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!

One Man's Meat

I finally finished E.B. White's One Man's Meat, and now I don't know what to do with myself. I was really sad to leave it. I dreaded the last page and made a little "Awww . . ." sound as I turned to it. I wanted more!

I've been reading it at lunch time over my sack lunches and cafeteria salads. White's essays on country life are so calming, so rejuvenating, and he somehow made subjects like patriotism and World War Two and freedom feel immediate and fresh and important. His essays created a truly quiet space in the middle of my work days; they seemed to clean out my brain for a little bit, sort of smoothing down its rough edges before I took out my notebook for my mid-day writing session.

Finishing a beloved book is a sad event, and also an exciting one. I get to choose a new book now, with a great deal of apprehension (will it live up to White's essays?) and a little bit of hope (could it possibly be even better than White's essays?!).

I think that I'll stick with essays at lunch time. They seem suited to the noon-hour. Poems, which are all impression, emotion, and instinct, seem right for foggy-headed mornings, and novels are purely evening fare, with their human camaraderie and thrilling imaginative leaps. But the honesty of non-fiction, the way that essays inch their way from fact toward wisdom, is steadying and filling, sort of like a turkey sandwich on whole grain bread.

So what's next? Hmmm . . . here are the possibilities:

1. Walter Benjamin's Illuminations
2. Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem
3. Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson's Self-Reliance and Other Essays
5. Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
6. Marilynn Robinson's Absence of Mind 

Any suggestions?

Anita Blake, Vampire Hunting Feminist Badass

I just finished another Anita Blake novel. This one was Cerulean Sins, and by God, isn't that title laughable? And the cover art . . . sheesh . . .

Cerulean Sins

But don't let's talk about it. Anyway, this is book eleven out of nineteen in the series. The books have--like all novel series--gotten worse and worse as the series wears on. They've become increasingly melodramatic and sexually gratuitous and repetitive, but I can't quite give them up. I think it's because Anita Blake, the vampire hunting heroine of the novels, is such a fantastic character.

Now, you all know that I love me a good vampire series, and I don't mind their conventionality: the main character is almost always a woman who is somehow embroiled in vampire culture. She's always both afraid of and attracted to the vampires, and she always becomes involved with at least one Vampire Boyfriend who's usually very old and seductive and dangerous and really good looking. And usually he has really long hair.

Gary Oldman as Dracula from Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Brad Pitt from Interview with a Vampire.

Jean-Claude, Anita's long-haired Vampire Boyfriend.

The Anita Blake series follows this pattern just like the Twilight books and the Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood novels. But the difference between Anita and characters like Bella Swan (Twilight) and Sookie is vast. Typically, the "heroine" of a vampire novel is a victim, an innocent who stands in for the reader. She's constantly put into great danger by the vampires, but she is also is seduced and loved by them. She survives in the vampire world largely by luck and the protection of others, not because of her own abilities.

But Anita is no victim. She's known as "The Executioner" because she's an officially licensed vampire hunter. She takes care of her own bad guys and doesn't fall to bits every time someone tries to take a bite out of her. Bella and Sookie are both protected by their Vampire Boyfriends, but Anita spends more time taking care of her friends and lovers than they take care of her. Both Sookie and Bella spend their novels crying and running away and huddling in a corner while the big, tough male vampires do all the talking, but Anita assumes that it's up to her to save the day. And if a vampire tries to eat her, she just shoots him. Her self-reliance makes for a refreshing change of pace.

She's part detective, part necromancer, and part assassin, but there's nothing victim-like about her. In fact, thought the novels, she doesn't worry about getting killed so much as she worries about losing her faith and innocence. She worries about becoming a hardened sociopath too ready to take a life, and this internal conflict is far more interesting than the ones in other vampire novels. 

To be honest, the Anita Blake series has jumped the shark so many times that, every time I read one of the novels, I find myself thinking, "Well, this is going to be it: no more for me!" And then the book always ends with Anita being a total badass and raising a hundred bloodthirsty zombies or staking some big scary vampire or shooting her way out of trouble, and I just can't stop myself from going back to the library for just one more: it's a pleasure to read about a female character who is tough, capable, funny, and complex. Besides, let's be honest, who doesn't love a good zombie massacre?

Anita killing some zombies.

Gaaaaahhhhh! (An Update)

So, since last Saturday, I've been packing, driving, camping, driving, packing, moving, unpacking, driving, cleaning, and shopping nonstop, and I am pooped with a capital P!

I had a fabulous Memorial Day weekend camping with my family, and I'm just getting settled into my new apartment, and this has all been great fun, but I haven't been on my computer at all. However, you can expect the following next week as I start getting back on track:

• pictures of my new place
• why thrift store shopping is awesome
• why I love "The Farm"
• and why Anita Blake is the best fantasy novel heroine ever.

I promise, I'll be writing again soon. In the meantime, wish me a full night's sleep--I sure as heck need one!