Worthy Things of Late

10:00pm on a Sunday night. The windows are open and the door is open to the summer dark of night, the sprinklers are on, and I am in a blogging mood.  Sean is watching something on the telly and a sweet folksy song was playing. When i asked him what it was he said, "it's actually the background music for a silent cooking show..."  which leads me to all sorts of half-hearted questions that will probably remain a mystery.

I did ask him why he liked cooking shows and he had this to say:

I like seeing people whisk, i like seeing the countertops. how they dress a plate. I like it all.  Usually i like how they talk about food too but here it's all in silence. 

"I like seeing people whisk."   :-D

In case you're curious, the song was Thou Mayest, by Tom Eddy. In fact, it's probably best you listen to it while you read the rest of this post to get the full effect.

I had a dream last night of an acquaintance and though the details are sketchy, it was a lengthy dream and feelings were strong and have lingered which always makes me feel weird all the ensuing day long. Like I have somehow formed a relationship with this person, but it's a fabrication and I'm made to experience the residuals, and it's weird.

There's a mosquito on my computer screen and for a while there I thought the mouse was going berserk. I even wiggled it around a bit-- "c'mon, whattsa matter with you."  And then my mouse sprouted wings and up and flew away.  Silliness. 

There has been silence from the next room for a while and suddenly Sean just exclaimed, (in the way Sean might "exclaim")

"holy cow. I just learned so much about pies."  - That's a decent contender for the title of this post.

If you ever want to drink a gelatinous blob for breakfast, put an avocado in your smoothie. It makes the texture sooo weird. So globular and shiny.  I am reminded of when I ate an avocado popsicle and it now makes a lot of sense. It would be perfect for popsicle consistency. Know what else it would be good for? Pudding. It looks just like pudding. And then i looked online for pudding recipes using avocado and they abound. Someone make it and tell me how it is.

Speaking of breakfast foods, every once in a while I get a hankering for muffins. (As you may know.) As many people do when making recipes, I like to add things or adjust the recipe a little.   Generally, any time I make a muffin recipe I like to add "single-handedly eat entire batch through the course of the morning day" to the list of instructions.  I shall add this to )en's Cookbook.  

Sorry for those links. I think I'm just now realizing how annoying it is to read blog posts with a million links in it. Actually I think I've known for a while that it's annoying, i just forgot to apply that to me.  

Back to baking:  Lately my favorite thing to eat has been a microwaved brownie in a mug. And now I've moved to single-portioned muffins in a ramekin in the toaster oven. I've wanted a toaster oven for a long time so finally I got one for Sean for his birthday--ha.  It's so great. Toasts, broils, bakes things up to like 450 degrees.  But I love my ramekins muffins. Ramuffin? Muffikin?    
Either of those is solid. 

Sean just wandered in, wearing a shirt with blue palm trees and said, "Whew... this lady just made spaghetti sauce from scratch and it was crazy." 

I recently attended a writers conference for an entire Friday. They provided meals and snacks and I went to about six or seven classes. Most of them weren't quite my area of focus. They were geared toward fiction writing and fiction writer I am not. As you may gather, the personal essay is more my jam. I sat at a table of other writers, one being a 14-year old girl who is into fantasy and mythology (who isn't), and who I loved, and an older gent. I can't remember if it was him or someone else i was talking to but i explained that I just don't have room in my head for making up brand new stories. Room/ability.  But why should i spend time creating an entirely new character when i have the best one I know? ME.  This probably makes me sound like an egoist, but maybe not for a personal essayist? 

Just now, Sean, peering around the corner: 

"I just saw a fried rice episode which showed me i know absolutely nothing about fried rice.  They don't even cook the eggs. It's all DONE and then they stir in the egg. 

JEN: Oh yeah? And the egg cooks?

SEAN: Not really, it's just like an egg sauce.

JEN: Really? Don't people like a little scrambley egg in there?

SEAN: I don't know. I make fried rice based on what i've seen in Japanese restaurants where they do it in front of you.  This was Taiwanese style. It looked good, but a little different.

But the conference was fun.  I wrote down a few notes in my notebook.  I'll include them here: 

1. -inadvertently flirted with the man in charge of door prizes when I said, "may I just say, you look very nice today" when I found out his duties.  I don't think he understood but he seemed very flattered.

2.  Each presenter introduced themself with a word of their choosing. A single word.  Brave, wonder, perspective, chocolate. One person said "sesquipid" and then proceeded to spell it, like in a bee, which I thought was clever.  I thought about it and, my word:

Engage.

3. I sat in various classes and by far my favorite was the Sci-fi class. Not because I have any dreams of being a science fiction writer but because I LOVE SCIENCE FICTION.  I got real excited sitting there watching the super-nerd teacher who was like the scientist guy on The Simpsons but with black spiky hair streaked with white, like a skunk. He was an actual physicist and wrote things for NASA and taught at Columbia and whatnot. I sat in the front and just soaked in all the nerdism. He talked about all the ways to use sci-fi, like space stuff, future stuff-- if you write future stuff, the things you MUST include, like how does this society eat? What is the food like? How does one thing impact the whole economy? Like the modes of transportation?  I loved it all.  So when he said, "it's like.. in the book you read about Spock's people, the Vulcans and how they used to kill each other just using their minds, which is why they had to work so hard to stifle emotion..."   I yelled out, "WHAA?? Are you kidding?  That's my takeaway from this class! I had no idea!"  

And then later I asked him stupid questions like, "what's your favorite science..thing..to use? In your writing."  Ha ha. I heard some snickers in the class because it was a dumb-a question but i don't care, I was so happy to be there.  He said it was artificial intelligence. When i asked him what was one he was afraid of, like how people are afraid of robots taking over the world, he said disease.  And we talked a bit more and people offered their two cents, about why Dr. Who was great or wasn't, and which version I should start watching, (I publicly asked the class after I confessed I had missed that boat), the teacher and I had a bit more back-and-forth at the end of the class which ended with what is turning out to be my favorite go-to quote: 

"engineers are so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they don't stop to think if they SHOULD,"  after which I thanked the teacher and exited the class with glee.  Definitely the highlight of my day there. 

This blog post is a product of my rusty brain groaning to get moving, begging for me to dig into myself and fling out some words. I haven't been doing it often and it shows. So thanks for bearing with me this blog night of nights and I hope you found something worth while up there stuck in the muck.