Emma and Ali and I were walking down Main Street when I called my boyfriend to say we were done shopping, we were planning on getting Chinese food for a late lunch because we'd gone out for breakfast and were still super full, so we couldn't eat yet. We were going to get coffee. Did he want to join us later for lunch?
It was impossible to say at the time. I said I'd call him when we made the next move. He said, "Have fun being a girl!"
I was too busy being a girl all day to write a blog post.
My Favorite Cake to Bake
I first made this cake in the Art of Pastries and Dessert Preparation class I took to fulfill one of my "practical arts" requirements senior year of high school. It's from the Food Network website, and I'm just going to link to the recipe because it's not like I made it up or tweaked it or discovered it on my own. It's one of the best cakes ever because:
1. The caramel. Four tablespoons of butter for half a cup of brown sugar, how do you go wrong?
2. Apples! Autumn!
3. The actual cake is moist and tasty and simple.
4. The actual cake has a little cornmeal in it, which makes it taste better and be more autumny.
5. It's beautiful!
The photos are from last year, but I just don't need to photograph this cake that many more times.
It's not that difficult to make, especially if you remember to let your butter soften and own an electric mixer. But I made it for our big Thanksgiving meal in Germany, where I didn't have a mixer, and both times I've made it this year it was without a mixer, and one of those times I didn't even let the butter get really soft and it was okay. I also made it once or twice in a springform pan, because I was in Germany and that's what they've got. If you disobey the recipe and do that like I did, put a cookie sheet or something underneath to catch the caramel that oozes out. Or maybe I put foil around the bottom of the pan. I don't remember any great disaster, not like the first five times I made chocolate ganache cake and kept filling the pan up to the brim because I was using the size pan it told me to, so why did it always run over and burn on the base of the oven? (So much yelling by my father.)
I guess peeling and slicing 2-3 small apples might be a pain for someone who doesn't peel every apple before they eat it because they didn't like skin as a kid and their parents indulged them and then it was too late...but just think how much easier 2-3 apples is than an apple pie's worth! The recipe tells you to scatter the apples in the caramel and then pour the batter on top. I think "scatter" is the wrong word. By scatter, I'm pretty sure they mean "arrange the apple slices in near-perfect concentric rings." But, you know. Whatever you want. It will taste delicious.
1. The caramel. Four tablespoons of butter for half a cup of brown sugar, how do you go wrong?
2. Apples! Autumn!
3. The actual cake is moist and tasty and simple.
4. The actual cake has a little cornmeal in it, which makes it taste better and be more autumny.
5. It's beautiful!
It's not that difficult to make, especially if you remember to let your butter soften and own an electric mixer. But I made it for our big Thanksgiving meal in Germany, where I didn't have a mixer, and both times I've made it this year it was without a mixer, and one of those times I didn't even let the butter get really soft and it was okay. I also made it once or twice in a springform pan, because I was in Germany and that's what they've got. If you disobey the recipe and do that like I did, put a cookie sheet or something underneath to catch the caramel that oozes out. Or maybe I put foil around the bottom of the pan. I don't remember any great disaster, not like the first five times I made chocolate ganache cake and kept filling the pan up to the brim because I was using the size pan it told me to, so why did it always run over and burn on the base of the oven? (So much yelling by my father.)
I Wrote This on November Third
Except for the part I started on the First.
I was going through my list of posts, and discovered quite a few unfinished drafts that I wish I had finished. Most of them are good openings that abruptly end at the transition to the main body. What a stupid time to stop! One of them could have been a complete post. There's not much to edit, it's ready for publication, but it was a retrospective of two summers ago and that's not really relevant anymore. The problem with that one, and some of the half-written ones that could have stood alone as mini-posts, is that they felt a little too open at the time. Open in the wrong way, meaning insecure, fragile, discontented, not open in the way I though I wanted my blog to be, which is consistent, fun, full of details, so that it's easy and enjoyable to keep up with. The way my favorite bloggers write. (Let's maybe not notice that all these bloggers are connected to each other in some way so it's sort of like I'm stalking a group of friends, nope, it's just, links! That's how the internet works!) Not that they all write only post positive things. If your life's too perfect, we might get sick of you.
