"Merlin Feels At Home"

Got this picture sent to me by my dad last night, an art piece consisting of a photographic study of the sleeping family dog, which Dad has entitled "Merlin Feels At Home."



Note the dying-cockroach-esque pose, and the toy armadillo that he is apparently comfortable laying upon. :-)

Exit pursued by bear

So it seems I will be taking part in Winter's Tale after all. I had definitely decided not to audition when I saw how many people were on the sign up sheet. It would be much better for the club to try and include as many new people as possible, especially if there were a lot of new good actors. At first it seemed like Steph would have no trouble rounding out the cast with solid people, with a respectable numer of new recruits who seemed like decent people. But unfortunately one of the new guys, Dave, turned out to have a family obligation the same weekend as the performances, so he was unable to take the part. It's a real shame; the kid was talented and he seemed like a nice person too. It would have been good to have him as part of the club. At least he seems genuinely interested in taking part, which bodes well for future shows. He should be coming back out next semester, with any luck.

The upshot of this is that Steph asked me to fill in his role for him. Sorry as I am to see Dave go, I think I will enjoy being part of the show. The part I will be playing is Antigonus, the man who bravely steps up to take the rejected baby away, and meets him end by the wild things on the shores of Bohemia. I like the part too, small but interesting, with good business to do onstage and good interactions with other characters. I also get to act out the greatest stage direction in all of Shakespeare-- "exit pursued by bear." :-D

I don't clean because it's fun, you know

I always take slight issue when someone characterizes me as "loving to clean." I must gently disagree, my dear, with that assessment. Yes, I often wake up early even on the weekends to have time to devote to chores, but I only wish I could teach myself to love cleaning. I also wish I could teach myself to love exercise and hate the taste of Coke and cake frosting. Then certain desireable behaviors wouldn't all be so much of a pain in the ass. But alas, I love sugars and fat, I really do not like most kinds of physical activity, and I get no joy out of the act of cleaning itself. In fact, I frankly distrust anyone who says they "love to clean." When you encounter someone who describes themselves that way, it tends to be a sign that they don't clean enough for it to have become a real chore yet. Because believe you me, it certainly loses any fun or novelty it might have had given how much work that means on a regular basis. What I do get out of it, however, is an extreme sense of wellbeing of the results thereof, having a neat, orderly, and sanitary space in which to feel comfortable and relaxed. It's very disconcerting for me how frequently I encounter people who don't clean on a regular basis because they "don't like it." I don't exactly view that as something that factors into the necessity of the operation. I must say, one of the most surreal and funny moments I've experienced in recent memory is when I excused myself from a social activity on the grounds of having to go do chores, the response I got was, "But you did chores last week."

Counting the steps

I have decided to start wearing a pedometer again. Several years ago Usdan gave out cheap little Coca-Cola-sponsored ones in the checkout line, and for a while I tried to wear mine on my belt everywhere I went. I am certain I looked very dorky, but damn if it didn't encourage me to work toward making the ten thousand steps a day required for walking to be a viable way to burn calories. So I downloaded one on my iPhone which more or less works, but its function is interrupted and must be reset if anything else happens on the phone, and it is considerably less convenient to have something the size of an iPhone in my pocket all the time. I may still have the little Coke-brand on in my boxes somewhere; it might be worth it to check, as frankly, silly as it may have looked, it was more convenient for the purpose.

Also related to this end of walking more, I have replaced my everyday walking shoes. I am a devoted fan of simple, sleek, dark-with-a-stripe Puma athletic-styled shoes and have settled upon the Puma Speed Cat SD as my variety of choice. This is my second time purchasing this style in particular, and my fourth time choosing something with this similar kind of look. When discovering they came in both black and brown I got both, reasoning that if I alternated them they would last longer. I always write down in my Livejournal when I buy new ones so I can check how long the previous pair lasted me. I am very hard on shoes, apparently-- it's only been a year and a half since the last time I bought new pairs. I've heard a lot of people can keep one pair going for years without it sustaining any seriously compromising damage. Of course, I consider shoes "worn out" to the point of unwearability once their arch support gives out, even if they are still presentable-looking and otherwise in good repair. They are just too painful to continue on with once that happens. I plan on still keeping the old ones so that I can wear them when I don't want to mess up my good ones. I will just have to keep insoles in them in those cases; they've really reduced the pain issues I've been having recently.

