The Gingerbread House Saga: The Conclusion

So, on Saturday night, right about the time the cowgirl and I were kicking back with our drinks, a much-anticipated storm finally hit the area. It started snowing, and while we were still relaxing in the living room, the power went out.

The next day, the power was still out, AND we still had to assemble and decorate the gingerbread house we'd been working on for the competition the cowgirl wanted to enter.

(Actually, the power being out was no big deal, since we had a generator, and since the only part of making the gingerbread house that required electricity was using an electric mixer for the frosting, but I mention it on a vague principle of trying to be dramatic. Shocking, I know.)

Well, we got started on putting the house together around 10a.m., then "painting" on the windows and icing the roof. I personally cut about a million little chocolate discs in half to simulate roof shingles. Granted, it was my own fault, because it was my own idea, but I'm just saying.

The cowgirl, meanwhile, tapped into a previously unrealized talent as a sculptor, fashioning Santa's legs out of almond paste. Yes, just his legs. (These were placed inside the chimney; the ol' boy must've had a few eggnogs too many to try diving in headfirst.) Encouraged by the fact that the legs turned out pretty good, she went on to try her hand at an entire figure skater, who would eventually be skating on the pond we were going to make.

We changed our minds about both skater and pond when the skater couldn't be made to stand. Plus his/her head had a tendency to keep falling off, so.

Anyway, we were having lots of fun, and joking about how there was no way the gingerbread house was going to win, but hey, at least people might get a good laugh when they passed it by on their way to ooh and ahh over the full-on gingerbread villages that some people apparently feel compelled to make. "Who has the time for that," I asked.

"Oh, you'd be surprised," said the cowgirl. "People plan ahead all year for this."

Not for the first time during my visit, Los Angeles felt very far away.

Sometime in the afternoon (and yes, we were STILL hard at work decorating the house), a neighbor came over with her two kids to "admire" our creation. As we were chatting, we all started wondering whether or not there were different categories that you could enter, or if everyone — village makers and total beginners alike — get judged in the same (slightly unfair) arena. The cowgirl dug up the entry form, and in the process of reading through it, alighted upon the rather important information that the entry form was supposed to be turned in no later than November 19th.

A rather tense moment ensued.

After it became clear that neither the cowgirl nor I were going to break down, scream, or cry (though I've no doubt both of us were considering each and every one of those options during that tense moment), the atmosphere relaxed. After all, if nothing else, we'd learned a lot of valuable lessons during our 20+ hour adventure in gingerbread house-making, including but by no means limited to the following:

1) Unless you are a highly skilled gingerbread house maker, bigger does not necessarily equate with better.

2) Roll out smaller sections of gingerbread dough to bake the pieces from, instead of giant slabs the size of placemats that barely fit on your baking sheets (assuming you are able to move them onto the baking sheets in the first place, and good luck with that).

3) Have a healthy supply of whatever your version of strong drink is on hand. This is for you, not the house. And trust me. You will need it.

4) Fondant works better than almond paste for making figures. But in my opinion, it doesn't taste nearly as good.

5) The little beads on those gummy raspberry and blackberry candies can be picked off and used individually in the decorations. For example, the red beads can be used to decorate a green-frosting wreath on the gingerbread house door. The black beads, on the other hand, look like deer poop when dropped on a gingerbread crust driveway. So, don't do that.

6) Check the due date on your entry form BEFORE you finish building your gingerbread house. You'll thank you. And so will the sister who spent all weekend helping you. (Love you, cowgirl! Wouldn't have done it for anyone else...)

UPDATE: Here's a picture of the house:



I know it's a little small, but if you look closely, you might notice that Santa has been joined by an elf up there on the roof. I can guess now why Santa "fell' headfirst into the chimney...

Also, notice the chocolate discs. Please, for the love of God, notice them.

Adventures in the Cowgirl's Kitchen, Part 2

When I left off my last post, my sister the cowgirl and I were taking a break from the gingerbread house we were making so that she could help her husband put hay into a barn. This took a lot longer than I anticipated. I resume the saga a few hours later...

3:15 p.m. With help from the cowboy, the cowgirl remeasures the cardboard template pieces for the house and scales everything down. Way down. The goal, as I understand it, is to avoid having to make another whole batch of dough—a goal that I very heartily support. Not that making gingerbread dough from scratch isn't more fun than a barrel of monkeys, but I'm ready to move on to the next part of the process, whatever that might be.

The cowgirl lays out the cardboard pieces on the three giant slabs of gingerbread we've already prepared. A few moments later she says, "We have to do another batch."

Maybe I shouldn't have sampled so much dough when the cowgirl wasn't looking.

4:00 Round 2 of dough-making begins. For the record, my right arm still hasn't forgiven me for all the whisking I had to do in the first round.

4:05 "No wonder they sell kits for this," the cowgirl says.

4:15 - 6:15 A lot happens, including the preparation of a butternut squash soup while we are still in the middle of baking what are starting to seem like an endless parade of gingerbread pieces. I feel like I've fallen into some surreal dream, or maybe a Disney's Fantasia! segment, where kitchen implements come to life and dance around and food bursts into song and the whole world trips out. Worst of all, I can't stop myself from snacking on scraps of gingerbread, which is giving me a stomachache. Plus, it tastes weird when eaten while the scent of the sauteed onions fills the air, which it does because of the soup.

At some point I realize I have not left the house all day. At another point, I pour myself a stiff drink.

The cowgirl wonders who first had the bright idea of making gingerbread houses. I suggest—or blame—the Swiss. I'm wrong, as it turns out, but I don't care.

6:15 If I never eat gingerbread again as long as I live, I'll be fine.

6:20 The cowgirl valiantly keeps trying to give me tips on making the butternut squash soup, so I can do it on my own in the future. Her confidence in my potential for domestication is endearing, really. Especially given her close proximity to me in the kitchen all day today.

6:55 The butternut squash soup is nearly ready! I think we are also still baking gingerbread, but I really have no idea anymore what's going on. Everything's a bit of a blur. And no, it's not because of the stiff drink. Even though I had another one.

8:00 Dinner's finished. The gingerbread house pieces are all cooked and laid out on racks on the dining room table. Are we almost done? No. We still have to make frosting tomorrow, once again from scratch. Why, I want to say, or, more accurately, scream. Why why why, when someone so cleverly invented ready-made frosting in a little tub that you can buy from the grocery store! (I'm sure it comes as a big surprise that between the two of us, the cowgirl is the one who's married.)

9:00 After cleaning up the kitchen, vacuuming, and starting a load of laundry, the cowgirl mixes a pomegranate martini for each of us. At least one of us has earned it.

9:10 I show the cowgirl what I've written here, before I post it to the blog.. When she gets to the part about the frosting, she says, "It's a different kind of frosting." Of course it is.

"And you earned it too," she adds, referring to the martini.

I laugh. "No, I didn't."

"You were standing up almost as long as I was!" She pauses. "You didn't drag hay into the barn, but..." I laugh again. A few minutes later, she asks if I want a refill. I say sure. Then she realizes there's only enough left in the shaker for one more drink.

I tell her to go ahead.

Adventures In The Cowgirl's Kitchen, Part 1

10:00 Since I arrived at my sister the cowgirl's place last Sunday for a visit, she's been talking a lot about a gingerbread house competition she wants to enter. Today is the day that we are going to embark on this project. I told her I'd "help" but we all know what that means. (Hey, someone has to make sure everything tastes the way it's supposed to, right?)

10:15 The cowgirl turns on the stereo and the soundtrack from O Brother Where Art Thou starts playing. The cowgirl begins trying to tape together the cardboard skeleton of the house, which has been designed and cut out by her husband the cowboy before he left to pick up some hay.

Apparently the house is going to be a mansion. The cowgirl hopes the gingerbread sections (which "we" are going to make from scratch) will fit on her baking pans. I hope so, too, if for no other reason than that it will be a lot more peaceful around here if they do.

10:25 It turns out that cardboard is less cooperative than you might think.

10:29 The cowgirl is taking measurements, making drawings, and trying to get the house to stand up. "The roof is going to be the bear," says the cowgirl. My thoughts exactly. Or something like that.

10:47 Not for the first time, the cowgirl expresses concern about how big the gingerbread pieces will have to be. In the background, I hear voices singing a mournful chorus: "I am weary, let me rest." I suspect it's an omen but for once I keep my opinion to myself.

10:55 I am given the job of whipping some cream and vanilla together until it develops "soft peaks." Not being experienced in these matters, I'm not sure what this means, but figure I'll find out. The cowgirl says I can use the handheld electric whisk, or just do it on my own power. I opt for the latter because "I need the exercise" but in reality it's because I'm too lazy to put together and plug in the electric whisk.

