Author Archives: iasshole

How Daddy Is Doing

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Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of the Bad Idea Pants Club. Longtime readers may know that I was a smoker 4 jillion years ago, before I even started writing on the internets. My affair with smoking was short, and torrid, and very very VERY enjoyable. I think I eschewed harder drugs when I was young for a variety of reasons, but in large part because of the intense and scary lock cigarettes got on me from the start.

In one sense, I smoked for the first five years of my life. I remember laying on the floor of our trailer, fascinated by the dust motes and smoke swirling around in the sunbeams, as I was trapped indoors by many feet of snow and bitter cold outside the thin walls. My grandmother took up smoking at 27 after her divorce (Mores, brown papers, green box), in what was probably a FUCK THIS SHIT moment after my grandfather fled and left her with a tiny baby (my mom) and my two-year-old uncle.

When I was divorcing at 26 I felt some affinity with my grandmother, though I had a three-year-old and was most of the way through grad school instead of being faced with long hours as a checker with an eighth-grade education. I thought of her as I tried to finish papers and read and kept breaking to smoke. I smoked on and off for about four months that time, until my ribs showed from the stress and the not eating and the calls from my lawyer taken in my GA office. Is this being an adult? FUCK THIS SHIT. I am having a cigarette. Of course everyone smoked outside, so on the moments when the wind was still I would watch the smoke curl out of the tip with the sun shining and think of being a very small child and of how everyone else worried about things. All I had to do was lay on the floor and make little smoke tornadoes with my hands.

Before I grew up into a smoker myself, I had a childhood allergy to cigarette smoke, among other things, and I spent a fair amount of time in the hospital as a tiny kid under oxygen, my cold having mysteriously escalated into pneumonia. I had dark circles under my eyes and pale skin, and a nagging cough. This lasted until I moved in with my mother, who uncovered the source of my illnesses and wouldn’t let people smoke around me.

Of course she smoked, too, having her own FUCK THIS SHIT moment after divorcing at 19. Are we seeing a theme here? When I became a teenager, I nicked cigarettes from my mother’s purse (Benson & Hedges, gold box). Cigarettes were part of my tough girl costume. I learned how to spit impressively without getting any on myself, ew (necessary, because since my lungs could not climb out of my body and run away, they did their best to stay clean).

My watershed moment with smoking, when I discovered how truly cool it could be, was when I went into my usual seedy gas station that was sort of on my way to school and was frequented by truckers and bikers. Plus the clerk there never ever ever carded me.

“Camel Regulars,” I said, like a confident legal citizen who was well within her own rights of accelerating her own demise when it was my turn at the counter. The guy had a shaved head and one of those assertive goatees, those ones that look more like some kind of animal has entered into a symbiotic relationship with its host rather than, you know, facial hair.

The clerk plunked down a too-small box of Camels that were a little cheaper than the usual price. I did not want to argue with him for fear of having him demand ID. I casually tucked them into my pocket and randalled out as if everything was kosh. I took them out once I was behind the wheel and packed them by slamming them against my palm as usual, and opened them up.

No filters…holy shit, old school. When I asked for “regulars” I meant non-light. I was not counting on this. Well, I had paid for them, I might as well try them. With no filters on the end, I was just holding a big block of tobacco in my hand and it smelled delicious. I took one out, lit it. At this point I was probably smoking about 15 cigarettes a day, but the unfiltered experience was like a donkey kick to the head. This was it, I thought. I will smoke regulars from now on. This lasted for a blissful two weeks until my cough got worse and to the horror of my vain 16-year-old self my fingertips started turning YELLOW.

Anyway, all this rambling is in service of telling you that after thinking about it for a couple of years, I bit the bullet and bought some snus from Sweden. I still love tobacco and I was hoping to find some way to enjoy it every few days or once a week in a way that will not freak my children out, but now I sit around and fantasize about cigarettes. There is no ” somewhat pregnant” and there is no halfway point with me and tobacco. If I make it to 80 I will resume smoking. True fact.

What’s Crackalackin

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OMG I HAVE A BLOG. Hello. I did not see you there.

Okay so my new favorite favorite favorite thing in the whole world is This Bitch. My dream is that she will sneak up on me and take a picture of my tragic ankles. SRSLY, best parody of a fashion blog I have seen in a long time. Slow clap!

