A recent viewing of the cult classic “Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter” justified the purchase of several jumbo boxes of Movie Candy, including Milk Duds, Raisinettes, and, of course, the original malted milk balls themselves, Whoppers. I mercifully don’t remember much about the movie, but I do remember glancing at the box of Whoppers and noticing that one full panel was devoted to suggested recipes. That’s right, recipes built around Whoppers. I’ll never claim to have the best desk-job ever, but at that moment I was glad that my list of working responsibilities has never included inventing recipes based on an ingredient that is used as the “O” in its own name on the box.
I tried to imagine the direction I would have gone in. High-brow, with dishes like Whopper-Crusted Salmon? Baked Asparagus with Whopper Apricot Glaze? Given that the recipes were displayed under the heading, “Whoppin’ Recipes”, I decided this was probably not the route that had been taken. In fact, upon closer inspection, two of the three recipes ended with the word Pie. This was not surprising. I should probably be a little more forgiving of the creative spirit of the Whopper box recipe suggestions. After all, my own culinary creativity tends to stem from sheer laziness and an understocked kitchen. Craving midnight Mac & Cheese, but out of milk? Flavored coffee creamer will do in a pinch! So will soy milk, half & half, and, once during the holidays, Eggnog.
In fact, I am a big fan of recipe substitutions. It is much easier to hunt through your cabinets and find some other, similarly-colored ingredient to use than to put on your coat and go around the corner to the store. Thus I once used heavy cream in lieu of buttermilk, and shortly thereafter was told by two people that you can essentially make buttermilk by adding lemon juice– not butter! to milk. But really, who has lemon juice lying around? And forget about milk.
While my earliest childhood forays into the culinary field involved making ‘soup’ out of things that dissolved in water (think mints), the seeds of my real interest in cooking blossomed on a stony path bordered by an EZ Bake Oven. For those of us who never had the privilege, baking with an EZ Bake Oven in the late eighties was baking by lightbulb. I use the term ‘baking’ in the broadest sense possible, because often it was more like ‘warming’, or ‘shining a bright light on’ your tiny confections. Cakes and cookies that sprang fully-formed from the forehead of the EZ Bake Oven were clearly inferior in every way to the real thing, particularly where texture and portion size were concerned, unless you like spending an hour to bake four pale cookies the size of nickels. I don’t blame my mother for holding me off of the real oven for as long as possible, however, especially considering that my recipe repetoire at that point was limited to Tic Tac Soup.
I still remember fondly the time my little sister and I, given the job of making dessert for that evening, worked all day baking cakes the size of decks of cards and batch after four cookie batch. We made signs advertising the event and hung them up around the apartment. The dessert menu we devised that night included sugar cookies and imaginatively titled “Brownie Balls”. One of my signs cleverly alternated between words written in large inch-high letters and words in tiny print. Thus, when read from afar you missed the words ‘cookie’ and ‘brownie’ and the sign announced, “SUGAR AND BALLS FOR DESSERT TONIGHT”. My four year old sister’s sign read, in large shaky letters, “IF YOU LIKK COOKIES, YOU WILL LIKK OUR COOKIES”. My parents still have those signs. It was not until later that I realized our posters were more responsible than our dessert for the amount of choking they did that evening.
Now, I use the grown-up oven! And most of my recipes do not involve adding water to powdered mixes (I said most). My interest in cooking and baking has grown, though my ambition, sadly, has stayed the same size. I have made many of the dishes in my roomate’s Betty Crocker Cookbook, and have had moderate success following several online recipes. But the gauntlet landed at my feet when I purchased my very own copy of Joy of Cooking. Flipping through it in my initial excitement, I found I had trouble identifying and/or pronouncing the names of roughtly 70% of the recipes (Quick Pink Chaud-Froid, I’m looking in your direction).