11:04 Whoever invented the handheld electric whisk deserves a medal.

11:15 I get in trouble for pausing the whisk so that I can sing along with the last song on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack.

11:25 Finally, the whipping cream is done, which is good because my right tricep is about to go on strike, electric whisk notwithstanding. R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People album is playing now. Ever so subtly, the atmosphere changes.

11:37 The gingerbread dough is all mixed! The cowgirl starts rolling it out. She stops, looks at the dough sticking to the rolling pin. "I can see this is going to get really obnoxious," she says. She's right. And what's even more obnoxious is how it takes both of us to try to lift the (giant) gingerbread pieces and move them to a baking sheet, and yet we still can't prevent the pieces from tearing.

"How does anyone do stuff like this by themselves?" I wonder aloud.

"I don't know!" the cowgirl wails. I pick up some of the scraps and eat them. Mmm, the sweet taste of silver lining...

12:05 Looks like we have a choice between making another batch of gingerbread dough or making the house smaller. The cowgirl and I glance at each other. She gets out her measuring tape and an X-acto knife.

12:15 The cowboy's returned with a truckful and then some of hay. The cowgirl has to run out and help him unload. I'd join them, but someone has to eat, I mean guard, the gingerbread dough. Besides, it's raining out there. Brrr.

More to come, I'm sure. Stay tuned.

Communion

Last night I had communion in a pub. I didn't plan to, it just kind of happened. And I have to say, it was pretty awesome.

I get together at this pub every couple weeks or so with a few friends to have drinks and discuss various culturally relevant topics of interest to all of us. We call ourselves The Philosophers Club, I guess because we couldn't come up with anything much nerdier than that. (I mean honestly, could you?) But inevitably, no matter what topic we start out with — the evils of Facebook (that's usually my idea), the nature of truth, the pursuit of happiness — we always end up talking about church and Christianity. And last night was no exception.

Confession time: I haven't been to church in several weeks now, because my church is in my black books lately. It's hard for me to articulate exactly why, but basically I'm annoyed at the whole programmatic aspect of the endeavor. Church isn't a place to be anymore, if it ever was, at least in America. No, it's a whole new To Do list, especially when you add up the myriad of activities beyond the Sunday sermon to help you get "plugged in" or "connected" (and notice the terminology of mechanization).

As if we weren't busy enough already in our lives.

Here's the thing. I don't want to join a "small group", or lead one. I don't want to go on a missions trip. I don't want to go on my church's annual retreat, a decision that people simply can't understand when I don't offer up a good excuse along with it, such as, "I'm dying." And so help me God, if I hear the word "community" or the phrase "doing life together" one more time, I'm going to puke on someone's face.

What I want is rest. I want silence. I want mystery. And I want communion. But I don't particularly want church. At least not right now.

I said some of this to my fellow philosophers (all two of them) last night. Not in so many words, but that was the gist. At least it must have been, because the next thing I knew, one of them was flagging down the waitress (who, I thought, was already a tiny bit annoyed at us for not buying beer or food this time, just coffee and dessert) to tell her, "We'd like to do communion. Can we have some wine and a side of bread?"

I felt a little weird about it at first. Praying over the bread and wine when it was brought to our courtyard table, while some sports event played out on the big screen TV behind me. Passing the elements around and trying not to look at fellow diners to see if they were looking at us. But after we prayed, after we read the Passover passage from the Gospel of Luke off of my friend's iPad, after we broke the bread and shared the wine, we sat back, looked at each other, and said, 'Wow. That was really nice."

And you know what? It was. Really, really nice.

An interesting little addendum to this story: Today I found out that last Sunday the topic at my church was... the meaning of communion. Weird, right? Maybe God's trying to tell me something. Maybe I'll try not to think about what it might be. Because I have this sick feeling it involves the word "community." Ugh.

NanoWriMo 2010!

Well, it's November and that means it's also National Novel Writing Month. Somewhat to my own surprise, my friend Drew managed to talk me into participating this year. "It works out to 1,667 words a day," he said. Which sounded doable.

Until today, of course, when NanoWriMo officially begins. And of course my mind is blank.

Soooo, anyone have a first sentence lying around that they don't need? Just curious.

Honk If You REALLY Love Jesus

The other night I was driving along Los Feliz Blvd when I found myself behind a car with a bumper sticker that said, "Honk if you LOVE it!" And I found myself wondering if people who have these "Honk if you love [whatever]" stickers on their car actually remember that they do. I mean, if someone behind them honks, do they think, "Cool, that person liked my bumper sticker!" or do they freak out and wonder if they did something wrong, or do they just plain go from zero to road rage and flip off whoever honked?

I considered honking to find out, but L.A. isn't really the sort of place where you want to drive around playing games with your horn, so I didn't.

Besides, the "Honk if you LOVE it!" sticker was underneath another sticker that said, "Real men find Jesus sexually attractive," and that gave me other stuff to wonder about. Mainly, why?

It's mostly a rhetorical question.

I Obsess Like

While the rest of the world is riveted by the saga of the Chilean miners, I have been obsessing over the I Write Like website. This should tell you something about me, but I hope you'll ignore it..

The important thing to note is that I finally got the website to say that I write like someone I wouldn't mind writing like. Someone other than Dan Brown, Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk (I really can't believe I got compared to the author of Fight Club), Isaac Asimov and Rudyard Kipling.

Today I achieved... drum roll, please... no, really, I want the drum roll, so please do it... thank you... get ready now...

Ernest Hemingway!

Now, I'm trying not to think about the fact that I allegedly write like old white guys. I'm also trying not to think about the fact that I have actually been obsessing over what a website has to say about my writing. And I'm also also trying not to think about the fact that I got Hemingway after typing the following three lines into the "analyzer":

"The unicorn was dead when they found it. Nothing they could have done. That didn't make them feel any better."

I know. I have issues. Lots of them. But hey, so did Hemingway. Did I mention I write like him? A website told me so. Booyah.

A Rant of Biblical Proportions

Yesterday on my way home from breakfast, I stopped at a local used bookstore that specializes in books on Christian theology and spirituality. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, but as I walked in I remembered that I had been thinking about getting a chronological Bible and decided to see if they had any. But I was only in their "Bibles" section for two seconds before I felt the familiar weariness that is my standard reaction to Christian bookstores as a whole.

There were so many Bibles. I'm not talking about translations here; I'm talking about "The Couple's Devotional Bible", the "Celebrate Recovery Bible", "The Groom's Bible" (subtitle: "preparing spiritually for the most important day of your life"), and the one that really made me gag, the "Busy Life Bible" ("Got a minute? Only a minute? This Bible is designed just for you").

There were Bibles for students, for dads, for "all people" (I guess just in case, God forbid, a niche market was overlooked). There was an "Inclusive" Bible, which sounds like the Bible for all people, except it's not; it's an "egalitarian" Bible, meaning it uses words like humankind instead of mankind, and so on. There were indeed chronological Bibles (none of which I ended up buying), as well as one-year reading plan Bibles and study Bibles — including the "Inspirational Study Bible", edited, to my complete lack of surprise, by Max Lucado.

I'm not going to make some big point here (probably to your complete lack of surprise). I just feel kind of sad. It's bad enough, in my opinion, that American Christianity has been commodified into bumper stickers and T-shirts with saccharine slogans on them, or Jesus Christ action figures, or (God forgive us) this. All of that is plain awful, period. But what can you expect from people who see in the sacred text itself an opportunity for profit? Every carefully branded iteration of what used to be simply The Holy Bible is yet another triumph of marketing over mystery.

We talk about Christ paying the price for our sins. Well, believe me, he still does.

Technical Difficulties... Again

OK, so I just posted something which may have gone out via RSS or whatever, but I had to delete it here because for some reason that I can't figure out, Blogger is cutting off the last part of the post. I've tried re-creating the post, re-publishing it, etc, but it's not working. So I'm going to try again tomorrow. In the meantime, please enjoy the music during this brief intermission...

What, there's no music?? Dang. I can't do anything right today.

You Know How Something Can Seem Like A Hilarious Idea At the Time....

...and then later, you realize, no. No, it really wasn't.

Yeah, I'm kind of having one of those days.

On another note (because no, I am not giving details), it's a gray day here in SoCal and I can't decide how I feel about it. I mean, OK, last week's record high triple-digit temps were a bit much even for this sun-lovin' girl, but it's a bit weird that a mere few days later I could be bundled up in a sweater, a beanie, a scarf and jeans.

But hey, that's how we roll in the Golden State anymore. Thanks, global warming!