What am I up to? Not much. I was just out of town for Memorial Day, and I think part of me is still recovering from that, in a way. I know, I know, sack up. I am trying to get back onto my Victorian horse as well. Woot. How you doing? I’m still alive.

WWIBD?

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Today is my last day of making this rich stock that my waking hours and dreams have been filled with. Fish slip through warm stock lakes, and mysteriously do not end up cooked, waterfalls gush with it; people at work open their mouth to speak and it all seems very normal except my desk is a giant badger and when they open their mouths to ask about the report, within which I have broken the pivot tables again, instead of a harangue, lovely golden stock issues from their mouths. In fact, the last batch comes off the hob in 6 minutes for straining. I didn’t realize that I only have two more recipes that call for it, and I will execute them this week. I will probably revisit this stock in the fall, when it is colder (assuming, of course, that it gets warm at all this summer). Getting to the end of the stock was a real surprise. My remaining soup recipes I have on the list to fool with either call for white stock or make their own through various means.

I wish you could see this stock like I do as it comes off the hob and goes first through the large strainer to get the bones and veg chunks out, and then though the fine strainer to get the gristle and herb bits. Golden layers of fat and loveliness swirl and fight for position as the cooling process already is beginning. There is something in stock that of course the Victorians had to quantify and label, and they called it “osmazome.”

100. OSMAZOME is soluble even when cold, and is that part of the meat which gives flavour and perfume to the stock. The flesh of old animals contains more osmazome than that of young ones. Brown meats contain more than white, and the former make the stock more fragrant. By roasting meat, the osmazome appears to acquire higher properties; so, by putting the remains of roast meats into your stock-pot, you obtain a better flavour.

I think I can actually see the golden, delicious monkeyscience. I am a little sad today, though, since it is goodbye for now. It takes almost no time at all for me to assemble it now in the morning, and let it bubble away for a while. What next?

This got me to thinking I should be more organized, more orderly, in the Victorian way. I should spread the recipes out better and plan better. What would Isabella Beeton do, I asked myself? I guess she would be repeatedly having miscarriages brought on by catching undiagnosed syphilis from her husband, in between skiving off to Scotland “on business” and stealing other people’s recipes. WAIT. If I was I.B. it would be four years on from my death.

I do seem to have some kind of bug this weekend that is making me sleep an ungodly amount and am hit with rolling waves of nausea. Gotta love the late spring thing. I guess being only half-well is rather Victorian. What I concluded, since I am horrible undead Isabella Beeton at this point in my career, is that I am making a calendar to keep track of shopping lists and ingredients, so I can keep things moving along, and not make anyone crazy burned out like in Beefuary.

So, spurred on by my progress through the world of soup, I am going to regroup and get more calendary.

You’re As Booty As You Come and You Dress Like a Geek

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I am thinking about two things today. One: still thinking about Miss USA and people bocking over the fact that she participated in a pole dancing competition before she was crowned, which violates the morality agreement that is part of the rules participants have to agree to.

I started thinking about why this morality clause even exists in the first place. Are these young women really role models? Is there anyone outside of the pageant world who points to the contestants and says to their children, “Honey, this is your future?” Rah tah to women (and men) trading in large part on their looks to win fabulous cash prizes and scholarships, but does it really matter if the “Miss” in question has ever given birth or has acted as a parent (see rule 2)? Is there are rule against men becoming fathers in these contests? I could not find a morality clause for men.

This leads me to conclude, because I like making crazypants leaps like Caitlin Flanagan, that even beyond  the surface “Hey here are some bitches in a bikini” these pageants are  about some antiquated idea of sexual desirability. I think if they could get away with it, they would ensure the face of Jesus appears on every contestant’s intact hymen. Who cares if you’ve even been pregnant? The last time I checked abortion was legal, and also none of anyone else’s business. What if you are a mother? SO WHAT?

I spent most of my twenties married, in some kind of self-imposed sequestered state, during which I balked at even wearing a skirt that fell above the knee, but I think if my life would have gone differently or I was ten years younger, I would probably have some kind of interesting mini-scandal up my sleeve from my twenties or late teens. Our culture is pretty freaking sexualized/pornified to the point where I almost think it would be difficult to avoid. And why should people avoid it, if they are going to live public life where they are trading on their looks or sexuality? I’d say the Miss America/USA pageants are kind of the exception.

Here’s the answer: bimbo cloisters. Does your preschooler have promising bone structure? Lock her up now, before she puts her Miss Body Shots 2027 pics on whatever passes for Facebook in the future times.

