Pastry Crust

Hey Amanda,

So I was basically apoplectic this week because I've got some ridiculously strong (but actually quite moderate) views on abortion. I bottled up all of my rage and righteous indignation and this was going to be my outlet. And... after sitting on my half-written post for a few days I decided that one, you and our readers are probably up to your gills in abortion opinions and two, it's just not the right time to talk about it. At least not online. Give it a few weeks and I'll give you a really beautifully researched, science-based post about abortion. But today I'm going to talk about pie-crusts.

The crust is a lie. 

Have you ever eaten a pie with a shortbread, cookie, or graham cracker crust and thought, "You know what would make this pie even better? A pastry crust." The answer is no. Because no matter what idyllic world you live in, where jupiter is in your sign and Nathan Fillion is guest-starring on Psych (one could only dream)---pastry crust is always disappointing. It's either mushy, hard, or over-done in patches. Maybe a combination of all three. In the rare event that the crust looks flakey and soft and is a color of gold that only exists on the French Riviera, it tastes like a bland piece of toast.

Not my best work,
but considering I didn't have a mouse or real editing software....I'll take it 

Pastry crust is essentially begging to be a metaphor. It's like having a date to dance. You want it so bad when you're hardcore third-wheeling, standing beside each of your friends in their elaborate hairdos, pinning on your own corsage because you're going stag. And somehow the next year you find yourself actually having the corsage pinned on by someone else, and...the night is about as good is was the year before. You left the dance early again, because you forgot that they still only play misogynistic hip hop.  There are no slow dances to Frank Sinatra, or clever banter as you sway with your date. You essentially have to yell "I have to pee!" directly into his eardrum, because the music is so loud it's vibrating your liver.

Pastry crust is working your butt off to write that amazing paper, practically living in special collections, flipping deliriously through the dryest writing imaginable, and then realizing at the end of class that the girl who wrote her paper saying that the French Revolution "killed a lot of people", also got an A.

Pastry crust is slogging through the last year of your undergrad, waiting for your life to start and realizing that life is more or less one, long slog punctuated by beautiful moments if you're not too catatonic to miss them.

Pastry crust is waiting to be happy. 

Don't wait to be happy y'all. Just pour some butter over some crushed nilla wafers.

Have a great Friday,
Stephanie

Photo credit:

Pastrybread.com

Wisdom

Hey Steph,
  So I feel a bit like a broken record of late, but once again I've been super busy. I'm waiting for it to calm down, but maybe that is the wrong way to look at it. Maybe this is just life, and it will never slow down.
         Four years ago, I was ending a yearlong internship before heading back to school for my master's degree. I felt busy then too. I kept thinking to myself, "If I can just finish off all these loose ends at work, then I'll be back to working part-time and going to school." I probably had a bit of nostalgic grass-is-always-greener syndrome going on because I remembered my days as an undergrad being fairly low key and not too busy--not true. As I was leaving my office after eight hours of work to head into the second half of my three-hour-a-day commute home, I ran into one of the elderly volunteers that hum in mass around my building. Like all the old (or shall I say mature?) people that I worked with, she had a smile on her face made of pure skylark song. She kindly asked how I was doing. I half-heartedly said, "Great. Just waiting for life to slow down." She looked at me with warm honey eyes and said frankly, "It never does." And she was off, leaving me perturbed in my stressful state. In frustration, I thought with the ignorance of a newly minted college grad that she was completely wrong. She had no idea that within a week, I'd be back to school life where I wasn't working 40-hour weeks and commuting 15 hours a week.

wisdom: rare and precious knowledge hard-earned wrought through experience and sometimes repeated experience


        Years later, I've learned she was right. But knowing that and coping with that are two different things, and I've haven't accomplished the latter. (Can I just time-out here and say that I wish we used the grammatical construction of "the latter" and "the former" more often? So clever and precise!) As it turns out, two days before I ended that internship, I was asked to stay on as a contractor working ten hours a week along with school and another job. So life didn't slow down, but it did get more complex as I tried and sometimes failed and sometimes succeeded at shoving in two jobs, church responsibilities, school, socializing--yes, socializing isn't always seen as a necessity but for the sake of my sanity and my singlehood it was--and writing a thesis into each of my days. I'm exhausted just writing this list.
         And I'm not special. Everyday, many people--let me rephrase that--all people are juggling family, job(s), community, hobbies, housework, worship, personal time, etc. And with all that going on, I wonder how many of us feel like we are drowning sometimes, drowning in an overwhelming deluge of responsibility, guilt, and failure even as we are actually doing quite well at accomplishing a lot? It's easy for me to see people feeling overwhelmed around me and wonder how they could ever feel like they aren't doing enough when their acing job opportunities, cradling a child in their arms, or merely having a smile on their face. That's success!
    But it's sure hard to feel like it is. The thing is I'm at another crossroads where for the second time I'm in my last week of work with the aforementioned job. Another exciting opportunity has presented itself in my life, so it's time to move on, and as I tie off loose ends and feel overwhelmed by everything that needs to get done just 24-hours from now, I think about that the words of that kind, wise, elderly woman four years ago. I'm still shaking my head in frustration, thinking, "She can't be right. It's going to slow down." But I know I'm wrong.

