the good fight

what does an average middleclass person in the developed world have to really fight for? stand up for? do capital-S Something about?

plenty of stuff, surely. but then again... fighting seems dangerous. difficult. as long as we have access to some safe-enough shelter, plentiful-enough groceries, functional-enough plumbing, a little companionship, what else could we need to really worry about? with those basic necessities secured, most of us will be content with the state of things, whatever mild to moderate chaos or metaphorical storm clouds may swirl around on the outskirts of our little routines. 

do I mean "be content with," or "get complacent about"?

both, I guess. the main difference between the terms is in the level of awareness each implies. complacency means ignorance. we can frame our implacable cockroach-like ignorance as blissful and cozy, or as a challenging opportunity to learn more stuff. or maybe as protective wall, willful and resolute. which way we see it (or if we see it at all, I suppose) is a decision to make. a mindset we get to set. more likely, multiple shifting mindsets that we trade in and out as days come and go. 

my list above of all the basics that would be worth fighting for if we had to didn't include any education, but really it should. what kind of teacher would I be if I couldn't say learning and knowledge are worth fighting for, standing up to demand, or working as hard as possible for, after all? we need good food and good information to really survive on this planet. we can't leave our brains out of the game. useful stories are what civilization is made of.

we've watched the newest Superman movie more than a few times this summer. is it a useful story? (perhaps I should ask "useful for what?" or "useful to whom?" here. stories can be made to do many kinds of work in the world. not every storyteller has the same kind of use in mind. not everyone understands their needs for safety, shelter, food, and information in the same terms as other people's.)

despite the comicbook/superhero genre not being my usual cup of tea, I did like the messages this one braided together for us. 

• your biological family and their cultural values aren't the be-all-end-all of who you are or can be. 
• seeking peace and justice is not easy; people will probably complain no matter what you try. 
• success of any kind at almost any level takes a ton of collaboration: there's work for the superheros, for journalists, and maybe for the unruly canines too. 

not all fighting is physical or violent (thank goodness). inasmuch as my daily work might be considered a figurative battle-- to wrangle my modest expertise in technical writing into a series of effective lessons for a bunch of college students every semester-- to apply decently rigorous empirical methods to relevantly articulated research questions in the field of media studies-- and all the other paperwork and collaboration and sitting through meetings that attend my little academic career-- then we can say I've fought to defend my few square feet of shelter and my $600/month grocery budget. perhaps I also fight here and there for recognition, for friendships, for leisure time, for a little peace and quiet. what advocacy my life entails beyond these selfish pursuits is very small. smaller than a pebble thrown into a puddle, it seems.

professionally, I advocate for all the podcasts to have transcripts. for inclusive and non-punitive learning-centered pedagogy where students get to make a lot of decisions for themselves instead of merely following arbitrary instructions. for a rejection of the workaholic mindset that still pervades academic culture. for everyone to do their best to read more and communicate clearly and vote in all the elections.

does all of that make a difference? I'll at least say that it doesn't not make a difference, so that's something. I won't always be able to measure the difference it might be making. there is plenty of hope involved.

could I make more of a difference if I were a scrappy investigative journalist? 

more or less is not the right question here though. it'd be a different kind of difference, on a different stage, but another form of education in any case. keeping people empowered with accurate and relevant information about the present universe. meaningful work, indeed. 

but also... maybe scathing exposés about the far-reaching misdeeds of tech billionaires only bring about lasting consequences in comicbook movies with happy endings. 

what does an average middleclass person in the developed world know, really, about all the bigger things out there to fight for? all the things we could/should/might/ought to/would do capital-S Something about before it's too late? nobody can be rationally informed about everything everywhere all at once. it's too much. even if we are informed enough about reality, learning/knowing/deciding what to do about it is another set of mental battles in itself.

my currently second-most-favorite podcast Never Post published a roundtable episode on this idea, back in May. the host (Mike Rugnetta--the one and only. I know, I know, will I ever shut up about Mike Rugnetta?) notes the tension between how we use the internet and how we might wish we could use the internet. it is a global medium--that's why it was made. one of the coolest things we do with the internet is "to socialize and connect globally, which, you know, that's powerful and that's important," Rugnetta says, "but we can't act globally. [...] it's even hard to act locally given the state of especially American politics.
"And, you know, I feel like even my ability to even know how to act locally has perhaps atrophied a bit because of my focus on the importance of familiarizing myself with national and global events."

