"Let them eat cupcakes!"

(Sarah Louise)

This post is about cupcakes. I had dinner with a dear friend and his wife this week and I explained the rules of cupcakes, so far. Since I invented the "cupcake game" as it were, I get to make the rules. And they change, to my delight, like Calvinball, the game Calvin played with his stuffed tiger, Hobbes.*

Cupcake rules

• Cupcakes can only be given to others, not to oneself.
• I can share a single cupcake with someone, or a plate of cupcakes. 
• If I share half a cupcake, the other person's cupcake can become a whole cupcake, like a starfish with a new limb. This probably also works with half a plate of cupcakes, but has never been expressed as such, yet.
• Cupcakes become the favorite flavor/color/style of the person receiving the cupcakes.
• Cupcakes have no calories/sugar/other things that adults avoid to be "healthy." 

I started giving cupcakes because of my friend, Holly, who was always making them, or looking at pictures of them. It sort of became a thing I gave away on Twitter, when anyone was having a bad day. I figure, not everyone likes to hear "I'm praying for you," and it's not always appropriate. But I haven't met anyone (yet) that doesn't like an imaginary cupcake. Well, actually, I do give Sara Zarr cheese, since she can't eat cupcakes. I generally give her wheels of gouda.

Anita Silvey is known for her hats. If I'm known for my cupcakes, well, that just makes me smile.

Little known facts: I don't eat actual cupcakes very often. I haven't actually made cupcakes in my apartment stove since I started giving them away on Twitter, circa a few years ago. I have sent actual cupcakes to events, (well, at least one event) and I have eaten cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery in New York. Funny story. The next to last day in Florida, I popped into the Gainesville Junior League Thrift Shop. They had an "I heart NY" shirt, but instead of a heart, it was a cupcake. The back said "Magnolia Bakery." I figured, if the shirt fit, I had to buy it. And I did. So I ate cupcakes in New York, but I had to go all the way to Florida to get the shirt.

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*of course there is a Calvin and Hobbes Wiki. (The internet is full of people of whimsy.) 

If it's Friday, it must be Florida...and everything new is old again.

In my world, the weekend is Sunday/Monday. In my world, I do errands on the way home from work. I climb three flights to my apartment, and crash, generally watching Bones or Frasier re-runs on DVD. In my world, I drive my car 30 minutes to work, 30 minutes home. In my world, I spend my day at a desk surrounded by things that belong to me or to the library, and I can go to the bathroom or get a drink of water at my leisure. I can even have a drink on my desk. I have the internet on in the background at all times, so that I can quickly check Twitter or email, and/or listen to Pandora internet radio.

In this new temporary world, my weekend is Saturday/Sunday. I live on the tenth floor. I ride an elevator down to the lobby or up to my apartment, which is not a glorified studio, it *is* a studio. Everything is right here. I have a balcony and when I look outside, I can only see the parking lot or trees, or the hospital a few miles away. I cannot see the street. The microwave is different. The freezer is TINY, no room to buy frozen foods. My freezer holds frozen broccoli, exactly two freezer pops, one ice cube tray, and can only fit the small one serving Haagen-Daaz ice cream. I ate the second and last one last night.

In my temporary world, I have access to an amazing Christian music radio station. This morning I got to listen to an in-studio TWO hour interview/chat with Amy Grant, listening to her tell the stories behind each track on her new album. I am eating dinner at home tonight so that I can buy her new album when I go to Target tomorrow. I take the bus to campus, which means there have been days when I haven’t even gone ANYWHERE in my car. Wednesday was the first time I put gas in my car since May 3.

It is wonderful to be in Florida, doing research using children’s books. My pet peeves? having to ring a doorbell every time I come back from the bathroom? The fact that I can't have a glass of water (any water) next to me as I work? I can only have these things on the table where I research: my notebook, a pencil, my camera, my phone, and four books at a time. These are small inconveniences that I will soon forget once I return to my world in Pittsburgh, where I don’t have daily access to chapbooks made for children in 1843. Signed copies of Maurice Sendak books. Conversations with people who care deeply about saving and talking about these things.

It’s one of those “on the one hand, on the other hand” situations, until  you run out of hands. I am here to research. If I can do some fun things, see some people, that is icing on an already rich (but hard working) cake. I am using my vacation time to enrich my life. This fellowship is meant to be a stepping stone to whatever my next step is in life.

