The best part of the day is often when I get to stretch out on my couch or my bed and just let go. Sink in, spread out, and breathe. Feet up on the far armrest—hopefully not usually kicking over the new, unopened bottle of some sort of face wash with sulphur in it for the perfection of the skin of my chin like I just did now, god I love my life and my desire for Face Progress—and also hopefully not at 10:30 a.m.
Some of my best naps are just after I've eaten breakfast. Once I've gone to the bathroom and filled my stomach and decided to leisurely read for the morning before biking to the office at ten to one, the body that just couldn't sleep from 7:50 onward is ready to give it another go, and my mind checks out and then there's nothing to do but set an alarm for noon and hope I'm not too sad when I wake up and realize I have to move and also all my beautiful, daylit free time is gone.
But the relaxation that doesn't herald a guilty nap, that's golden. (I want to take a moment here to mourn the loss of class schedules and dorm living, because the best naps of my life were the winter of my sophomore year. I had eleven to one free, or twelve to three, and that totally justified an afternoon nap. If I didn't eat lunch I could just head up to my room, peel off my scarf, cardigan, jeans, and socks to reveal the perfect nap uniform of tight but cozy H&M turtleneck and leggings. The only good thing about our room facing the weak winter north was that the drapes made it dark enough for a good nap. It was the best. And the point was that this oblivion was guilt-free. It was earned.)
In the evenings, if I'm at home and without plans, I eat dinner and tidy up my living/bedroom, but probably don't do the dishes in the kitchen because that's such a morning thing to do. I read nonfiction, or a novel (nonfiction's really more for the morning too, I think, except that it is sometimes one of the factors leading to the guilty 10:45 a.m. nap; I don't know that I can ever go to grad school because every time I read something factual I fall asleep), or I watch TV on DVD, maybe with popcorn. I breathe.
If I had internet, I could connect with friends far away, but some of their time zones make this unlikely. If I had internet, I might not breathe because of the clicking frenzy and the typetypetyping storm. I'm typing this now sans internet, and I still feel that boring computer rush, the one that locks me in and would keep me up until 3 a.m. when I had people online or no real reason not to. It can't win tonight, because there's just me and this screen, no other people, nothing to read, and a bed calling out to me.
I was thinking I should do yoga every time I blogged. That sounds weird. After an evening blog post, before a morning one, something like that. Because I should do yoga every day, because exercise, flexibility, clearing one's mind. But if that were a requirement, I would probably quit this blogging streak. It's a lesson I learned long ago: don't try to develop too many new habits at once, because you're more likely to develop none.
This Feels Like Cheating
Back in July, or August, I got cupcakes with a darling friend and ex-housemate, whom I hadn't seen in weeks, and afterwards, I realized that I have a problem with the past. It's one of the reasons I haven't blogged much in the last year; the only posts I really like are written fairly in the moment, when thoughts flow and feelings are clear. We were catching each other up our lives, and I could do the current situation, how I'd gotten to that point—
I am now the receptionist at an Ann Arbor law firm, replacing another friend who moved down to Georgia for graduate school. So I'm staying in Ann Arbor another year. So I found a new apartment, a studio, where I exist solo. No cats, no roommate, just a boyfriend in the same town as me for the first time since we started dating, because he's back for grad school here. Well. On North Campus, eons, or at least a bus, away. I'm still at the restaurant, too, working a few nights—
and I can do the future. I can do the future great. Plans plans plans. (I should probably say the near future. The things I am going to do in the next month or so. I love—no, I have a pressing need—to pin those details down.)
One thing about me, which I already knew, thoroughly, is that I'm usually only comfortable with certainty. I miss my exhausting, seven- and eight-hour shifts at the restaurant because I know how to do everything there. I could make every salad (except some of the ones from the "nutritional combos" menu) from memory in under a minute, probably. (Before everything got switched around.) I know the prep tasks, the ins and outs of the menu, the closing choreography. I am good at that job, even if I don't like it as a job. I like it because I'm good at it, the co-workers are friendly, and because it pays my bills.
I like the law firm job for different reasons, mostly boring reasons, because it is a boring job working within boring parameters. At the time, I couldn't say much about it, though, because it was only a couple weeks in, my position felt tenuous, and I didn't know if my impressions of the job were due to the way I react to this job, or just a product of feeling uncomfortable in a new setting. I think I explained that to my friend.