Thing the second is that I really enjoyed a look at the dementia prediction issue on Radiolab called “Vanishing Words.” It’s about Agatha Cristie’s language decay in her final books and about the study they did on the nuns to see who lost their marbles later. Wouldn’t you love to know if batshit or confusion is in your future? I wish there was some kind of device that could measure your last good day, before you hurt the people who love you by forgetting who they are, or before you get lost, or cannot remember what happened for a few decades in there. That is when I would like to die–in my sleep on that last perfect day when you are all there. I find this program heartening because it says that people who write like overeager beavery maniacs  and less in a journalistic, carefully plotted fashion have a better chance of being non-nuts. Or maybe it means that you’re nuts now, ha ha! Well. Run on sentences full of mixed metaphors for the win.

Off to a dinner party tonight to discuss Omnivore’s Dilemma. More like OmniBORE amirite. Seriously, I would rather get a pap smear because at least that will be over in ten minutes. I’m going to get drunk and keep my fucking mouth shut. Will update.

Lust, Actually

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Caitlin Flanagan, whom I am coming to believe is a bit of a froot loop, or at least has a moderate case of fogey-dom, has landed in my mailbox again courtesy of the Atlantic. This month she is writing about how teenage girls “endure” hookup culture.

In approaching this article we first need to consider the fact that her perspective is heteronormative and her examples of wholesome teen culture are, well, stuff white people like. In short, she makes assumptions that teenage girls are sexually-oriented toward teenage boys and are under the thrall of girly pop culture romance baloney.

Further, Flanagan doesn’t really define hookup culture, which, fair enough, it’s been in the lexicon for a few years now and people generally know what it means. She does kind of talk around the idea of hookup culture, and an example that she gives is of a solo young woman participating in a locker room gang bang, which some people might consider a varsity-level “hookup” at any age.

So whether girls are either burned by hookup culture, or, like the plucky heroine of a Victorian-era romance novel, they manage to avoid some faceless boy skeeting in their eye through a combination of spunk (def. 1) and luck, they yearn towards romantic impossibilities. She cites the example of the High School Musical franchise and the music of Taylor Swift as where young girls are taking their cues about romance from. Girls want boyfriends, she claims. Girls want to be loved and they want a happy ending. I wonder if Flanagan is too old to remember that teenagers can identify bullshit pop culture constructs? Is it not possible that this treacly pap is being engineered to appeal to the parents of these girls, to assuage some of the pearl clutchery engendered by a media that tells them that their daughters are getting DPed by the lacrosse team?

Flanagan compares the youth of today to the previous generation. A girl is “taught by her peer culture that hookups are what stolen, spin-the-bottle kisses were to girls a quarter century ago. She is a little girl; she is a person as wise in the ways of sexual expression as an old woman.” O RLY, Flanagan. If you want to pull pop culture as a reflection of society, a quarter of a century ago Fast Times at Ridgemont High portrayed a 15-year-old girl having an abortion, and I don’t think the character got knocked up from playing spin-the-bottle, and I don’t think you can shove 1985 (or the 70s, or the 60s) into the same weird platonic-ideal youth culture box as people have done with the postwar period in the US.

Can anyone else see the giant elephant in the corner of this pile of malformed claims? Where are teenage boys in all this? They mostly exist in this article to deny love, and to use teenage girls as their sexual playthings. Do teenage boys not desire love and stable  and healthy relationships? Let’s say for a moment that all teenage boys do seek to take advantage of girls. Flanagan writes about all this exploitation as something that is kind of just magically “happening” to girls, which seems a little rape-culturey to me.

Then there is this, her closing paragraph: “There might seem something wan, even pitiable, about all these young girls pining for boyfriends instead of hookups. But the wishes of girls, you have to remember, have always been among the most powerful motivators in the lives of young men. They still are.” What is this, I don’t even. Did you suddenly hit your word limit, Flanagan? At the very least, this seems to contradict all her business about girls following the desires of boys, typified by statements like, “Is it any wonder that so many girls are binge-drinking and reporting, quite candidly, that this kind of drinking is a necessary part of their preparation for sexual activity?”

I should say that Flanagan’s viewpoint is not as blinkered as the points I’ve pulled out here. She does make some decent points about the very real contradictory expectations that adults (who are inured to these contradictions)  impose on the young, especially in regards to sexuality.