I was incredibly homesick until yesterday. A switch flipped and this morning, I thought, I am *so* incredibly blessed to be here, now. But it’s still lonely. But I've been lonely before. That is one of the few "not new" things about this adventure.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls:

Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation. (Habakkuk 3:17-19, KJV)

I am trying to aim myself in that general direction. Every once in a while, it shines through.

TGIF (Friday); TGIF (Florida)

Went to lunch with the curator (SA) of the Baldwin collection and my faculty adviser (JC), who is in the English Dept, with a focus on Children's Lit. (Swoon.)

Today, twice was outside when the bells rang, they ring at the 15 minute intervals of the hour. Also, got a picture of a bird. My first picture of an animal (fauna) to balance out all the pictures of plants (flora). 

Today was the first day that I actually had personal conversations with people, as opposed to professional ones. And I got to go with SA to the Library West, where we found a few books I wanted for my project and then browsed the DVDs. They are in the order of purchase, so TOTALLY RANDOM. I picked up a copy of "Sense and Sensibility, b/c *what a great movie,* right? Also, 2 episodes of "The Prisoner" which SA says is amazing. Also, "Pan's Labyrinth," which might make me sob uncontrollably. Oh, and the documentary on the Dixie Chicks, called "Shut up and sing." I adore them.

Right now, I am listening to my "Girl from Ipanema" station on Pandora. It calms me down. I lived in Belem du Para for the first two years of my life while my dad was the Consul General, and my first word(s)? were in Portuguese. The house boy adored me. I love hearing stories about that stuff, who doesn't love hearing they were an adorable baby, and adored?

I miss the Book Nook at work, where I get my daily decaf for $1.00 and talk to the volunteers, who love hearing about my life. They are like having at least 5 extra Grandmas, since there is a different volunteer each day I work. SN said when her sister was in college, there was a guide for off-campus students called "where to find free coffee on campus." I don't know that there is a coffee area at the Baldwin. I guess that's to find out next week.

Goal this weekend: to make real macaroni and cheese, in the oven. NOM. (My freezer is teeny tiny, so buying frozen dinners at Trader Joe's seems silly. Although SN did say they probably won't go bad if you put them in the fridge. Still, I want to bake. Baked macaroni came to me like a vision as I walked to the bus. There goes my stomach, time for pita chips and hummus. Trader Joe's, you save me. (Not more than JC, but you know what I mean.)

Keys: SA, curator. JC, faculty member at UF, SN, my BFF, JC, Jesus Christ.

The red winged blackbird...and love.

Once upon a time, a college senior lived on the freshman floor of a women’s dorm, in a single room. This was the same girl who dreamed of her senior year being full of memories with her two friends, sharing a suite in the cottages at the edge of campus. Not so much after both girlfriends got boyfriends over the summer and sleepovers ensued. One friend slept over at her boyfriend’s dorm room, the other’s boyfriend slept across the hall from me.

It was the year I made a sign in markers, each letter a different color: “Change is the only constant.” And how true it was. Change happened in the death of a drama student by electrocution, Fall Weekend. That same day, in a New Jersey hospital bed, my grandfather breathed his last breath. I still have the belt I purchased at a store in Union Station, Washington, D.C., on the way home to my parent’s house in Rye, New York. The belt may never fit again, but it holds the memory of the day I wandered around Union Station, before everything changed.

Because after that, it wasn’t just our classmate and my grandfather. It was Ray’s grandparents, all four of them. Not all at once, you understand. Grandparents die. But then it was freak accidents, brothers and mothers and children dying in car crashes. It was as if Voldemort had come back and the sky was dark every day. Except that none of us had ever heard of Voldemort. This was 1992, after all.

In the spring, a new year, 1993, when I lived in my nun-like existence, I often took walks around the small college town. My favorite place was just beyond the trailer park, an area of the river where cat tails and other kinds of reeds grew. I would locate the red-tailed blackbird, and everything would be alright.

Today, I woke up early, and it seemed only fit to take a walk.

I came across a broken egg, yoke and all, on the walk around the reservoir and looked up. Two more women stopped by and we ascertained that it was probably some kind of hawk. One of the women had been a close friend, about ten (more?) years ago. And I just wanted to talk, maybe to walk with them, tell her how excited I was, that I’m off to Florida in a few days, and before I knew it, she and her walking companion were gone.

Snubbed. Alone, again, naturally…like the old British lyric.

And as I walked along, taking pictures of cherry trees (there must be more than five kinds of cherry tree up at the reservoir), I took out my broken heart. And I took more pictures. And I counted how many benches Mr. and Mrs. Richard Fisher have paid for—EIGHT!  