But it was a pretty big gap we were trying to fill in. We lived in the same house for a year, but it had been over a year since we'd graduated and I'd moved home. We only saw each other occasionally, so there could have been so much to say. She'd just gotten back from Africa, so there was lots there, and other things, but I wasn't feeling particularly verbose about the things about my current life that were easy to say. And then there are the obvious questions that you can answer in a heartbeat, fairly meaninglessly, or else take very seriously and plunge into a study of yourself for the past few months.
And that's the thing. It seems so hard to remember precise worries of a month or two ago, and the general response I had to them, how I felt day by day. I remember the rage I felt at the entire GRE test-taking process. I remember the stress of finding somewhere to live beginning at the end of August, when it was already partway through June. I remember the horror of moving. But how did I feel about living in my new apartment the first full week? When did the solitude become too much? When did it feel right? As long as you can remember things that happened, things you felt, the details don't need to matter. The important thing is that they happened and that you understand them and share them if you need or want to.But I hate to get things wrong. I want everything told right, in order, just as everything should be cleaned in order, from the top shelf to the counter to the floor. I just want it to make sense.
This is the secret: I wrote the first half of this post back in July, the day we met for cupcakes. I didn't finish it, I stopped at a key transition and I no longer remember exactly where I was trying to go with it. I don't know if what I did write makes sense. It rambles, maybe. I think I'm missing the punchline, so to speak. Maybe there never was one, and that's why I quit writing it.
Oh well.
I am now the receptionist at an Ann Arbor law firm, replacing another friend who moved down to Georgia for graduate school. So I'm staying in Ann Arbor another year. So I found a new apartment, a studio, where I exist solo. No cats, no roommate, just a boyfriend in the same town as me for the first time since we started dating, because he's back for grad school here. Well. On North Campus, eons, or at least a bus, away. I'm still at the restaurant, too, working a few nights—
and I can do the future. I can do the future great. Plans plans plans. (I should probably say the near future. The things I am going to do in the next month or so. I love—no, I have a pressing need—to pin those details down.)
One thing about me, which I already knew, thoroughly, is that I'm usually only comfortable with certainty. I miss my exhausting, seven- and eight-hour shifts at the restaurant because I know how to do everything there. I could make every salad (except some of the ones from the "nutritional combos" menu) from memory in under a minute, probably. (Before everything got switched around.) I know the prep tasks, the ins and outs of the menu, the closing choreography. I am good at that job, even if I don't like it as a job. I like it because I'm good at it, the co-workers are friendly, and because it pays my bills.
I like the law firm job for different reasons, mostly boring reasons, because it is a boring job working within boring parameters. At the time, I couldn't say much about it, though, because it was only a couple weeks in, my position felt tenuous, and I didn't know if my impressions of the job were due to the way I react to this job, or just a product of feeling uncomfortable in a new setting. I think I explained that to my friend.
But it was a pretty big gap we were trying to fill in. We lived in the same house for a year, but it had been over a year since we'd graduated and I'd moved home. We only saw each other occasionally, so there could have been so much to say. She'd just gotten back from Africa, so there was lots there, and other things, but I wasn't feeling particularly verbose about the things about my current life that were easy to say. And then there are the obvious questions that you can answer in a heartbeat, fairly meaninglessly, or else take very seriously and plunge into a study of yourself for the past few months.
And that's the thing. It seems so hard to remember precise worries of a month or two ago, and the general response I had to them, how I felt day by day. I remember the rage I felt at the entire GRE test-taking process. I remember the stress of finding somewhere to live beginning at the end of August, when it was already partway through June. I remember the horror of moving. But how did I feel about living in my new apartment the first full week? When did the solitude become too much? When did it feel right? As long as you can remember things that happened, things you felt, the details don't need to matter. The important thing is that they happened and that you understand them and share them if you need or want to.But I hate to get things wrong. I want everything told right, in order, just as everything should be cleaned in order, from the top shelf to the counter to the floor. I just want it to make sense.
This is the secret: I wrote the first half of this post back in July, the day we met for cupcakes. I didn't finish it, I stopped at a key transition and I no longer remember exactly where I was trying to go with it. I don't know if what I did write makes sense. It rambles, maybe. I think I'm missing the punchline, so to speak. Maybe there never was one, and that's why I quit writing it.
Oh well.
Too Busy Being a Girl
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.
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!
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