Anyway, I'm sitting in a coffeeshop today, trying to write but (as usual) mostly not succeeding. I kind of think I should just give up today, but I'm feeling stubborn. Sadly, my stubbornnes is not directed so much at getting anything done as it is at complaining about the fact that I'm not getting anything done.

I am a woman of very badly prioritized determinations, what can I say. And no, I really am not going to tell you about the Hilarious Idea That Wasn't. Sorry. Some things are better left to the imagination.

(Actually, I'm starting to wonder if my writing might fall into that category Gah! Let's hope not.)

UPDATE: I'm glad to note I'm not the only one winning awards in the Ideas That Weren't Incredibly Awesome In Retrospect department.

I Write Like

Today a poet friend forwarded an interesting website to me, called I Write Like. What you do is, you paste in some text you've written, click the "Analyze" button and the site tells you what famous author you write like.

I pasted in the opening from a short story I wrote a while back and got Dan Brown. Horrified, I chose a selection from a different story... and got Stephen King.

I should perhaps mention that neither of the stories were even remotely thriller-ish.

In desperation, I pasted in an entire story, one of the few I've written that I actually like and which is in a more experimental vein. There is nothing science fiction-y about it, so naturally, it turns out that I write like Isaac Asimov.

I'm a little depressed right now.

Staying Sober

Someone asked me the other day if I was "born again." I never know how to answer this question. The term "born again" denotes more of a(n extreme) conservative political stance these days, at least in the United States. You can say you are a Christian and still maintain a shred of respectability (very slight, and most definitely a shred), but say you are born again and you may as well walk around with a sign saying, "I am completely insane." I mean, OK, some "born agains" are insane, but frankly I think they would be one letter short of an alphabet no matter what creed they latched onto. It's just unfortunate that they picked Christianity as the philosophical and spiritual context in which to exercise their particular brand of crazy. But if anything, they are yet another exhibit for the defense of one of the foundational truths proclaimed by Christianity: Humans need some serious help.

The political and mental implications were one obvious reason I hesitated in answering "yes" to the question of my born againness. But as the conversation continued, someone else alluded to the other part of the "born again" concept that I have trouble with; namely, the idea that you "come to a point of decision" at which you "accept Christ into your heart" with the aid of a prescribed "sinner's prayer" that functions as a sort of magic spell with the result that after you say it, hey presto, you're saved! God has completed you! Ta da!

Well, that just reminds me of the scene in The Princess Bride where the man in black says to the princess he's come to save that "life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something." Same goes for Christianity. If you think all you have to do is pop a sort of prayer pill and everything will be fine and dandy, and you'll always have the answers to all the questions that haunt the human race, just wait a while. The pain is bound to come sooner or later, along with the doubts and the uncertainty. And then what do you do?

So I looked at the man who had started the whole discussion and my thoughts ran back over the course of the past couple years, all the doubts and all the (many) times I struggled (and still struggle) to believe in God, in Christ, in the whole Christian idea. I said that being born again wasn't so much about a single moment as a decision you make every day. Over and over and over again.

"Like staying sober," he said.

"Yeah," I said. "It's a bit like that."

Shadows

I've been having some trouble with my shoulder, so today I went to see an orthopedic surgeon who prescribed an MRI to find out exactly what's wrong. When I called to make the appointment, the woman on the other end went through a series of "routine questions", which included stuff like, "do you have diabetes," "do you have any metal inside your body" (yikes), "have you had brain surgery" (!). I went into a sort of autopilot of "No's" but then she asked, "Have you ever been diagnosed with cancer?" And I was just a little weirded out to hear myself say, "Yes."

Yeah, I know. It's been more than a year. But still.

The Long-Awaited, Probably Forgotten-About, Argentina Update

Now that absolutely no one cares anymore about my Argentina trip — which, after all, took place way back in June — I'm going to finally update this blog with another post about it.

You can see why I never made it as a reporter. Not that I ever tried. Bleah.

But I just can't leave everyone with the impression that all I did during the entire time I spent in "the Paris of the South" was eat. I mean, it felt kind of like I ate all the time, but I also went and saw stuff and did things. Here are some highlights, in no particular order:

1) The Recoleta Cemetery.

This place is a true city of the dead. I mean, it even has streets with street signs:



OK, so the street signs aren't in that picture, but they really are there.

The Recoleta Cemetery is one of, if not the, most popular tourist destinations in Buenos Aires. Someone in our group asked the question, "What does it say about a city that its most popular spot is its cemetery?" I leave it to you to ponder the no doubt many possible answers to that question; it is way too early in the morning right now for me to start being philosophical.

2) El Ateneo Bookstore.

Built in 1919, El Ateneo started out as a theatre house called Teatro Gran Splendid, or Grand Splendid Theatre. Today, it's a totally awesome-looking bookstore. Check it out:



As you can see, El Ateneo has retained the features of the old theatre: the box seats, where you can kick back with a book for a while; the stage, which is now a cafe; the domed, muraled ceiling, which you can't see in that picture because it's in this one (or at least part of it is):



By the way, I bought a book at El Ateneo, by an Argentine writer named Poldy Bird. An Argentine friend recommended her. Of course, the book is in Spanish, but in a fit of misguided belief in my self-motivational, not to mention linguistic, abilities, I thought, "Hey, I'll practice my Spanish by translating it!" Given how good my Spanish isn't, this was, to say the least, not my finest hour in the department of Great Ideas, but oh well.

3) Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay.

When I heard that Uruguay was only an hour away by ferry, I decided to pop over there for a day trip because a) it was an easy way to get another stamp in my passport, and b) by that time I'd been in Buenos Aires for over a week and the city was starting to jangle my suburban nerves a bit. I needed a change of scene, and that's exactly what I got as I wandered the cobblestoned streets of Colonia, the oldest town in Uruguay (founded in 1680 by the Portuguese; thanks, Wikipedia). A few pics:



Here's the spot where my friend and I had lunch:



As we were leaving, another customer came along:



And finally, here's a pic of me under a shop sign that reminded me there's no place like home:



4) The World Cup.

Yes, my trip coincided with the epic soccer series, and it was quite interesting to observe how seriously Argentines take the game. Let's just say that if you are going to have a life-threatening emergency during the World Cup, try not to have it when Argentina is playing, because whoever would have come to your aid is probably glued to a TV screen watching the match, like every other human being in the country.

I watched the Argentina-Mexico game in a cafe with a group of friends, and afterward we went down to the Obelisk to celebrate Argentina's win with everyone in Buenos Aires (not much of an exaggeration):





Good times, although I will say that the mosh pit got a little alarming. But I survived, as you can see. Also, I believe my group got on Argentine TV at some point. No doubt the crazy Americans singing "Vamos Argentina" into the camera provided a great deal of amusement to whoever saw the clip.

5) Milion.

I don't have a picture of this bar, but if you ever go to Buenos Aires, definitely check out it out, located on the second floor of what was once an old mansion. It's not well-marked from the street, so if you don't pay attention you could walk right past it. But if you find it, it's a really cool spot for reasonably priced drinks.

Speaking of drinks, I'll finish off this post with

6) The Pisco Sour.



A classic South American cocktail, it tastes even better when mixed by a hot South American man. I don't know why that should be, but hey, I didn't make the rules.

Hmm, now that I've come to the end of this post, I'm suddenly remembering all the other things I haven't mentioned — touring the colorful La Boca neighborhood; visiting the estate of Victoria Ocampo, an important figure in Argentina's cultural history; having lunch at Cafe Tortoni, the oldest cafe in Argentina; exploring the city's many art galleries on Gallery Night; taking tango lessons and then watching a stunning tango show while enjoying dinner at El Querandi. And there's even more... the list could go on and on. But, no doubt to your great relief, it won't. Because I'm done. Whew!

Thanks for tuning in. Back to our regularly scheduled program of unpredictable updates...

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties!

I interrupt my own blogcast with some sad news. Last night, I spilled tea on my computer. Turns out that wasn't a great idea. Now, whenever I try to type numbers, I can't. Unless it's a 7,8,9 or 0. I also can't type any of the symbols that are on the non-working number keys. Argh.

So, guess who has a date with the Genius Bar at the Apple Store tomorrow. Sigh... I had a good Argentina post in the works, too. And it wasn't even about food! I know, that's hard to believe.

Anyway, I'll keep you apprised as the situation continues to unfold. Until next time, this is your intrepid correspondent, the frogg princess, signing off. With (of course) kisses.