Love you, Steph.

Cheers,

Amanda

Who do you know that could use some words of reassurance that they are succeeding? Let them know. We all could use a warm honey smile sometimes. 

Amazing Women in History: Lise Meitner

Hey Amanda,

Let me introduce you to Lise Meitner. She was a boss- for one she earned her doctoral degree in private because she wasn't allowed to actually attend the university that gave her her doctoral examination. She not only convinced Max Planck to permit her to attend his lectures (which he had previously denied to other women), but after a year, he made her his assistant.

She later switched to the lab of Otto Hahn and worked in the Radiochemistry department at the Kaiser Wilhem Institute for a year as a "guest" because they wouldn't pay her. But, she also convinced them that that was stupid.

She discovered several isotopes, the Auger effect, and the neutron. But, the Auger effect is named for a French man that discovered it a year after her. And the Nobel Prize of Physics for the discovery of the neutron was awarded to her research partner, Otto Hahn, alone. Not cool, patriarchy.

Lise Meitner is not impressed.
(Otto Hahn at her right)

Meitnered: vt.having one's accomplishments wrongfully assigned to someone else because one doesn't fulfill expectations for that accomplishment--often due to gender. See also Watson-Crick'sing

Dear Watson,
 Your welcome.
 P.S. No one calls me Rosie, especially not you,
 so you  should probably edit that out of  Double Helix

And although she and Hahn were close friends, Meitner didn't pull any punches. She wrote him a letter condemning his behavior during WWII, writing:

You all worked for Nazi Germany. And you tried to offer only a passive resistance. Certainly, to buy off your conscience you helped here and there a persecuted person, but millions of innocent human beings were allowed to be murdered without any kind of protest being uttered ... [it is said that] first you betrayed your friends, then your children in that you let them stake their lives on a criminal war – and finally that you betrayed Germany itself, because when the war was already quite hopeless, you did not once arm yourselves against the senseless destruction of Germany

Man.

Right, she was also a jew that fled Nazi Germany...twice. Once into the Netherlands, and then into Sweden after the invasion.

So yeah, women physicists. It's not just Marie Curie.

Have a great weekend,
Stephanie

Talent

Hey Steph!
  So this past week I got to spend time with our amazing little brother. We had a great time and really lived up the local scene while he was here. We went to a local theater production of Urinetown the Musical, a university production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, a comedy club that performs in the manner of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and a Spring Salon at a nearby art museum which gathered art pieces from state artists. I've got one word for it all: talent.

talent: an amorphous quality usually attached to the performing or visual arts in which the possessor performs in a superior fashion; also, any quality which the possessor is especially adept at

I believe there is great fallacy in the way we generally think about talent in our society. When I was a little girl, I used to think that the really skilled people were the ones who got success and were famous for their talents. Only the most amazing singers were played on the radio; it was solely the actors with the broadest range of emotional display that were in the blockbusters; only the true wordsmiths were selling thousands and thousands of books.

The older I get the more I see this just isn't true. Talent is everywhere--and I'm not just talking about middling talent; I'm talking about knock-your-socks-off, standing-ovation talent. I know you and I live our lives by the rule we learned in Music 100: if you stand up for every production you see, you are really not standing up for any of them. We reserve our standing ovations for those performances that truly astound us, so we don't stand that often. But I have to say, I'd give a standing ovation for both Urinetown and the art exhibit I saw. Truly talented work was shown in both of those. (That's not to say that the other performances weren't great as well--just not standing ovation-worthy.)

See, Hollywood, NYC, and Nashville don't have the run on talent. They just have the run on famous-ness (more commonly known as fame). And those two items don't always correlate. There are all types of things that feed in to people being famous that have little to do with talent: attractiveness, connections, and luck. In my humble opinion, some of the performers I saw this week were world-class performers (and many of them were pretty enough to grace the cover of Tiger Beat to boot).

