a bunch of beans with some spices and tomatoes thrown in. The problem with vegetarian chili is that meat adds a good deal of fat and flavor that is indispensable to the whole chili experience. I was forced to turn to lots and lots of red chili flakes to make my chili appetizing. My taste buds have been feverishly thrilled all week, but every day my stomach growls at me and says, WTF, Lesley! Are you kidding me? MORE of this stuff? Ahhh! Stop it!!! Where's the Tums?!
3. Good Reads. I finished two really excellent books this week: The Art of Losing (a collection of poems on mourning that I wrote about here), and Jonathan Franzen's How to Be Alone. I picked up Franzen's essay collection because I was curious about his writing, but I didn't want to commit to taking part in the Freedom "best novel of the century" hoopla.Though many of the book's essays are about reading and the state of the novel, How to Be Alone consists largely of an old-fashioned curmudgeon's complaints about modern society (its disinterest in serious fiction, its mindless passion for new technologies, its meaningless passion for privacy, etc.). It can easily be read as a work of late adopter naysayer-ism that frequently contradicts itself, but Franzen is so brilliant in his thinking and so adept in his prose styling that you're willing to growl and harrumph along with him, just for the pleasure of spending time with his voice. The collection made for surprisingly good airport reading material, and it's convinced me to put The Corrections on my to-read list.
4. Writing & Wranglin'. The last week's busyness has put a serious crunch on my writing time, so the writing has been going slowly. I'm in the process of radically revising my chapbook, and I'm trying to work my way through a new process of drafting and revising. In grad school, I had to write fast to keep up with the pace of workshop (I wrote one poem a week for years!). Now, I'm trying to write more slowly and to think more deeply. Instead of playing with images and making up the substance as I go along, I'm trying to clarify the ideas and feelings I want to express before I start worrying about image and diction and line length. I think that this will be an excellent method in the long run, but it's trying right now. Writing more truthful, more emotional, more intellectually interesting poetry is hard. I'm trying for a sort of clarity that is extremely difficult to achieve. So, like one of my Penn State MFA Reading Series t-shirts says, I "Just Keep Pounding Those Keys!"
5. Wedding Weekend. Last night, one of my third cousins got married. She's having her wedding reception in Abilene this weekend, and I'm going with my mom. Though I'm not thrilled to be traveling for the second weekend in a row, I'm really looking forward to it. Charlie's stepfather once told me that the quality of a wedding always depends on the feeling between the couple. If the couple is joyful and deeply in love, the wedding celebration will feel joyful and easy and sincere. Consequently, I expect this weekend's celebration to be an excellent one. :)

Guess What I'm Doing Tomorrow

Oh, nothing much, just flying to State College, Pennsylvania to see Susan Orlean read as Penn State's 2010 Steven Fisher Writer in Residence. Which Susan Orlean? Oh, yeah, that Susan Orlean who just happens to be my favorite living writer of non-fiction. I'm going to drink Yuenglings with her and stuff. At least I will be when I'm not stuffing my face with Waffle Shop and carousing with my friends from grad school who I haven't seen in a year and a half.

So, you know, no big weekend.


*pause*

AHHHHHOMIGOODNESSSOEXCITEDIT'SGOINGTOBEWAYAWESOMEYAY!!!

*ahem*

You get the idea.  ;)

I'll see you next week, blog friends!

Sleeplessness

After a weekend full of plentiful and restful sleep, I had a bad bout of insomnia last night.There aren't many pleasures to insomnia, except for the quiet reading time. Once I accept that I cannot sleep and drag myself out of bed, I usually enjoy the quiet, late-night time, the sense that I have no place to be and nothing to do.

Last night, I read a fascinating New Yorker article about Colorado uranium mining towns that have been gutted and razed due to radiation. Despite the health concerns that plague the towns, the "uranium widows" would happily welcome back the uranium mining industry. You can read an abstract here, but it's definitely worth tracking down the whole article.