are there information diet plans out there, something akin to the handy food pyramid, but for sources of news instead of calories? probably. 

do they teach such things in grade school so everyone grows up knowing that your brain will not thrive on a diet of nonsense and trash? maybe somewhere somehow. bless everyone who dares teach grade school.

there is so much information in the world to be had. maybe I shouldn't say "too much," because that depends. too much for what? for whom? 

sometimes it does seem necessary to just stop for a little while though. to push back on all the information (the firehose, the overload, the deluge, the six-lane highway traffic jam) with a little carefully cultivated ignorance: "I haven't looked into that myself," "that's not my lane," "I trust someone else to be smart about and work on that particular problem" and so on. (this brings to mind some of Hank Green's recent vlogbrothers video in which he touches on the difficult value of trusting our fellow humans.) we can all find our own good fight to fight-- there isn't just one. 

hopefully we aren't all fighting alone and/or at cross purposes though. hopefully we have some kind of justice gang/league/squad to back us up at least some of the time. smart and good people don't only exist in the comicbooks and movies. the Green brothers are on my list of people I admire for trying to make the world better. academic acquaintances are on the list. non-profit organizations managed by people whose names I may never know are on the list. 

its been a week or so since I read this detailed breakdown of "The Dark Internet Forest" as a concept for understanding the possibilities and risks of all our globally mediated connectedness and was thus suddenly enchanted with its author, Erin Kissane. she comes back to the centrality of place-- real or physical or digital or conceptual, place is important to remember. positionality. relationality. places matter. where are you? what other places are within reach right now? who else is there? how can you join forces and do Something?

I especially loved that Kissane cites this beautiful pushback against the classic "tragedy of the commons" idea. Elinor Ostrom's book helped me write my dissertation. I should read it again sometime. 

doing capital-S something is not always (probably not often) gonna be easy even when you have a team of active, collaborative superheros to work with. it's still messy. pebbles in ponds sometimes and big splashing ordeals other times. 

flip a switch somewhere and set your mind to care at least a little. doesn't have to be about everything. just don't get totally complacent.

plans for a tournament of pies

we have been over my haphazard recipe cataloging skills before. did I ever think I'd need to change my habit of just sorting through a pile of recipes-written-on-the-backs-of-whatever to find the one in the handwriting of a lovely Canadian on a square-ish grease-stained piece of blank notepad paper? not really. it's a fine enough system. I know how it works.

but nevertheless, one of my current projects is to sort out all the recipes I really want to keep from the pile where they sometimes mingle with too-ambitious recipe printouts that I only thought I might want to follow someday but never have, to rewrite any that need to be rewritten, and then organize them all into proper usable sections. the fat yellow folder that used to hold them has long ago been repurposed for something else, and I've kept recipes since then in a little black binder. or in a manila folder in the cupboard. or bookmarked in my phone. it's messy.

for my last birthday, Jeremiah bought me some butter-themed fabric with which to cover the new recipe binder, as soon as I might get around to it. there are a handful of savory dinner-esque recipes to finish sorting and writing out to fit. all the more fun things like brownies and brunches and custards and pies are already done and filed in a sort-of-thematic-sort-of-alphabetical way in their sections.

pies are my favorite things to bake. my mother's pie crust recipe almost doesn't need to be in the recipe book, because I've memorized it by now and could probably mix it up blindfolded if I needed to.

and ever since the tournament of RPG books a few summers back, I've been pondering what else to write tournament-style reviews of... so why not pies? it's perhaps not quite as ambitious as this neat pie-baking project (also far less likely to get a book deal, I assume...), but pretty fun anyway.

baking sixteen pies is a lot though. and for a proper tournament experience I might need to bake the winners of opening rounds multiple times as they advance in the bracket... so... I am still not totally sure how I'll plan this out, schedule all the celebratory pie tastings, ration my supply of butter and eggs properly, and all that. but I have gotten as far as choosing eight savory and eight sweet pies which could contend against one another:

chicken pot pie,
shepherd's pie,
mushroom and barley pie,
vegetable cornish pasties,
tomato corn pie,
squash galette (this one or this one? hmmm...),
quiche (not sure what type...),
spanikopita;

and 

pumpkin,
mixed berry,
cherry,
peach,
apple,
key lime,
french silk,
banana cream.

