Syllaus #206

We've been birthdaying real hard over here.  Most years, I hate my birthday with as much passion as a severe wave of depression can manage, and sometimes I end the day crying on the floor of my closet.  It's real cute.  This year I was bracing myself for a deluge, because it was a perfect storm of me having raging PMS on a rainy day that also happened to be my annual reminder of the futility of existence.  Instead, I just ate my feelings at Redheaded Stranger and then Andy took me out to a ballgame but did not buy me peanuts or cracker jacks.  He did buy me a beer, although we are one of those couples with fully merged finances, so technically we bought me a beer.  Nice try, though.

Then I was supposed to drive out to the old homestead to visit the parentals, but I made it a quarter mile down the block before my low tire pressure light came on and I found a nail in my tread.  Shout out to the Dickerson Pike Tire Barn for patching my tire and having me back on the road 2 hours later.  When I finally arrived, there was cake:

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This is really a bop.  

Long live Samantha Irby, never stop writing about your diarrhea.  

Not to be one of those commenters on a recipe where I say, great recipe, but I changed the following 87 things, but, uh, I did that.  I made Smitten Kitchen's roasted pear and chocolate scones, but I used peaches instead of pears and did not use any chocolate, and as a result of the peaches being so juicy, I increased the flour to 2 cups.  Also, I did not shape the dough into a big disc and cut it into wedges, I just made them drop-style.  Overall, great recipe!  5 out of 5, would make my completely different version again.  I'm sure Deb's is great, but I had a glut of peaches I was trying to use up in a fun way, and this required 1 bowl and ingredients I already had on hand.  

Analog Reading:

Finished my old pal Steve King's novella collection, Different Seasons.  The Body was great, and now I need to go watch Stand By Me.  Andy continues to be shocked by movies that literally everyone on the earth has seen but me, and that is one of them.  The other night we were at Redheaded Stranger, sitting at the bar eating tacos and tots, and they had a Keanu Reaves movie on the TV.  I turned to him and stage whispered, "Is this The Matrix?  I've never seen it."  If we hadn't been in public, I'm pretty sure he would have poured his drink on me.  Reader, it was, in fact, The Matrix.  

The last story in the collection, The Breathing Method, was a bit unusual in several respects for a Stephen King short story/novella, one of which being that that it was actually short.  It left a lot of questions hanging in the air when it ended rather abruptly

Syllabus #205

Happy Father's Day to uh, my mom I guess?  And to all the good dudes out there.  And maybe Andy, too.  He's a decent cat dad.  Dog dad, not as stellar.  He did admit to googling "how to play with your dog" when we first adopted Charlie, but to be fair, that was more of a Charlie problem.  Guy is 10 and still doesn't understand fetch.  We throw the ball for him and he just looks at us like we're a coupla Gretchen Wieners, and he trots over to the ball, flops down, and starts gnawing on it, like, y'all, stop trying to make fetch happen.  Aside from that, he is a Very Good Boy, but man, it's hard to trust a dog that doesn't fetch.  Like, are you really a dog or are you an extremely anxious, withered old man in a fur suit?

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Representation matters!  You know what doesn't matter/is very dumb?  Dying on the hill of insisting that fictional/mythical characters have to be a specific race and can't possibly be reimagined to be otherwise, when they are, in fact, imaginary to begin with.

See also:  People have no chill!  

I had a bounty of strawberries from the farmer's market, and I wanted to do more than just shovel them into my gaping maw unceremoniously, but I also didn't have sufficient motivation to schlep to the store for heavy cream or start futzing around with cold butter and a hot oven, so I found Joy the Baker's recipe for strawberry salad with cucumber and feta.  I made the salad dressing, too, and it was aces.

Analog Reading:

Finished Samantha Irby's Quietly Hostile.  Man she's funny.  No notes.  10/10.

Also finished Apt Pupil,  Stephen King's novella about a sick and twisted entanglement between a child psychopath and a Nazi war criminal living in disguise in 1970s California.  Now I'm starting The Body, which was made into the movie Stand By Me, which I'm realizing I have never seen.  No shocker there.  I spent most of my childhood rewatching Captain Ron and the Ernest movies when I could have been watching all the other classics, too.

Syllabus #204

 A Day Late and a Dollar Short, or, the title of my next memoir.

Coming to you on a Monday instead of a customary Sunday, because, surprise, I'm religious now and I needed to take yesterday off to worship the lord.  

Jay kay.  I can't even claim to be sacrilegious because up until five minutes ago I thought it was sac-religious, and I thought it just meant those people who are really passionate about taking their own bags to the grocery store.  You know, because some weirdos call it a sack?  Bless their hearts. 