I also read more of The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing, which I've been working on for awhile. It's not the cheeriest late night reading, but it's a great anthology, in part because editor Kevin Young does such an excellent job of mixing old and new poems. The poems in the collection are varied in age and style and message, but Young is nearly unfailing in his ability to choose compelling poems from excellent poets.

Here are two of my favorites from the collection. The first is a poem by Mary Oliver that I heard her read last fall. I liked it then, too, but these days it seems so important to remember these lines: "When it's over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."

I read the Galway Kinnell poem for the first time in this anthology. It's so beautiful, so simple and spare, that I couldn't resist posting it here. It has that ring of trueness to it that all poems should have, no matter what their message or style.

----------

When Death Comes

Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. 

---------- 

Wait

Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now. 

Distrust everything, if you have to. 

But trust the hours. Haven't they 

carried you everywhere, up to now? 

Personal events will become interesting again. 

Hair will become interesting. 

Pain will become interesting. 

Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. 

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again, 

their memories are what give them 

the need for other hands. And the desolation 

of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness 

carved out of such tiny beings as we are 

asks to be filled; the need 

for the new love is faithfulness to the old. 

Wait. 

Don't go too early. 

You're tired. But everyone's tired. 

But no one is tired enough. 

Only wait a while and listen. 

Music of hair, 

Music of pain, 

music of looms weaving all our loves again. 

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, 

most of all to hear, 

the flute of your whole existence, 

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion. 

Becoming Buffy

I'm pretty sure that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was instrumental in getting me through the first month after my breakup.

There's something deeply rewarding about watching a strong female character beat-up some grody-faced vampire dudes. More importantly, there's something deeply rewarding about watching a profoundly cute, intrinsically girly blond girl with a great sense of humor beat up a bunch of vampires while growing from a teenager into a mature-ish adult. Grrrrl power, much?

Buffy is part of the feminist-y kick I've been on lately. I'm listening to a lot of Madonna and Lucinda Williams. I'm reading Wonder Woman comic collections and rereading some of my favorite novels that feature strong female characters, like Thea Kronborg from The Song of the Lark. I'm reading excellent articles like this one on the importance of just getting over yourself and "writing like a motherf****r."

In general, I don't feel like I see nearly enough strong, independent, fierce female characters in movies, books, and television. When I do see them, these women are rarely allowed to be both independent and happy. Instead, we're usually shown uptight career women who can only be happy when they let their guard down, give up control of their lives, and marry a hunky Mr. Right. And don't even get me started on how terrifying it is that so many young women choose Pretty Woman as their favorite romantic comedy . . . oy, vey!

But I digress. Basically, I find it difficult to find role models for how to be a woman who is single, strong, successful, and genuinely happy, which is precisely what I'm going for these days.

So what can I do about all this, besides watching all the Buffy I can lay my hands on? I guess I'm given no option but to do it for myself: If there aren't enough Crazy Badass Amazon Warrior Artist Women in the world for me to emulate, then I guess it's up to me to be one of the first.

Now, don't worry, I'm already on my way. My hair is already superhero red . . .

 and the new Buffy-esque pleather jacket is already hanging in my closet.

If I can look like a superhero, why can't I be one?

Bringing It All Back Home

So I'm back.

I took a long Blogger break for a couple of reasons. The most important one is that I broke up with my boyfriend of four years. Naturally, it's been a very hard few weeks. The adjustment has been extraordinarily difficult. I didn't just break up with Charlie, I broke up with his friends, his family, our shared hobbies, our plans, and some of my hopes for the future. It's left me shaken in a way that I haven't felt in a very, very long time.

The breakup has made me question a lot in my life, including this blog. I considered quitting it permanently. I started writing here to help with my job search--the idea was that I could use this space to showcase my writing ability, my journalistic style, and my ability to write lots of prose really fast--but it's outlived that use. It's transformed into a place to talk about things that I love, about what I read and write and bake and listen to and watch and experience. It's become a place to connect with family and friends and other bloggers. It's become a casual place, a place of impressions and expression.