[this is where there would be a picture of one of the benches, with a plaque, reading, “Mr. and Mrs. Richard Fisher.”]

And as I walked to my car, an old man with a dog chatted me up, wanting to know was I taking pictures and not asking exactly why, but wondering in his conversation. Had I grown up here? Did I live nearby? This was a man who could not conceive of taking pictures for the beauty of the day, only for the memory. And so I explained it in terms he might understand. I’m going away for a bit and all this will be gone, all the flowers will be different, when I return. Where are you going? Are you moving away? He was an old man, caught in the past, not seeing the beauty, wanting to talk about the year the deer ate all the tulip bulbs. His dog was cute, it was the kind with a beard—a Scottish terrier?

This man, to me, was Pittsburgh. Living in the year things went badly. Expecting young people to be moving away for a job. There was no joy in his step, only duty.

I’m not being fair, you realize. Pittsburgh is also young and adventurous and musical and very very artsy. But if you’ve lived here any time, (twenty years, give or take?) you realize that there is this Eeyore quality. “If you ask me, and nobody ever does.”

But I’ve drifted away from the red winged blackbird.

I decided that though I no longer wanted to walk around the reservoir (I didn’t want to bump in to HER and her friend), I’d walked my mile and I was tired, that I’d drive down to Lake Carnegie. Its name makes me chuckle, because it is no lake. It’s a pond, that Andrew C. himself paid for, to be a sort of reservoir before the technology existed to have the double reservoirs we now have. But Lake Carnegie it is. The mallards live there in the winter. And who did I see among the reeds? My old friend, the red winged blackbird. Reminding me of another time when I felt snubbed, and that I got through that time as well.

He drew a circle that shut me out —
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in. (Edwin Markam)

I had this on my study carrel in the library. My friend Rachel had it on the door of her dorm room. For today, it is enough. And I will write on my friend’s Facebook page, “So nice to see you at the reservoir this morning.” And I will post the pictures I took, pictures I was able to take because I was on my own, with my own thoughts. Not a bad place to be.

Good night Irene, Good night, Good night Irene, Good night...

It's past my computer's bedtime.

I've been sitting here, for the past half hour, reading old posts on my blog, posts from 3 years ago, in March 2010, when I was doing the Artist's Way with some folks from the Open Door.

Times have changed since then. Boy have they changed. More on that later. (And yet, they haven't changed, and I have but haven't changed...)

But this is what brought me to the March entries, a quote I've cherished since college: "Madness is never just madness. It is a way of coping when sanity will no longer do." (Renita Weems, in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.)

Take a trip back to 2010. You are all there: Helen, and Holly, and Katy, and Badger, Lemony Sarah, and even Anonymous.

Tonight I watched Housekeeping, which is an odd little movie, one you would never ever call cute. (I HATE it when people say a movie is cute. A kitten is cute, a baby is cute. A movie, is never, in my book, cute.) It's based on a novel by Marilynne Robinson, who is a hero of a writer to our family. My cousin knows her personally, and many of us have at least shaken her hand. We've all read Gilead, which is better as an audio for the first read at least, and a lot of us have read her other books. I don't know if anyone has read Housekeeping, although I bet my cousin has. It was her first published novel.

The movie reminds me of an Australian movie from the same time period (1980s) that is a really famous Australian movie about a girl whose biological mother happens upon her. I'll have to troll around to see if I can find out what it's called. High Tide. You have to be in the right frame of mind for these movies, because they are life affirming, but have sadness. Best seen either in a theater (if you dare, and I don't, these days) or found by flipping channels on a Sunday afternoon. I had enough "umph" in me tonight to watch Housekeeping on DVD. I think I might watch it again before I return it, now that I know how it ends. (I won't tell.)

Oh my goodness, these two movies were made in the same year!! (1987.) They really are like twins, or mirror images...it's too late to go into WHY right now, but I guess an orphaned girl finding an adult woman that is a little strange, but who loves her...and in one movie it's the girl's aunt, and in the other, it's the girl's biological mother.

Ruminations

This morning I started a new devotional by Joyce Rupp, Open Door. I have gone through her devotional The Cup of Life twice, and was hoping for something new, but similar. I'm already a little disappointed and it's only the first day of six weeks. (My standards are high.)

But she asked what kind of door was our heart. And in my mind, I saw a summer porch, with a screen door. And that seemed to fit. Because I don't like surprises, for the most part. So a door where there are two steps, the screen and the door, getting to me is a two part process, after you've rung the bell. (I am, as everyone who knows me will agree, high maintenance.) Chuckle.

