Domestic Monday: Cakes and Ale Edition

Everyone copes with stress in different ways; I happen to bake out my feelings. Why? Because baking has rules. You follow them, and order (cookies, muffins, cakes) is produced from chaos. This is unlike cooking, where chaos appears whenever it pleases.

Last Sunday I baked honey spice madeleines. Hazard a guess at my emotional state.

If you guessed fraught, you're correct! This caused me to make a few mistakes while baking. I used salted instead of unsalted butter. I chilled the batter in the fridge instead of letting it relax room temperature. I filled the madeleine pans too high.

Magically, they turned out just fine, and I probably have this beast of a cookbook to thank for that miracle. In the Sweet Kitchen is about the size of a bible, with a suggested retail price of $60, except I found it at a book sale for $3. It's out of print now, but if you find a secondhand copy, buy it. Half of the book is foolproof recipes for elegant yet satisfying desserts, while the other half covers baking theory and pantry essentials. You could also use it as an emergency step stool in a pinch--it's kind of a brick.

As for the beer, I decided to head out of the province this week. Or rather, BC came to me. Through whatever mysterious process the LCBO uses to stock its shelves (Why are there suddenly six kinds of Mikkeller beer?), Phillips beer is back on the shelves. Or at least the Amnesiac Double IPA is. As you would expect, the hops aren't shy in this beer (tastes of citrus, pine and pineapple) but there's still enough maltiness (toasty!) that it didn't make me pucker. Oh BC. I miss you. I'll come visit, and I'll bring madeleines.

Book Pile for November 20, 2014

1. Something I Will Read: Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood, on this Kobo. Or maybe some SciFi. I haven't picked my e-reader up in weeks (I tend to go through print-only phases) and it's probably time to make sure this still works.
2. Something I Am Reading: Mark Avery's A Message from Martha. It's about extinction, the "Martha" coming from the name of the last passenger pigeon.
3. Non-Fiction I Recently Read: Emily Horne and Tim Maly's The Inspection House: An Impertinent Guide to Modern Surveillance
4. Fiction I Recently Read: Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer's All the Broken Things

Canada Reads Thinkpieces

1. A Book I Did Not Like
The last time I paid much attention to Canada Reads was back in 2011. I was still living in BC, in an apartment that didn't have Internet, or a real oven. Listening made me feel connected to the east I had left, at least until some of the panelists started saying asinine things about graphic novels.

So it made me feel connected for all of an episode. Yes, this was the season where Jeff Lemire's Essex County was a contender, at least until Ali Velshi reminded us all that it's not "Canada Looks at Pictures." Well, okay then. Apparently, it's "Canada Reads Deeply Unfunny Funny Books" instead.

Yes, I finally got around to reading the eventual winner, The Best Laid Plans, except I did so three years too late. I should have waited longer, preferably forever. By chapter two, I had started to hate the narrator, by midpoint the book, and by the end I mostly just loathed myself for being able just to put the book down and walk away. The hero (one Angus McLintock) lurches from unlikely political triumph to triumph, layering the Scottish tics on so thick he basically ends up as Scrooge McDuck with an MP's office. While Angus has too much personality (he plays chess, is a stickler for proper grammar, builds hovercraft etc etc) the narrator has none. At least that's an improvement over the narrator's love interest. All she gets to do is talk about Canada's Senate (bad) and have elided sex with the narrator (presumably worse). When it comes to earnest Canadian content, my personal hell would probably be to listen to this on audiobook while my eyes are propped open, Clockwork Orange-style, to watch Murdoch Mysteries on loop. Gah!

2. A Person I Don't Like Now
Because I am a generous, sharing sort, I then complained loudly about a four-year-old book to anyone who would listen. Since this period coincided with the ongoing  Jian Ghomeshi story, the conversation would often shift to the ex-Canada Reads host.

"Martha," my brother told me, "you should really take down that comic."