My biggest sticking point is that Flanagan portrays teenage girls as resigned participants in some kind of sexual vacuum (boys exist only to deny them love and to fuck them unpleasantly, and then run), having no apparent agency or sexual desires of their own. Again and again popular culture wants to portray the teenage girl as the innocent or the victim, or completely over the line as in her example of the slattern in the novel she cites in her article:

In Testimony, the sex party occurs at the fictional Avery Academy; Shreve imagines Siena, the girl at the center of the event, as a grifter, eager to exploit her new status as victim so that she can write a killer college essay about it, or perhaps even appear on Oprah.

Just like real humans, teenaged girls can like romance AND they can like fucking. They can enjoy these things together or separately. Ultimately, Flanagan’s article is yet another pointless rehash of myths and half-truths about teenage culture.

18 Minutes Ago Having Just Woken Up

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Me: Who was that on the phone?

P: Oh, my sister. She’s on her way.

Me: From San Francisco?

P: No, she just got off the 5. She’s about five minutes from here.

Me: !!!!! GIRLS GET YOUR CLOTHES ON YOUR AUNT’S HERE APPARENTLY.

Girls: *Heads cock simultaneously*

Me, to P: WOW do you owe me one now.

Twenty minutes later, after I get out of the shower:

P: Uhh…so I realized I did not tell you at ALL that my sister was coming today.

Me: Yeah.

P: I am SO SO SO SORRY.

(He even made sad pleading hands.)

Me: You realize that Mother’s Day is going to be EPIC right?

P: Umm

Me: Like a parade of elephants? Like the blood of ocelots running down our street just for my amusement?

P, walking off: Note to self, ocelots.

Four Ways with Asapargus

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I am doing a lot of cooking lately. Like, a LOT of cooking. Like, sleep, fap, work, cook, seriously. As a result of this kind of microscopic level of examination of food, and specifically the Book of Household Management, I am starting to ask a lot of questions. Why is a recipe written a certain way? Does it matter? Would X technique work better?

Due to the season, we have been eating a lot of asparagus. Beeton calls for peeling asparagus, which always seemed an overly-fussy way to present it or deal with woody asparagus, which, YUK. Beeton takes it one step further and instructs the reader to boil the now-nakey stalks with their peels. I don’t think anyone advocates for that nowadays.

It got me to thinking. Would it affect the taste? It was time for some ASAPARGUS SCIENCE! (IENCE-IENCE-IENCE)

I started with your typical pound bunch from the supermarket, not too big and not too leetle. I split them into four piles and trimmed the tough bases evenly. Two piles were peeled, and two were not.

The peels went into one pot per Beeton, and both pots were salted (1 tablespoon per 2 liters). I boiled them for precisely two minutes.

The results were interesting. We all agreed that the peeled ones were sweeter than the ones with skins on. The texture was a little like stewed cucumbers, but you could cut them with a fork, whereas a lot of the time I end up employing a knife too.

What was dicier was discerning between the ones that were boiled with peels and the ones with were boiled without. I think that the peeled ones boiled with peels were the sweetest. I like this. I will probably peel from now on unless they are tiny little whips.

“SCIENCE!”

Dear Tenacity Jones

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Yesterday Franny recited a poem about mashed potatoes in front of her class. The children were given a couple of weeks to memorize their poems, which Franny did right away, and then sort of forgot about it for a week or so, then refreshed before she went in. Strudel listened attentively and was a good audience during her sister’s practice sessions, and when Franny returned home triumphantly and announced that everything had gone splendidly, Strudel jumped in and said the poem front to back without batting an eye. Strudel has a knack for memorizing things casually as Franny grapples with learning them, then spewing them out at inopportune moments.

“YES YES you have it,” snapped Franny, cutting Strudel in the middle of the final verse of the poem.

Strudel also finds other little fissures to thrust her tiny irritation tentacles into. Franny has low moments while doing math at times. Math facts sort of slide around and get mixed up. There is a particular deer in the headlights stare that Franny gets when what she knows leaves her and her mind is a blank.

I used to get the same look on my face. I was the last child to complete the timed tests that we had to take OVER and OVER and OVER until we passed. And by last, I mean weeks after all the other children had finished. My face burned with shame every afternoon as the teacher quietly timed me while everyone else did their silent reading.