Joy of Cooking is a cookbook which takes for granted that you have access to as well as a working knowledge of Buckwheat Groats (which I capitalize out of concern that it is the name of a person), and that you may someday need to know how to prepare and cook a bear. It is the only cookbook I ever felt like apologizing to. “Um, Octopus Pasta Sauce sounds really good, Joy of Cooking, but I kind of just wanted to make spinach dip, if you don’t mind.” It is no small thing to go from recipes that show a measuring-cup half filled with light-blue liquid to indicate that you need to add a half-cup of water, with a diagram of a spoon to indicate stirring (thanks, Betty Crocker!), to recipes that begin with the words, “Draw and cut free from the shell 1 armadillo. Discard fat and all but the back meat.”
If you think Twister when you read the word ‘Game’; if you prefer pretty photographs of cakes to chilling line drawings of a hiking boot firmly planted on the head of a squirrel as the squirrel is stripped of its hide, then this may not be the cook book for you. Sometimes I feel that Joy of Cooking would be more accurately titled if the word ‘Joy’ were replaced by the word ‘Fear’ and the words ‘of Cooking’ were replaced by the words ‘of Joy of Cooking’. The first recipe I made from this book was a simple coffeecake, and throughout the ordeal I almost expected Irma S. Rombauer to jump from the pages, rap my knuckles with a wooden spoon and cry, “I said UNSALTED butter, you fool!” Like some sort of mystical Tome of Spirits, to this day every time I open that book I can hear spirits moaning, “You call that braaaaaising?”
Nonetheless, I will keep trying. While I may never churn my own butter, will continue to insist that chocolate chips are an appropriate substitution for nearly every ingredient, and will probably never perfect a Blanquette De Veau (I bet you don’t know what that is either), hopefully I will someday return the investment my parents made in my future by buying me that lightbulb oven.
Tear out your hair, beat your breast, fill your pants with dirt and howl in misery, all those who missed the Pumpkin Carving Contest last week in the multipurpose room. Go ahead, I’ll wait here.
Yes, it was that much fun. My team made a robot pumpkin. I was so excited about it that when we finished, I decided to carve another pumpkin all by myself. It was soon plain to me that I had followed in the footsteps of most artists of questionable talent who attempt solo careers. While the pumpkin I worked on as part of a team came out looking sassy and robotic, my pirate pumpkin, embarked upon in a selfish quest for personal glory, was neither sassy nor robotic, but it did inspire several curious onlookers to question and ultimately discard the idea of the existence of God.
It didn’t look anything like a pirate. I don’t know what it looked like. In any case it was a lopsided, toothless token of my artistic inadequacy. It reminded me of a pumpkin I decorated with a green magic marker when I was four. There is a picture of me, taken that Halloween, with my arms around it, staring into the camera with the direct, pained gaze of a misunderstood artist. My creation had an enormous raggedy maw full of shark teeth, rimmed by two eyes of different sizes, with a nose on his forehead. Examining my latest pumpkin attempt has confirmed my suspicions. Artistically, I peaked at four.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I grew up believing that I was a good artist. Perhaps I had one too many encouraging babysitters or overenthusiastic arts and crafts instructors at camp. As it is, nothing I ever draw looks like what it’s supposed to be. When I was little, I solved this problem by telling my Mom what my scribbled drawings were–there were a lot of cowboys–and having her write it at the bottom. Now that I can read and write, I do that part myself. No matter how much they disagreed with it, few art teachers could disregard the pure efficiency of this method.
I still remember the high school art teacher who broke my gentle, deluded spirit. She is the one to whom all credit is due for my sadly realistic view of my meager artistic talents. She made us paint from still-life arrangements which consisted of mountains of elaborately arranged fruits and vegetables, which, amazingly enough, after four or five months, rotted away. This infuriated her.
She was less than five feet tall and shaped like a mini-fridge, wore long beaded necklaces and made me hate myself from 2:00-4:30 on Mondays and Wednesdays. This was because she made me use color. A student of the doodling-with-a-pen-on-lined-paper-during-math-class school of art, color did not belong in my artistic world. Nor did fruit, or, for that matter, Mrs. Thompson.