שנה טובה ומתוקה

So Winter's Tale is now cast, and has even begun rehearsals. They had only the read through and then one night of blocking so far, since there are never any rehearsals on high holidays, and it is now Rosh Hashana. I am happy to hear that Steph is extremely pleased with her cast. I am as well; I attended the read through and was really happy to see how many good actors we've got. Hold Thy Peace seems to be starting off the year in very good shape, and I have secured permission from Madame Director to visit rehearsals every now and again so I can see a little of the process. Onward goes our little Shakespearean family.

Tomorrow night I will be attending a Rosh Hashana dinner. I am going to be making a mixed berry pie, one of my showiest dishes, which just happens to be pareve and therefore can accompany any other dish whether milk or flesch. I have all the crust ingredients, and I'm pretty sure I have corn starch and chambord for the filling, so all I need to buy is the various kinds of berries. I'll leave that till tomorrow.

L'shana tova to all my lovelies.

Beginning to experiment with food

So I am only just now getting to the point where I feel confident enough in my cooking skills that I feel I can experiment with at least a chance that the results will turn out edible. I tend to cook for large groups, and I've shied away from experimenting in the past because if I fail in that instance, well, my large group will have no dinner! But I am now at the point where I know how certain things react to certain cooking methods, and how different flavors go together, so I think it is time that I try to expand into developing my own cooking style through experimentation. This weekend saw two major forays for me.

There was a "welcome back" party at Elsinore this past Saturday conceived by blendedchaitea*, ostensibly just for people we missed who weren't here over the summer, but which pretty much ended up being a gathering of Hold Thy Peacers, which in my opinion is never a bad thing. We did it as a potluck of finger foods, for which I was planning on making a simple tomato-basil-mozzarella bruschetta. But when my family came up early in the week to help my brother move, my dad brought me two big coolers full of vegetables from his garden. Eggplants, zucchini, butternuts, tomatoes, garlic, hot peppers, sweet peppers, and three different kinds of unidentified volunteer squash. They were really great vegetables, but he brought me so many that there wasn't room for all of them in the fridge, and I was afraid the ones that had to stay in the cooler weren't going to last very long. Matt and Lise had also brought me beautiful Roma tomatoes from their garden, and I had only used a few of them so far. So I decided to make my standby dish for when I want to use a lot of different vegatables as once, a simple ratatouille. It would put the veggies to good use before they had a chance to go bad, and even though it wasn't a finger food, I figured I could also serve it at the party.

The kitchen was really buzzing with a lot of us busy making our party contributions in there, so I wanted to get the ratatouille going quicky and give it time to cook, so I decided to take a chance and throw it together without a recipe. Enlisting lovely friends blendedchaitea* and nennivian* to help me chop, I tried to get the veggies that I knew would take longer to cook into the pot first, which meant the eggplant, the onion, and the butternut squash. Breaking down large squashes with firm flesh and hard skin can be really tough, but I've found the most effective technique is to take a large, cheap knife and tap it through the squash with whacks on the spine from a wooden rolling pin. Safe, efficient, spares your hands, and doesn't dull up your good knives. I did notice that the rolling pin was starting to take nicks from striking the back of the knife, so I may end up buying a wooden mallet to do this instead to spare my beloved pie-making instrument. So I threw it with the other longer-cooking veggies into the Dutch oven with a few tablespoons of oil, stirred to coat, and let that cook while we then went on to the tomatoes. I decided that Matt and Lise's Romas would be better suited to a veggie stew than the bruschetta, so they went into the ratatouille while my dad's heirlooms got cut up for the toast topping. I then dug around in the cabinets to see what else I had to throw in. Fortunately I had about a cup and a half of red cooking wine, which went in when the tomatoes did, and some dried basil and oregano. That was left to cook for about thirty minutes more, reducing the wine and softening everything up, before I called in some brave souls from the party to taste it. Aside from requiring a bit more seasoning in the form of salt and pepper, the stuff wasn't half bad! Topped with some fresh basil chiffonade sliced up for me by Charlotte, I was pleased to send it out in a serving bowl to the rest of the party. It was late enough in the course of the evening that people had become too full to eat much of it, but I enjoyed having as lunch and dinner for myself the next day.