On Waking Up In A Strange Town Alone

So while I was sampling the cultural (and yes, culinary) delights of Argentina, the editor of my MFA program's alumni newsletter sent me an email asking if I'd do a write-up about my time in Buenos Aires. I emailed her back and said "Sure!" and she replied, "Great, can I have it by July 19?" and I answered back, "Sure!" and then I procrastinated until I had to ask for an extension, then procrastinated some more until the final deadline (yesterday), at which point I cranked it out in about an hour amid lots of last-minute panic.

And yet somehow I continue to persist in believing that I am not a Real Writer. Ha.

But anyway, during a brief interval when "procrastination" took the form of "brainstorming" for the article, I went online looking for cool quotes about travel, because every writer knows the value of starting off an article with a witty and/or insightful observation by someone else who is more famous. (In my case, of course, that's pretty much everyone.) I found a website with the 50 Most Inspiring Travel Quotes of All Time, #18 being this:

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

Which just goes to show you, even people more famous than you can end up veering out of "insightful" and into... well, silly.

Because let's be honest: The first thing that happens when you wake up in a strange town quite alone is, you try to go back to sleep so you don't have to face the fact that it is totally and completely and unavoidably on your own shoulders to figure out the agenda for the day. If by some chance you really just want to stay in bed "to relax", you will have to fight the guilt that will start whispering in your ear about how you are wasting an Amazing Travel Experience and that when you get home you will SO regret that you didn't do a lot of Exciting Tourist Things.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't qualify any of the above as one of the "pleasantest sensations in the world."

But there is this: The sensation of knowing that, even though you're alone, you're somewhere you've never been. You're someplace new, different. And you yourself are different in that place. Or maybe just more yourself. There's none of the usual routine and distraction and same-old that gets in between you and your own soul. And OK, yes, that's actually kind of an uncomfortable sensation, but if you can live with it, (or live through it, as the case may be), you never know, you just might be rewarded.

And I imagine that could actually end up being pretty pleasant.


PS Oh by the way, I didn't end up using an inspiring travel quote for my article. I figured Real Writers should come up with their own, so here's mine, taken from the actual article I finally sent off to the newsletter editor:

Of course, I can’t write about being in Argentina and not mention the food. One word: Amazing. Two more: HUGE portions.

Why I'm not famous yet is beyond me.

Inception: A Pseudo-Review

I'm just going to take a quick little break from re-capping Argentina to ask a question: Am I the only person in America who did not in fact think that Inception was totally awesome?

I mean, OK, oodles of props on the mind-bending premise, the exceptional special effects, and the scene-stealing charm of Joseph Gordon-Leavitt (who is frankly adorable even as a grim, all-business... well, I don't actually know what he was, because the film doesn't make it clear, come to think of it). Oh, and not to mention the eye candy that was Tom Hardy (wow). But 2.5 hours is a long time to spend wandering in and out of people's brains and still not really have a good sense of where you want to go, or where you've ended up when the credits (finally) start rolling.

As the movie went on, I had the sense not so much of being taken on an exciting ride as being forced to watch someone else's exciting ride. Namely, Christopher Nolan's, as he tried valiantly to keep control of the wild horse that was his screenplay, eventually beating it into some sort of sullen, but not entirely satisfactory, submission.

Ultimately, I felt that Nolan had this truly amazing, fun, thought-provoking idea but didn't know how to really dig into it, and so he settled for building on his intriguing foundation with a totally pedestrian (and underdeveloped) storyline that dragged on for way longer than I think it had to.

Also, Hans Zimmer's score was a little overly enthusiastic in its pounding dramaticness, if you ask me; especially in the final scene.

So yeah, that's my take. Anyone else see it who'd care to a) correct my Philistine impressions, or b) laud my incisive critiquing skills (aka my cool wild horse metaphor)?

Eating in Argentina; or, How Not To Lose Weight

Here in America, we are often lamenting over the terrible eating and lack-of-exercise habits that have resulted in what we call our "obesity epidemic." One of the things we like to blame a lot for our weight problem is the size of our meal portions, particularly when we go out to restaurants. Anyone who has ever been to Claim Jumper knows exactly what I'm talking about, and if you haven't been, don't start now! You could gain a few pounds just by looking at their ridiculously gooey, six-layer Chocolate Motherlode Cake. (For the record, this dessert is listed on Claim Jumper's menu under the heading "Sweets for Sharing", but honestly folks, it's too big even for two people. Or three. Or five.)

So anyway, I have thought for a long time now that America was the world leader in eating more food at a single sitting than one might think humanly possible. Argentina broadened my understanding of this issue — to say nothing of my waistline.

On one of my first nights in Buenos Aires with the creative writing program, I went out to dinner with a few of the students and one of them ordered a calzone. Here it is:



The guy who ordered it said, "I asked for the small." I nearly choked. And then my food arrived:



Yes, that is a baked potato, and yes, it was roughly the size of my entire head. I mean, it was good, but wow.

From a restaurant outside of Buenos Aires, here's a version of a caprese salad, which a friend of mine ordered in an effort to be somewhat healthy:



As you can see, that is pretty much just a big bowl of cheese, with a few tomatoes and olives thrown in for color. So much for healthy.

I honestly think the only thing that kept me from having to buy a whole new wardrobe when I got home was the fact that I tried to walk everywhere we had to go, instead of taking taxis. Even so, when I got home I had to spend a few days eating nothing but salads, and I couldn't even let myself THINK of the word "empanada." Ugh.

By the way, if you are surprised that I haven't mentioned anything about the one food Argentina is famous for outside of Argentina (i.e., BEEF), well, the truth is, I was kind of surprised myself that it wasn't as big of a deal as I was expecting. Most of the restaurants I went to in Buenos Aires offered cuisine that showed the influence of the region's Italian heritage — milanesa, pastas, calzones (see above!), that kind of thing. There were vegetarians on our trip, and they didn't seem to have any problem finding good stuff to eat, so there's certainly no need to write Buenos Aires off as a destination if you're not carnivorous. (That said, I still managed to eat more meat in the few weeks I spent in Argentina than I have in about a year. Not an exaggeration).

Well, I think I've talked enough about food for one day. Next time, we'll take a look at — I don't know, I haven't decided yet. Something besides eating, though. I promise!

I Left My Taste Buds in Argentina

Well, here I am, back from my travels, and yes, I'm late in updating the blog. Who's surprised? I thought so.

Anyway, I had an absolutely fabulous time in Argentina, and over the course of the next week I've planned a series of posts about the trip, including photos. For now, a few highlights:

1) Sampling dulce de leche granizado ice cream from Freddo's. Mmmm.

2) Getting addicted to alfajores (a typical Argentinean treat which consists of two little round cakes joined together by dulce de leche).

3) The delicious flan at Parilla Peña, which was even more incredible with the addition of dulce de leche on the side.

Are you seeing a trend here? Let's just say that if you go to Argentina and manage to NOT have dulce de leche during your sojourn there, I think you actually ended up in another country by mistake. Which is too bad, but I hope you had a good time wherever you were. As for me, I did in fact do other things besides eat dulce de leche (and accidentally hit on museum guards; see previous post), and I'll be talking about those things in the upcoming days. So stay tuned, kids!

In the meantime, I leave you with this revealing quote from the renowned Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who said, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be made of dulce de leche."* Mmmm, Paradise...




* OK, I lied. What he said was, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library"** but that didn't really fit my theme, so.

** Really, Borges? The harps and clouds idea wasn't boring enough for you? I love books and all, but honestly.

A Little Spanish Is a Dangerous Thing

One of the problems with knowing solamente un pocito de Spanish is that, when you find that you actually can get by pretty well with the basics, you'll start to get reckless and attempt actual conversations, which involve actual knowledge of grammatical conjugations. And that can lead to little problemas.

For example.

Tonight I went with a group of writing program students to the Museo Nacional de Bella Artes. During the course of my thoughtful perambulations around the exhibit rooms, I ended up talking to one of the museum guards, who had already spoken to other members of the group and knew we were all from the U.S. He asked me a few polite questions, in Spanish, about my visit to Argentina, and I gamely tried to answer with more than just "yes" or "no". The problem came when I attempted to ask him how long he'd worked at the museum. Apparently that's not what I actually said, because he answered that he got off at 8:30 and that if I wanted he'd walk around with me afterward.

Oops.

The conversation from that point only got more difficult, as at first I thought he was asking me to invite him to join our whole group. But no, it turns out that's not what he meant. And then he asked if I had a free day and I, bizarrely, answered that yes, it was possible I'd come back another day. I even asked if he worked every day til 8:30. Why? Probably because I knew how, and in spite of my good sense I was going to deploy the tiny bit of Spanish I knew at any cost.

Including the cost of never again going to the Museo Nacional de Bella Artes. Sigh...