After a semester, my canvas was filled with pears that looked like neon light-bulbs and bunches of grapes that looked like they were caught in midexplosion. I told myself that my fruit picture looked inept and distorted because I was working so close to it. Once in awhile I would tack it to the wall and look at it while backing away slowly, hoping that distance would resolve the colorful mess into something that didn’t make you want to stop eating fruit (or perhaps into something that didn’t look like the tragic result of not eating fruit. I don’t know what I meant by that, exactly.) The further away I got, the better I felt, not because the picture looked any better, but simply because I was farther away from it.
Near the end of the year, I came to class to find that my painting had been cut neatly into three pieces and stacked in the corner, to be used by students as scrap paper. I brought them to Mrs. Thompson and demanded an explanation. She looked shocked and apologized, claiming that she had only seen the blank back of my picture, and hadn’t realized that it had a painting on the other side. But a look of understanding passed between us.
The following was written for a “Drunken Edition” of the newspaper I wrote for in college.
I’ve spent more time writing this column than I have my senior
thesis, and I probably shouldn’t find that funny, let alone really funny. I can definitely say that college has taught me how to prioritize, and so can the enormous pile of dirty laundry that is growing up the wall in the corner of my room. It can also tell fortunes.
College has likewise encouraged me to pursue my own interests, like eating six or seven boxes of mac and cheese a month, an activity which has certainly helped me to grow as a person. Lately I have been increasingly tempted to say and do things for no other reason than simply because I think it would be funny. Often, this definition of ‘funny’ also means ‘creepy’ and ‘disturbing to others’. This list of things includes knocking on the door of my neighbor who I have never spoken to and who glares at me when I pass him in the hall, and when he opens the door, peering behind him and saying, “I just wanted to see your room.” I have also considered responding to noisy neighbors by opening my door and screaming down the hall, “No one will ever love you”.
(The author left to freshen up her drink at this point. She returned an hour or two later.)
My God, I hate Tollbooths that have “EZ Pass”. Someday soon EZ Pass is going to take over the world. I shudder every time I drive under that huge, horribly misspelled blinking lighted sign. That sign is the visual equivalent of having someone shove a sock in your face and ask whether it smells like it’s been worn or not, and you know they can tell it has. “EZPass”, the sign says, but what it really means is, Pitiful Driver, Someday You will Bow Before Me and Name Me as Your God. The abridged version just fits better on the sign, especially since they use that slanted lightening-y font to make the letters look like they’re zooming along. With the greatest of EZ.
An EZPass sign generally signifies that the tollbooth beneath it has nobody in it and thus doesn’t recognize money as a form of currency. I ask you, what kind of tollbooth doesn’t accept
MONEY? Can a tollbooth really be a tollbooth if you can’t pass through it by giving it cold hard money? Money is accepted nearly everywhere else in the world, making EZPass’s domain seem rather limited. Waving an EZPass in a store cashier’s face won’t buy you diddley-squat. It may even buy you a night in jail, if you’re naked.
(The column ends here, as at this point its author got up to go play charades.)
In many ways, this last summer was a fairly uneventful one for me. I worked two jobs, one a fun, laid-back retail gig, the other a messy, crazed but also fun-when-the-boss- wasn’t-looking and you could sample the ice cream (as in, “What does vanilla taste like again?…Oh. Right.”) position in foodservice. A “Position in Foodservice” is the phrase you use on your resume to describe the kind of job in which you are denounced by angry tourists, sponge up endless trails of spilt ketchup, and come home each night smelling like french fries and questioning your self worth. In any case, this was a typical summer in all respects except for one: It was the summer of Baby Fever. Baby Mania. Baby Envy. Call it what you will, I had it but good.
