Today, I had the honor of guest posting at Preston Yancey’s blog as part of his series on what women want from the Church.
I see that God works through the Church, but sometimes, I have anxiety about it. The Church deems much of what I see God doing as inappropriate. Hop over to Preston’s to read the rest.
Posted in Church, Hope | Leave a Comment »
The day after Thanksgiving is one of my favorite days of the year. After the feasting from the previous day, my family is still at my parents’ farm. We don’t go shopping. We don’t go to town to the Treasure Hunt. We play Christmas records, get out Christmas decorations, and make homemade candy.
Some of the candies change from year to year. Mom’s favorite is the Texas Millionaire. Aunt Gale’s favorite is Divinity (blech).
And we always have at least one type of fudge.
When we were little, my sister and I didn’t really like fudge. We weren’t fond of dark chocolate, and we were generally content with store-bought candy. This was unacceptable to my mother, so one year, she made Fantasy Fudge. It’s a light, milk chocolate fudge. I think she got the recipe off the back of the Marshmallow Creme jar. For a long time, it was my favorite.
As our tastes matured, we started to like Mom’s chocolate peanut butter fudge, which is very similar to this recipe. Her use of a variation of this fudge as the frosting to her chocolate cake probably helped us make that transition.
Yes. You read that right. My mom uses fudge to frost her chocolate cake. Go and do likewise, but make sure that you have a nice place to lie down afterward, because you’re going to need it.
Mom is particular about a lot of things, but the process of candy-making takes her pickiness to a whole new level. There is a right size and shape for every candy. There is a right way to pack them. And every year, she reminds me that the fudge has to get to exactly 235 degrees, or it won’t set up, and then we’ll be forced to eat it straight out of the pan with a spoon or slathered on macaroons or vanilla wafers. And wouldn’t that be terrible?
If by “terrible,” one means “glorious,” then yes. Yes, it certainly would.
And that is the beauty of fudge. It’s not difficult to learn to do well, but even if you mess up (assuming you don’t scorch it – that really is terrible), you’ve still got a pan of butter, chocolate, sugar, and cream, so the end result is going to be wonderful, no matter what it looks like.
If I’m making fudge for other people, I’ll make one of the recipes above. They’re both crowd-pleasers.
But if I’m making a special fudge treat just for me, I make it vegan, and I make it pour-able.
This recipe has many uses. It’s good on waffles. It’s good on fruit. And it’s amazing when poured over a chocolate espresso cake.
Vegan Hot Fudge
In a double boiler, whisk together and heat, stirring often:
When it starts to steam like it’s about to boil, whisk in:
At this point, if one were so inclined, one could stop and enjoy it as a nice drinking chocolate. One might also find this to be a pleasant addition to coffee.
But if you’re committed to hot fudge, stir in:
If you want a thicker sauce, add a little (1-2 tsp) cornstarch with the cocoa at the beginning.
Remove from heat and pour into a glass jar to cool. I imagine that it will keep in the fridge for about a month, but mine never lasts that long, so don’t hold me to that.
My hot fudge might be a fairly distant cousin of the fudge I grew up with, but it still brings back memories of home, family, and tradition.
Posted in Food, Resolutions, Vegan | Leave a Comment »
This was the Story Sessions prompt:
“I need to be startlingly clear. This thing of finding your authentic voice, expressing your blessed weirdness and revealing your soul isn’t an elegant process. You don’t do it to be cool. It’s only real when it is ruthless, relentless, and inevitable. But it is also a matter of personal and collective survival. Yes, it’s that important. You are that critical.” – Jacob Nordby
So, as it is the first week of class, and this quote closely resembles the ideas I try to get across to my students all semester, I thought I knew what I wanted to say about it. I outlined a grand post about the stages of the bumpy process of helping students go from being terrified of public speaking to finding something to say, and from there, discovering their own unique way of saying it. It wasn’t a bad post. In fact, there was poetry involved. It was a little fancy.
But as I was reading over my notes, I couldn’t bring myself to post them. The words just felt flat.