Adventures in a Hostel Land

My hostel in Buenos Aires leaves a lot to be desired. Namely, everything. It's noisy, run-down and the linens are surely from the 70s. At least the bathroom was clean. Granted, there is no shower per se, just a shower head installed high up on the wall next to the toilet, i guess in the name of maximum efficiency. Still things could be worse. Like, it could sound like a construction crew was using a jackhammer or some similar heavy equipment right outside my window.

Oh wait, it does.

My reservation is for nine nights. We'll see.

Estoy Aqui

"Aqui" being a hotel room in Mendoza, where I am watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind in Spanish. Because, you know, that's the kind of adventurous freak I am. I do it so you don't have to.

Anyway, I think this movie makes about the same amount of sense in any language.

So yeah, I arrived safely in Buenos Aires (obviously), where I spent the night with friends. The next evening I boarded a bus for the 12-hour journey to Argentina's wine country--because I guess I hadn't had enough of sitting still after my 13-hour flight. But today I made up for my lack of exercise with a vengeance, with a 45-minute walk to my hotel from the bus station and then two hours of wandering fairly aimlessly around the city, pondering the fact that travel is always a lot more glamorous in theory than in actual practice, especially when you are an introvert traveling alone.

Tomorrow will be good, though. I signed up for a group wine tour in the Uco Valley. Definitely looking forward to that.

I wish I could write more, but I've been typing all this on my iPad and I'm kinda over it for now. So I'll check in again later. Amor y besos...

Well, I'm off...again! Can't believe my last international trip was less than two weeks ago. But anyway, here I go, on my way to Argentina. I'll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, be good! And if you can't be good, don't tell anyone.

Just kidding.

Ciao for now! With lots of hugs and kisses from the frogg princess...

Happy (Belated) Birthday To Me!

Hmm, I'm late wishing my own self a happy birthday. How weird am I?

Don't answer that.

So, the birthday weekend went off quite well, considering I "planned" the festivities at the last minute (yes, I know, a big shock). On Friday evening, I went out to an Argentinean restaurant for happy hour with some friends to enjoy wine and food together, and then on Saturday had another group of friends over to my place to enjoy (more) wine and food together. Hey, what better way to prepare for an adventure in South America, right?

Now about gifts. As most of you know who know me, I love getting presents. And I have gotten some great ones — including this year, an iPad! (Thanks to my Dad and not-so-little little brother!) Yet I have to say that in all of my 35 years, I had never received a flask for the liquor I rarely drink that includes a handy built-in compartment for the cigarettes I don't smoke.

Well, that terrible lack in my life has now been remedied.* (Thanks to my friend Sam!)

So yeah, good times all around this weekend. Wish you could have been there! I mean if you weren't. And as long as you're not some strange psycho person. Because If you are, I'm sorry, but I'm kind of glad you found something else to do instead.

Er, anyway. Moving on...

Now I'm in the process of finishing up with my packing for Argentina. Actually, wait. I think I am finished. What?! It's not even midnight! What about my usual last-minute flurry of chaos-generating panic? What about my trademark procrastination?

I must be getting soft in my old age.



*Yes, you're right. There's a story behind this one.**

**Oh, you wanted me to tell it? Dang, we're out of time.

Where's Summer??

I really hate June gloom.

Where Have I Been?

If there is one single reason that I shouldn't let too much time go by between blog posts, it's that when I finally do get around to updating, I don't know where to begin. How do you sum up a couple months' worth of happenings in a single post?

Not that there has really been much "happening" in my life, seeing as how I continue to be unemployed. I guess that makes it easy.

I did go to New Zealand last week, which was awesome. And yesterday I went to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which was, well, less than awesome. But that's OK, I'll make up for that next week (I sure hope!) when I go to Argentina.

Speaking of which, lots of people have asked me why I'm going to Argentina. While I'd love to say, "why not?" to bolster the image I'm trying hard to create of myself as a careless adventurer type, the truth is that I'm going to be sort of working. The creative writing program that I got my MFA from a year and a half ago is taking their summer-semester students to Buenos Aires, and I'm going as a "post graduate residency assistant." However, I tacked on a few extra days in the beginning of the trip for myself, figuring I'd travel around a bit before the rest of the group arrives.

It will come as a surprise to probably no one that I still don't know what I'll be doing or where I'll be going during those extra few days. And yes, I know — next week is coming up. Believe me, I know.

Oh, and did I mention my birthday is this weekend? Well, it is. Yay!

But otherwise, yeah, not much going on with me. You?

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Hermiting It Up

The past few days have been cold and rainy. Hibernation weather. All I want to do is stay inside and move as little as possible. Mostly, I've managed to do exactly that.

Call Me Cassandra

When Google and Facebook finally join forces and then morph into one of the dreaded Beasts of the Apocalypse, all I can say is, don't come crying to me.

Facebook Seeps onto Other Websites

Hmm. "Seeps" sure sounds promising. And how about this intriguing quote:

Analysts say Facebook’s desire to spread its tentacles across the Web could run into privacy hurdles, as it will require the company to share increasing amounts of personal information about its users with other sites.

I don't know, what do you think? Does this seven-headed Dragon make me look like Facebook, honey?

Honey?

¿Cómo se dice...?

In a (probably misguided, certainly naive) attempt to brush up on my Spanish before heading to Buenos Aires in June, I decided to watch some Spanish TV today. And yes, I know that's #115 of stuff of white people like, so don't bother to tell me. Instead, simply bask in the irony of the fact that one of the first commercials that flashed onto the screen as I settled into my couch was one touting the benefits and ease of a teach-yourself language program. For English.

Texting for Dummies

OK, so you know how when you're texting, your phone is usually smart enough to figure out what word you're trying to type? Well, then there's my phone. A member of the Blackberry family, you might think it would be the Stephen Hawking version of the kid who wins the spelling bee, but as it turns out, you'd be wrong. Because the truth is, my phone thinks that the word "Oh" should be "Pg". And I don't know why. What I do know is that it's really annoying to have to go back and delete "pg" and type "oh" again every single time I want to say "oh."

But even worse than substituting nonsense words for real ones is substituting nonsense words that are made up of real words, so that they almost kind of mean something — something really weird. For example, one time a friend messaged me to ask what I was up to. I sent her a text that said, and I quote: "boyhung at the moment." Now, that sounds... well, worrisome to say the extreme least. Of course, what I had actually typed was "NOTHING at the moment", but I had hit "send" reflexively when I came to the end of typing, and only saw the mistake as the message was being irretrievably sent. I stared at the word, then checked the keys on my Blackberry Pearl. Lo and behold, the same keys that bear the letters for "nothing" do indeed also spell "boyhung". And the question of why my phone would think that the latter word is the better choice for a sentence written in English remains a mystery that probably won't ever be the subject of a Discover Channel special, but which nevertheless haunts me to this day.

The icing on the cakewreck of this story is that I started frantically texting my friend again to explain that my phone was not, in fact, as smart as I could wish, and that I really, truly wasn't boyhung (whatever that might be), but then I decided to just call her because texting was taking too long.

Yes, I know. The irony.

I Know, I Know

Yes, it's been ages (once again) since I updated this blog. You all should be used to that by now, though. So I will forgo the apologies and you know what, let's never mind what I've been up to for the past month since being laid off because believe me, even I'm not interested. Let's start with where I am now.

If you want to get really specific, I'm sitting at a desk in my hotel room in Grand Rapids, MI, sipping on coffee that I suspect may be substandard, but since I'm usually a tea drinker, I can't be sure. I needed the extra jolt of caffeine, however, since it was a late-ish night last night* and I had to get an early start this morning. Because I'm attending the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College this weekend, and the fun starts at 8:30a.m. today.

I got here yesterday, and I have to say, the opening lecture by poet Scott Cairns was so good, I felt kind of sorry for everyone who had to present after him, because man, he set the bar pretty high. I'd give you some highlights from his talk, but somehow I managed to lose my notes from his session. And if this comes as a surprise to anyone, you must be new to the blog. (Welcome!)

But it doesn't matter, because I don't have much time to write now anyway, since my ride will be here in 15 minutes to take me over to the conference. So I'll just leave you with a Scott Cairns quote that I found, which kind of, sort of sums up the gist of his brilliant lecture:

I pray that the American church will one day—sooner than later—overcome its addiction to narrow certainties. Thereafter, its people might recover a taste for enormity.
—Scott Cairns (from an interview in The Other Journal

(I'm really, really mad that I lost my notes.)

I want to tell you more, but oh dear, look at the time. Hopefully later! Til then, kisses from your friendly neighborhood frogg princess...


