Employed.

Yup, I have a job.

It only took me ten months, eight interviews, half a dozen informational interviews, and at least thirty job applications, but I did it, and good golly I'm proud! And I'm moving back to Lawrence, which makes me happier than pretty much anything ever. So basically I feel like this right now:

Go, panda, go!

Here's what I learned from my long, long job search:

1. Relationships are important: At several of my interviews, I felt like I said all the right things and had all the right answers. Did I get those jobs? No. What job did I get? The one where I had fun in the interview. My future co-workers laughed at my jokes and I laughed at theirs, and I was impressed by their intelligence and energy. I liked their questions, so I answered them well. Ultimately, we wanted to work together, so now we're going to!
2. "Work" is a relative term: I wasn't appreciative of most of the job titles, job descriptions, and salaries I saw on-line, at least not until I started working at the cafe. That's when I figured out what real work was. My feet ached, my head pounded, and I was in bed every night before eleven. And, even though I was nearly full-time, I still didn't have health insurance or enough money to live! After that, I realized how lucky I was to have the opportunity to earn my living with my mind, not just my hands.
3. There are many ways to be happy: Despite its more grueling aspects, I love my cafe job. I love my co-workers, and I like how high-energy and physically demanding the job is. I like the choreography of working the line, how we all learn to weave smoothly between each other and prepare dishes with an unthinking, almost instinctive grace. I know, I know, it sounds over-the-top, but I'm being serious! I'm good at being a line cook, and I'm glad that I know that about myself. I can be happy making food in a restaurant, and I have a talent for it, just like I have a talent for writing poems and doing marching band drills. So maybe there's a second career as a trained chef waiting for me in the future!
4. Tangents are okay: I had a hard time finding a job. So what? I also got to develop a blog that I now love. I learned HTML and CSS and SEO. I learned how to bake bread and cinnamon rolls and make cafe mochas and cappuccinos. I got to teach Othello to a fantastic group of business students, some of whom had never read Shakespeare before. And I got to experience the restaurant business first-hand. I could never, ever say that these months have been wasted.
5. The (mental) readiness is all: After grad school, I felt entitled to a job. Not a great job, just a job, because I was smart and nice and responsible. But around February, I realized that nobody owes me anything. Nobody owes me their attention, their good will, or their employment. The only thing that could earn me anyone's attention, good will, and employment was being truly willing and eager to work hard. Somehow, during my time at the cafe, I went from thinking like a student ("Give me a task to do and I'll earn an A!") to thinking like an employee ("Give me a chance to put my nose to the grindstone, and I'll impress you this week, next week, and next year. And I'll out-think the next guy to help you and your company grow, all while building my own knowledge and career.").
6. I am not my job: I felt awful about not having a job for a very long time. Part of it was hating the boredom and the constant horror of job applications and interviews and cold calls and emails. But most of my self-loathing came from considering myself a failure. Working at the cafe made me realize that I could still be me and have a good time even while I mopped floors and plunged toilets and sliced croutons. It taught me that I am not my job, or my lack thereof. Success is not the result of succeeding at one limited task (finding a full-time office job), and it doesn't come with any set job title or a salary. It's about feeling like myself and following my gut and finding a way to do something I love every day.

Homemade Strawberry Cake

Ever since a recent lustful encounter with a boxed strawberry cake mix, I've been wanting to make a homemade strawberry cake. I wanted a recipe that incorporated fresh crushed strawberries and would pair well with fresh whipped cream frosting. Fortunately, this Fresh Strawberry Cake recipe from Recipezaar.com really fit the bill.

My strawberry cake!

The question is, is homemade strawberry cake really better than Duncan Hines's marvelous, monstrous, candy-flavored version? I mean, it's the tacky, bright-pink, sugary smoothness of it that's so appealing, right?

Mr. Hines's Strawberry Supreme.

The answer is yes and no. The box mix cake is extra moist and super fluffy and tastes just like a strawberry Skittle, so it's pretty much the best thing in the world. However, real strawberry cake is similarly moist, but it isn't so tender or so fluffy. With real fruit in the recipe, I don't think it's possible to obtain the same texture as a chiffon cake. And the homemade cake definitely isn't baby pink!

The naked strawberry cakes.

The cakes turned out to have a sugary, slightly dense texture, with an almost crispy crust; they were a little like a scone on the outside but were purely cake-like on the inside. They definitely tasted just like strawberries!

Crushed strawberries for the cake batter.

I had been wanting to make fresh whipped cream frosting for some time, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to try it. I used strawberry puree (strawberries, a bit of sugar, and a dash of lemon juice) to take the frosting from plain to strawberry flavored.

The strawberry puree and fresh whipped cream frosting.