I couldn’t tell you why. I have always more or less liked children, although during the last few years of college, it’s been mostly for their novelty. I didn’t see very many of them around Bard’s campus (and I’m sure there’s a good reason for that), so when I did, there was usually a little jolt of surprise as I remember that they exist. It’s a pleasant jolt, but it’s not by any means a jolt of longing. But this last summer, something within me clicked, or snapped, or kicked in, because everywhere I looked, I saw people walking around with their kids and I stretched my hands out feebly, trembling with jealousy. It was amazing, how abruptly the feeling arrived, considering its tenacity. It unnerved me completely. I felt as if, all of a sudden, I was the target of an insidious and diabolical advertising campaign, designed and launched by the most cruel and heartless executive of all, Nature. All around me, mothers cavorted with their babies, as slogans flashed beneath them. “You Got the Right One, Baby”, they said. And, “Enjoy BABY!” and sometimes “Baby: It’s the other Baby meat.” I don’t know how I withstood it.
I also wonder how long this obsession would have kept up under less fortunate circumstances. As it is, I am relieved but slightly sheepish to report that my baby craving vanished entirely once I was in the prolonged company of actual children. My brother Sam and his family came out to visit for a week near the summer’s end, bringing with them Sammy, age 4, and Natalie, who toddled. The kids were sweet and well behaved and said the darndest things; I on the other hand, disappointed myself by falling far short of my goal of being known and recognized far and wide as “The Cool Aunt”. Damn it, I wanted to be the Cool Aunt. Instead I was Aunt Molly, who stealthily polished off the mac-and-cheese at dinner even though she suspected it was for the kids, who probably weren’t too big on lobster salad rolls. So I like both. Is that a crime? Aunt Molly told Sammy that she couldn’t take him down into the cold, dark garage to get some toys one evening because there were bats there. No, they weren’t mean bats. But they probably would be if you woke them up.
Instead of Aunt Mode, I found myself back in the familiar territory known as Big Sister Mode. It is a mode in which you press your advantages. When your sibling is seventeen years younger than you, however, that is really easy to do, and also makes you a bad person. I was never a predatory sort of big sister, mind you. My tyranny never went further than the occasional clumsy manipulation, usually something along the lines of, “Let’s have a race to see who can finish her cookie first. Go! Ok, you win. Hey, look how much cookie I still have. Ha, ha.” Etc. Repeat as necessary until either your sibling’s memory or her motor skills are sufficiently developed to render the game ineffectual or dangerous. In any event, yeah. I discovered that for me, a baby was a bad idea not for the usual reasons, but because I would probably end up competing with it, the consequences of which are too dire to even imagine.
Now that nearly a month has elapsed since February 14th, I’ll venture to say that I don’t know why anyone bothers to get worked up about Valentine’s Day. I measure holidays by the variety and amount of candy that you are encouraged to eat on them and the amount of work or school they get you out of. It’s a poor excuse for a holiday that fails you on both of those accounts. (Arbor Day, I’m looking in your direction.) I know Candy Conversation Hearts have their devotees, but I for one am not impressed by a candy that comes across as emotionally needy, although it is true that Conversation Hearts have become much less effusive in recent years. Hearts from not too long ago said things like “SWEET THANG” and “MARRY ME,” which are a far cry from “FAX ME,” which is what this latest, more guarded generation of Candy Hearts would prefer us to do. And as far as I can tell, no number is given, making even this impersonal, perfunctory contact impossible.
I don’t even know much about the origins of Valentine’s Day. The part of my brain which heard and remembered the tale of St. Valentine (and everyone has had the story explained to them at least once) now stores the lyrics to Fat Bottomed Girls. I thus find it impossible to reflect on the true meaning of Valentine’s Day and why it is important for us to show our devotion to loved ones and Hallmark executives.
I suppose that your feelings about Valentine’s Day often stem from your earliest encounters with it, and mine were always fairly innocuous. Until I reached the age where I was supposed to have found someone else to love me on February 14th, our parents gave my sister and me candy, taking advantage of an opportunity between Christmas and Easter to shower us with affection and chocolate that they would have to help us finish.