Finally, it clicked one day. I had memorized the answers in their correct order. I did not even need to look at the problems. I had learned something, but probably not what I was supposed to have learned. I am fond of saying I did not really learn how to do math until I was 27. True facts.

Franny often lays her head down on her paper and taps her pencil while she takes a break from her math homework.

“A number times zero is always ZERO,” Strudel will say cheerfully into the anguished, frustrated silence. Franny sighs.

Strudel is deviling everyone at the moment. She is a huge fan of YOU ALWAYS and YOU NEVER and she will shiv a bitch if we cut her apples the wrong way.

I tried addressing the behavior and providing negative consequences, and the kid can hang on. I think her middle name should be “Tenacity,” which would be a totally awesome Pilgrim virtue name, don’t you think? I’d take Tenacity over Prudence any day.

One morning this week I woke up and it came to me–the thing I had not tried. It was time for a good old fashioned ignoring. Now when she flips her shit she is completely dead to the tribe. If she has anything remotely constructive to say regarding how she feels I acknowledge her, but otherwise she is shunned. No reaction, no need to continue the performance.

And I feel compelled to tell you the reason this letter is so utterly dull is because I really have nothing to tell you of any real importance. I was sick for a week and a half which is long for me. I suppose I could tell you that SeaFed tried to claim Franny on his taxes, despite not paying a dime in child support or for any of her insurance or upkeep beyond feeding her and clothing her on her brief visits to his far-away house. How we laughed. I am looking into buying a new desktop. I am going to Los Campisinos next week. Work is eating me LESS, which means my powers of evil are growing and returning. Soon orcs will be spewing out of my ears again and I will drive hobbits before me and hear the lamentations of their women &etc.

Hope you are well and xoxoxo,

SJ

This Recipe May Be Much Improved with Some Chopped Shallots or a Tincture of Lead

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Last night I had all the ingredients to make two Victorian desserts, and I decided to charge forward despite the fact that I was pretty sure the houseguest I was cooking for this weekend was going to cancel. It’s been about a month since I made a feast or even a simple meal. I am mindful of the passage of time because the menus are starting to reflect local spring ingredients like asparagus.

Now that I am about a fourth of the way through my year of Victorian cooking, I am able to reflect on how it’s going and what I’m getting out of it. I feel lucky that I read Beeton’s newest and most comprehensive biography first. It gave me fair notice that she did not test even a fraction of the recipes before she slammed them out in serial form. This historical document I have been planning parties around was once just another sheisty Victorian moneymaking scheme.

So how’s that working out for me? What am I getting from this? A lot of stomachaches. Fun, in that new-recipe way. I am doing a lot of personal research around the recipes and ingredients, and that always gives me a boner.

One feeling I get very strongly is that it would be nice to have Beeton’s rewritten with care and edited judiciously by someone who actually gives a shit about cooking. The extant abridged version cuts pages and menus off willy-nilly, sometimes in mid-menu. The recipes that the menus suggest are not included in the abridged one, which is more poor editing and proof that it has just become a crusty historical document. Though, to be fair, sometimes my unabridged version cross-references recipes that do not actually exist (looking at you, Sorrel Sauce), and I think if I was creating a book in serial form with 1200+ recipes without the aid of a computer, I would be fucking shit up left, right, and center.

I find myself editing some of the recipes as I go, since generally it pains me to waste or ruin food. I followed her advice on baking apples (something I rarely do) last night and ended up with applesauce. Franny says it is delicious.

Some of the recipes I would cut all together, like the “French” forcemeat recipe that calls for calf udder. Many of the recipes are interesting from a historical perspective, but I wonder if some of them were passed over even when the book was new. Why make forcemeat that requires boiling calf udder for hours and then pushing it through a sieve when you could make the simple one that calls for yummy bacon?

Anyway, the short answer is that I have no regrets about starting this project. My regrets center more around the fact that work has become exponentially more stressful in the past month, something I did not see coming at all, and I am trying to do that work-life balance thing. The best part of my day yesterday was making accidental applesauce and a lemon custard that did not thicken and probably will never set, while Franny sat around and played string games and talked to me. I was grump all day and cheerful after that. Tonight I will do my best not to ruin dinner, and I suppose I will make a quick gluten-free cake for dessert instead.

I think I will change tack though. If something sounds wrong to me, I am going to have to modify it a little, while still keeping the spirit of things. I cannot pour out another unset dessert.