Success Diverges

Ohhhh lawdy, another Philosophical Post of a Share of a Like of a Post on PasteBook...

Entirely and Completely Property of Geniuses Stone and Parker

But this time, Trey Parker and Matt Stone' viral animation of Alan Watt's lesson on success.  I did pause to re-evaluate my view of my own life.  I followed that bag full of promises to a certain point, then life got wavy and I made it to 39 without having passed those benchmarks, made those achievements, obtained the degrees and pursued the careers and have, as a result, felt so much the poorer for it.

Born and bred in Silicon Valley, I am very much the ugly duckling in this respect (normed to my socio-economic background, yaddah-yaddah). I was a middle-class white girl in the 80's--what went wrong????  Yes, there were some who also diverged, those who chose the path less followed, but they were usually some sort of artistic or technical genius whose very divergence spoke to their not-too-future innovation and success in fields they quite often invented.

And I bumble along.  

And I usually get very upset about this when I do stop to consider: What have I really done?

But I've reached 40-ish (I just started saying '40', gives me a couple years with it and the sooner I do it the sooner I stop involuntarily wincing) and have taken another couple of good looks at my life. Toured the house, inspected the passport, taken inventory and seen where I've been.  Yes, I'm well-married and have a great family.  I have cool friends.  Not just nice, or helpful or loyal.  Cool.  Lots of them. And a cool husband.  To quote Mitt "Lost My Mittens" Romney-- 'Severely' cool.  And we do cool stuff.  Fun stuff, in fun places, like Portland and Edinburgh and maybe next year Paris. 

I have "Hobbies and Interests".  I love knitting and spinning and traveling to strange new worlds to seek out new yarns and buy them.  Knit Long and Prosper.  With all those cool--no, frikkin' awesome-- people, in beautiful places with great restaurants.

One day I will get through all the books I have on science.  I will somehow come to grips with the most primary, rudimentary concepts of particle and astro-physics just because it's there and I want to know why it's there and where it's going.  It will finally sink in that light can be waves and particles. ?????

One day I will be more adventurous with my trove of cookbooks.

One day I will publish my Treatise on the Social and Historical Implications of Potato Salad on the Formation and Migration of Human Populations.  Don't laugh.  Sit down, get a pen and paper and set a timer for 4 minutes.  Write down all the different potato salads you have ever eaten, and their ingredients.  BING!! Time's up, and I bet you were in the middle of a sentence.  This is serious business.   And I will do it.

I haven't woken up to 40 and opened a bag of empty promises, I've got a house packed with stuff and a passport full of pages waiting to be stamped.  

And this has made all the difference....

What has made the difference in yours?

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Tomato Soup and Garlic: Recipe for A Cure

Feelin’ kinda ropey today.  You know, the kind of schnurffly day where your cold doesn't have the decency to get visibly gross, it just throws you under the Existential Malaise Bus and runs off down the road.  I'm left on the sofa with Life Support Squid watching Foyle's War (having finally wound all the way through both eras of Miss Marple and all of Inspector Lewis--sometimes not even Lawrence Fox can cure me.) 

Just a Girl and Her Squid

So I had a bunch of tomatoes from my CSA box  (Community Supported Agriculture-the farmer's market brought to me) over the last couple of weeks.  I just order the max and save ‘em up then commit the following act of assault.  I’m weak and need the vitamin C.  

Proto Tomato Sauce/Soup

1.  I gather up all the ‘maters I’ve got.  If I happen to have an assortment at the time of killin’, I throw them all in together.  A few cherry and grapes added near the end of baking are quite delightful in the end product.  Here  I started with eight beefsteaks.

2.  Set the oven to 325F.  While it’s heating, cut the tomatoes in half at the equator and place cut side up in pyrex baking dishes.

3.  Douse liberally with Olive Oil.

4.  Sprinkle with Salt, Herbs and Garlic/Shallots/Onion as you desire.  In consideration of this, you will be determining the nature of the end product.  Do you want a traditional Tomato/Cream of Tomato Soup, and therefore a more neutral flavor? Will you be using this as a pasta sauce and therefore desire the essence of roasted garlic and a panoply of classic Italian herbs?
>>Here I am using:  Coarse Sea Salt, Shallots and Penzeys Mural of Flavor herb blend (it adds a nicely rounded herb background but nothing boldly specific).  Keeps my options open for later.
>>A Word About Roasted Garlic:  A more effective, and deeper, richer garlic flavor can be achieved by roasting your garlic separately.  You can do this at the same time, is super simple, and instructions follow at the happy ending of the tomato story.