I do not like lemon meringue so it is not invited, even if it is a very classic variety of pie.

what I haven't decided yet is which pies should face which other pies to start with. and should we narrow down all the sweet pies to one, all the savory pies to one, and have those winners face off against each other? or would it really be more fair to have them share the victory?

it hardly matters, since it's all just a silly excuse to bake and eat 1.3 dozen pies (or more) in some too-short span of time. I'll figure it out at some point and see how it goes.

today is pi/e day, which is a great day for baking pies (or for talking about math and Greek letters, a la the legendary Vi Hart-- who seems to have taken down all their great pi- and tau-related youtube videos from back in the day. odd, but I can't say I blame them). but alas, I am not organized enough yet. maybe for next year I can time everything to announce final winners on Saturday, March 14, 2026. let me know if you want to come visit and share the responsibilities of pie-judging and dish-washing with me next year.

a catalogue of small beauties

the wind and air currents in our neighborhood are conspiring to toss little snow pixies up against the window above the desk. I'm imagining them as tiny winged creatures frolicking their hearts out. 

it's a snow day. no classes. no going anywhere. just snow: sparkly and white, soggy and slushy underneath. 

I do hope this is the last big winter storm. for weeks it has seemed that spring is just minutes away... but the mornings are still often freezing, the wind biting and fierce, the sunsets rather early. 

I've been wanting to blog about small but satisfying contrasts from recent days. I don't know how long the list will be, but anything I find inordinately beautiful or strikingly lovely will get added to it. 

in no particular order: 

flecks of black pepper, scattered across the whites of a fried egg. 

sap frozen into drippy, globby icicles all around the scabby trunks of pine trees.

thick ribbons of sweetened condensed milk folding softly, meltingly against each other in a bowl.

perfect avocado slices fanned out across crumbly homemade toast.

cold, bare tree branches (or window sills, or fences, or mailboxes, or sidewalk railings) lined with defiantly high, narrow piles of snow.

walnuts chopped into uneven pieces-- craggy nubs, random slivers, and grains of walnut dust.

woven wicker baskets of varying colors, stacked up in the corner, waiting for me to organize yarn and crafts into them.

mismatched but mostly coordinating pillowcases squashed together with their pillows at the head of the bed.

clean blank notebook paper, but with crisp little doodles-that-turned-out-quite-nicely along the edges.

gently twinkling strand lights against the dark wood of the kitchen cabinets. 

pale scented wax (passion flower & citrus, in this case) cooling so flat and smooth and solid after the candle warmer is turned off.

sleep and soup and stories

the general if mild exhaustion of this month feels pretty normal by now. but it is Thanksgiving week at last. there shall be time for sleeping more and making art and baking a dozen pies.

okay, maybe only three pies. or a smattering of mini-pies. we shall see.

there are bigger ideas than pie that I want to blog about. will blog about someday. maybe even soon.

on reading and teaching and knowing and goals that involve other people and therefore feel both somewhat easier and a million times more difficult than any other goals might feel. 

on airplanes and writing. believing. or not.

but today the priority is simpler: blogging for its own sake. I know my brain is too tired for blogging about all or any of those big ideas. so for now, this post is about smaller things. or at least about smaller-to-write-about things.

like the sunlight and shadowy air that lap around the hills and ridges about this town. the depth of horizon we get here is an endless source of loveliness.

or like how I've run out of time for making my handdrawn Christmas cards. but maybe I'll rehash one or two into digital ones. or reprints. or something.

what else?

today, apparently, is a new-ish holiday of its own (invented by a 7-year-old New Zealander a few years back). so, happy howly Wolfenoot to all. perhaps I'll give the gift of a bath to our two little pugs, for the occasion.

I'm also thinking about cookie dough. I'll probably make spaghetti and asparagus for dinner in a moment. there is laundry to fold and knitting to knit and a new roleplaying character to draw several increasingly-less-terrible sketches of. (she is a halfling monk with a wild amount of red hair. I named her Juniper Thornbrook, or June to her friends.)

and there are plenty of little bug-monsters to fight, in this rather adorable new to us platformer game.

and reading and writing, too. three library books. a journal/diary five-eighths or more full. two or three teaching notebooks (one for plans, one for grading), a research notebook, a professional service notebook, and various folderfuls of notes (inside my brain and outside of it) on a half-dozen half-told stories.

one month from now I'll be another year closer to being "old," whatever that really means. it'll also be the depths of actual winter. what will the solstice-time hold for us then? hunger and cold, to be counteracted with stories and soup. (speaking of soup, this is my new most favourite soup ever, though we make it with vegetarian meatballs.)

so inbetween baking pies and roasting poultry this week, let us collect some more good soup recipes, stock our brains with good stories + good story ingredients, and make plans for hibernating in as much comfort as we could possibly ever deserve.

today is Wednesday.