I think we sometimes don't perform because we don't think our talent is to par, but this is just because a misguided view of talent. There isn't just a handful of a couple hundred or thousand that have true talent. I think talent is sprinkled throughout the world to share. And, man, am I grateful for it. I'm so glad that I don't have to view talent only through reproductions of Van Gogh paintings or through the tv screen or through hundred dollar concerts and plays on Broadway. I can be uplifted by talent at my local art museum, my community playhouse, and my neighborhood blog.

So if you have a drive to write, please write. If you have a need to sing, please sing. If you gotta perform, please perform. And I'll be your humble, poor-in-money, but rich-in-gratitude patron.

Cheers,

Amanda Kae


Here's an artist to check out (and watch his other stuff on his YouTube Channel):

Also, if you live in Utah, check out  Alta Hills. They're performing in Provo this weekend!

Who's the artist we should all know about but don't? What friend is quietly rocking the world with their talent but needs a bigger mike? Share! I'd love to check them out.

Romance is a Myth

Hey Amanda,

I've been thinking a lot lately about how we prepare as a society for marriage. And I think we suck at it. I think for women especially, one of the biggest problems is that Romance is a myth. I wouldn't be surprised if the proliferation of chick-media has contributed to our divorce rate.

Don't get me wrong. I'm happily married to-- honestly--a way better man than I deserve. Love isn't a myth. But, the magical lie of the Romance section really doesn't have much to do with that.

Let's be clear. Although, I'd much rather go through my roughest days with my spouse than on my own--Relationships don't solve problems. They don't. If you loathe your body and lack the confidence to feel comfortable talking at dinner parties as a single person, you will still hate your body and feel cripplingly self-conscious in a committed relationship. If you feel directionless and bored with your life, that won't change after you've tied your destiny to somebody else.

I love you.

Romance books and movies use the relationship as the source of the excitement, fulfillment, and growth for the characters within them. But that's not how real-life works. The euphoria of new love is awesome. And every once in a while I miss it. But it also sucks. All of the doubt and second-guessing about this other human being who has control of so much of your emotions and you have no guarantee that they feel anything like you do about them.

I can tell you without any caveats that right now, halfway through my fourth year of marriage is sooo much better than the year I met and got engaged to my husband. No slighting on the blistering good looks, humor or intellect of my man, but I don't really feel giddy about him anymore. But I know in my bones that he trusts my competence. Sounds romantic, huh?

I don't really care about your plans for your future, or
how this might affect your standing with your boss,
--I'm just too...excited.

But that's my point.  Relationships at their best are about having each other's backs. It's not the jittery, adrenaline rush of the first date or the first kiss. It's the consistent pep talk and commiseration in the ups and downs as you pursue your dreams.

So if I could go back and talk to teenage me, daydreaming on long car trips about being loved (and not being so awkward it produced physical reactions of distaste in those around me)--I'd say the biggest thing you can do to have happy, stable, awesome relationships is have tangible goals in your life. Because it's a lot easier for your partner to support you if he knows what to support you in.

So don't wait for a knight in shining armor to save you from your ennui or self-doubts, because he can't.

Bella Swan- 1. a fictional characters universally disliked but strangely envied by a large segment of the population. Her flabby emotional health is only barely kept at functional levels by the prop of a new romantic interest and/or the immediate threat of death. 2. A person who has a similar need for new Romantic stimulus to avoid the realization that they are responsible for their own happiness. 

Love,
Stephanie, the twenty-something curmudgeon

Okay, but some chick-flicks are awesome. 

I'm a big fan of Kate and Leopold. 

What are your favorites? 

Crepuscular and Crepuscular Ray

Hey Amanda,

You were right about The Way--it was an awesome movie. The best part? This.

Okay I lied. The movie was also awesome because I was eating delicious tomatillo salsa, and more importantly, I was watching it in Texas with you. Which is why we were MIA last week, sorry y'all--family first.

It was a fantastic week for words. Probably because Amanda is awesome, I won the vocab lottery multiple times last week. You know, when the perfect time to use that obscure-but-oh-so-delightfully-apt-for-the-situation word comes along. For instance:

crepuscular: Having to do with dusk, e.g. animals that are most active at twilight are crepuscular rather than nocturnal animals.

We went out for a walk after dinner to find an owl. We were talking about the best time to see birds since our brother recently got big into birding.

(Aside) Pretty much getting "big into" anything is a genetic predilection for the entire family (a predilection for predilections, if you will). So on one hand it wasn't really surprising that I found myself on a hunt for an owl. On the other, my brother already knows by sight the difference between a Neotropic Cormorant and a Double-Crested Cormorant, and my brother is perhaps the antipodes of a stereotypical bird watcher, But then again, so is Jack Black. (Antipodes? I'm on a roll.)