Then there were the Valentines. Since the Law of Kindergarten stated that you could not give something to one person unless you had “enough for the whole class,” I was generally forced to make Valentines not only for my very exclusive group of First Best Friends, but for the kids I hated as well. Not to mention the many children I felt nothing for. Sometimes I made them by hand, sometimes I bought them pre-packaged and signed my name at the bottom in cursive, but either way, my seemingly magnanimous gesture was often fraught with subtle details which indicated, in my judgement, the social status of the recipient. Mary, my spelling partner, got the heart trimmed with lace and covered with glitter that said, “Love,” while Lucas got the misprinted Care Bear card in which Tenderheart Bear looks as though he has a fishing-pole sticking out of his head and six eyes. Lucas was a mouth-breather.
My family did host a Valentine’s Day party one year when I was about seven, which was a glorified excuse for my mother to put me in patent-leather shoes and a party dress. She liked doing that. As usual, the entire class was invited. The only memory I have of that party is that George, one of the kids who wouldn’t have come had I been in charge of the guest list, showed up with his dad and an extravagant (at least in my mind) present for me. It was a small candy-filled mug with “I LOVE YOU” printed on the side. I assumed from it that George did in fact love me, and treated him with nothing but scorn from then on. I knew how to play the game.
Toward the end of the summer I took an aluminum baseball bat on a Trailways bus and no one, including the driver, gave either of us a second glance. I took that as an indication of how far this country has come and then gone back again in terms of heightened security for travelers. I can remember a time late last fall when my fellow passengers and I had our baggage searched and were questioned fiercely by security before we were permitted to board a Peter Pan bus out of Albany. They demanded to know whether I had any guns or knives. “No? Razors? No? Well, what about fingernail clippers?” This last one surprised me. I didn’t in fact have any, but even if I had, what sort of damage could I possibly have done with them? How do you threaten someone with fingernail clippers? “Pull this bus over. Don’t mess with me, I’ll clip you.” Certainly you could injure someone with them, but only…very…slowly. The in-bus movie that trip was My Father the Hero, a romantic comedy starring Gerard Depardieu as a father who must play the part of his underage daughter’s lover so she can impress a boy (although the boy who would be impressed by anyone’s dating Gerard Depardieu I certainly wouldn’t go near). It was halfway through this lighthearted, overtly incest-tinged romp-which was inescapably played on the bus’s speaker system, so that even those passengers who hadn’t brought headphones or rented them from the driver could enjoy the show-that I realized why security was so strict about passengers not having access to any sorts of harmful or sharp objects. They were only trying to protect us from ourselves. Had I had access to fingernail clippers, I could have inflicted much more bodily harm on myself in my efforts to distract myself from the movie. My only other explanation for the fact that no one batted an eye at me as I clutched my menacing travel accessory is to take it as further
proof that, as far as appearance goes, I am about as non-threatening as it gets. On the threatening scale, I am ranked just below yogurt. And not the kind with active cultures, either. The kind with listless, inactive ones. The state of being congenitally nonthreatening (cases are also referred to as having a high “wuss-factor”) does have its plus sides. My ability to do well in card games where looking innocent helps you do well is slightly increased, although when that slight increase is coupled with my incompetence at card games, I just about break even. Perhaps this is why running has become my sport of choice; it works with my wussy appearance, rather than against it. As a person who naturally looks intimidated, I appear much more in my element when running away than I do standing firm, clutching a bat and staring straight ahead, my knees defiantly touching.
I was one of those children who had an enormous enthusiasm for dogs and cats and was unfortunately allergic to both. Whenever it was possible to play with a dog or a cat I did so. It takes an enormous amount of dedication (and an enormous lack of self-control) to play with something that consistently and without fail gives you a severe allergic reaction. I played with furry animals until my sneezes echoed to the cold, uncaring skies, and the tears in my itchy, watery eyes mingled with real tears of regret that I could not have this much fun all the time. More than anything in the world I wanted a puppy, and I asked for one every Christmas. I got a sister.