My brother was referring to this comic, which was a half-joke on autobiographical indie comics, and a half-joke on myself. If you don't want to subject yourself to my art, it chronicles my failed attempt to talk books with CBC's Shelagh Rogers, and how that ended many dreams including that of producing the next CBC host, Banff Hunter-Ghomeshi.

Yes, there was a time that I found Jian to be sort of attractive, instead of just a fucked-up abuser enabled by the CBC and our prevalent rape culture. I'm not going to pretend that it didn't happen. And though I can say that I soured on him about two years after reading that comic, it wasn't because of the rumours. It also says something about how common they must have been if even I, the least connected person in Toronto, heard something eventually. I had just grown to dislike his interviews, and so when I heard that he liked younger women, and was far too creepy in pursuing him, I wasn't even concerned. Instead, I shrugged, like "Can you expect more from a man with that much cultural capital?" Of course I should have been, and I should have expected nothing more or less than the basic requirement of consent.

3. What I Read Now
That's all I have to say about Jian Ghomeshi, not because there isn't more to it, but because so much of it has already been covered in so many ways. Why women don't report, how our conversation about that in the strict terms of stigma ignores other factors, why people believed him, what the CBC knew, what they hid, the political economy of the situation, and even the ethics of his lawyers. I collected many of these articles for my friend in a spreadsheet on Friday, so she could use them in an article for her legal clinic. The spreadsheet contained dates, titles, authors, publications and key topics. I had to stop when I reached fifty entries. It was only a few hours of work, and more articles could have easily been found.

As a feminist, I had already been reading about many of these issues, but without the specifics of Jian. That may be why I feel so burned out right now. At least it's made people talk about sexual asault and reporting, I tell myself; at least more people now say the word "rape" when they talk about Bill Cosby. Even the prospect of a Ghomeshi-free Canada Reads is promising. But I still worry about the others that are still out there, and if we'll talk and write about them the same way when we find out.

Pillow Blog: Assorted Pieces of Canadian Culture That Almost Make Me Patriotic

In the tradition of the Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, here's a Pillow Blog: an observational list on some subject or another. 

1. Léolo: This movie is everything Canadian cinema should be, but rarely is: big, bold, a little grotesque. Instead we usually get reel after reel of earnestness. With each year that passes since Jean-Claude Lauzon's untimely death, I worry a little more about Léolo's legacy - give it a viewing and save me from this anxiety.
2. Beautiful Losers: Leonard Cohen, as walking, croaking, bagel-buying myth can rub me the wrong way, probably because the fact of his talent is so evident. It's annoying. Anyway, I read Beautiful Losers decades after it was published, when I was still only 19, and still knew it was cooler than I could ever hope to be.
3. Pas de Deux: Perhaps some of Norman McLaren's other work is more groundbreaking, but Pas de Deux is arresting in its beauty. Somehow through the repetition of ballet dancers and their bodies do you find their form and purity.
4. "Raven and the First Men," Bill Reid: There's something about including a piece of indigenous art on a list that includes both "Canadian" and "patriotic" in the title that makes me stop; it makes those words sound hollow. As they should, I think. Perhaps what I'm listing here are the things, made within the borders that set out a concept called Canada, that make me feel honoured to share that space with them.
5. Canadian Heritage Minutes: Here's a tonal shift from my last entry. And let's talk about earnestness! Still, as commercials for Canadian history, CHMs have taught the subject as well as most middle school teachers can manage, or at least those I encountered at the Upper Grand District School Board. The Sam Steele one is indisputably the best.
6. Joni Mitchell: I listen to "Both Sides Now" and open one can of beer. Then "River" and I'm drinking two. If I make it to "A Case of You," I'll be finished all six that night, so don't disturb me before 11am tomorrow.

Domestic Sunday: Turkey Day Edition

Happy (Canadian) Thanksgiving! I hope your dinner chart looked much like mine: 33% turkey, 33% stuffing, 24% mashed potatoes, 10% carrots, and then all the gravy you want poured all over that. With the gravy, that's more than 100%, but Thanksgiving is about the two G's - gratitude and gluttony - so why not give 110% to your food?