Field Notes sends me emails every so often (it's okay, I invited them to), almost always on Wednesdays, announcing the random Wednesday promotions and such that they have. today was such a Wednesday. I've never yet taken advantage of such a sale, but I love the idea of it. in their announcements about these sales they always say something like "you don't even have to be aware of this deal-- as long as you buy something from our shop today, you get the free stuff and the discount and it's all good." someday I will, probably, hopefully, happen to be able to buy something awesome from them on a Wednesday when there will be free stuff.

this Wednesday, perhaps for you too, doesn't really feel like one. it sort of feels like a Sunday instead. naps. a little rainfall. no pressure from the outside world to do anything in particular.

it's been nice, overall. the most productive thing I've done so far was pasta making.

one of our most awesome wedding presents was a pasta machine. it's very nice to have.

I didn't use it for pasta rolling today though. the lovely little thing can be a hassle to assemble, and it's tricky to find the right corner of the table to clamp it to, and the spaghetti attachment tends to squeak terribly anyway. so today I used a rolling pin and settled for rather thick noodles. they're fine, if rough. it's all good.

the basic rough egg pasta noodles I made today were made specifically to go with this mushroom bourguignon recipe. that was the other productive thing I did this afternoon. unfortunately, I slightly undercooked the carrots. but nevertheless, it's one of our favourite things to eat and it's worth the relative complexity involved in making it. highly recommended.

six pounds of salted butter

about three weeks ago, the store brand of butter was on sale. so I bought six boxes.

and then I realized most of it was salted instead of unsalted. meh. 

but half of it has been used for pie crust by now anyway. some pie crust dough is still in the freezer, and some has been baked into quiches and veggie pot pies. next up: a beet, goat cheese, and kale galette. 

eventually I'll make a dessert with some of the pie crust, instead of all this savory stuff. I have had my eye on this strawberry cheesecake ice cream pie ... but it calls for graham cracker crust, not pastry. perhaps this one instead? it looks like it could do a good job as the consummate dessert pie of the summer.

any other suggestions? favourite summer pie recipes?

{ yes, I intended the title of this post to echo the best line from the 1985 movie adaptation of a specific moment from chapter 25 of Anne of Green Gables, in case you were wondering. }

from the air and from the sun

it was shady on the west face of Badger Mountain this morning. the inward corners between each ridge were especially cool. at the crests of each ridge I could look back north to see the whole town like a set of toy models, framed just so by Thumb Butte and Granite Mountain.

snippets of songs and past conversations and poems-to-be and a whole bunch of other ideas sewed themselves through my thoughts as I climbed. 

how to describe the sensation of one's body breaking spiderwebs. birds--I think it's a female bluejay but I'm not sure.

layers and layers of pine-scented Saturday. the striking, heavy-feeling color of smooth, dry, grey-white, dead trees.

oh how lovely was the morning. but what if there's no way of telling how virtuous or good-intentioned any historical figure truly was?

thinking of the outdoors as sacred. mountains and high places as extra sacred. the striking, smooth, dry, white-grey color of what once was a tree now feels like a symbol. persistence. potency. 

I give myself permission. or I take permission from the air and the sunshine like a plant takes oxygen and energy. permission to decide for myself and say what I want.

and what was the name of that book about forests? How Forests Think, by Eduardo Kohn. we read it for Thomas Rickert's class, almost five years ago. the most memorable thing about it to me now is the story the author tells about seeing a bird near a river and being suddenly, beautifully, drawn out of himself and his troubles.

conincidentally when I sat down to blog for today I found in one of my old drafts a copy of a paper I wrote for that class, mainly drawing on Kohn's book. much of the paper is semi-cringy, flippant grad school pretentiousness, connecting what Kohn writes with my own thoughts about food and food media. but even so, some of it might be worth remixing here.

it starts with food and eating, but then goes beyond that into where all the food comes from.

Kohn’s bit about “managing a variety of ecological assemblages” stood out to me most. at first glance, management has such a one-way connotation... but I want to pick that apart. ecosystems manage us back, after all, and have done for millions of years. we and world are meshworked together. one process.