I've been rereading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, which my mom gave me for Christmas senior year of high school. It's a book about how to write, but for anyone—aspiring novelist, poet, essayist, but also businessmen, teachers, anyone else. She uses a LOT of silly metaphors, and maybe how she writes isn't how everyone learns to write, and I think what I liked about it best the first time I read it was the little bits of her life that came through with the writing. But I do think it's good. She emphasizes that the biggest thing is simply writing. You need discipline, to write every day, or write five pages a day, whatever it takes to get you to practice. It's a style of writing informed by Zen meditation. You just sit down, put the pen to paper—computers barely existed when she first wrote it—and don't pick it up again. You write whatever comes out, even if it's pages of repetitive self-criticism, or revelations you don't want to have, or practically the same thing you wrote two days ago. If you write enough, you get to what's real, what has power.
Obviously, the same does not apply to a semi-public blog. I'm not going to set my fingers to the keyboard and keep them there until I've been typing for an hour and a half, and simply post it. For the past few weeks, I've been trying to take the time to just write, pen on paper (it helps that after two months I STILL don't have internet in my apartment). I haven't tried that hard, I guess, but I am figuring out how to get myself to focus better. Step one was getting a smaller desk to replace the one that didn't fit in my new apartment. The smallest IKEA MICKE desk fits exactly in the space by my couch, and in pure white, it fits the decor perfectly too.
A desk isn't enough to get me to focus, though. I can fidget in a chair at a desk for hours. I pretty much spent two months doing that while I tried to write my 15-page, 1.5-spaced German term paper (probably the most painful thing I ever wrote). What does seem to work like a charm is darkness. I turn out the lights, light a candle or three, and it's kind of like a reset button. The room changes, but in a lovely way that makes me somehow more content. The paper glows, and the desk, and nothing else, and then I can set myself to the task of taking myself seriously without any worry about anyone or anything else. Until I run out of things to say, which can happen surprisingly quickly. But it's progress.
If only there was something similar that made the distractions of the internet go away. (And I don't mean that weird program that shuts down your internet/specific-website capabilities for a timespan set by you, unless I do mean that, in which case, what is it called?) I find it very difficult to focus when what I'm focusing on is a glowing screen with Facebook in the background.
These were the closest things I had to jack-o-lanterns this year.
I was going through my list of posts, and discovered quite a few unfinished drafts that I wish I had finished. Most of them are good openings that abruptly end at the transition to the main body. What a stupid time to stop! One of them could have been a complete post. There's not much to edit, it's ready for publication, but it was a retrospective of two summers ago and that's not really relevant anymore. The problem with that one, and some of the half-written ones that could have stood alone as mini-posts, is that they felt a little too open at the time. Open in the wrong way, meaning insecure, fragile, discontented, not open in the way I though I wanted my blog to be, which is consistent, fun, full of details, so that it's easy and enjoyable to keep up with. The way my favorite bloggers write. (Let's maybe not notice that all these bloggers are connected to each other in some way so it's sort of like I'm stalking a group of friends, nope, it's just, links! That's how the internet works!) Not that they all write only post positive things. If your life's too perfect, we might get sick of you.
I've been rereading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, which my mom gave me for Christmas senior year of high school. It's a book about how to write, but for anyone—aspiring novelist, poet, essayist, but also businessmen, teachers, anyone else. She uses a LOT of silly metaphors, and maybe how she writes isn't how everyone learns to write, and I think what I liked about it best the first time I read it was the little bits of her life that came through with the writing. But I do think it's good. She emphasizes that the biggest thing is simply writing. You need discipline, to write every day, or write five pages a day, whatever it takes to get you to practice. It's a style of writing informed by Zen meditation. You just sit down, put the pen to paper—computers barely existed when she first wrote it—and don't pick it up again. You write whatever comes out, even if it's pages of repetitive self-criticism, or revelations you don't want to have, or practically the same thing you wrote two days ago. If you write enough, you get to what's real, what has power.
Obviously, the same does not apply to a semi-public blog. I'm not going to set my fingers to the keyboard and keep them there until I've been typing for an hour and a half, and simply post it. For the past few weeks, I've been trying to take the time to just write, pen on paper (it helps that after two months I STILL don't have internet in my apartment). I haven't tried that hard, I guess, but I am figuring out how to get myself to focus better. Step one was getting a smaller desk to replace the one that didn't fit in my new apartment. The smallest IKEA MICKE desk fits exactly in the space by my couch, and in pure white, it fits the decor perfectly too. A desk isn't enough to get me to focus, though. I can fidget in a chair at a desk for hours. I pretty much spent two months doing that while I tried to write my 15-page, 1.5-spaced German term paper (probably the most painful thing I ever wrote). What does seem to work like a charm is darkness. I turn out the lights, light a candle or three, and it's kind of like a reset button. The room changes, but in a lovely way that makes me somehow more content. The paper glows, and the desk, and nothing else, and then I can set myself to the task of taking myself seriously without any worry about anyone or anything else. Until I run out of things to say, which can happen surprisingly quickly. But it's progress.