In the ensuing tryptophan haze (urban myth), I nearly forgot that I had planned to bring back Domestic Whateverday to the blog on Sunday. Perhaps barely Monday morning still counts?

Unfortunately, the domestic craft portion of the post is not all that inspiring. In fact, it's a bag of fabric:

The plan is for this to become a new quilt for my new apartment. That was also my plan when I moved into the new apartment. At the end of June.

While that photo may not be that inspiring, I assure you that I've done something over the past three months. Behold:

Why, that's like six finished squares, and a few more than are halfway there! I only need to sew about 75 more, sew those together into the quilt top, get the batting and the backing, quilt all that together, and...

Whoah ho ho, it's beer! Let's move on to the other domestic part of Domestic Sunday, the brew. This is the Country Bumpkin from Niagara Oast House Brewers. It's probably much lighter than it appears in the photo, which was taken inside of a King Street bar that has its dimmer switch perpetually set to "smoky 17th century coffeehouse", ie, dark. This disconcerts me in the same way that a casino's censure of natural light bewilders a gambler, so that I probably spend more money than I should, and then act like a cave salamander when I finally head out into the bright and irritating light of day.

Or so any "working lunch" there usually goes. At least this time I kept to one pint. I picked the Country Bumpkin because October is the time for pumpkin beer. Pumpkin beers seem to be coming under increasing criticism from beer folks, and I resent that, because they're often delicious. I also resent the distinct note of sexism I've started picking up, alongside the notes of clove and cinnamon in the beer. Even supporters will feebly celebrate pumpkin ale as, essentially, gateway craft beer for the ladies.

Yes, some pumpkin beers do taste a little too sweet, going heavily enough on the spice that they start to taste less like a beer, and more like a carbonated Pumpkin Spice Latte. And so people will extend their stereotypes of PSL drinkers to beer. But screw 'em. More beer for me, and even a dudely hophead should have few issues with the Country Bumpkin. It was low on the carbonation, and the expected pie spices were supported by the hint of something vegetal. It's worth checking out, both as a decent beer, and as a fine introduction to the style.

Protagitron: Editorial Assistant, With Kung Fu Changes Tracking Action!

Greetings from... almost a month after my last post! Good Lord. I didn't realize that the soggy post about crying at work would remain front and centre for over a month, or else I would have written about a book cover, or my cat, or anything else to push it down the page.

This September I turned 27, wound up with a different job at work, signed up for two continuing education classes, got some bad news, and bought a new bike. I'm now an editorial assistant, so it should be little surprise that one of the classes is for copyediting. The copyediting class is a humbling experience - I went through school when teaching the fundamentals of grammar was out of fashion. I've read enough that I can fake it sometimes, 'sensing' that things are wrong without being able to explain why. Now I have to face that my understanding of when to hyphenate compound words is quite shaky, best described as 'when it doubt, hyphenate.'

I also find myself quietly resentful of the online message board, which is full of people's well-articulated questions about cases and tenses, that is, well-articulated evidence that they probably aren't working 9-5 EVERY SINGLE DAMNED WEEKDAY.

Yeah, you heard me, "Ruth." Take five minutes away from the keyboard, sometime.

I think I will like copyediting though. Reading every word very slowly and constantly referring to the style guide capitalizes on my all-consuming anxiety. I also yearn for consistency, and have a certain megalomaniacal urge to turn chaos into order, so style guides are right in my wheelhouse. I'll just have to remember that I can't rewrite everything to sound like me: sentence fragments, caps lock, and chock full of puns.

The Waterworks: A Damp Geography of my Employment History

In recession-era 2009 I fell into the employment pool, with something that definitely sounded like a splat. Since then, I've had four full-time jobs, triple the number of job interviews, exponentially more job applications, and a brief part-time stint at a butcher shop on Roncesvalles, where I quickly became famous as the clumsiest person to ever work there. All of these jobs were a little different, but it didn't matter what city I was in, or the sort of work that I was doing. I always cried. 