James Gibson writes that “The possibilities of the environment and the way of life of the animal go together inseparably” (p. 143). my own management of eco-assemblages is pretty indirect these days, unless I’m home digging in my dad’s garden. as a non-hunting, non-fishing academic person, I take advantage of grocery stores and farmers' markets full of already-managed things to cook and eat—things that I will probably never need to learn to procure from the earth or the sea for myself. maybe that means my involvement with ecosystems is less intimate, but maybe not. the groceries I buy and cook and eat still matter, not only to my body and my kitchen but to the world I am a part of. every purchase makes marks and leaves traces in a hundred directions. the infrastructures that support grocery stores afford certain possibilities, and those are inseparable from my way of life, so far.

we could make a long list of specific ways non-human lives support our dietary habits. Ingold makes note of this mutual support in a broader way:

“Moreover, granted that not all producers are human, it is easy to turn the argument around and show how various non-humans contribute, in specific environments, not just to their own growth and development but also to that of human beings. … living beings of all kinds, in what they do, constitute each other’s conditions of existence, both for their own and for subsequent generations” (Ingold, p. 8).

A line before this lovely acknowledgement, Ingold writes rather simply (even naively? nostalgically?) that “The farmer’s work on the fields, for example, creates favourable conditions for the growth of crop plants, and the herdsman’s does the same for domestic animals” (8).

doesn't that just sound so symbiotic and peaceful. idyllic, even. but how exactly do we define favorable? whose favor are we most concerned about? Gibson’s observations on how much humans muck around with what our environments afford reinforce this tragic mess: “In making life easier for himself, of course, he has made life harder for most of the other animals” (p. 130). we don’t think about this very deeply very often. often we sometimes actively avoid thinking about it.

what one does or does not put into one’s body makes marks. dietary strictures may be religious, political, ethnic, personal, health-related, or any combination. the forbidden substances seem to make the deepest, most obvious marks: no dairy, no carbs, no pork, no coffee, no alcohol, because this is who we are.

or is it the other way around—this is who we are, because we can’t eat gluten or we won’t eat meat or we’d rather not support Chick-fil-A?

either way, as Ingold pulls from Marx and José Ortega, “what we are, or what we can be, does not come ready made. We have, perpetually and never-endingly, to be making ourselves” (p. 7). and for Thompson, these processes are about “I-ing,” but it seems just as important to think about “we-ing.” It matters who/what we tend to include in “we” and who/what we do not. our human management of eco-assemblages (and maybe of everything else) has been too shortsightedly human-centric for too long.

and then the paper quotes from Roy Scranton's “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” and I question his rhetorical dichotomization of nations and markets vs. "our sense of what it means to be human."

it's not so separable, I say. organisms and their environments can’t really live without each other. it's too connected.

none of us can deny our intimate interactions with things we eat, even if we don’t think about them very deeply all the time. even if we actively avoid thinking about them.

{ apologies for my incomplete citations throughout this refurbished text. if I get a chance I'll update them here to specify titles and other info that was taken for granted when I wrote this for Posthumanism in 2014. }

briefly, for now

apparently Rosa Parks wrote recipes on the backs of envelopes too. really, is there anything else as useful to do with the back of an envelope? maybe doodling.

just the other week, right before our roadtrip to Utah and back, I wrote this brownie recipe down on the back of a small, greenish envelope. the brownies were baked, and then proceeded to get lost in our box of roadtrip snacks for almost the whole trip. but we found them again, and I ate several alongside the bananas.

speaking of recipes, I've been very much wanting to make this marvelous pie again, but there has hardly been any time inbetween celebrations and driving and driving and more celebrations and more driving. making pie crust is the hold-up today. if only I had pie crust in the freezer, I would be set.

all I have in my freezer by way of crust-esque stuff is phyllo dough at the moment. so I have been prompted to go searching for a phyllo tomato and corn pie recipe. and I found one. my hastily-thrown-together version of it is in the oven now.

unrelatedly, I am recently fascinated by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. my sister had a copy of it sitting around when I was at her (very cute, new) house in March, and while she hemmed a huge fat white ballgown for me, I read to her from it. we only got to chapter 3 or something, but ever since I have been thinking about it and wanting to keep reading. not long ago, on my little non-LibriVox LibriVox app, I found a free audiobook copy, read by the lovely Cori Samuels, whom I feel like I sort of know from listening to practically every single episode of the LibriVox Community Podcast.

I have a section and a half still to go, I think. I'll finish it soon and then see where my thinking takes me next. I'm especially intrigued by Woolf's section about women writers in the centuries preceding hers. there are so many she cites that I want to go look up and investigate a bit more: Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchilsea. Aphra Behn. George Eliot.