Catching Up with the Cats
After two months apart from the kitties, I saw them tonight for a little while. Aren't you happy to see me, Table Cat?
Don't worry, he was. Unfortunately, the "Cat Preserve" is a basement, and Table Cat's eyes don't get along with the flash very well.
What an alien.
Hey Harouny on a treadmill...
You're doing it wrong.
It was all too brief, but I am a tired person who worked four hours at one job, three at another, then drove home in the deep dark in a car she just can't get used to driving. And my Isabel cat needs my love too, in my parents' house across the street from Haroun and Table. And Emma!
It was all too brief, but I am a tired person who worked four hours at one job, three at another, then drove home in the deep dark in a car she just can't get used to driving. And my Isabel cat needs my love too, in my parents' house across the street from Haroun and Table. And Emma!
Allerheiligen
The only time I ever observed All Saints' Day was—naturally, I think—the fall of my year in Germany. The first month we were in Freiburg, we took intensive German classes at a language institute located by the university. At the end of October, when the Wintersemester began, we began an "Aufbau" course at the institute, in the evenings after our university and program courses were over, to help build up our writing skills and prepare us for those scourges of the German university system: Referate (presentations) and Hausarbeiten (term papers). We didn't get out of Aufbau until the dark of 8 o'clock, if I remember correctly.
The weekend of Halloween (it fell fortuitously on a Friday that year) I made into a long one. That Thursday, I lugged my suitcase to Aufbau, then rushed right to the train station after class to catch the first of several regional trains that would take me, cheaply and leisurely (slowly), to Aschaffenburg, my expatriate aunt, and her German wife. They visited our family in Michigan almost every year, sometimes with my cousins, sometimes without, but I'd never been to visit them. At the end of the weekend, I was happy I had gone because of all the good food (meat dishes! all my friends were vegetarian! also Kaffee und Kuchen in kleinen Cafés!) and the first cats I'd encountered in Germany (living in their lovely penthouse, only friendly on their enclosed balcony) and the fact that my aunt had made me speak German for a significant portion of the weekend.
On Halloween—which is an entirely American holiday—I missed a wild party back in Freiburg, which I hadn't really thought about beforehand, and didn't really care about once I did. My aunt, her wife and I celebrated in our own way, going on a walking tour about the witch-hunting history of their town. I remember the group was big, and it was hard to hear everything the tour guide said (of course in German). It was also very cold, and long. But that meant I got to see a lot of the city under cover of darkness. Sometimes my aunt or her wife would fill me in on what I had missed, or add another detail that hadn't been mentioned. Afterward we went to a bar. They had beers, I had an Apfelschorle. Wie immer.
The next day, I think, was the day we went in to Frankfurt to sightsee a little, eat some cake, have dinner, and see an English play, with one of their other Esel-friends and one of my German cousins. (Esel means donkey, but it stands for English-Speaking Ladies, which is a group of friends that meets every other week or so.) What I remember most clearly is visiting the cathedral (pictured above). The building is red stone, like Freiburg's Münster and so many other churches in southern Germany. I'm not particularly fond of the red, for whatever reason, but I liked this fairly plain cathedral, which was almost entirely destroyed in the war. Part of it was the iridescence in the plain, un-stained glass, which shone a grey-blue in the waning light. Part of it was that my aunt studied the Middle Ages (Middle English in particular), and both she and her wife were always telling me stories about the building of the church, or the tale of the saint in this fresco, and always, always searching for another depiction of the Death of Mary. It's my aunt's pet subject, part of the reason she might like to get a second PhD, I think, and her wife knew all about it too, after all those years.
As we were leaving, my aunt stopped to light a candle, or else stopped to say something about not lighting a candle. But I think she did, because that's the thing to do when you're in a church, to leave your little coin and light a candle for the dead. By then, my grandpa, her father, had been gone just over four years; her mother, just one year more than that. I think it was as she was getting her wallet out that she mentioned they had finally left the Catholic church when Ratzinger became pope because of his strong views on homosexuality, not to mention all the rest. They were married five or six years before, in a civil union recognized by the German state, but not the church they were both raised with, on either side of the Atlantic.