Largely, I like it that way. I like that my audience has changed from an anonymous potential employer to people I truly care about. I like that this is casual, that I can post as frequently or as rarely as I would like, and I like that I write this largely for me, not for anyone else.

So I've decided to return to writing here for as long as it makes me happy. I'm also working on a chapbook of poems, which is, honestly, a much larger priority than this; if you ever wonder why I haven't posted here in awhile, just assume I'm neck deep in poetry! I'm also taking a class in letterpress printing, spending a lot of time with friends, going to concerts, and listening to music voraciously. I'm spending a lot of time on me and on doing my thing, on figuring out who I am and what I have to do in my life to be happy.

As hard as the last month has been, all this, I know, is a good thing.

And now, an extremely beautiful and extremely convoluted Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that's been on my mind lately.It's a tough read, but it's lovely to hear out loud. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Yours with much blogger love,
Lesley

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

Carrion Comfort

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me	5
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,	10
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

As you may have noticed . . .

I've been on hiatus for a couple of weeks. I'm taking some time to set up my apartment, figure out what writing project I want to work on next, and taking it easy in general. I love this blog, my blogger friends (and family!), and sharing my writing here, but I'm not sure when I'll be back. But rest assured that . . .

 I WILL BE BACK.

Random Reads

I always keep a list of books somewhere that I mean to read. In high school, I kept the list tacked to my wall. In college, I kept it in my journal. Now, I keep it on Goodreads.

But no matter where I store it, the list doesn't ever seem to grow any shorter. In fact, it only gets longer and longer and longer, and it develops a desultory stink about it. No matter how excited I am when I first type a new book into my list, the excitement never lasts. The longer the book sits on my list, the less I want to read it and the more it feels like a chore or an obligation. Right now, the most tenured book on my list is One Hundred Years of Solitude. At this point, I'm pretty sure I'd rather sift through my old trig textbook than crack the spine of Solitude.

However, there's something truly invigorating about choosing to read a book that I've never heard of before, a book that I know absolutely nothing about. I decided to snatch Barbara Vine's The Minotaur off the shelf at the KU library purely because it was a stranger to me.

Before I started The Minotaur, I'd never heard of Vine and I didn't realize that the book was a mystery. All I knew was that I loved the first sentence of the jacket blurb: "As soon as Kerstin Kvist arrives at remote, ivy-covered Lydstep Old Hall in Essex, she feels like a character in a gothic novel." Awesome.

So far, I like it. I want to know what's wrong with John Cosway, and I want to know where Kerstin will find the labyrinth, and I want to know what's locked inside the library. Right now, that's good enough for me.

In the meantime, I'm doing a lot of walking, sweating, swimming, and editing, with a little baking thrown in (pictures are coming, I promise!). Mostly I'm just sweating, but that's July for you. More specifically, that's July in an apartment with a single window unit, weak fans, and a dryer constantly running outside the front door!  :P

Editing: A Short, Short Post

I've been doing a few freelance editing jobs this week. They're keeping me busy (oh, boy, are they keeping me busy!), but there's something I find deeply satisfying about revising someone else's writing. It's lovely to take a knotted, dense, nearly meaningless sentence and force it to unfurl itself into clarity. I enjoy making it possible for a reader to see through grammatical snarls and into what it is the writer really means.

It's tricky work, and tiring, but I love helping others slip into the flow and clarity necessary to expressing themselves. The trick isn't to make the writer sound like me or any other "good" writer: it's to help them sound just exactly like themselves.

Vacation

For the Fourth, I spent spent a long weekend in Milwaukee. I was doing a dual-visit, meeting up with a couple of old friends (Jennifer and her husband Mike) and visiting some family (my aunt, uncle, and cousins) who live there. I was also there to experience Summerfest, a massive annual music festival beloved by Milwaukee natives. At Summerfest, I heard a couple of great bands I'd never heard of, and I heard a few terrible bands whose names I made a point of forgetting! I also got to see Devo (they were wacky--what's the deal with Booji Boy?!) and Modest Mouse (an old favorite from my college days) in concert; they were both excellent! But the best part of the weekend was definitely seeing people I don't usually get to spend time with.