My next cooking experiment that weekend, however, had more mixed results. Jared had brought me back a lovely big bag of apples when he went apple picking during his recent visit, and though I was happy to eat the sweeter varieties out of hand, I didn't really have a taste for the tarter ones. So I decided the way to properly use them was to bake them. Now when it comes to apple pie, one of my all-time favorite desserts and the first real dish I ever learned how to cook, at this point I can make it in my sleep. So I decided to do something a bit different. After making up the dough for the crust, I divided it into four pieces rather than my customary two, wrapped them individually in plastic, and put them in the fridge to chill. The filling was made up according to my usual recipe, but there was a good deal more of it this time because of how many little apples I had to use. I then got out my four four-inch mini pie plates and one of my regulation eight-inch pie plates. I took two of my wrapped dough balls and again divided them further so that each half would become the bottom crust for the one of the mini pies. Since they were so small, I decided it would be easier to press them into the pans rather than roll them out. Now on to the filling.

So the one other time I had tried to make mini apple pies was for the time Jenn and I made dinner together, and for some reason they just didn't come out right. They were dry, somehow. So I decided to make sure there was enough gooey goodness binding the fruit together by topping the apples with a tablespoon of sliced-up butter per mini pie. I then rolled out the third dough ball from the fridge and sliced it into strips so that I could lay little lattice crusts on top of each one. I almost ran out of dough, but with some clever patching they came out well enough. A milk wash and a little sprinkled sugar finished them off. Now came the tricky part-- baking. Again fearing that they would be dry, I decided to bake them at 400, like I would a normal pie, but only for fifteen minutes, and then I would check them.

While they baked, I turned to my other experiment, a pie-like apple tart. I took the last piece of pie dough and rolled it out extremely thin. It was really tough to get it round enough, and it tore in like eight places, but I managed to lay it out just inside the eight-inch pie tin. Then I poured in all the remaining apples and dotted with the typical two tablespoons of cut-up butter I normally do for a pie. But since I didn't have a second shell to lay on top of it, I dug around in the fridge to see if we had some kind of jam I could use for a glaze. My preference would have been apple or apricot, but we didn't have any. So I settled on a sweet berry mixture that gave the apples a pinkish tinge. After pulling the mini pies, which did look done to me after the fifteen minutes, I put the tart into the 400 degree oven. I wasn't sure of the bake time for this one either, but since it didn't have a top crust, I decided to set it for a half an hour and check to see how it looked. By the end of that time the apples were ever so slightly starting to singe at the edges, so out it came. I wrote a little note that said "Please eat!" as an invitation to my roommates and stuck it next to the mini pies. The tart, I decided, I would take to that evening's read through of A Winter's Tale.

After letting the mini pies cool for a while, I decided to try one. I was very disappointed. It was still kind of dry, both the crust and the apples inside! What happened to the extra butter? Digging a little further in, I found it-- it had pooled on the bottom and was making the bottom crust soggy. Ew. I guess a tablespoon for a pie that size was too much; after all, I only used two tablespoons for a much larger full-sized pie. I immediately went back to the kitchen and tipped each of the remaining three pies over into the sink to let that pooled butter run out. I hope that improved them at least a little. Roommates who ate them, feel free to let me know how they were, and what you think they needed. The only thing I can think of is that a 400 degree oven is just too hot for a pie that size, even for as short a time as fifteen minutes. I guess what I should do is look up a recipe for a pie that size and see what temperature is recommended, and for how long. I can probably get away using my own recipe and have it come out if I do that. Alas, despite how I love miniaturized food, this particular one still eludes me.

Since the mini-pies didn't come out very well, I was nervous about the tart. I brought it to the Winter's Tale read through with trepidation, and made sure to secure myself a piece to make certain it didn't completely suck. To my surprise and pleasure, it was pretty damn good. The top was the slighest bit overdone, but the jam glaze compensated for it, and the layers beneath were just right. I also liked it in the thin crust. I was pleased to see it disappeared in fairly short order. Also present at the read through was a really unique and unusual cinnamon brownie that Steph made, as well as tasty sweet oatmeal cookies.