5.  Place baking dishes in oven for 1 Hour.  Your kitchen will begin to smell delicious.  Check the tomatoes at this time, make sure nothing’s burning.

6.  Turn oven down to 300F and bake for 40 minutes more.  I like to leave them a bit juicier than some recipes have called for so I lower the heat and cut the time.  There’s a ton of flavor and the shallots don’t darken as much.

7.  Remove from oven and assemble the following rig:  
> Steady, flat-bottomed bowl
> Food Mill
> Rubber Spatula
> Rubber Jar Opener Grippy-Thingie

Rubber Grippy Goes Down First

Everything Else is Held in Place!

8.  Once assembled, place tomatoes into food mill and smoosh away. I usually do them in two batches and clean the skins out in between.  

 

When finished, you will be left with a small pile of skins and a loooovely bowl of fresh tomato sauce ready to do your bidding:

>>Why a Food Mill??  They are inexpensive and brilliant.  They will make the smoothest, creamiest mashed potatoes ever, will make nearly anything into the starting stages of sauce or soup and in league with your Thunder Stick, will process nearly anything you need, removing skins and lumps without the expense of a food processor.  A Food Mill is also ridiculously easy to clean.  It pops apart into three pieces that hose off so quickly I didn’t bother to take pics.

*So About That Garlic... 

1.  I take a couple full heads of garlic, chop the tops off well down the head so plenty of each toe is open, then place each in a deep ramekin. 

2.  I then douse in Olive Oil, sprinkle in Kosher Salt and cover tightly with aluminum foil.  

3.  I stick one on each rack, pretty far back, for the entire baking time of the tomatoes.  Remove at the end, allowing them to cool several minutes.  

4.  I take them out of the ramekins, remove any errant skins, then pour all the oil from one dish into the other and carefully, holding the bottom of the garlic head with one hand, squish the garlic out of the skin with my fingers into the dish.  

You may leave it whole, I like to mash it up to use as a dip or spread, and it will incorporate beautifully into any soup or sauce, using your stick blender.

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STRING THEORY

In Brian Greene’s series, The Fabric of the Cosmos, on NOVA (available on PBS), a new and interesting graphic of the classic, vexing, Double Slit Experiment shows electron particles as coalescing waves round the slits like rocks in a river.  But something about how after Schrodinger's wave equation, further research showed that it does not in any way determine or predict where the electrons are landing, only the probability of where they could be.**  

The result, most physicists interviewed said, is we don't have the right to ask exactly where things will be, only what the probability of finding them in one very particular area, where we want to look at the very moment we want to look, would be.  Because something about how Neils Bohr said the act of measurement forces the finality of the matter, momentarily.**  

Many of the scientists in this series echo the same sentiment, often laughing (sometimes somewhat bitterly): That Quantum Mechanics, and String Theory (with it’s possibility to tie all things together across dimensions, time and space), that the very fact we only have the right to ask the probability, are frustrating, bizarre, maddening and mostly unthinkable, but their experiments keep working out. 

And the final word from each?  

“There seems to be no law in the universe that says a particle physicist has to be happy about any of it”. 
--Every single person interviewed, Brian Green’s Fabric of the Cosmos.

Now, considering that many physicists, depending on degree of, well, scientifically philosophical bent, consider such things as philosophy and psychology as suspect offshoots of Underwater Basketweaving 101, it seems they stray ever further into the realm of the darker psyche.  

For all the years I have struggled to gain a final hold on sanity, to force a permanent, overarching structure of normality and function in my life, it has proven resolutely slippery and ultimately elusive.  Perhaps it will never be anything more than what I can pin down, squiggling to free itself, in any given moment, and that’s all I get to call ‘normal.’ 

It’s a bit like having a permanent flu, with that hideously uncomfortable dis-ease lurking beneath your skin, sometimes making you twitch and try to rock yourself to comfort or sleep. Fifty-Fifty success rate on that. Every time my baby niece has a fussy day; when bouncing and rocking and nursing and swaddling-and-shooshing can’t overcome the existential discomfort, I want to take her in my arms and let her know she’s not alone; that Vincent Van Gogh and Brian Cox and Albert Einstein and Mozart all raged and despaired and deflated with the same melancholy. But as sharp as the kid is, she doesn’t believe me when I say that eventually it will subside and she will get to drive and go to parties and follow her dreams and vote Democratic. 