The pretty, petal-colored strawberry frosting.

The cut cake.

However, I ran out of frosting for my last cake round, so I used the strawberry glaze recipe that comes with the cake recipe. It was pretty tasty, too, though I didn't like it as well as the whipped cream frosting. The whipped cream was light and fresh and smooth and darn pretty. But the glaze looked chunky and *ahem* a little unappealing. Besides, even though it was delicious, it somehow made the cake taste more like a muffin than a proper cake.

The glazed cake.

But that just means I'm allowed to make this recipe in cupcake form and and eat it for breakfast, right?

A slice of the glazed cake.

I liked this recipe quite a bit, but I would like to find a chiffon version (if, indeed, that is possible with fresh fruit!). This cake was a touch heavy for me, even though it was wildly popular; pieces seemed to fly mysteriously from the platter every time I turned around! But it was a great way to deal with the vast amount of strawberries I usually buy each spring, futilely hoping that I can finish them before they start to go bad.

My favorite fruit.

Oh, and did I mention the best part of all? I suspect that all my frozen leftover strawberry puree will make some pretty fantastic margaritas come summer time! Hooray for buying in bulk!

Food, Inc.

On Wednesday night, I finally got the chance to watch Food, Inc. on PBS. It's a documentary about the American food industry, more specifically the meat, corn, and soybean industries.

Now I've seen the PETA video about the horrors of slaughterhouses, chicken houses, and feedlots (Warning: Do NOT click on the previous link unless you have a strong stomach!), and I was expecting more of the same: excruciating scenes of sick and dying animals, fetid killing floors, and desolate swaths of polluted ponds and fields.

Instead, I was surprised to find that the documentary focused on the human costs of industrialized farming and food processing. The film covered a wide range of abuses, many of which I had never heard of before, including

• food corporations' gross exploitation of immigrant worker communities,
• the coercion of American farmers by giant seed and meat corporations,
• the rising diabetes epidemic as an unintended consequence of government subsidized corn products,
• and the prevalence of e. coli and salmonella contaminations in slaughterhouses across the country (which the USDA is largely unable to regulate).

I know that these bullet points seem unbelievable--you may be thinking, what a bunch of hippie, anti-capitalist babble!--but the documentary does an excellent job of talking directly to the persons involved and explaining these issues clearly. So I highly recommend that you check it out for yourselves and form your own opinions.

One of my favorite things about the documentary was its concluding message: each of us has the power to change our food by "voting" with our money. By buying conscientiously, with an eye toward human costs as well as the more obvious monetary costs, we can change the way food in America is grown and raised. So buy locally, choose sustainably raised and organic foods when possible, and go to your local farmers' market this weekend!

AWP 2010

This year, AWP did for me exactly what a professional conference should do: it made me feel refocused, motivated, and, in the words of Gary Snyder, famous poet and environmental activist, "way stoked."

In years past, I've spent a lot of time in AWP's panels on writing and pedagogy. The AWP panels are one hour and fifteen minutes long, and they cover a wide range of topics. You can hear talks there on anything from charming magazine editors and teaching poetry in high schools to discussing trauma in a workshop setting and writing effective sex scenes.

This year, I didn't force myself to sit through too many panels. I went to three talks (one on on-line journals, another on writers collectives, and a third on careers in the literary arts), one reading (Anne Waldman and Gary Snyder), and I went to the book fair. The panels ranged from so-so to fascinating, and Gary Snyder was a let-down while Anne Waldman lived up to her reputation as a "human dynamo" with a highly theatric reading of her poems. And, yes, she was wearing one heck of a green and fuchsia scarf!

 Anne Waldman

But, as always, the book fair was my favorite part. It's always an overwhelming/disheartening/inspiring experience due to its size: I would guess there were nearly 250 tables packed into a single warehouse of a room. 

One half of the book fair.

Some of the exhibitors were literary journals, some were large publishers, and some were writing programs. But my favorite tables were the small presses, many of which were publishing visually gorgeous books of fiction and poetry. This year, there were more handmade publications than I'd ever seen before, beautiful books printed on vintage hand presses and bound by hand individually. I found myself lusting after hand-printed calendars of typographic art and chapbooks covered with reclaimed leather covers and literary journals bound in strips of carpet insulation!

The other half of the book fair.

What makes the book fair overwhelming is its size and the impossibility of really examining every book and talking to every interesting publisher. What makes it disheartening is seeing the thousands and thousands of new books printed each year, most of which are purchased and read by very few readers (selling 700 copies of a book of poetry is considered pretty successful). It can make you realize what a saturated, competitive market writers work in, and it can make you wonder whether the world really needs another book ever again.