Just because I love you, and apparently, have no sense of shame. Here's a bonus word. Related, but perhaps more useable.

crepuscular ray: the beams of sunlight that cut through the clouds. The kind of thing that makes you feel like being a little nicer and a little less worried.  They're called crepuscular rays because they are most commonly seen at dawn or dusk because the contrast is greatest between the reddish light of the sun and the purple of the clouds.

If you can flip the bird while looking at this, you definitely need more hugs in your life

Be excellent to each other
Steph

Are there any words that you're dying to use?

 Does anyone else do that or am I the only one?

Yeah... okay. 

Genealogy

Hey Steph,

 I have something to confess. Saturday, I spent nine hours straight doing family history research. And yes, most of those hours were during prime social time. It just happened without me noticing. I know that sounds crazy, but I started working on family history work and six hours later I noticed my clock. I thought it had been about two hours. I was wrong.

      And I wasn’t ready to call it quits yet. I was totally geeking out over genealogy. Now, I’m a fairly passionate person. I can get (and have gotten) so excited about Greek-style yogurt that I literally jumped for joy like a little kindergartner. I love to read and have read for hours. I love playing my guitar and singing at the top of my lungs. Yet, even with all my love for these activities and items, I can’t imagine doing or focusing on any of them straight for nine hours, especially without noticing time pass.

Genealogy: an it, which I am doing; the study of both past family and yourself

      What drove this gluttonous adventure into genealogy? Well, you don’t know this, but Dad has asked me to do a secret mission for his birthday. He wants me to plan a New England getaway for Mom and him that focuses on the locations our ancestors lived in. (Isn’t it great how we could probably convince our parents to go anywhere if it had to do with family history?)

       Well, as I began working on this, I decided to take it to the next level. This would not be just a map of cities to visit with maybe a few sites of interest and a list of family names. I was going to go all-out Elizabethtown-style on this. In case you have forgotten this quirky and somewhat forgettable film in which Orlando Bloom plays neither a pirate nor an elf—yup, it’s just about the only movie that he plays a “normal” person—the movie involves a man (Bloom) on a solo cross-country journey spreading his dad’s ashes. His wacky friend, who brings levity to his life, plans the trip for him with a scrapbook binder full of odd landmarks to visit, opportunities to dance alone in the middle of nowhere, and a music playlist for the whole journey. Here’s a bit of the movie if you’re wanting more of a visual (You really only need to watch the first 30 seconds or so, unless you’d like to see Orlando cry about his daddy, then you may continue.):

       Anyway, I set to work making this the vacation plan of all vacation plans. I dusted off my book layout skills and started compiling information about each of the vacation spots. Stop number 1: Plymouth, MA.

Steph, did you know that we are related to both to the physician and surgeon for the Pilgrims and the first English murderer in America. The murderer, John Billington, also claims the title for being the first Englishman hung in America. When it comes to deaths and firsts in America, we are quite famous.

       Another of our ancestors was only three when she travelled in the Mayflower with her parents. Like so many of that first group, both her parents and aunt and uncle died that first winter. It’s quite remarkable that she lived on through all of that.

       This is just the tip of the iceberg. I learned so much in those nine hours—too much to share in one post. Research is easy when each of your ancestors has their own Wikipedia page. What is it about family history that could keep me engrossed like an obsessive Justin Bieber fangirl?

       Well, I think part of it is the history. I know I’m preaching to the choir since you majored in history, but the stories of our communal past are a part of knowing who we are as individuals. Ancestral or not, the stories of the Pilgrims suggest a responsibility to make good of your life—a story that is repeated in the Irish immigrants coming in the 1800s and Mexican immigrants coming today. I think it is easy to take lightly the ideas and culture we have in America because of the efforts of our communal ancestry who chose to uproot their lives for what they hoped would be a better one. But we shouldn’t take this lightly. Nearly half of the Mayflower passengers died within months of landing at Plymouth. They left behind a country with more than a thousand years of history and civilization to come to a country with no Western buildings or known resources. That’s quite the courageous spirit and forgetting what they did and why they did it makes us far less resourceful than they were.

       Another part is personal history. I recently read this article about family stories and its integral role to raising well-adjusted, happy children. The article said it was important that we share not just the happy stories but the stories of how our family overcomes hard times. These stories help children find strength in their heritage to push through and do hard things.

       When I read about how Samuel Eaton came across the Atlantic as an infant only to lose his mother while still living aboard the Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor and then lose his father 13 years later, I can almost feel Samuel’s strength running in my blood. If he could survive in wilderness America alone at 13, I can surely find strength to go and talk to that guy I’m too scared to talk to—and hopefully to do much harder things.

Cheers,

Amanda Kae

What family stories bring you strength? Why does sharing stories matter to you?