I really liked In Defense of Food. The only thing I was majorly disappointed about was the fact that Pollan never really took the time to discuss the issue of class and food, and fatphobia. I can't count the number of times I've heard that if we merely educate people, they should eat well. (It's sort of like projecting meritocracy on to food and diet.)

I'm working on deconstructing my notion that race is something biological. It's a difficult one, I think, because it's so deeply ingrained. However, I'm finding that it's a construct that is very central to the entire institution and the privileges therein. It's a weird thing to think about at first, but it has some merit. A few entries people have written that ring well with me:

http://kmd.livejournal.com/41989.html
http://sanguinity.livejournal.com/431413.html

Btw, Carrie --> I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, especially the scientific perspective.

Lastly, a few things that came up for me yesterday: Privilege is pervasive, awareness of it is evasive and tricky. Central to anti-racism (and other *isms, as well as intersectionality) is the reality that it is, in fact, a privilege to have the ability to think of privilege awareness as something personal. White privilege gives me the ability to decide whether or not to confront racism today on a social level. That privilege is not given to POC in this institution.

Time for school.

i don't even recognize myself anymore

this isn't what i'm supposed to be, look like.

take an inch.

i don't even know... i should have gone to clown college... that's what i thought in the first grade. wasn't i right? like tennessee williams and the fire escapes and human desperation. i bet euler felt that near the end. the fire escapes. he just filled it up with numbers. and integrating factors.

oh god how i miss those.

oy, today... not turning out to be such a good day. i did something awkward this morning at school. hopefully it will turn out to be for the best, but it was an awkward thing to do (i know i'm being vague, but i can't bring myself to write it out just yet).

although the day started badly, things are looking up. my birthday present arrived! (it's half from myself and half from my parents) - it's a 6 quart professional kitchen aid mixer! yay! time to make some cinnamon rolls! mmm... but first a nap.

so, yes. things are definitely looking up. :)

did not eat enough today somehow. am crashing.

school starts in the morning again!

my favorite day of the year!

nekkid bicyclists!

now i'm off to brouwer's for teh yum.

back to my roots, spending the afternoon reading in defense of food in front of fremont coffee with a latte and some hfcs root beer. ironic, i know, but love like water is me - about 78 percent really. lime chiffon cake with strawberry coulis and lightly flavored coconut italian buttercream. listening to old school tori, thinking of lindsay as i re-learn leather on the keys. leather is somehow more haunting and less funny than it once was. pressing the keys in the right order it's like she's unlocked some magical melody, not really about leather but more about love and memories. maybe just me channeling my tennessee williams fetish once again. fire escapes and desperation and now i'm back to the drawing board. blanket friends and i think of sam and all of our laughter together. bells bells bells for her like the cracks. shifting.

last week i put new pictures above the keys - tori, alice paul unfurling the banner, and euler hashed with mother. particularly the page about the green limousine dancing dancing girl.

cant stop what's coming can't stop what is on its way.

#!

I'm thinking of starting a dessert club. I need to do "research" around town and keep current, right, as do some of my fellow baking students. We don't really have the annals of the association of american pastry chefs or bulletin of the american pastriology society so we have to eat to keep up. Something like once a month or so we'll go out to a restaurant for dessert and drinks. I'll send an email out when I start it up!

Mmmm... shebang. You know the weather is rockin' when I can feel the sweat dripping down my armpits. :-P

hey - i finished my first quarter of pastry school. huzzah!

the weekend was fantastic. birthday beer on friday was love. mmmmm... the monk. saturday i made baguettes with poolish at home (first time making breads at home!) and they came out ok... i burned the bottoms of two of them. :-/ also, ian and i made cinnamon rolls at his parents' place. mmm... with cardamom.

sunday we watched THE WIZARD OF GORE which totally exceeded my expectations. thank you to everyone for making it gore-tastically fun! i still have eyeball garnishes for martinis! i made oodles of blood-tabulous food, daniel brought me some awesome beer brewed with raisins (will have to try that tonight), paul made some bloody eyeball martinis, eric gave a fantastical lecture about the director's filmography, the toilet is now certified for windows vista (thanks ian), and i have a big chunk of leftover vegan banana chainsaw walnut bars a la terry to enjoy.

last night i had fabulous dessert and champagne at cafe flora!

many exciting plans this week -- possibly going to the farm on friday to help with the harvest.

my wrists are healed, going to work on some bread... maybe a new cake recipe idea for saturday. strawberry cake with champagne syrup and lemon curd? chocolate cake with salted caramel mousse and ganache? mmm... off to brainstorm. also, i miss veronica mars.