Mary Carmichael is fictional, it turns out, or I would want to look her up too.

but ah well. I do have enough reading to do anyway, without adding fictional novels to my list.

and oh, guess what-- my first audiobook solo has been catalogued! I may work up a whole post for it one of these days, in which I'll have space to outline the tricky process of translating a text into a series of audio files, and comment on the intertwining layers of authorial and narratorial presences. we'll see.

and oh, one more thing-- it did rain, but not too much. I loved it all.

if you ever are in Houston...

occasionally I still get emails from a little caribbean fusion restaurant in Houston, Texas. I haven't unsubscribed from those yet, for some reason. possibly it's because the owners were so gloriously nice to me last year when I was planning the reunion for our Purdue Rhetoric & Composition program. Heidi, the woman I spoke to about organizing our event at Calabash Island Eats, was the epitome of loveliness and accommodation. her venue was likewise lovely, and all the attendees at our reunion last spring seemed to enjoy the evening very much. the restaurant was close to the convention center, the weather and the space were as comfortable as anyone could imagine, there was plenty of food and drink, and we didn't go too much over our little budget.

just today (around 6pm EST, 3pm PST) I started calling around to potential reunion venues in Portland, Oregon. thanks (endless thanks!) to friend Ellery and his sister Bethany--both charming Portlanders--I had a great list of recommendations to work with. I'm slowly winnowing out the places that are too far from next year's convention center, places that look too small, places that don't seem to do private bookings, places that want more money than we can spend, and so on. there are 5 venues left on my potential venue list so far...

so this process is reminding me of all the phonecalls I made last year. all the harried restaurant managers and hospitality professionals who promised to call me back and didn't, or who never answered my emails, or who scoffed that I had waited until November to book this Wednesday night thing for April. Heidi at Calabash did none of those things, and made my job a thousand times less stressful. if you are ever in Houston, it is a place worth checking out.

favourite pie crust

on a very smudgy half-sheet of paper (pictured below) that usually lives in my yellow folder of recipes, I have scribbled:

mum's pie crust 

1 cup butter or shortening
1 teaspoon salt
2½ cups flour
1 egg
1 Tablespoon vinegar
½ cup cold water

there are no instructions listed, because I know to cut the cold butter into the dry ingredients, then add the beaten egg and the cold liquid. mix it all just enough, then wrap it up to chill in the fridge for a night. or 30 minutes. or something like that.

and then of course you roll it out on a floured surface, and make pies. pies with flaky, golden, lovely crusts.

these are apple. we also made two sweet-potato pies. they'll be our breakfasts for days, I'm sure.

the best thai food

across the road and down the hill from campus, there is a tiny Thai restaurant tucked into a strip mall: Basil Thai. there are mirrors on the walls to make the narrow little dining space feel less cramped.

their menu is full of photographs, and footnotes explaining which dishes are spicy, which dishes are vegetarian.

everything I've had there has been absolutely wonderful. curry. soup. pad Thai. tofu and veggies.

it's a restaurant I crave going to, but don't indulge in going to as often as I could, given that it is just down the hill and across the road.

savory, not sweet

as coffeeshops go, Greyhouse is a pretty nice one. it gets crowded, but the ambiance is great (all that brick and art, and the big windows) and the hot chocolate is lovely.

they also do crepes.

my favourite is the Idaho Dream: Roasted rosemary potatoes, kale chips, sauteed leek, bechamel, and creme fraiche. there is an option to add sausage but I never add sausage.

growing up, we only ever made sweet crepes at our house. we were very much missing out though-- savory crepes are glorious.

artsy morning food

beauty is important. it's somehow easy and impossible to forget that.

Wednesday: Waffles [...]

A photo posted by SymmetryBreakfast (@symmetrybreakfast) on Nov 2, 2016 at 12:47am PDT

I can't look at these fancy staged photographs every day (or I start getting a) annoyed at the emoji-filled captions and b) incredulous that anyone should have the time and resources and clean dishes lying around for this kind of media project).

but to inhale pretty pictures of food does feed a good deal of enjoyment, so I look at them every once in a while at least.