So I suppose when you experiment with food, you're going to hit some and you're going to miss some. The more I try it, the better I'll get at it, and in turn my all my cooking skills will improve. Heh, after all, my new motto when it comes to entertaining is Horace's fine quotation, "A host is like a general-- it takes a mishap to reveal his genius." I certainly can't be afraid that things are going to go wrong with that outlook, now, can I? :-)

"Could Mohammed move a mountain, or was that just PR?"

Sunday I went to see usernamenumber* in the MTG’s production of Jesus Christ Superstar. I attended the Sunday matinee, and Bernie and Plesser were good enough to accompany me. I enjoyed Evil Dead there very much, and I know now that I should never miss a chance to see Brad act and/or sing onstage.

The production was decent and I enjoyed it, but it had issues. To put on my critic hat, as I threatened Brad I would, the biggest problem for me and the one that kind of pervaded the whole show was that the sound levels were really off. I had a very hard time hearing the singers over the band, which unfortunately made it harder to appreciate everyone’s performance. Judas was a good actor as well as a good singer, but he particularly got lost volume-wise. Brad of course was amazing, easily my favorite performance in the show. He has such a rich, strong voice, and I very much enjoyed how he conveyed the peculiar conflict of Pontius Pilate, particularly when he exploded with frustrated rage when the man he was trying to spare would do nothing to save himself. I also had no idea that wired_lizard* could dance, and my compliments on her really fun costume work!

My favorite scene was the scourging of Jesus. They had a very clever, visually striking way of doing it. They had Pilate stand on a higher level than everyone else, cracking his whip and counting the lashes, as Jesus was seized by the arms and turned away from the audience, so that the ensemble could run downstage, dip their hand in a bowl of blood, and smack their bloody fingers against Christ’s back in time with each of Pilate’s strokes. I thought that was an incredibly clever way to do that. Other highlights include Greg Lohman’s really fun performance as Herod (his song is one of my favorites from the show) amid girls dressed as sexy security guards, and the tiny Asian guy with the BIG BASS VOICE playing Caiaphas.

I wish I could see it with Jared and hear what he thought. He's a big fan of the musical, and while I saw the movie a million years ago, I didn't remember it all that well. He and I had an interesting conversation as to how the musical is ambiguous about whether or not it sees Christ as truly divine. As for the group I went with, Plesser was the only one of us with real familiarity with the music. He was sorry that Pilate's Dream was played electric instead of acoustic. I was just glad that they did Superstar justice. And though I'm not sure I agree with every stylistic choice made by Andrew Lloyd Weber, I find his adaptation of them material very interesting. Recasting Jesus as a sixties-style revolutionary is a great idea because he really was a revolution. Religiously, socially, politically, ideaologically revolutionary. He did what every great social reformer means to do: he changed the world. And after all, as I've always said regarding the saga of Christ-- even if you don't believe it, you gotta admit, it's the greatest story ever.

Nameplate

I finally got my name on my office door.



Only took a year. ;-) Actually it was mostly because I didn't care that much. But having it now, I must say it's kind if nice.

Is good body image dependent on feeling physically beautiful?

I wrote once a while ago in this entry that for some reason I was bothered by how so many of the style blogs I've started reading go about promoting positive body image. Back then I was trying to parse out why the approach they took felt off to me, and though I still don't have real conclusions, something occurred to me that I wanted to work out. I think a major component of my discomfort with their approach is that it seems to suggest that the only way to feel good about your body is to be able to regard it as physically beautiful.

I hear so much complaining about how much societal pressure there is on women to be beautiful and that there is something wrong with the notion that this is the most important thing for a woman to have. But appearing so frequently along with that are exhortations to expand the standards of beauty so more women can fit the definition. That seems really contradictory to me-- it puts a weird premium on physical appearence that I'm not sure is healthy. It suggests that even though beauty shouldn't be a value indicator, it IS a value indicator, so everyone has to be able to feel beautiful, because it is simply too important a thing for any person to feel complete and valuable without.

Does that bother anyone else? Because it feels like a mixed message to me.