We tried to watch Zardoz last night and I have to say it's pretty freaky.

Also, this. For the wizard of gore!

1. I'm a foraging maniac. I found a ginormous rosemary bush across the street. Cha-ching!

2. SUMMER IS HERE OMGWTFBBQ

I really really LOVE working on the farm with the kids in the afternoon. It just puts me in a fabulous mood. Today was harvest day, and it was truly exciting to see their faces light up while digging through their little patches of land to find heads of lettuce, spring onions, kale, arugula, and the hugest cilantro plants I've ever seen. I could only be in a better mood if it was sunny and 90 degrees.

I'm somewhat saddened that I cannot work with the kids this summer on the farm. Their summer camp hours are from 10am to noon during the day on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Luckily, I have Fridays off from school and can spend those days harvesting from the community section of the farm. Isn't it cool that right here in good ole urban Seattle we have a farm committed to sustainably growing vegetables for food banks? Why aren't we growing food all over the place? Let's do it. Take over. Make your landscape edible.

I got some strawberry plants this weekend at the Ballard farmer's market from a local organic farm. I put them in huge containers on the back porch - hope they survive the transplant shock... they look a little miffed.

I think I may have been a little too hard on my wrists during the harvest, but it was so worth it. Must be more gentle!

p.s. - I think that I never had any carpal tunnel (apparently there's a TUNNEL in your wrists... go figure) issues from typing because of my strict piano teacher as a child. I must have been well-trained to hold my wrists properly while doing anything similar to playing the piano (typing, IMO).

that's where you found me rain falling around me looking down at a worm with a long way to go and the traffic was hissing by and i was homesick and i was high i was surrounded by a language in which i could say only hello and thank you very much but you spoke so i could understand and i drew a treasure map on your hand and you were no picnic you were no prize but you had just enough pathos to keep me hypnotized

I'm compiling my wish list for pastry gadgets and books here, feel free to ignore. (It's mostly for me to remember the things I want and check them off as I get them!)

( Mmmmm sugar )

this week ---> waaaaaaay too much excitement. as a result of my volunteer efforts, ian and i have free tickets to Good Food at the SIFF this afternoon. so, huzzah to that.

on thursday night i pulled sugar for 6+ hours. that's right.... SIX HOURS. (there was a fundraiser at school and we had to make some showpieces and then 160 ribbon circlets for our plated dessert). it was awesomesauce fun, but i really messed up my wrists, especially my left one. horrrrrrrrible pain. it kind of hurts to type a little bit, so i should probably stop.

also, i had a REALLY weird dream about katie's voldemort.

next weekend is splatter film night, so i'm coming up with fantastic gore-themed recipes! so far i have: tomato chutney bruschetta, roasted grape and morbier cheese bruschetta (eyeballs!), cornmeal and currant cookies, rasbperry-basil tart, rhubarb-ginger tart with custard (looks like entrails).

Ok, so I know I'm not supposed to livejournal after drinking, but i'm having such a good day. Or, I guess.... somewhat of a good day. *GASP* I know, you know... look at all my livejournalings lately and I'm a total basket case. Well, not today.

Anyways, I just stopped by to say that sometimes I truly think that Bruce can see ghosts. I'm not kidding. Sometimes he gets this _holy crap_ look on his face and stares off into the void.

Shhhh *remember freshman honors english, J walking me to class for some reason, when the cafeteria on campus used to actually be a cafeteria, elizabeth the musician, talking about the boy she knew who just liked to look into the void. Remember what she said, it was compelling. She said that there's no experience like hearing a song for the first time. You can never have that back. You only get it once.... as far as you know.

I am so very much in procrastinating mode right now.

Annoying, I can't play the guitar right now because I sliced my left pinky finger this weekend. No worries, though... I was doing something really sexy when I did it. Bow chica bow bow... I was actually supreming an orange. I can sort of play without the pinky finger. Why is that finger called the pinky anyways? Piano is easier right now, although I do tired of the plasticky feeling of my keyboard and wish it at least had weighted keys.

This weekend Boom Noodle and the Naked Ladies were quite fab, although I was incredibly spacey and the next day I was sort of in freak out mode... the library downtown calmed me, although my cheese research for a school project has yielded much much less information than I had hoped. Sunday was better... I made lovely cookies and tarts with reckless abandon.