Symmetry Breakfast on tumblr and Symmetry Breakfast on instagram.

of chocolate things

there is a tradition among my fellow scholars at Purdue, that after all the back-to-school meetings that happen on the Friday before classes start, we convene somewhere to eat, drink, and be merry for a while. last August it happened to be at The Black Sparrow. 

that day was the first day I tried the mosaic cake. 

the menu at Sparrow changes a lot, but lately it has had this delightful line listed under the "Small Plates" section of its specials:

MOSAIC CAKE / A FEW DIFFERENT LAYERS OF CHOCOLATE THINGS IN CAKE FORM WITH BERRY SAUCE    7

and ever since that August Friday, I have been in love with it. mouse and sponge and fudgey smooth beautifulness. I've had it three times this semester and am not sick of it yet. I hope they keep it on their menu a while longer.

S

because I can, I shall decree Sundays a day off from writing reviews-of-things.

I'll post some pictures-of-things instead.

scribbles.

scones.

I was going to make blueberry scones today, but I read some things about Florence Nightingale instead. the above-pictured scones are from months ago.

subscription snacktime

a week or so before our roadtrip to New York for 1. the Computers & Writing conference, 2. friend Fernando's wedding and 3. randomly exploring Toronto and waving at Patti's relatives inbetween 1 and 2, I tried out a subscription box of snacks from Naturebox. I figured it'd be good for roadtrip munching. I was right.

the other week I caved in and ordered a second box, just cuz. it's the busy time of the semester. snacks are good for keeping my brain awake.

these cheddar lentil loops were pretty much the most glorious crunchy thing I've eaten in all of recent memory. I loved them.

the dried peaches were almost equally wonderful. and every handful of gummy watermelon stars I rationed out for myself made me smile a bit. I wasn't so much in love with the peanut butter nom noms or the trail mix, though they were okay. the salt-and-vinegar veggie crisps were alright, but I confess I can't handle too much salt-and-vinegar after a while. it overwhelms me.

if you want to try Naturebox, here is a handy referral link for you: http://fbuy.me/eyIL_. you get free snacks, I get credit for more lentil loops and more chocolate nom noms. awesome, eh?

all the sushi

I might love it if somebody decided to pay me to review all the sushi ever. what a daunting and delicious task that would be. 

alas, today I am only able to review some of the sushi. particularly, some of the sushi served at Maru Sushi in West Lafayette, Indiana.  

the first time I sat down to sushi at this place was with friend Sherri, I think. that seems like a long time ago now. since then, I've been there quite often with friends and dates and colleagues. next time any of you dear readers wants to go out for sushi, call me up and let's go. 

Maru's new location (across the street from its old location) is gorgeous: much bigger, less cramped, with nice booths and lovely big windows on one side. friend Sam and I went there today and ordered a quartet of rolls to share while we talked about all the dissertation prospectus thinking we've been trying to do lately. it was so lovely and good--as sushi usually always is. 

here's what we ordered and how I liked it:

Rainbow roll (California roll topped with avocado, tuna, salmon, tilapia, and white tuna) 

I'll never not love the Rainbow roll. it's beautiful. it comes with variety built into its stripes. so good.

Sunday Morning roll (Deep-fried roll with salmon and cream cheese topped with teriyaki sauce and spicy mayo)

I was brave with the spicy mayo on this one. it was worth it. not my most favourite, but good.

White Night roll (Crab salad, salmon, and cucumber inside topped with white tuna, flying fish egg)

another beautifully constructed thing, this one. it was probably my favourite of the four. 

Yam Yam roll (Deep-fried sweet potato inside topped with teriyaki sauce)

the best vegetarian roll I can remember ever having. it's simple, but I love it. 

is there a collective noun for lists?

foods I should eat more often (but not too often) because I love them so much:

- brie
- beets
- gnocchi
- sweetcorn
- dark chocolate

half-finished blogposts that I need to either finish or give up on:

- one about things I did this summer (with lots of photos)
- one about my first official co-authored publication thing
- one about things facebook seems to be up to
- one about whoever Prince is, and music, and theatre
- one about urbanity (specifically, maybe, traffic, insects, and cinder blocks)
- one with a bunch of links that seem to be broken or dead now (except for this one and this one?)
- one about Chagall and repetition and shared-ness
- one about memorable vehicles belonging to people I used to know
- one about my little brother's axe handle and other technologies
- a few with many, many photos from Austin and San Antonio
- a few about generosity and gratitude
- a few about books (The Myth of Sisyphus and Spinster)

books from this year's Tournament of Books long list I still want to read:

- Delicious Foods, by James Hannaham
- Signs Preceding the End of the World, by Yuri Herrera
- Submission, by Michel Houellebecq
- The Tsar of Love and Techno, by Anthony Marra


a few things that happened today, September 7, 2016:

- I sent 3 emails and 6 text messages
- I met with several colleagues and several students
- I cut my left-hand index finger on the pop-top of a small can of ginger ale, one that Ellery left at my house after some sort of social gathering once upon a time
- I read this fascinating little article about linguistics, language, reality and aliens
- I made pie crust, and used half of it to make a peach galette (the other half will be a butternut-squash-and-onion galette, I think)
- I planned to go to the gym after choir practice but got into a car wreck instead (not my fault, not too devastating, could've been a million-billion-trillion times worse)
- I skipped choir and the gym and took a long soak in the tub instead, with one of my awesome sister's grapefruit-scented bath bombs

summer weekend, so far

it has been a week of ups and downs and chaos, post-vacation highs and crunch-time woes. but slivers of wonderfulness got mixed in with the rest. luckily.

new pots for some plants. rain in the morning.


farmers' market wandering, in all the drizzle.

I bought one pumpkin-chocolate-chip muffin to go along with my daydreams about chai and frothy hot chocolate. and I came home with interesting-looking jam (peaches and strawberries and cherry and cranberry and raspberries? that is so much for one jar of jam), a big pint of tart strawberries, and some veggie pasta.




it rained more and more and more on the way home.

 
and then the day got eaten up, mostly by all the summer teaching prep, but also a little bit by LibriVox recording. more poems.

earlier this evening I saw the very first firefly I have seen since last summer. always delightful, the glow and fade and flight of those bugs. there was one, then another. I didn't stay out to see more. tonight, the sight of fireflies flying is entangled with old memories that surprise me with their rusted, pokey edges, un-kempt, un-sharpened, but cutting enough even after sleeping so long underneath so many others.

still, fireflies. enjoy the fireflies while they're around.

soaking-in and stirring-up

friend Patti and I have driven miles and miles and miles in the last week. across all the states between Indiana and upstate New York. up and around to Toronto, and back, and across and through and along. I'll put up photos eventually. there has been ice cream and yoga and wonderful views and confusing traffic and much adventure.

who was it who told me about David Antin?

{ this is a photograph of northwest Missouri from ten years ago. random, I know. }

it was someone at the Digital Humanities Symposium I went to during finals week, earlier this month. someone was talking about genre and medium and sound recordings. it was someone making a point about what poetry is, and as they did so I wrote down a mis-spelled version of the poet's name on my hand.

reading David Antin poems in pdf does not seem very fun. I will have to consult the library.

in the meantime, when Patti and I are not on our way from here to there in a car, and when I have not been writing article drafts and planning my summer teaching adventures, I have been reading various other things. books I picked up at publishers' exhibit halls, books Patti passed on to me after she read them for the tournament of books, and books that stowed away in Patti's trunk when we left the states.

a list:

Gold, Fame, Citrus (irritating in spots, otherwise good)
So You've Been Publicly Shamed (rambly yet thought-provoking enough)
Between the World and Me (I want my dad to read this)
Go Ahead & Like It (lovely, evocative, simple)
The New World (bewildering and sudden)
Our Souls at Night (sweet. poignant, even)
Bats of the Republic (a puzzle)
Information Doesn't Want to be Free (inspiration-sparking)
The Mermaid's Sister (tedious, vague, bleh)
The Blue Hour (poetry snippets, dark, tattered)

only two of those are non-fiction, everyone. and only one of them can at all be considered research/dissertation-related. but don't worry. I spent three and a half days at a marvelous Computers & Writing conference. I learned so much, took so many notes, resolved to do so many things, and have plenty of whirring ideas caged up for later use. research/dissertation-land will not be abandoned.

this David Antin fellow does not 'write' his poetry. he talks it. oral poetical rambling, recorded and transcribed, and then published.

that sort of poetry is not a thing. it is an event, a production.

but how dare we trap any piece of writing in nouns?

processes. hows, not whats. and I have so many questions about how. why? how? those are where my questioning mind goes. why speak your poetry instead of write, type, paint it?

well, why not?

I was about to wish for my summer to have just as much writing and creating in it as reading and consuming. but how would I measure that, when the reading and soaking-in is part of the writing and building? how would it make sense to compare? I could force it to, I suppose... but it might be more interesting not to.

for now, I have picked up Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway, another stowaway book from Patti's trunk. its book jacket promises fairy-tale twists in an aloof and mysterious vein, and its first section title seems to be "The Golden Afternoons." I hope it is good.