* Being over 30, I define "late" as anytime after 11pm; and yes I know, that's sad),

Speaking of Sisyphean Enterprises...

...just try getting a live person on the line at the Employment Development Department. Gah.

About Time

So, I didn't intend to let what, nearly a month go by since my last post, but I did anyway. Oh well.

The past few weeks since my last day of work have been a blur. I kicked off my entrance into the (increasingly crowded) realm of the unemployed with a trip to the charming beach town of Encinitas (not to be confused with Ensenada, though some people apparently do, I discovered). I spent my days there walking and lounging on the beach, mostly, or else just wandering around the town. It was great.

But of course, you know what they say about all good things.

Since returning to reality, I feel like every day has become Saturday, and if you take a moment to think about it, that's not as awesome as it sounds. Because Saturday for working people is the day when you run around trying to catch up on all the errands and such that you don't get done during the week because of being at your job. Well, imagine that your whole life has turned into one long unbroken series of catch-up days. It won't be long before you are forced into the realization that, guess what, you are never going to catch up. Ever. There will always be something awaiting your attention, and it will usually have to do with the endless generation of paperwork that living in this society seems to require — mail you have to sort through, a form you need to fill out, an application you have to write, filing that obstinately refuses to do itself.

Basically, full-time employment is the gift of not having the time to spare to think too much about the implications of the fact that a great deal of time is being leached out of your mortal existence by Sisyphean enterprises.

Um, yeah.

So, how's everyone else doing these days?

Countdown

Today was the first day of my last week of work. That sounds like it felt a lot more momentous than it was. Actually, it was a mundane Monday, like so many others. Which highlights a strange fact of life that I've noticed more times than I can count — the fact that it just, well, goes on. Like normal. Regardless of any chaos that has infiltrated one's individual situation.

Speaking of chaos, one of the first orders of business demanding my attention post-gainful employment is my bedroom. The details are simply too horrifying to go into here, but let's just say that in my own personal universe, entropy is alive and well.

Of course, since it's me we're talking about, procrastination comes before first orders of business, so this weekend I'll be heading out of town for a few days. No, not to Buenos Aires — not yet. (God willing, that'll happen in June.) This will just be a quick trip so I can rest and recharge after what's been a difficult few months. Also, I need to spend some time wrapping my brain around this new reality that's opened up in front of me, and what opportunities it brings with it.

One thing I can be sure of — entropy will be waiting for me when I get back. And then it will be so on.

Ack!

I don't even know where to start with this blog tonight. It's been crazy around the ol' lily pad lately, and I'm trying to think what's the best way to sum up what's been going on. Well, how about this:

a) I got laid off.

b) Er, do I actually need a "b"?

So yeah, things have been interesting, and probably will continue to be for a while. But don't cry for me, Argentina! Because the truth is, after the initial shock and also my sadness at the thought of leaving some of the greatest co-workers anyone could ask for, and whom I will truly miss, I am excited for what the future might hold.

For example, a trip to Buenos Aires. (And here you thought that Argentina reference was just my usual pure randomness, didn't you? Tsk tsk.)

But more on that and other stuff in the weeks to come. In the meantime, I leave you with this inspiring thought for the day:

Just kidding. I don't actually have one; it just sounded like a cool way to end this post.

The Facebook Follies

The other day I was chatting with my friend Drew about the evils of Facebook, a favorite topic of ours, and made the mistake of suggesting we both blog about why we both don’t like it. This was a mistake because Drew took me up on it, which meant that I would have to keep up my end of things and write about it, too. On a deadline, no less. And of course that meant that I a) procrastinated and b) when I finally did sit down to write, I suddenly couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

God knows I shouldn’t be having writer’s block over this, of all topics. Having never joined Facebook, I've had plenty of opportunities to explain my reasoning behind why I continue to eschew the most popular social networking site in the entire world. People are always mystified at the fact that I don’t have an account. The other day a girl asked if I was on Facebook and when I said no, her resulting expression was a unique blend of pity, awe and disbelief, accompanied by a single word: "Wow." I might as well have said that I used oil lamps to light my house, and commuted to work in a horse-drawn buggy.

So I eventually came up with a bunch of reasons ready to deploy whenever someone asked why I'm not on Facebook. I've said the site was causing people to trade real-life relationships for virtual ones, or that it was making us more isolated while giving the illusion of more connection. I've said it was a big distraction and that the last thing I needed in my life was another way to waste time, because I was doing way too well in that department already. All of which I believe are true. However, as Drew and I conversed the other day, it became clear that our biggest beef with the social media juggernaut could be summed up in a single word: Privacy.

Facebook has made eroding privacy into something of an art, if by “art” you mean “terrible travesty.” I mean, let’s be candid for a moment: It’s a joke to think that a company whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, got his start hacking into Harvard’s computer system and illegally lifting people’s private information to use without permission on a website he’d created would care one bit about your privacy.* Except insofar as caring about it could possibly make money for them. But since it can’t — since in fact it is your lack of ability to keep things private in the Facebook universe that provides the most potential for making money off of you — well, need I say more?

Probably not, but hey, I will. (Mostly because Drew will so not let me get away with leaving it at that.)

Recently, as many people know, Facebook changed their privacy settings. Their default mode is not that all your stuff would be hidden, but that all your stuff would be out in the open for anyone on the ‘Net to see. And even if you do choose to lock down every possible setting, there is some information that will still be publicly available. Like, your profile pic. Your gender. Your fan pages. Your networks. Your geographical region.

Well, so what, you’re saying. I have nothing to hide. Why should I worry?

To which I say, seriously?

Look. We’ve all heard the saying, “Knowledge is power.” Well, in this society, knowledge is equated, for better or worse, with information — and guess who’s sitting on the mother lode of it. (Hint: Facebook.)

Everything you do on Facebook is pretty much owned by Facebook. It’s also logged, tracked, saved. It’s already being used for potentially invasive research. All your photos, all your blog posts, all your wall messages, and yes, every silly quiz you take, it all becomes data that can be used to tell any number of things about you to people you don’t even know, and probably never will.

The point is, privacy isn’t about keeping stuff hidden anymore, it’s about controlling the information that belongs to you. And when you use Facebook, you cede control to Facebook. Ultimately, you’re handing over your personal information to a corporation headed by the guy who very recently said this:

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.(from the Guardian)

That explains those new “privacy” settings, I guess. But it sure doesn’t make me feel any better, knowing my information’s under the control of 25-year-old Zuckerberg, who has decided for himself what people have gotten more comfortable with over time. And I’d beg to differ with his analysis anyway, considering the backlash that has greeted Facebook’s roll-outs of products like the ill-fated Beacon — a service which broadcast a user’s activities on external websites to that user’s network on Facebook, and which, I’ll just note, was initially implemented without user consent and only discontinued after protests. Lots and lots of protests.

Odd that anyone would have had a problem with it, considering the new social norms and all. Granted, Beacon was launched in 2007, and Zuckerberg's quote is from this year — no doubt a lot has changed in three years. Maybe if Beacon was launched today, people would just shrug their shoulders and not care. Somehow, though, I doubt it.

Now wait just a minute, I hear you saying. You use Google. You blog. Heck, you blog using Google! And what about cell phones, and IMing and all that stuff? How is any of that different or better than using Facebook?

Well, those are good questions, all of them! And if I weren’t so behind on when I promised Drew I would publish this post, I’m sure I’d be more than happy to go into a deeper analysis and provide informative explanations. On the other hand, that doesn’t sound like me at all, does it? Fortunately for all of us, there is a simple solution to this little quandary anyway. And here it is: Go read Drew’s blog.





* “Zuckerberg was charged by the administration with breach of security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy and faced expulsion, but ultimately the charges were dropped.” (Wikipedia, pulling from The Harvard Crimson)

Simple Pleasures

There's something to be said for coming home after a stressful day, running a hot bath, filling it with peppermint-scented bubbles, and reading poetry while soaking in the water.

And that something is, simply, "Thank you, God."

To The Person Who Left A Nice Big Dent On My Car Door This Morning

Dear Whoever You Are,

I just wanted to express my deep gratitude, first of all for hitting my little sedan and second for your thoughtful self-effacement which no doubt prevented you from leaving a note. Kind of like a Secret Santa! Words cannot describe what a treat it was to come back to the car after my run and find that the driver and passenger side are no longer boringly symmetrical. I only wish I'd been there to thank you, profusely, in person.

Have a lovely day! I know mine sure is off to a great start.

With appreciation from the frogg princess...