I do feel like everyone deserves to feel desireable-- to feel like they are worthy of being wanted, loved, and valued. One of the reasons I believe everyone should dress well is because it gives you the power to appear to your best advantage, telling the world that you are a worthy human being from the moment they lay eyes on you. Concerning yourself with this is helpful to you because you have control over this presentation. But your physical beauty is determined by factors which can only be marginally affected by anything you do. Everyone's heard of that person who is constantly struggling to lose weight, to hide things with makeup, to change something about herself that genetics already determined were not going to be changed. Do we want to say that just because nature made it so you're always going to be a size twelve or that you have a round face instead of a heart-shaped one that you are not worthy of being wanted and loved? Do we really want to allow beauty to have such an enormous share of what constitutes desireability? If we're so fed up with being bombarded with messages that YOU'D BETTER LOOK PRETTY OR WHO CARES ABOUT YOU, shouldn't we be encouraging ourselves to place value on other, more important qualities instead of all scrambling to claim the "beautiful" marker?

Now God knows it's not like I don't have trouble with this issue myself. It was suggested in a very trenchant observation by meamcat* that in that original post I might have been trying to ask the question of "How do you feel good about your body if your body is not beautiful?" This is something I have a problem with. I have a hard time liking the features of my own body that I don't feel are beautiful. I had about a paragraph here in my first draft of this post about everything that's wrong with my boxy ribcage, but I deleted it because I decided it was in bad taste. Because it demonstrated how deeply I too am in that mindset of putting all the value in beauty, and not in any other quality, and that is not something I want to be endorsing. We don't all NEED to be pretty, because that is not the be-all and end-all of personal value! We should be able to feel good about our bodies even if they are not physically beautiful!

I hear the reaction to my saying that now-- "Easy for you to say, conventionally pretty girl. How would you feel if you didn't get to see yourself as beautiful?" Got a point there. God knows it is way too important to me that I be the pretty girl, that I base too much of my self-image and maybe even self-regard on it. I acknowledge that I am more fortunate in that department that many are, and I don't have to know what it's like to be in a less fortunate situation. Maybe if I were, I wouldn't feel so comfortable saying "We don't all need to get to be pretty." But we all have things that are good about us, and that's one of my gifts. There are other things that I don't get to be. I can't sing, I'm not good at math, I can be very unkind, I'm surrounded by people who are smarter than me. Not everybody gets to be good at everything. Am I really so compensated by my physical appearence that clearly it overshadows anything else I might lack? Is being pretty SO MUCH MORE intrisically valuable than any other positive quality? And if it's not, do we want to give it that status by treating it as if it is?

It doesn't sit well with me when I see an image of a woman on one of these body-positive blogs and the blog exhorts me to see her as beautiful when I don't. The issue, for me at least, is two-fold. First of all, honestly... there are things about people I just don't find beautiful. It's not that I think there's anything wrong those things, or those people, or even that I think they're ugly. It's just that on a purely aesthetic level they are not optimally visually pleasing to me. And whenever a blogger or whatever goes off on how unfair it is that a person who looks a certain way doesn't get to be considered beautiful, I get a little uncomfortable, because I think to myself, "But... they're not pretty. They just aren't." But I shouldn't have to feel guilty about that. I'm not saying every woman should comform to my aesthetic standards. I get that you're not here to decorate my world. But I'm not here to admire your display. I'm not sure why, maybe I just don't like feeling pressured or obligated to say something I don't believe, but I strongly dislike anyone trying to tell me that my view on what is beautiful is wrong. Beauty is, as the trope goes, in the eye of the beholder, and if you force me into your definition of it, you're just as bad as any cultural image that you decry that tried to do the same thing to you.

And secondly, I don't want to admire her for a virtue that I don't believe she has, and I feel like it's degrading and patronizing to her as well. Why can't we admire her because she's smart, talented, funny, or kind? Why do we have to manufacture a positive trait for her when she's certainly got real ones of her one that she deserves to be praised for? Everybody is good at something, and everybody is not good at something. We don't all get to be considered funny or wise just to spare people's feelings. By making beauty into something a person NEEDS, aren't we just reinforcing the notion that PRETTY IS ALL and if you don't have it you're WORTHLESS? Screw that.