But there is no comfort for an 8-month-old in these histories and promises!  They are mere probabilities, the rantings of a mad auntie!  Could happen, might not, won’t know till we get there. She literally cannot see any but the momentary certainties.  Thus, ecstasy is chewing Sofie the Giraffe, right here, right now.  

Right now I have hold of a cowl I am knitting out of (now defunct) Sanguine Gryphon Codex yarn in a breathtaking ruby red which has been balled and ready for use for nearly a year.  It has been matched against many projects and summarily rejected all of them.  It is a knitted item in it’s quantum state--that is, in all states of possibility--and probably the one I needed to find two years ago when I flipped out and handed over my credit card while slathering like a rabid possum.  

I've heard tell of other luscious yarns, I won't believe you...

I bought the buttons, ostensibly for use as a bracelet, a year ago, and that idea just kept bonking off my brain as well.  

Until two weeks ago with the Knitting Cabal at my house, someone saw my crystal bowl of favorite buttons. I had just laid the Codex on the coffee table along with 4 other Projects-in-Potentia that were driving me crazy.  Buttons met yarn, yarn asked for cowl, cowl pattern was, miraculously, found.  

The French Braid Cowl by Breean Elyse Miller

This is how I’ve come to terms with the Particle Physicist’s plight: It’s usually a difficult process which begins in optimism and ends in despair, but occasional triumph and fits with fearful symmetry the history of physics research.  I buy pretty yarn. It might sit around, perhaps displayed, for who knows how long, while I feel intimidated by the huge, seemingly amorphous Knitting Universe. At some point, a pattern might be found and printed out, even stuffed into a project bag with the yarn and needles, but rarely started. Sometimes, on later consideration, it was a poorly chosen pattern--a terrible experiment, and is dismantled. So it sits some more, waiting and waiting, while in some dimension it is a beautiful finished thing, being used and worn and loved instead of suffering the ignominy of repeated rejection and limbo.  In the end, I only have a beautiful finished thing at the one exact moment I can pounce on the yarn and a magically workable pattern at the same time and just get the damn thing started. 

To me, it is a whole squirrelly, multi-dimensional mess of lovely string, improbable patterns, and I only know it’s possible because this experiment keeps working.

!!! PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT!!!

STITCHES WEST 2013 REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN!!

Join us here in Silicon Valley in late February (yes, 2013) for a mad, hoppin' fabulous weekend of Fiber, Shopping, Classes and Events! Visit XRX/ Knitting Universe for details and Class Registrations!

**PS: I know I don't have it all right, it's why I watch it over and over and try to read the books.  I'm hoping for enlightenment by 80, I've just hit half-life.

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QUANTUM OF GOUJONS

As we traveled from Ireland to Scotland, England, Wales and back to the Emerald Isle, I took stock of local delicacies, sampling as many as possible:

Bangers and Mash, Irish Breakfast, Sticky Toffee Pudding, Tea Cakes at Harrods

Lots of things with ancient names, such as the drool-y Scottish whipped dessert, Cranachan, devised of whipped cream, fruit, oats and whiskey.  

The Edinburgh celebration of Pork:

  

Despite making a cultural comeback, I left haggis hanging.

Haggis, Haggis, EVERYWHERE!!!

Also some universally mundane items wrapped in terms my Internal Irritation Drive obsesses over long after the fact.  

To whit: The Chicken Goujon (goo-ZHON). Pronounced in Northern Irish (Gaelic for “Cuts Steel”) as “GEW-jdohn”. 

Otherwise known as Chicken Fingers.  Chicken Strips.  Proving once and for all that the only word which properly describes long-cut bits of white-meat chicken--"strips"-- is the very one which makes it completely unappetizing. Is it hitting the pole for tips?  Note to the NI delegates, Chicken Fingers is our contribution, so no prizes there...

I fully realise, and revel, in the plasticity and welcoming nature of English.  My favorite number is 1066.  Thus our language contains approximately 14,000 French-based words, which is why we have a word, Pig, for the squealy beast the lower-caste Saxons herded; and the word Pork (Porc), the culinary end product the upper-caste Normans delighted over.  Lamb and Mutton (Mouton). Cow and Beef (Boeuf). 

Tomato, Tomate; Lavender-Honey Ice Cream, Glace à lavande et---

So rich and flavorful on the page and on the plate, and yet, I find my quantum of tolerance for the cheesy- or provincial-sounding to be inversely limited.  Again, the Atlantic scale remains balanced, I did live in the south-east for three years:

“Oh hunny, thows ain’t cawk-rowchis, thows'r just paaawl-meeh-tow buuuugs!”