I cried at desks, and I cried on park benches, but most of the time, I cried in bathrooms. 

Yesterday, I found myself in that most familiar place: trying to sniffle softly enough so that the person in the stall next to me wouldn't hear (horror!), try to investigate (no!), and then attempt to console me (I'll just drown myself in the toilet, thanks.) Sensing a pattern, I was forced to confront my own failings. 

Eh, no. That would have just made me cry harder. Instead I thought about all of the bathrooms I have cried in. 

First, there was the rather dingy affair of my first job. This will forever be known as "the porn job," though it was more of a writing gig and no cameras were ever, ever involved. Shared bathrooms are bad enough for crying - everyone must hear, but pretend not to know, your shame - but this one smelled of urine and was perpetually out of toilet paper. Colleagues would head down or up one floor just to crap in nicer surroundings. Clearly, not ideal. In fact, most of my crying was eventually done in a parkette across the street, the traffic of St. Laurent hypnotizing me back to calm. 

My next job, a publishing internship out in BC, was an improvement in both prestige and weeping areas. A floor above, in a barely tenanted area, was a solo bathroom. The ideal workplace cry, in the ideal bathroom. Unfortunately, with the next job, at a university bookstore, it was back to the stalls. Worse, these bathrooms were shared with the very customers I had to serve, and I didn't want to show any more weakness than I already had. A weakness probably shown by crying at my desk. Here's a platitude for you: Sometimes you don't need a bathroom to cry, because you carry the bathroom inside your heart.

The stalls have also followed me to my current occupation, where I work in sales and customer service at a publishing company. They are better than the other shared bathrooms I have known - cleaner the first, and customer-free compared to the third - but we share the floor with two other offices. So I am perpetually scared of roving bands of stray women, practising a kind of tissue terrorism with their sympathy and concern. 

I should let them in. But I would rather be alone behind the metal door, please and thank you (it's just some allergies!) Not just because I'm bothered when others see me cry, but because all the tears bother me. I feel like I've gone past the stereotype of the emotional working woman, crying in between bites of desk-drawer granola bars, and all the way back to something real: a girl, the tearful child I used to be, again reacting childishly to what is only a regular, and pretty manageable, life.

And so I always grab the rough brown paper towel (no matter the location, this has been constant), blow my nose, and get back to work. Because every time I hope this will be my last trip to this soggy geography, and at the very least: I've never had to cry it out in a port a potty.

Pillow Blog: Some Things I'll Miss About Tim's

Tim Horton's and Burger King might join forces. And though it's kind of like when Tim's and Wendy's did the same a few years ago, that doesn't stop it from being big news. For Canadian news, that is. The "man on the street" interviews seem mostly concerned with one thing: Would that mean Burger King takes over food operations at Tim's? Could extra large sodas and salty fries replace our double doubles and sugary donuts? Eh, probably not. Tim Horton's has its finger on the sluggish, cholesterol-choked pulse of Canada's food tastes. Still, if the worst did happen, here's what I would miss about our national coffee chain:

• Bagel BELTs. But only when hungover. And with some sort of cheese-covered specialty bagel. God, you're gross, but also suddenly sober. 
• Sour Cream Glazed Doughnuts. Here's the secret about Tim Horton's. They may put the date on the coffee pot, but you don't really know how long the doughnuts have been there. I once saw pumpkin spice 'nuts for sale at a Tim's. In March. However, the sour cream glazed doughnut is a reliable choice. The dough is already moister thanks to the sour cream, and the glaze seals it from even the most punishing rest stop air. These are the things you learn on many family trips along Canada's highways! 
• Timbits at work. With nearly any other work treat, you're limited by shame and social graces to one piece. Not so with Timbits. As long as no one is looking, who's to say if you had one Timbit or six?
• Related: the work Tim's run. Social bonding at its finest.
• The Honey Crueller doughnut. If I'm feeling lucky, I pass over the reliable sour cream glazed for the treacherous, yet occasionally rewarding, territory of the crueller. What mysteries are contained in its many folds and crevices? What fairy magic renders its insides so spongy and delicious? Perhaps a second one will unlock its secrets. 
• Oh heck, the Iced Capp. But only once a summer, because it's the adult Slurpee. 