Ash Wednesday

Today I went to Mass at a Catholic church for the first time in my life. Contrary to what I might have expected, growing up as I did in a very strictly Protestant sect, I did not get struck by lightning the moment I crossed the Catholic threshold. A huge relief, since that would have put a big damper on the whole occasion. Instead, I really enjoyed the experience, apart from the rather severe wooden pews that had clearly been designed with the intention of keeping everyone in them as uncomfortable as possible and therefore wide awake. We'd barely been sitting for five minutes before one of my friends leaned over and whispered, "Now I know why Catholics stand so much."

The service was led by the fifth grade of the church's school, which was, of course, adorable. The kids had even made "Lenten Activity" booklets, which some of the children handed out at the entrance. Each page is a different color and represents a week of Lent. Each week features an activity, charmingly handwritten by one of the fifth graders (I presume).

Week 1: "Pray for young people this week." I note with interest that nowhere in the book does it say to "pray for old people." Maybe that would have sounded disrespectful, but it seems sad to just leave them out. On the other hand, maybe "Pray for everybody" was considered a little too vague. Or maybe they just tossed a coin and the young people won. Next year, old people!

Week 2: "Do a special act of kindness this week." At least they didn't say "random" instead of "special." Although I am a fan of the word "random" in just about any other context.

Week 3: "Get up 15 minutes early... to pray." Being a fan to a fault of ellipses, I applaud the trenchant use of them here. Also my own use of the word "trenchant."

Hmm, good thing "Be humble" isn't one of the specified activities in the booklet. On the other hand...

Week 4: "Practice being patient." Yikes. Well, I guess there's plenty of practice to be had on L.A. freeways. Unfortunately.

Week 5: "Give food to a food pantry." I don't know why, but every time I read that, I think of the food pantry as this giant mouth, waiting to gobble up the food you're going to give it.

Week 6: "Do not waste anything this week." I hope that doesn't include time, or I'm in trouble.

But if I can be serious for a moment (and yes, I know that's a big "if"), I actually really like the season of Lent. I know that probably sounds weird, if not spiritually masochistic, but I do. Maybe it's because I didn't grow up with it, so it seems somehow novel, but I think it's a fantastic idea, this setting aside of weeks to review life in the light of one's faith and prepare ourselves, body and soul, for Easter. When we participate in Lent, we are giving ourselves the opportunity to experience the wonderful mystery of that day in a deeper, richer way when it comes, because we took time in advance to contemplate its meaning, and to make space in our hearts for the Resurrection and the Life.

I don't think Lent is just about doing good works, nor is it about giving things up. It's about taking stock of who we are, and reflecting on who we want to be, and facing the hard truth that the former falls far short of the latter. It's about looking in the mirror and recognizing our failures, but instead of despairing, finding joy in the pursuit of the One who gives chance after chance; who says he can give us new hearts and new spirits; who says at last, "I make all things new."

And to that I bow my head and say, Amen.

Almost There

"There" being Tahoe, of course.

The flight up to Sacramento, when it finally happened, was uneventful, which is just how I like flights to be. Now I'm here at the cowgirl's house, waiting for her and her husband to come home so we can load up the truck and get to our friend's cabin near the slopes.

Not sure if I'll get a chance to blog while I'm away, so I wanted to take the opportunity to wish you all a wonderful weekend, and a lovely Valentine's Day! With lots and lots of kisses from the frogg princess...

Waiting

So, my flight has been delayed. I was supposed to leave around 9 p.m.; now I'm stuck here at the airport til midnight. Which means, I won't get to Sacramento until at least 1:30 a.m. Which means I won't be going to bed til something like 3 a.m., since I'm going to be staying with the cowgirl and she lives about an hour and a half away from Sac.

Which means, I owe the cowgirl one, big time.

Further bulletins as events warrant, or (more likely) boredom dictates.

Today

I'm tired. And sick. I have a cold and my head is heavy. Tomorrow night I'm supposed to get on a plane to Sacramento, ultimately heading up to Tahoe for the weekend. I hope I feel better. At the moment, I'm simply feeling sorry for myself. As I usually do when I'm sick.

In other news, Monday was the one-year anniversary of the date when I discovered I had a tumor growing in my chest. Sometimes I can't believe it's only been a year. It seems like it happened ages ago. And it's still hard to believe it happened at all.

People ask me how I'm feeling, and mostly I'd say back to normal. My energy levels are back, but I still haven't managed to get into a running routine that is anything like what I was doing B.C. (before cancer). I experience pain in my chest from time to time, which the doctor said was probably due to internal scarring. My hair is super-curly now, whereas before it was just a bit wavy.

I look at pictures of myself B.C. and there are times when I feel like I'm looking at pictures of a different person who bears just a passing resemblance to me. But I also feel like that when I look at pictures of myself now. It's hard to explain. As is so much about the cancer experience in general.

But as much as I still don't always know what to make of the whole thing, I do know this — I'm so glad and thankful that, a year later, I'm here.

Brief Meditation On A Line From Hopkins

Today I went for a walk. I saw a trail I'd never taken before, and followed it to a street I didn't know. For some reason, a single line from a poem began to run through my head: The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

The word "charged" means many different things, of course. You can be charged in the sense of being accused of something. You can be charged in the sense of being entrusted to carry out a task or duty. When you charge a battery, you cause it to store energy drawn from another power source.

I looked around.

There were a scattering of pink petals on the sidewalk, fallen from a flowering bush that stood taller than I ever will. Water drops on the petals winked back at the sun.

There was a tree with some kind of berry hanging from its branches. Large dark berries, like a cross between blueberries and olives, cast in silhouette against a golden light.

There were long swathes of grass growing out of the soil next to the sidewalk. Water drops on the grass sparkled like diamonds. I stopped, crouched down, stared, ran my fingers along the thin green blades. The diamonds melted away the moment I touched them. But everywhere I looked, there were more. If God so clothes the flowers of the fields, I thought.

The world is generous with its riches. God is generous with the world. And yes, the world is charged with His grandeur. In every sense of the word.

A Laid-Back, Totally Non-Road Ragey Note To Drivers In L.A., Yo

The following is a public service announcement from your friendly neighborhood frogg.

To those who are going below 65mph on the freeway, please take a moment to look at the posted speed limit signs. You'll be able to read them just fine because no way are they going to be a blur at the rate you’re going. So you will see that they say 65mph. Consider what this may mean, not just for you, but for everyone on the road with you. Especially those who are stuck in the huge line of cars stacking up behind you in the fast lane. Which, by the way, you shouldn’t be in.

To those who are going exactly 65mph, you may be interested to know that you have a 5mph leeway. This is not written in any "official laws" per se, but we all know it. Except you. Until now.

To those who are conscientiously going 5mph above the posted speed limit, please take a moment to get out of the fast lane. You’re going too slow.

To everyone using the L.A. freeway system — the fast lane is the one on the LEFT.

I realize all this may sound a little more like a diatribe than a public service announcement, but I don't care.

Thank you for tuning in. Back to your regularly scheduled day now. With kisses, of course, from the frogg princess.

M&M Overdose Imminent—Intervention Please!

OK, seriously, I think I am addicted to M&Ms now.

I blame my roommate (in, of course, the nicest possible way). She came home the other day with a giant plastic tub filled to the brim with M&Ms—a prize she had won at an anniversary party for some friends of hers. So maybe I should actually blame her friends. Anyway, there are enough M&Ms in there to last til Doomsday. Or whenever North Korea decides to fire their rockets at us, whichever comes first.

Er, wait.

Whatever, the point is, I can't manage a simple walk through the dining room without taking a scoop of M&Ms out of the little glass bowl that sits on the table. Or sit in the living room without having a few—or a few too many—out of another glass jar on the coffee table. I can't even eat oatmeal anymore. I mean, by itself.

On the other hand, I've been wondering what to give up for Lent this year. Maybe I have my answer.

The Breakfast of Champions...

...can get a little old after a few days in a row.

Not that I would know from personal experience or anything.

In other news, I'm off for a hike near Malibu today. A much-needed opportunity to get outdoors and clear the brain after a tough week. Hope you all have a wonderful Saturday! With love, as usual, from the frogg princess...

Oatmeal + M&Ms

= the breakfast of champions. Strange champions, perhaps; quirky champions that you almost kind of wonder if you should maybe worry about their mental health, but champions nonetheless.

Although I should clarify: you have to actually put the M&Ms in your oatmeal to qualify. Besides, if you don't, you won't see how many pretty colors your oatmeal can turn, and then what fun is it?

I'm going to go now.