Splat.

Usually in a fit of pique, any two countries so closely related as America and the UK trade barbs over drawls and pretensions, but this one just--GAAAAHHH!!!--- flips my tick.  So I clicked over to the Babelfish Translation website to find enlightenment, and reported to GingerMan.

Me:  Ha!  I went to Bablefish "Goujon".  It means "stud"

GingerMan: Lol 'Chicken Stud' makes me think of a chicken dressed as The Fonz.

That’s Le Fonz to you, pal.

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A Quick Note From the Datebook:

Eleven Years.  Hmmm.  This could be soupy and over-drawn.  Long-winded or some other hyphenated blogerary travail.

September 11, 2001 was three days before the birthday I share with my younger sister.  Four years apart to the hour.   Yeah, we got our sh*t together.  We were in our room getting ready for the day when our mom came in and mentioned that before we left the house we might want to turn on the TV. 

Mistress of Understatement.

So what happened?  A few unspeakably inhuman freaks committed an act of terror against the human race.  It turned into some clownish 11-year ordeal which has brought seemingly little closure to many involved in the militant festivities.

What has happened:

Six weeks later, I met my husband, the Incomparable GingerMan.  A year later, we were married in a beautiful ceremony in my grandmother’s garden, as would my sister a few years later, both while our grandmother was alive to share it with us.

I gained a family in Ireland, and got to travel to the UK for the first time in 2003 for my sister-in-law’s wedding.  It was huge celebration and she was gorgeous and he was charming and handsome and nearly 10 years later, they still are, but also 3 beautiful children richer.  I've traveled there 4 times and WOW you should see London at Christmas!

Through the machinations of fate, after a layoff three and a half years ago, I walked into a yarn shop the next day and introduced myself to the people who would become my family, my real community of friends.  We are knit together in die-hard support, superficially by pretty string and deeply by Love.

Drawn by wool, I met the sister of my heart, the ineffable Jedi Jasmin, her husband Amazing Andrew and Vavoom Gigi (if you meet her, the Vavoom may be silent but always present).  They have added Danger Mouse, my alarmingly precocious niece to the flock and we are a pretty big bunch at Christmas, I will tell you.  And Thanksgiving.  And Mother’s Day, Easter, Fourth of July...What I’m saying is, we cook, we eat, we’re Family.

Today, on September 11, two of my dearest girlfriends are bringing their second adopted daughter home from the hospital.  I will leave the “adopted” here, because possession is nine-tenths of the law, and as one with an “mid-season replacement” mom, I will reliably inform you that Family is 90% mental.

So many new little people, people I’ve met, things GingerMan and I have done and places we’ve gone.  Road trips to fiber events and late nights drinking and knitting in hotel rooms.  But sometimes I still feel that existential angst.  That voice that says pfftt, what have I done with my life, what’s happened?  

Every week, I hang with older and younger friends and mention a song or a book and someone says “WHAT are you talking about??”  And then I get to show them, play them a new song.  Or be shown and be played to.  

GM and I took a three week kick-ass holiday to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, London at the end of the Olympics and Belfast for our nephew’s second birthday.  When I got home, Danger Mouse was crawling and cruising and looked like a different kid.

So many different things learned and seen every single day.  Not having seen or done or tried means you have so many things left to do! Dr. Seuss was totally right.

Yes, cliché.  And yes, I lose sight of that even while I’m sharing these things with other people, then I stop and go, quote:

WHOOOOOOAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

Eleven years and more of Life.  That’s what’s happening. 

TO MARY URQUHART:  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MY DEAR, DEMENTED, BELOVED SISTER.  LOVE, YOUR WEIRDO.
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On the Brink, A Treatise on Turning 39; OR An Ode to a Ginger.

Once upon a time, on this date in 1973, a new ginger came to be.  His father wanted to pass down the family name, making this boy about the hundredth William in the family, but his mum said stuffaroo to that and called him Robin Alexander, herein known as GingerMan.

Almost exactly two months later, I was born and given an exceedingly plain and yukky name and blame my wild and cantankerous nature squarely on they who stuck me with such a homely moniker.  For this boy, from a tiny town called Ballymena, outside Belfast, Northern Ireland, would overcome the grayness and depression of The Troubles which plagued his land for so long and strike out for California, in the great free nation of America at the age of 27.