My Marvin Troubles

Marvin isn't taking the move in with Dan well. And, like all concerned parents, I wish I could outsource my parenting issues to picture books. Here's what I would buy Marvin:

... AND HE TURNED PRETTY WELL.

If he could read, that is. Marvin remains stubbornly illiterate, though not silent. Oh no, everything but that. He was vocal before (I named him after Gaye not Lee for a reason) but ever since the move he's been a non-stop howling machine. For a while, he would regularly howl between 4:30 and 4:40 in the morning, before his regular 6am hour of howling power. Then he would keep it going throughout the day, before finishing off with an evening recital of demonic yowls and then a well-deserved dinner. 

It made me cry. It frustrated Dan. It made me angry. And finally, it made me hopeless. 

We tried the calming collar ($20.) Then we took him to the vet for shots and a hormone spray (nearly $300). There were more toys and a collar so he could go outside ($18). The the hormone diffuser ($60) and another collar because he hid his first one, as well as more toys to keep him entertained ($18.) Finally, a scratch box and a squeaky squirrel ($19.) Now he's going for blood work on Saturday ($money I don't have.)

And still, he howls.  

We had to stop letting him outside because his favourite activity, according to several concerned neighbours, was to lounge in the middle of the road, letting cars come at him. My little death wish kitty.

On Friday, the noise was so bad that I held Marvin and cried. After nearly strangling him. I cried because I was frustrated and tired, because I wanted to seriously hurt an animal, and because I didn't know what else I could do, or at least afford. 

Marvin watched me cry before letting out a truly horrendous yowl. I looked at him, anime eyes and all, and realized that I wanted to do nothing more than something I thought I would never, ever consider: surrender an animal. 

Yes, I wanted to surrender this face.

I felt so guilty for considering it, but that didn't stop me from googling it. And of course I cried some more, for being the kind of person who would just give up. That guilt means Marvin is still here. Good for Marvin. But there's a bit of shame in knowing that I didn't want to do the right thing, so much that I didn't want to be the person who did the wrong one.

Cottage Reading

I've been meaning to write something to push the "O woe is me, I am so sad" post down to where it deserves to be. Below the fold! Away from here!

But work got in the way, which I suppose is a better reason for my silence than being overwhelmed by life in general. Some very kind friends got in touch after that post to see how I was doing. And while I didn't write it for that reason - I was angry, and tired of putting a cheerful face on a desperate situation, and wanted that feeling to go on the record somewhere - it was a pleasant side effect.

Other than that, the good ship SS. Protagitron putters on. I was reading The New Jim Crow, which was good, but as anger-inducing as a book about mass incarceration in the US (and on its way to a Canada near you!) needs to be. Then I had the chance to go to a cottage. The ideal cottage reading has at least three of the following five things: a dead body in its pages, embossed type on its cover, pink everywhere, sex scenes that aren't quite a hard X, and some historical aspect because come on, we're classy. The New Jim Crow has none of those things, though it is a very worthy book, so I left it behind.

Why I thought finally finishing Kamouraska was the right choice though, I'll never know. Let's relax with a fractured, jumpy, poetic narrative about a love triangle in 19th century Quebec! WHAT FUN! Bodices were almost ripped, but it turned out I was pinning all my hopes for cottage diversion on what felt like four sex scenes, three mentions of pus, and a lot of sleighs dashing through snow. It's a beautiful book, but the last thing you want to feel in an Ontario summer is the bitter cold of rural Quebec and/or a stifling marriage.

Of course, I also spent my time at the cottage hauling old shingles, so maybe my reading material was appropriate.

I can't wait for my next trip to the cottage, when I can finally unwind, pour myself a beer, and really lose myself in the diverting decadence and sparkling wit of, uh, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano? Oh crap, I am not doing this right.