I do have this weird love-hate math relationship going on right now. It's like there's a lot of baggage or something. Geek night brings visions of shortest-path algorithms from my first programming job (for that GIS firm while in undergrad)... also some vague memory of Euler and the bridge problem? Was that Euler? Maybe my memory is crossing mathematicians. All these questions/ideas, but I can't bring myself to ask/talk about them at all very much until I am alone with Ian later. It's weird... it's like all that crap from the past three years comes rushing back. I remember that phase I went through as a question-hater. I think it was the first year of grad school.... I decided that there *were* stupid questions, and most of the questions asked during class *were* stupid and people were just wasting our precious time with the instructors, now that we were finally working *with* the instructors during class (rather than the undergrad dynamic, where the instructors kind of pass their knowledge to you without a great amount of discussion.) Boy was I a ridiculous product of that institution.... who has intelligent discourse without questions? Blah, I was bitter that I felt discouraged from asking questions by craptastical professors so I felt like doing it to everyone else. Anyways, enough psycho babble. Time probably, time will get rid of the baggage. I still love math. Math is still my mistress.

The Katie's fundraiser thing was fun last night. I was totally mesmerized by the swinging glowy balls.

And now I cannot think of anything else to write about and must do my homework. Blargle.

i'm so FREAKING socially inept i cannot figure out weird vibes. WTF.

for the love of freaking euler. sometimes i'm just hit with a pang of unwholesome self-loathing on an otherwise fantastic day.

you know, an epiphany, hits me like a brick. after all of these days of self-hating, blame, tears of failure, using my brain as a punching bag, it hits me:

you know. i know. i'd still be there if i had only picked the RIGHT advisor. i think i had a 33% chance of picking the right one. just, probability, you know. at least a big part of it.

i drew the wrong card.

i wouldn't have done the awesome research i did.... i wouldn't be here, today, making spiced meringue for a rhubarb tart, or experimenting with vegan salted caramels.

oy. i need a drink.

the afternoon almost phoenix like, me with my hands in the dirt always shaking the soil off the roots, right?

it's like feeling the energy flux through my psyche... not half-assed, but more like a line integral around my soul. weird dreams and memories of h with a jug of milk in fluid dynamics class and some odd laughter around the idea of age and its relation to green's theorem. that's where all that line integral crap seeps into my head again anyways. it's not a part of me inherently, just something i sort of built up over time. forcing it in there.

AAAaaaanyways.

I watched 2 great movies this weekend: Network and To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar. Yes.

i made tarts all day.

small ones.

saucy tartlets.

muhahahaha



also, ian keeps trying to eat them



do not have camera right now, so had to use ian's lappy.

in conclusion, i have successfully avoided working on my homework. now i'm going to katie's to *not* work on my homework!

Ok, so... today I'm one of THOSE people on the bus. You know them. The ones who cart a whole shitload of crap around, making it difficult to maneuver, etc. So there I am, with my HUGE backpack (we did some work with raw chicken in my culinary class so I need to bleach the hell out of my uniform), my toolbox in one hand, and a loaf of bread in the other. I'm finally sitting down with my feet on my toolbox so someone can sit next to me. All is good. Until I need to get off the bus. I decide to get up a few seconds early in order to get all my stuff so I don't spill it all over the bus on my way out. I say, "excuse me please" to the woman sitting next to me and she replies with, "Oh! I'm getting off too." I wait for her, then, to get THE FUCK up... (very nicely, mind you.. although I was kind of pissed because she does not, in fact, get up until the bus stops). It takes me a few seconds to get all of my stuff and the bus driver makes an impatient noise. So I try to hurry and end up slamming my head into a bar. :( Of course the woman sitting next to me is long off the bus at this point and everyone just thinks I'm that idiot who ran into the pole.

Ok, maybe I am just that idiot who ran into a pole.

It's been one of THOSE days.

In good news, I am the monster of all tart monsters and I make an awesomesauce ginger-rhubarb tart. Take that! Wuh-paw.

Trader Joe's will not give out information about their products because they claim the information is proprietary.

I'm not talking about SEKRIT recipes. I'm talking about information about the ingredients in, say, marinara sauce. Where was it made? Where were the ingredients grown?

Don't you think that people should have some sort of right to know that kind of information about products that are meant to be consumed? I guess it's all capitalism, right? TJ's, you suck. I'm going to start making lists of stores/food that are good about transparency and those that are not. So far, Theo Chocolate has my confidence, and TJ's has lost my trust.

And now, in a rather hypocritical dorito-induced stupor, I'm going to go cuddle with my boys and go to bed incredibly early.