Time For Another Frogg Award

Haven't handed one of these out in a while, but I'm proud to announce that, in the "Most Embarrassing Moment of My Life" category, we have a winner. For those of you too lazy to click on the link (and honestly, how lazy are you, that you can't click on a link?!), our recipient was participating in a guided tour at the Met in New York when, for some unexplained reason, she stumbled and fell. On a painting. By Picasso. And tore it. In front of many other people.

Yikes.

As an expert in embarrassing moments, having played a starring role in more of them than I care to remember, I just have to point out that there's really no good way to ever live something like this down.

I also have to point out that the article kind of leaves a lot of unanswered questions rolling around in my mind. Not least is the question of what on earth Picasso was thinking when he produced that painting. And if you'd just click on the link like I said, you'd know exactly what I was talking about. But also right up there is the question of how the docent leading the tour reacted in the moment of the accident. I mean, museum docents have kind of perfected the art of looking vaguely threatening even at the best of times; i.e., times when you are not falling on an irreplaceable masterpiece and destroying it. So really, I can only imagine. After all, we're talking here about a painting which had been negotiated for a sale of $139 million.The woman is no doubt thanking anything but her lucky stars (which were clearly asleep on the job that day) that the museum did not enforce a "you break it, you buy it" policy.

Thoughts On A Rainy Night

The long, stormy day is done. Earlier this evening I saw lightning through a heavy rain as I drove the streets near my house. Now I'm home again, sitting in my room with a cup of chamomile tea, the light dim and a few candles burning. Just thinking. I make a few false starts on the ol' blog, but nothing flows. Sigh.

I pick up my old journal and flip to the entry for this date last year. Turns out that on January 21, 2009, I was on a plane headed to Thailand. Strange. Seems a lifetime ago and then some. In a way, I suppose it was. Just over two weeks after getting back from that trip, I'd find myself starting chemotherapy. Life is full of surprises.

My hair has grown back very thick, and curlier than before. Darker, too. Meanwhile, the biopsy scar at the base of my throat is fading. I doubt anyone would notice it anymore, if they ever did. I see it, though. Every day.

I pause and listen. The rain has stopped. I wonder if it stopped a long time ago and I just never noticed until now. Everything is quiet outside. Inside, well. That's another story.

A Quote For The Day

The following made me smile, for a number of reasons.

"God is not without mercy," said Toma vaguely.

"Toma, when you first came here three years ago, the year Annushka was born, you told me you were an unbeliever."

Toma's face relaxed into the creases of leathery goodwill which were a preparation for hours of aimless discussion.

"Not an unbeliever, sir, a free-thinker. Perhaps you've never thought about the difference. As a free-thinker I can believe what I like, when I like. I can commit you, in your sad situation, to the protection of God this evening, even though tomorrow morning I shan't believe he exists. As an unbeliever I should be obliged not to believe, and that's an unwarrantable restriction on my thoughts."

-- from Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring

Hope, Truth And A Dose Of Something That Might Be, But Probably Isn't, Quantum Physics

I've been reading Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal and today I came across a passage where he quotes Camus, who wrote to a friend,

Only one thing on earth seems to me to be a greater good than justice—and that is, if not truth itself, the pursuit of truth. We don't need hope, we just need truth.

I'm not so sure I agree. Can hope and truth exist without one another? Or no: better to say, can we as human beings exist without both? That is, exist in a way that does honor to what we are? Although even as I write that, I hear Jesus' words in my head, when he said to the disciples once, "You know not what manner of spirit you are of." So that leads me to the question, what are we anyway? Can we find out the truth without hope? I would think that hope provides the motivation to seek out and pursue truth. But what if we do find truth, and it teaches us that there is nothing to hope for?

Ouch, my brain hurts.

On a tenuously related note, I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day on Gchat. We were talking about God and he was telling me about how his idea of God is inspired somewhat by his understanding of quantum physics (and here I'm pretty sure I'm about to mangle both my friend's understanding of God and whatever quantum physics is really all about, so I apologize in advance to my friend as well as any scientists who might, however improbably, be following this blog); that is, that God, existing outside of time in the realm of infinity, thus contains everything that not only has happened but that could happen. Every conceivable possibility is in God. So when I responded to that with, "My head just exploded," my friend said that somewhere, I guess in a parallel universe or something, that really happened and that in that parallel time and place, he felt bad about making my head explode and then HIS head exploded. Which made me laugh, in this universe.

Quantum physics is nothing if not very strange. And somewhat entertaining, at least if it's anything like the way I understand it, which I admit is highly doubtful. But anyway, I just hope I'm always living in the universe in which my head remains firmly attached to my body, intact. And that's the truth.

Not Comforting

Just when I think I'm getting somewhat of a handle on the concept of prayer, something like yesterday's Haiti disaster happens and I'm at a loss. How do you pray for something like this? If I say, "God, comfort these people in their suffering," it sounds like I think He won't do it unless I tell Him to, which is absurd, unless He's generally as mean as we try to convince people He isn't. On the other hand, I wonder why He let it happen in the first place if He's as loving as we try to convince people He is.

Then I think, maybe it happened because God isn't actually omnipotent. Or because He doesn't exist in the first place.

I seem to lose my faith every couple months or so. The duration of my atheism, or at the very least agnosticism, varies, and I can't say for sure what brings me out of it. Each time is a bit different. At this moment, I happen to believe. I have my reasons and for now they are sufficient. But then there's Haiti.

The question of why evil and suffering exist in the world has been around for, well, pretty much as long as the world, I'd guess. I don't have any answer for it. What I do have is a weird little story in Luke's Gospel where a bunch of people come to Jesus to tell him about some Galileans who had been rounded up and murdered by Pontius Pilate for some unexplained reason. Here's Jesus' response:

Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower of Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.

Uh, gee, Jesus, thanks for clearing up the problem of suffering and all. Oh wait, you didn't. Boo.

OK, so obviously this is not one of the warm-fuzzy Jesus sayings that gets inscribed on plaques and keychains and God knows what else, like, "Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy-laden, and I'll give you rest." But to be quite honest, most of what Jesus said was strange or scary or very uncomfortable, or a combination of all three. This statement here falls decidedly in the uncomfortable category, if you ask me. He's saying, look, death comes to all of us. Maybe it'll be cancer, maybe it'll be a car crash, maybe it'll be a devastating earthquake. But frankly, when it does come, the reason why really won't matter.

From where I'm sitting right now — coming up on the 1-year anniversary of my cancer diagnosis, looking through images of what's left of Port-au-Prince, pondering the unpredictableness of life on this crazy planet, and feeling kind of sad and freaked out — the only thing that could possibly matter is summed up in another question:

This whole Christian thing, is it for real? Is Jesus for real?

And all I can say right now is: I sure hope so.

Madness, I Tell You

Today I read a fascinating article called The Americanization of Mental Illness. Here are a few key quotes for your consideration:

For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases.
[...]
Cross-cultural psychiatrists have pointed out that the mental-health ideas we export to the world are rarely unadulterated scientific facts and never culturally neutral. “Western mental-health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory and a source of moral authority. None of this is universal,” Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry in London observes. He has also written: “The problem is the overall thrust that comes from being at the heart of the one globalizing culture. It is as if one version of human nature is being presented as definitive, and one set of ideas about pain and suffering. . . . There is no one definitive psychology.”
[...]
Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering.

Interesting stuff, yes? But as I read the article, I found myself thinking more about another Americanized idea that has been exported to the world, also with perhaps mixed results — Christianity.

Understand, I have no problem with people proselytizing on behalf of the religion I believe in (though I may not always agree with the methods employed to do so). No, what I really take issue with is the way Christianity has become co-opted by such uniquely American ideas as the pursuit of happiness in the form of material wealth and the manifest destiny, if you will, of the individual. Ideas, I might add, that are antithetical to the Gospel as presented in the New Testament. (Joel Osteen, I'm talking to you.) And I don't like the idea of this particular brand (ah yes, the language of commodity—also very American) of Christianity making the global rounds.

But hey, it's not just problematic theology that gets spread out into other cultures. What about our institutional formats? When I was in Thailand I went to a church service one day and it was both comforting and disheartening to discover that it looked and sounded just like so many services I've been to here in the States. I even recognized many of the worship songs as ones written by Westerners (if not Americans), though sung, of course, in Thai.

Er, but wait. I just realized I'm talking about Christianity and mental illness in the same post, and the same context. Which, granted, many readers may find perfectly appropriate, but which bums me out a little, even though it's my own fault. On the other hand, it also reminds me of a funny story. I was living in the Bay Area some years ago, and the church I attended at the time would usually include a traditional hymn along with a set of more contemporary tunes before each service. One Sunday morning, I looked at the program and was startled by the title of the hymn for the day: "Come, all Christians, be committed."

Freud would, no doubt, be pleased.