None of this is true!  I just wasn't home all weekend.  We dropped the N, added a superfluous silent e, and spent the weekend in Asheville.  We spent the weekend with one of Andy's good friends and his girlfriend, who showed us a great time in West Asheville (which is like the East Nashville of Asheville, but, hot take, is better/grittier/crunchier).  We went white water rafting on the French Broad, where we probably didn't get e. coli, but just to be on the safe side, we Dresden Fire Bombed our insides with hot chicken afterwards.  Of course.  

Leaves Nashville, immediately seeks hot chicken

They actually had Quorn ChiQin* tendies, so I was able to get in on the action, too.  I ordered the second hottest spice level and the guy at the counter asked me if I knew what I was getting into.  I told him we are from Nashville and it's not my first hot chicken rodeo.  They really pasted the spice rub on like they were spackling a hole in the wall, perhaps to punish me for my arrogance.  If they did, jokes on them, because it was delicious and damn, it was fire in every sense of the word.

*I get that you can't just spell it 'chicken' because everyone will be confused, but that is the most offensive bastardization of the spelling I have yet to witness.

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Beige flags.  God I must be throwing up beige flags every minute of every day.  I get the sentiment, but beige is not the color I would have chosen to illustrate the concept.  Weird, non-threatening behaviors are what make people interesting!  What about a neon green flag, or a high-viz orange flag?  Or a tie-dyed flag?  If you're jumping into the dating pool to find a khaki-wearing normie with no endearingly strange predilections, you should probably just seek an arranged marriage with someone whose mommy still irons and folds their undies.

Analog Reading:

Finished Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait.  I liked it!  I was skeptical going in, as I had read a couple reviews by readers who found it boring.  There were some very slow parts, and it's true that not a lot of action happened, but it was psychologically interesting and the world-building was compelling.  The twist ending made it all worthwhile!  You think you know how the book is going to end from the first few pages in, and you think  you're just working backwards to find out how and why it ends that way.  Hold onto your butts, people, it's not gonna be quite what you think.

Now reading the highly anticipated Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby.  It is nothing less than hilarious, as usual.  Even her essay about her unironic love of Dave Matthews had me lol'ing, and I can't friggin stand Dave Matthews.  

Also reading Stephen King's novella collection, Different Seasons, which contains Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, The Body, and The Breathing Method.  The first three have all obviously been adapted for the screen - The Body became the movie Stand by Me.  So far I've read the first story and part of the 2nd, and they are just so so good.  The movie version of Shawshank is so faithful in tone and content to the original text.  I feel like I need to watch it again because it's been well over a decade and I think before I read the novella, I was conflating parts of Shawshank with elements of Slingblade, which, really, couldn't be more different outside of being set inside a prison and starting with the letter S.  

Syllabus #203

The days are blurring together in that pleasant way of a summer untethered to the constraints of a regular schedule.  This is one of the rare summers in my life as an educator where I haven't been a) doing additional coursework to get certified, b) moving, or c) working multiple additional jobs.  I just have one, mind-numbingly simple but occasionally physically grueling job that I do 1-2 days a week.  And the rest of the time?  Well honestly, so far I've mostly been cleaning and putting my life in order, but I assume I'll get to the part where I spend a whole day relaxing.  Maybe.

13th Anniversary Nightcap 

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I want to endorse this brownie recipe, but I will decline to comment here on whether you should just use 4 ounces of regular degular butter or follow the recipe as written.  Or you might, I dare say, quadruple the amount of, shall we say, nonconventional butter, if you are, in fact following that recipe as written.  I will say that these are the richest, fudgiest, from-scratch brownies I have ever encountered in my life, and it's a good thing there are, ahem, baked-in reasons to adhere to a strict portion size, or I'd be eating the whole pan in one sitting.

The real problem with dads as old as DeNiro and Pacino - you mean aside from the pruny old man balls of it all?  

We watched part* of Sarah Silverman's new special, and she is a delight.  She has obviously made a deal with the devil to halt the aging process.  Just to put things in perspective, she is two years older than Dave Chappelle.  

*only part, because apparently I am Fall-Asleep-30-Minutes-Into-a-Movie-or-Show Years Old.

Another book roundup!  I'm not big on romance, crime, or beach reads, but the thriller and historical fiction sections have a few promising titles.  

Rest in Power, Tina Turner.  If I was from a town called Nutbush, I woulda written more than just one song about that, though, just saying.    

Analog Reading:

Did finally finish Poverty by America.  Spoiler alert, people aren't poor because they're lazy or bad!  Can you even imagine?  Turns, out, it IS a zero sum game.  APPARENTLY, people are poor because the rich people in charge give them a limited suite of terrible choices to make them stay poor, so the rich people can stay rich and keep gettin' richer.  

Now reading Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait.  She's very good at world-building and making historical time periods come alive, this one being 16th century Italy.  Beyond that, though, the plot itself is a little slow.