Before we drove out to Frankfurt that afternoon, we met her wife's parents at the cemetery where much of their family is buried. I don't think we stayed to hear the priest speak—over loudspeaker, they said is how it's done now—since I have no memory of this event, just that I was told it was always boring. Maybe I did, and it just wasn't memorable. I do know that I met her parents, she probably went to the graves quickly before everything started, and then we were off to pick up the Esel-lady and head into Frankfurt like the rest of the not-so-religious (across the border from Bavaria, in Protestant Hessen, where Frankfurt is, I think it was a big sale day).
That was already three years ago. I don't remember it so well. I do remember the dinner they cooked, maybe the next day, maybe the day before. Chicken roasted in Calvados (apple brandy from Normandy) and stuffed with apples, which came out of the chicken after cooking as the most delicious chickeny-applesauce, I don't care if you think that's gross, it was the best thing. I remember how, coming down from the loft that serves as the office, after checking my email, I slipped so quickly on the marbles steps in my socks and went boom boom boom the rest of the way down. It was high up, and it was so slippery and fast, and I was badly shaken. My aunt poured me a taste of the Calvados—had already poured it before I fell, really—and her wife rushed to get some little tube of something for me to smell ("Petra and her homeopathic remedies"). I held the railing tightly, scared, every time I went down stairs for probably two years.
This year, they came the second half of August, so as not to miss the family reunion. My boyfriend and I were busy packing, and working, and moving, and seeing friends who were only in-state a little while. I only saw them that one afternoon in the park, with all the rest of my aunts and uncles.
And now this Allerheiligen, I'm remembering my aunt. Not my father's sister, but my aunt, Petra, who I never thought to label—she was always just Petra—until after she was gone, when I began to recite to myself, over and over, in case someone at work asked me why I looked unhappy, trying to figure out what would be best to say. My aunt in Germany died. The funeral was today. The funeral was yesterday. I couldn't be there. Most of our family couldn't be there for my aunt, who so suddenly was left alone.
I always thought of Petra with a smile on her face.
Soft Open
In the office, the rain on the roof sounded exactly like someone was faking it with a rainstick. The drops were small, precise, hitting the metal roof like needles, extraordinarily consistent. Though there was a sort of ebb and flow to the storm, at no point did it stop. Bad news for my bike and me.
The rain sound was definitely coming from the clouds, not from someone with a stalk of dried cactus trying to bring on a storm. I left the bike outside the building, made the trek to my apartment and then the restaurant on foot. Halfway to the Diag, I realized my left rain boot had split down the heel. Now I have to go back and get my bike, again on foot, because there's no other way to get from one job to the next on time tomorrow. It will be raining then, too.
This morning, it was peaceful, dark, cozy in my apartment. When I finally committed to waking up, I spread open the curtains to these pretty little drops of rain. I used my camera with deliberation for what felt like the first time in forever. Then I stretched as far as I could.
This will someday, hopefully, be a lemon tree. Even though the window climate's getting cold and the sun harder to find, in the last few days, it's sprouted another baby leaf on top. If I were my darling Rachel (Rachel! Rachel! Are you out there, Rachel?) I would probably name it, but being myself, I haven't, even though it's arguably the closest thing I've got to a pet right now. It's too dainty, delicate, and I think it would be offended to be treated like anything from the kingdom Animalia.
Here's the first glimpse into my new home for you, the internet. There's a game we could play, and it would be about identifying where every item in this picture was purchased, but let's not play and say we didn't. Name no names. Though the guinea pig would argue she's the closest thing to a pet in this home, she's really closer to a pillow.
I desperately miss the lover-cats. And another cat, but we'll talk about him later, because he deserves a lot more words. I do appreciate my "ice cube" walls, and my shiny spotless new white desk, and the warmth of candlelight before bed.
The rain sound was definitely coming from the clouds, not from someone with a stalk of dried cactus trying to bring on a storm. I left the bike outside the building, made the trek to my apartment and then the restaurant on foot. Halfway to the Diag, I realized my left rain boot had split down the heel. Now I have to go back and get my bike, again on foot, because there's no other way to get from one job to the next on time tomorrow. It will be raining then, too.
I desperately miss the lover-cats. And another cat, but we'll talk about him later, because he deserves a lot more words. I do appreciate my "ice cube" walls, and my shiny spotless new white desk, and the warmth of candlelight before bed.
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