But it's inspiring to see so many people writing, designing, and printing based purely on love. These people don't hope to turn a profit--even big publishers rarely do that any more. They just hope to create something beautiful and have it picked up by a few admirers. It reminds you what we all write creatively for, anyway: not for money (though it would be nice), not for fame (though it would be fantastic), but because we love literature, enough to travel to Denver and spend too much money on literary magazines and limited edition chapbooks!

Besides the book fair, my favorite part of AWP was meeting people. At past AWPs, I slipped soundlessly through the book fair and never asked any questions at panels. This year, I made the effort to meet my local writing community. I talked to one of the New Letters publishers, shook hands with an NEA program officer, met a slew of Lawrence's Bathtub Writer's Collective members, and even encountered a poet-programmer while chatting with a table full of on-line publication editors. 

I wasn't networking to find a job or create "business" connections. I networked to meet my local writing community and to experience the pleasure of speaking to enthusiastic people. Meeting these new people and getting excited about their ideas was almost--almost!--as rewarding as spending time with old friends from grad school who love writing as much as I do.

Me, Alita, and Stephanie.

My grad school friends and I drank excellent Colorado microbrews, talked about critical approaches to the memoir, bitched about poets who can't read their own poems out loud, and hoofed all over downtown Denver together, and that alone was worth the price of admission!

So, Washington, D.C., watch out! You're next!

"The Food's the Thing"

Hi, folks! AWP was simply wonderful. I loved seeing my friends from grad school, basking in the warm Denver sunshine, drinking really good microbrews, listening to poetry, and hearing talks about professional development and on-line literary publishing. The conference was extremely rewarding, but it was also extremely tiring! I need a day or two to sleep it off before I write a longer post about it!

But I did want to share this with you: a fascinating little article about a Ph.D student writing her dissertation on food in Shakespeare's plays. Keri Sanburn Behre of Lawrence studies the impact of food on Shakespeare's language and metaphors, but she also bakes Renaissance-era pastry in her spare time. Obviously, I should be this woman's best friend. I'll try to attend her talk tomorrow night and convince her of this fact, without coming off too stalker-y.

Anyway, check it out: it's a great little article that talks about the transient nature of food trends and why Europeans used to think that cantaloupe could kill you.

AWP

I'm off to the AWP conference in Denver for the weekend! I'll update here when I get back. Expect pictures, poetry reading reviews, and Denver sightseeing stories!

I'm most excited to see this lady: Anne Waldman, famous Beat-era poet and one of my personal favorites from college. I'm certain that she'll be wearing a scarf at her reading, and I'm certain that I'll want one of my own afterward!

Best wishes, folks--I'll be back soon.

Springtime

Okay, okay, I'm back!

Last week was one of those unofficial vacation weeks when I wanted to be miles away from my computer. I didn't want to write anything or check my email or tweet or do anything except exist.

Besides working at the cafe, the only business I handled involved 1) planning my upcoming trip to AWP in Denver, 2) the mall (new khaki shorts!), 3) reading yet another Anita Blake novel, 4) frosting sugar cookies and eating Easter candy, and 5) sitting on the back porch generating vast stores of vitamin D and watching the birdies. I couldn't even muster up enough energy to take pictures of the budding hyacinths and sprouting daffodils and fluttering birdies for this blog--I was too busy actually enjoying them!

April and May are my favorite months of the year. I don't know if it's the lengthening days, the shifting color of the sunlight, the warm breezes, or the hard-earned eruption of green grass and tulip shoots, but I get positively giddy in spring. I'm always full of energy, but, fortunately, I'm never bothered with any industrious inclination to do anything practical with that energy. I turn lazy and frivolous, and it is wonderful.

Come to think of it, I believe that frivolity is highly underrated: isn't it basically a useless, desultory, meaningless joy and an appreciation for life's happy minutiae? Isn't a touch of frivolity here and there--especially when the springtime air smells like earth and rain and tangy green things--a necessary, life-affirming thing?

Anyway, go outside. But if you're stuck inside for some reason, here are a few of my favorite spring poems that might help you through your captivity. The first, William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All," captures the difficulty of spring, how each year it is truly a challenge for the earth to recreate itself whole from nothing but scraps of gray grass and soggy roots. I love how Williams depicts the miraculousness of spring's rebirth in this poem, even while paying close attention to its gritty, grimy specifics.

The second poem, Billy Collins's "Today," is a typical Billy Collins poem: it's simple, playful, and true. While Williams's poem is better crafted, Collins's seems just as true to me and perhaps more relatable: why yes, Mr. Collins, I do want to "rip the little door from its jamb" in springtime joy, I do!

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

Spring and All

By William Carlos Williams

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

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

Today

By Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.