On some of these blogs I read recountings by people who were tormented through their youths because they were not physically beautiful. Some people might use these things as examples of just how damaging it can be if people will not see you as pretty. But I find that an inappropriate reaction. The problem is that people are cruel, not that people don't get to be pretty. If people treated someone cruelly simply because she wasn't physically attractive, those people are dicks and their behavior is wrong. If that poor girl magically became pretty and was no longer set upon, the problem would still be just as disgusting-- being nice to someone, or at least not mean to them, because they're pretty is just as much bullshit. NOBODY gets to treat ANYBODY badly, FOR ANY REASON. The problem is not that their definition of beauty is too narrow-- their problem is that they are MEAN TO PEOPLE for STUPID REASONS like phyiscal appearence.

I'm certainly not saying beauty is meaningless. I believe it's a wonderful thing that should be enjoyed and celebrated. But I do not believe that it is more valuable, or even always AS valuable, as so many other good things a person can have. Not in life, not in work, not in art, and, to make an old-fashioned but still relevant point, not in love. God knows it can be hard for us girls to believe at times, but our mothers tell us this and we know it to be true. Beauty makes a man notice you. It doesn't make him love you, stay with you, or treat you right. It takes real positive qualities, less transient ones, to do that. And beauty makes you more of a target for bad men who don't care about those things. Being pretty certainly has its advantages, but it is NOT the most important quality to possess in this life.

And anyway, beauty fades. Yes, I'm very pretty now, but I'm going to get older and someday I'm going to get wrinkles and put on weight. And when I'm not pretty anymore, I better have something else that's good about me going on, because in the long run it's those other things that really matter, that make you who you are. Yes, pretty is a great thing, but in the end it's an accident of genetics that tends to have an expiration date.

I know it's a hell of a lot easier to SAY this is the right thing to think than it is to actually convince yourself of it. This is of course something I need to work on as well. God knows I'm just as fucked up as anyone, and like anyone I have good days and bad. I have days when I believe to the highest level of certainty that I am the most delicious creature that ever graced this Earth with her presence. I have days when, often when my unibrow seems particularly intent on growing back in, I am equally certain that I should be considering relocating to beneath a bridge conveniently near to a billygoat's home. Sometimes I am so disgusted by the gooey greasy slimey squishy meat-sack that is this human flesh I wish to trascend my base fluid-filled shell and become a being of light or perhaps a cloud, and I think to myself, "How can anyone NOT hate their body?" Sometimes I just can't get over how AMAZING it is that God made me this thing out of dust that lets me run, dance, type, fight, swim, have sex, have babies, heal myself, taste the difference between sweet and salty, and feel the sun on my skin, and I think to myself, "How can anyone NOT love their body?"

I need to believe this too, I need to learn this. My being influenced by this poisons me too. Among other things, this is where my fear of aging comes from. I've got to get past that fear of becoming less pretty, because I don't want it to be true that once it's gone there's not going to be anything left that's worthwhile about me. If I can't teach myself that there are more important things, how am I ever going learn to let go when the time comes that I have to?

Waaaaah, busy

Wah, so busy. Busy at work, busy at play, and busy all this week. I was going over my schedule for the next week and it is packed. Yesterday I spent the day with Jared until it was time to take him to the airport, and then I helped Steph run her auditions for Winter's Tale. We saw a lot fewer people than signed up, but there were definitely some promising candidates. Unfortunately due to family committment I was unable to attend the second round. My parents are in town today and tomorrow to help my brother move from his old apartment into his new one, and I am expected to report for moving crew duty. There's a chance I can show up tonight for callbacks, but I'm afraid I won't count on it. Thursday won't be so complicated, but this weekend is packed full. There are two parties I must attend, one of which I must cook for, as well as a show to see. Rawr, so very, very busy.

At least I did something useful today. To make up for my deliquency at auditions, today I ran Steph through my favorite exercise to help with casting a show, the one where you make lots and lots of sample casts in different combinations to see how you feel about them. She's considering a lot of people for a lot of roles, and doing this helps you compare how you feel about one person as opposed to another in any given part. I've used it a lot in the past, and I think the stuff we talked about it will help her run an efficient callback. I'm really excited to see how things go!