Syllabus #231

Today is the best day of the year - Finnish Bread Day.  As soon as I click 'publish' on this bad boy, I'm getting right into the kitchen right over to a different part of the kitchen to get started. It's kind of hard to be downstairs in my house and not be in the kitchen.  But I digress.  

My grandmother has eaten this bread at Christmas basically every one of the 90 years of her life.  We used to make it together every December 23rd so we would have a loaf to enjoy on Christmas morning.  Now, I need to bake it earlier than usual so that Ye Olde USPS can deliver it to her before Christmas Eve.

Iowa was an excellent teacher of this craft.  Over the years, she gradually let me take over more of the process until I was doing most of the work.  I say let, and maybe she was strategically scaffolding and building my confidence, but I think the last couple times we made bread together, she was also glad not to be standing at the counter, punching and kneading dough.  

The bread I make alone somehow never tastes as good as the bread Iowa and I made together.  However, and I know this is blasphemy to admit, I think my loaves are prettier.  To be fair, I'm working with an oven that was manufactured more recently than the Reagan administration and therefore generally maintains a consistent temperature, and the pan I use is slightly bigger so the loaves are less crowded.  I'll never tell her that, though.

Finnish Bread circa 2015

Finnish bread, 2022

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The worst gifts given, received, or witnessed by Slate staff.  I'm sure I've given some real duds over the years.  I'm not a great gift-giver.  Sometimes I'll have a flash of brilliance and come up with something really thoughtful and unexpected, but most of the time, no matter how much mental energy I put into it, I just end up hoping the intended recipient will furnish an explicit wishlist.  Sorry to everyone who's ever received a well-intended flop from me.  

I come by my tone-deafness honestly, though, if you believe in thoughtlessness being hereditary.  Not that I want to claim any legacy of personality from the paternal side of my family.  But I once witnessed my dad's daughter-from-his-first-marriage* open a package of Christmas gifts from my dad's mother, a woman I'll call a grandmother for the sake of verbal expediency**.  

I recall being about 10 in this story, so let's say it was 1995ish, which puts the gift opener around 20 or so.  I'm in a small, stuffy apartment and everyone is probably smoking except me.  I mostly hate every single one of them for that, and there's a good chance I'm reading a Goosebumps book and hoping to sink so far into the itchy plaid couch cushions that I disappear completely.  

But then the most wonderful thing happens.  This daughter-from-his-first-marriage unwraps a bar of soap.  Okay, normal enough, except this soap is RANK.  It smells like a funeral home and the aroma cuts through the plastic packaging and the wall of cigarette smoke to hit me on the other side of the room.  Then she unwraps another bar of soap.  And another.  Beneath the bars of soap, she unearths another small rectangular package.  Surely not more soap?  Oh no, dear reader.  Finally, something a young 20-something of the mid-90s can truly enjoy.  Cassette tapes!  What did senile old Helen think this modern young woman wanted to rock out to?  Janet Jackson?  Mary J. Blige?  Rod Stewart?

Wrong!  They were...exercise tapes!  On cassette!  Not VHS.  Just plain old for-your-ears-only audio cassette tapes.  Nothing says, I love you granddaughter and want to cultivate your healthy body image like a gift that tells you to get off your ass and sweat it out, then hit the showers 'cause ya dirty.

*I strongly identify as an Only Child and refuse to refer to these children-from-his-first-marriage as siblings.  They are not.  

**Much less grandmother and more senile woman I met a few times, who always called me hon because I'm not sure she actually knew my name, and who thought I was about 6 years old until the day she died, even though I was in college by that point.

In praise of flipping off your friends' doorbell cameras.  That's an idea I can get behind, much like taking a close-up shot of your elbow-pit on a friend's disposable camera so when they get it developed they have to wonder if it's an ass.

Analog Reading:

This was a banner week for reading!

Finished The Heat Will Kill You First.  The author tried to end on an optimistic note, but all I got out of it was, we're gonna be hot, and we're all gonna die.

Read Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson.  After reading about dying from climate change, it was fun to read about the fake problems of 1-percenters in New York City, and how strange it can be to enter that world through marriage after growing up working class.

Read The Guest by Emma Cline.  This was an interesting choice to follow Pineapple Street, as it follows a darker path to attaching yourself to members of elite society.  The protagonist is a 22-year-old sex worker with a drug and alcohol problem, who has worn out her welcome everywhere she goes due to her increasing desperation and decreasing grip on reality.

Just started to read John Updike's sequel to the Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit Remembered.  It feels like going to a high school reunion, catching up on all the hot goss about who became successful against all odds, who had a glow-up, who really let themselves go, who wasted all their potential.  After reading all 4 of the original books at the beginning of this year, it seems fitting to finish out the year with this one, that picks up in 2000, 10 years after Rabbit at Rest.