He took passage with the Evil Empire MS (tm), who, with promises of stock, riches, cheap drink and loose women, lured him from his tiny island home. There were those who derided him, certainly.  Some said it could not be done, and he would return home and face dreary reality sooner than later, but he persevered.  A stranger in a strange, sunny, palm-treed land, he bought a convertible, lowered the roof and drove to Half Moon Bay from the lower Bay Area without sunscreen or water, a closely death-defying feat if ever there was one.

He made friends and one night went to a halloween party where, due to the last-minute nature of his attendance, he managed to be wearing a women's-size nun's costume.  I came upon him wrapped in black nylon, swilling ale and grinning like a mad ape.  The poor bugger had obviously been given very bad advise by drunken cohorts or read the wrong tourist guide pamphlets when he landed on these shores or surely he would have made a better match, but marry we did and he has paid dearly for it every day since. 

In some way I believe, against my rock-solid atheism, that some tiny, elegant force of nature changed his fate when his mother stood fast on his name--he became a man with more inner strength and integrity than any other five people I know combined.  He has at times felt the heavy gray mantle of life's lesser ambition weigh him down, hasn't been able to see the virtues and abilities and brilliance others value in him.  I'm not sure he sees the beauty of his twisted wit and twisted snarkiness, that he is smart AND intelligent, that he is kind AND gentle AND caring.

I on the other hand....

See the one who became GingerMan.  The one who grew a shark fin and flaming red viking beard, the one who started believing in himself and walking taller.  The one who very kindly keeps his zombie and horror flicks to himself.

And now we seem to have woken up and become 39.  Eleven years have snapped and compressed to the length of ten minutes and--and--and... Now We Are (Nearly) Forty, (Christopher) Robin!  I mean it, we became.  I remember birthdays:  the pirate birthday I threw at a restaurant, with hats and goody bags (what is turning 37 for???), the Star Wars Birthday with the 3D printed table cloth with glasses to see it  and all...Yet these things, these numbers just floated by, and here we are.  39.  Thiiiiirteeeee Niiiiiiiine. 

Now, seeing as how a good deal of our friends and family have long since crossed to the land of Fifty-ish, I can hear them wetting their pants with laughter, but kindly grant us license on this threshold. This intrepid Traveller, this inimitable, indomitable,  perfect GingerMan is sure his liver is only good for another 20 minutes, and the revelry of this coming weekend should shave another ten off that, so we are feeling somewhat fragile, if not certain that Fifty, Sixty and Seventy are just another wake-up away and we have no time to waste.

No time at all to waste, my love.  You are my Rock, my Light, my Viking-Pirate-Jedi-Knight adventure companion and I cherish every single minute we have together.  Happy Birthday, Robin Alexander. 

Love, Me.

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The mixer stands silent. For now.

Marion Cunningham, the latter-day Fanny Farmer,  has left the kitchen.

In an early post, I compared Joy to many other tomes of American culinary tradition, and may have found the Fanny Farmer (nèe The Boston Cooking School Cookbook) a bit less awesome in the deal. And yet, it is a fantastic book, full of rock-solid basics and a good format.  So easy and comforting for a new cook, and a time-tested bible for veterans.

             

Just in time for Tomato Season, Plus Something Good for Olympic Viewing!

Marion met culinary legend James Beard in the 70's and eventually stepped in to freshen up the Fanny Farmer's stodgy, aspic-y personality, to bring home cooking into relevance for a new generation of working women and an increasingly no-longer "traditional" family life.  Yet she felt her mission was to somehow lure us back to the family table, for just a moment, every day, to share life together. Every interview with her fairly vibrated with passion and dedication to this goal.

I meet people all the time for whom (like me) this was their first cookbook, often a wedding gift from mom or grandma.  Some lucky ducks (with peanut stuffing, pg 262, Twelfth Edition, 1979) inherited the family's edition replete with generations of notes, additions and alterations.  Here are my books:

Neither of my grandmothers left notes???  How am I sposed to know ANYTHING???

You may read one of the better memorials written here in the New York Times .  All I can manage is to hope that, with our books propped open against the slow cooker and held open with the fruit bowl, we continue her mission to pause every day to show love and value and kindness in the feeding of friends and family.  And maybe, if we're very lucky, to share this with one small percentage of the lives Marion Cunningham touched.

BTW, Revlon's new Colorstay Overtime Lengthening Mascara, is, as advertised on the tin, Flake-Proof, Smudge, and Tear Proof, as is now Fairy-tested. Pin It Now!