I slept ten hours last night. One of those hours meant that I missed the very last minute of Bones at 8:56ish. I woke up to the new show with Kevin Bacon, The Following, which I'm sure is great TV, and I adore Kevin, but looks much too violent for my taste.

Yesterday I went to the movies. I saw Quartet, which I had first heard about at the Golden Globes and then a friend from Twitter recommended it when I was moaning about the wasteland of movies. (January-February are typical wastelands, due to the awards schedule. All the movies up for awards are still, or back in the theaters, and movies that producers don't care about as much are opened in January. See: Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, see Hot Tub Time Machine.) [ed.: Hot Tub Time Machine was released in March of 2010.] [DARN! s.l.]

This year was rich in the rich movies and weak in the weak ones. In past years I have sat through some interesting January fare (see Hot Tub Time Machine) [ed: see note above] [s.l.: darn!], but this year, I went to see Silver Linings Playbook three times and other movies, none. I was contemplating not going to the movies yesterday, as I sat (no joke) in Starbucks with my decaf no whip Mocha and no less than five newspapers, culling out what I wouldn't want to read later, saving all the news about the Oscars. And then I remembered Quartet. I had an odd schedule yesterday, as I had a 6:15 chiropractic appointment, so I couldn't do a 4:00 p.m. movie that was longer than 2 hours. And none existed at my regular Monday theater. So I started to look.

The Manor, a Squirrel Hill film institution (Squirrel Hill being a Pittsburgh neighborhood) had it, but the time looked wrong. I called to find out how long the movie was and their movie line was busy. Darn. My eyes looked eastward to the Waterfront listings, which is where I found a 3:10 showing of Quartet. With my therapy appointment at 2, it would be cutting it close, but that's what previews are for. I still didn't know how long it was, and I was not about to call the movie line of a theater that has 22 theaters. Can you imagine listening through that possibly alphabetical list for Quartet? So I did what any non-smart-phone card-carrying librarian would do. I called work. "Reference desk." "Yes, I'm trying to find out the length of the movie, 'Quartet.'" After a few minutes (or less), she came back with the magic words, "An hour and thirty-five minutes." Blissful sigh. That would give me enough time to drive across town from the Waterfront to Etna for my chiropractic appointment at 6:15.

Quartet, review: To say Dustin Hoffman's debut as a director was a treat would be an understatement. There were moments where I thought, I WILL FALL ASLEEP, as the movie was about sleepy people. The movie took place in a retirement home for aging musicians. I wonder if such a thing exists outside of the imagination of the playwright, but what a wonderful concept! I would only hope I could get into the retirement home for aging writers (Anne Lamott, Judy Blume, Nicholas Sparks) or even the one for people who care about children's books (Anita Silvey, Leonard Marcus, E.L. Konigsburg, Margaret Kimmel, Amy Kellman, Elizabeth Mahoney).

But I digress, where was I? (By the way, that was the way the movie went.) People went in and out of being completely lucid to being completely mad, but were brilliant at it, the entire time. You really had respect for them, even the diva we all hated by the end of the movie, well, because she was SUCH a diva. The credits showed the musicians and publicity photos from their musical youths. So. There were two movies about Brits in retirement homes this year, and Maggie Smith was in both of them. In the one, she was a racist housekeeper needing a hip replacement (The Best Marigold Hotel), and in this one, she was a former opera singer needing a hip replacement. In the BMH, she was the first guest we meet, and in Quartet, she was the last. She shone in both, and I'm glad that I saw both. The two movies have ONLY these components in common: British movie, film adaptation, Maggie Smith needs a new hip, wonderful casting.

What a luxury that this is a post called "Ruminations" and I don't need to do a thing before I leave you but check to see if I should use less or fewer when describing minutes.

Ah, the Grammar Girl has set me straight. Minutes are an exception to the rule. Of course they are, that's what makes English such a delightful language to learn:

"There are exceptions to these rules; for example, it is customary to use the word less to describe time, money, and distance." (Grammar Girl)

And I'm out. Until next time,

Sarah Louise

The Oscars: WOW!

I am just star struck from last night's Oscars.

This year, the movies were very personal to me.

Argo brought up and resolved some issues I had with my father.

Silver Linings playbook (no link b/c I haven't written about it yet, need to fix that!) gave me hope about being a bipolar woman. And I just adored Jennifer Lawrence for being so nervous about her best actress nomination that she ATE the stairs on the way up to receiving her award.

I'll be back with more, probably. But right now, I need to eat breakfast. There's a commercial break on the morning shows (which are all about the Oscars, of course.)