Looking back, I don’t think a real animal could have lived up to my expectations, anyway. I wanted a playmate, a confidant, and a licensed therapist all rolled into a big furry package that never shed or smelled like a wet dog. I was determined that my dog, when I got one, would be courageous and faithful like Old Yeller and have the wit of Snoopy, the soulful, melancholy brown eyes of a Pound Puppy, and the British sophistication of the two parent dogs from 101 Dalmatians (the cartoon, not the live-action version). On top of this, I had no real experience with owning a dog, and my subconscious assumption was that they waited, patient and immobile like stuffed animals, for you to play with them and take care of their basic needs when you felt like it. One of the more inventive of my many How To Get A Puppy When Your Parents Won’t Let You Get One schemes involved letting the puppy live in a large cardboard box on the New York City street outside my apartment building, where it would be taken care of and properly watched over by kind, attentive strangers and passers-by.
I couldn’t have a puppy, but I could have goldfish, my parents said. I sure could. And I had goldfish, off and on, for many years. I discovered early on that I received precious little emotional fulfillment from taking care of a creature with a six-second memory and no awareness of my existence. Not that I didn’t try. I named my fish, I took care of them, I watched them swim. It’s pretty much all you can do, though I somehow continued to expect more—and to be disappointed. A short but eloquent poem that I wrote at the age of five perfectly expressed my feelings of disillusionment at the deep and profound bond that failed to develop between me and any of my goldfish. It went:
I have a little fishI love her very muchBut she doesn’t care.
The thought that I wrote that poem still troubles me. My parents think it’s hilarious.
I have been giving this topic a lot of thought, because last week I bought another fish. I haven’t owned one since early on in high school. My motivations have changed, I reasoned. This is a frivolous purchase; I’m getting a little blue fighting fish because it looks pretty and it will jazz up my room. I won’t even name it. Look how far I’ve come!
Perhaps I’m a glutton for punishment. Maybe I like my feelings unrequited. But I really think it’s going to be different this time. Just now when I looked over at my fish, I could have sworn it gave me a look like it understood. At least, for six seconds.
I can’t lie to myself anymore about the work I’m going to do today/tonight/when I am steady enough to walk again. These lies poison my soul and irritate my friends. Each time I stand up from dinner and announce that my plans tonight are to get a little reading done, maybe study some flashcards, then turn in early, an angel loses its wings. Or at least gets heartburn. This cannot go on.
My latest endeavor is to have a completely open, honest relationship with at least myself. I know damn’ well that I am not going to walk into my room, pick up a book and read for an hour, though it’s what desperately needs to be done. I won’t go on the Internet and immediately begin my research on the history of the tent.
No, when I get to my room, before getting started on that six-page paper, I call the friend who is in the class with me to complain about the length and difficulty of the assignment. When I get off the phone, I tidy up my desk. I feed my fish. I water my plants. I wonder why living things that need my attention receive it only when I’m putting off doing work. Perhaps my priorities are a little off. At this stage I should only have children if I plan to have the kind of high-pressure job that makes feeding them become an attractive alternative to meeting deadlines. So, the paper. Right. First, better make some Ramen. And a mix tape…
I now assume that carrying a book with me like a security blanket everywhere I go is equivalent to reading it. Consequently I lug books to places where reading is at the least inappropriate and at most impossible. I have sat in darkened friends’ rooms and watched movies with Sociology readings in my lap. I have gone to parties in the Old Gym with Crime and Punishment tucked under my arm. My books become battered and worn from their constant travels but still remain very much unread.
It is my hope that being brutally honest with myself about the ways in which I am actually going to spend my time, rather than the ways in which I have the best intentions of spending it, will shame me into better study habits. Probably, though, it will just shame me.
I Heard Tell 