I also enjoyed being away from home and work and my everyday life. I have a theory that vacations are rarely about the experience of seeing someplace new; usually, they're about home. They're about taking a break from the places and people you see every day so that you realize how much you miss the familiar faces, the familiar landscapes, the familiar rooms you usually live with. I usually take vacations less to broaden my horizons and more to re-familiarize myself with the horizon I live under everyday.

Wisconsin was a beautiful place, full of lush vegetation and long, rolling hills and gorgeous, glimmering lakes. But one of my favorite views from vacation was driving down Mass Street toward my apartment on Monday night!

Her Name Is Ida.

Isn't she beautiful?

*sniff* I tear up a little bit when I look at her . . .

My aunt, grandma, and mom bought me a KitchenAid stand mixer as a housewarming present. I was so excited. I've wanted one for years (years!), and now I finally have one of my very own. *sniffle* It was the best present ever. *sniffle* *snuffle* *snort* And she's red--I always dreamed she'd be red!

Look at her go!
 

She's already helped me make fresh whipped cream, a dense chocolate loaf cake, and a batch of cinnamon rolls for my dad's birthday. And I've only had her ten days.

Why's she named Ida, you ask? Well, duh!

Secret Geniuses

I don't know if you were aware of this, but I am a secret genius of jai alai. Yes, that jai alai, the game with the big plastic scoops and a wiffle ball. I'm amazing at it. I'm like a graceful, athletic ballerina when I play it. A ballerina with a giant blue scoop!

I'm also a secret genius at working the line at a restaurant, doing marching band drills, and knowing just how much spaghetti sauce you can fit into a Tupperware without having it overflow. These are my "secret geniuses," my strange, small, innate talents that came pre-packaged with my bizarre little brain.

I believe that everyone has some bits of secret genius in them. These talents have little to do with training and everything to do with nature. For example, one of my friends is an expert cat charmer; she can have the most skiddish feline cuddled in her arms in less than a half hour. Charlie is astonishingly good at arranging furniture; he can glance around a room, draw a little sketch, and tell you exactly where you should put your couch to make the best, most elegant use of your living room space. My mom is an extremely talented gardener, capable of casually tossing some flowers or tomatoes in the ground only to see them flourish into a beautiful backyard garden with the minimum of watering and tending. Her thumb is neon green!

Of course, it is important to understand one's greatest natural talents and aptitudes, those skills that define one's professional life. I have a strong aptitude for writing, editing, managing detailed projects, juggling deadlines, and fitting into team settings. These are all very nice things to have on a resume.

But I think it's also important to understand and nurture my smaller geniuses, even if they're completely tangential to my "serious" work. Maybe these talents are nothing more than party tricks ("Just wait: your mind will be blown by how small of a container I can put this queso in!"). But they can also be the source of great pleasure.

For example, my secret genius for baking has led to an incorrigible baking hobby, one that consistently makes me happy. And it's always nice to think that, if I ever get sick of writing, baking is always there for me: a second talent, a second life, a second world that's always waiting for me to explore it!

Killing Time

So far, the most surprising thing about full-time work is how short the evenings feel. It's summer, and the daylight lasts forever, but each day after work I'm surprised by how quickly the clock hands spin from 5:00 p.m. to my bedtime. I want to tell them, Take it easy, guys! It isn't a race to 11:30, you know!

If I get, say, six hours of free time each evening, I spend an hour eating out or making/eating/cleaning up my own dinner. On average, I spend another hour paying bills, cleaning, running to the grocery store, setting up my apartment, etc.--doing all of that responsible stuff adults have to do. After that, I spend another half hour on play time with Willa and another half hour for making tomorrow's lunch and getting ready for bed.

If I'm lucky, that leaves me with three hours for hanging out with Charlie, going downtown with friends, calling friends on the phone, reading, writing, blogging, baking, planning vacations, checking Facebook, and renting and watching movies. Three hours sounds like a lot of time, but it sure doesn't feel like it when there's so much I want to do! And if I'm not careful, a whole evening will sneak away from me in a rush of shopping and chores; I'll be left holding a few Wal-Mart sacks, a ball of dirty dish towels, a glass of wine, and a very strong urge to pass out on the couch!

But this time crunch has helped me prioritize my life and avoid time-sucking habits. It's made me glad that I didn't sign up for cable; I don't feel like I have hours to spend with Bravo and Lifetime and VHI each week. I also spend less time on the Internet, which is bad for blogging but great for avoiding Twitter and mindless Amazon browsing.

When I was unemployed last year, I killed time. My biggest challenge was to fritter away my hours without frittering away my money. I resented my boredom. But now I feel more grateful for my leisure time, for every bike ride and long walk and book chapter. I appreciate spending time with people I care about and those half hours when my kitty crawls into my lap and sleeps. Staying up past midnight on Friday nights feels like a huge treat, as does greasing up my baking pan for a batch of cookies.

I'm especially fond of the feeling I get when I walk home right after work: I feel like a kid being let out of school for the summer because that evening time is mine, truly mine. I've earned it. There's no homework to do, no resumes to tweak, no deadline waiting in the wings. There's just my apartment, my people, my life.

Phillip Lopate on Michel de Montaigne

I've started reading Phillip Lopate's Against Joie de Vivre: Personal Essays. I've been enjoying some of the essays, but others have left an unguent, unpleasant taste in my mouth. (Lopate is a bit of a confessionalist, which is a tricky mode to write in.)

However, I'm loving "What Happened to the Personal Essay?", especially the parts about Michel de Montaigne:

"It was Montaigne's peculiar project, which he claimed rightly or wrongly was original, to write about the one subject he knew best: himself. As with all succeeding literary self-portraits--or all succeeding stream-of-consciousness, for that matter--success depended on having an interesting consciousness, and Montaigne was blessed with an undulatingly supple, learned, skeptical, deep, sane, and candid one. In point of fact, he frequently strayed to worldly subjects, giving his opinion on everything from cannibals to coaches, but we do learn a large number of intimate and odd details about the man, down to his bowels and kidney stones. 'Sometimes there comes to me a feeling that I should not betray the story of my life,' he writes. On the other hand: 'No pleasure has any meaning for me without communication.'"

Ah, Montaigne, I want to be just like you when I grow up!  :)

Food Envy

Look what I just got in the mail:

Shirley O. Corriher's  BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking. Corriher is a chemist turned chef, and her books give you the recipes for awesome food and the reasons why awesome food happens. I love Good Eats for the same reason: when I read BakeWise, I don't just get more recipes, I get a little bit closer to knowing how food works and being able to modify recipes on my own. And, as you know, chemistry is cool.

I'm sixty pages in (yes, I'm actually reading a cookbook through!), and I want to stop and make something every time a turn the page. I want to try these recipes out and make them mine. I want to put my new knowledge about baking powder and bundt pans to the test!

In other news, I desperately want to know how to make Indian food. Charlie and I went to India Palace last night, which is my favorite restaurant ever in terms of pure deliciousness. I could eat their food every night for a month and never get tired of it. (Of course, I'll never know that for a fact because it's way too expensive to eat there every night for a month!)

Indian food seems so simple: as far as I can tell, it's only tomatoes and onions cooked down into a paste and flavored with a blend of spices (most of which can be found in American spice racks). So, really, it's not so different from Italian tomato sauces except for its consistency, its spices, and its pairing with rice instead instead of pasta.

But, for the most part, I'm baffled as to how it's made! I've never found a recipe that actually turns out to be anywhere near as amazing as the stuff you can get at a good Indian restaurant. I don't know if it's the spices or my technique. It's a mystery to me, that cooking of banal ingredients into something that makes me groan with gluttonous delight.

So, I have food envy: I want to know how to calculate fantastic cake recipes, and I want to know how to make mind-bendingly good chana masala. Just a few more items to add to my long list of life goals!