It’s easy to hide behind what I’m helping others do. But what about my authentic voice? Do my students ever get to see into my soul?
Last night, I’m not sure they did.
Sure, it was the first night, so we were mostly just going over the syllabus. Not a lot of opportunity for soul-baring there.
And sure, when I’m teaching at NCTC, I’m not just representing myself. I am representing the college, too, and I have a responsibility to do it well, which means that saying what I really think is not always the most important – or even the most desirable – goal.
I had moments of authenticity. I told them of my own struggles with overcoming speech anxiety, because I want them to know that I understand what they’re going through. When discussing class rules, I was honest about my quirks. I told them that I would stay two hours after class if they had legitimate questions about an assignment, but if the questions become a pitiful wheeze of don’t-wannas, they should not expect that conversation to end well. I felt that it was only fair to warn them that I would have a hard time responding pleasantly to whining.
But for most of the class, I felt like I was reading a script that someone else wrote. I told a lot of the same jokes that I have used the whole fifteen years that I have been teaching this class. I did my love-of-cheese bit, even though I’m lactose intolerant now. I confessed my nerdery regarding superhero movies, even though I haven’t seen any of the ones that have come out in that last few years, because all the people I used to see them with have moved away.
All my jokes are old, and telling them felt fake.
Don’t get me wrong. The jokes still work. More importantly, they serve a purpose. They get laughs, which slice through some of the tension that tends to be pretty thick on the first day of a public speaking class. I could go through the whole semester, using the same lectures and the same assignments, the same examples and the same stories, and it would be just fine. The students would still learn. Some of them would even surprise themselves by liking it.
But I can’t help but wonder what would happen if I broke out of the rut. What would my class be like if I rose to the same challenge that I gave my students? What if I wrote new lectures, or asked different questions, or just admitted that I prefer TV to movies (because to care about a story, I need good character development, and two or three hours is usually not enough time to do it well)?
What if I expressed my own blessed weirdness?
This semester might get very interesting.
And Story 101, it’s all your fault.
(thank you)
Posted in Story Sessions, Work | 8 Comments »
My sister and brother-in-law got me a waffle-maker to replace Old Faithful that finally died a sad, smoky death early in the fall, so naturally, I was itching to use it. What better way to do so than to introduce my first vegan treat of the year?
Food photographer, I am not. Ignore the towel. Concentrate on the golden brown fluffiness. Also, my vintage Fiestaware is super cute.
Moving on…
These waffles are the result of various trials and recipes. I consulted this recipe from allrecipes.com and Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything to help guesstimate the ratio of the ingredients. Then I deleted and substituted those ingredients to make them vegan. Then I squinted and fussed and bent the ingredients to my will until the batter looked like it should and produced what I wanted. I like a crisp waffle, but some people like them puffier, so if you’re one of said people, just beat the batter for an extra minute or two, and that will help it out.
I also flat-out ignored the piddly 1/2-teaspoon – 1 teaspoon nonsense with the vanilla. I didn’t measure what I used exactly, but I did pour it like I was about to do a shot.
Vanilla Coconut Waffles
Yields 6-7 waffles
1. Preheat waffle iron and brush with coconut oil.
2. Sift together:
3. In a separate bowl, mix together:
4. Mix the contents of both bowls together, adding more coconut milk if the batter looks too thick (i.e., moves more like molasses than waffle batter).
5. Stir in about a cup of shaved coconut (I use unsweetened, but sweetened is fine, too). Mix thoroughly.
6. Pour onto waffle iron. When it stops steaming, it’s done!
I love breakfast, and I especially love these waffles. They are a quick fix, and they freeze beautifully. Enjoy!
Posted in Food, Resolutions, Vegan | 2 Comments »
Today is the first day that I’m back at work. I am glad no one was here to see me coo at these little fellows who greeted me once I got my computer hooked back up. That would have been awkward. It was an exuberant cooing.
(This is a snapshot of my computer screen. Sadly, I was not present to take the original photo, and I would give proper credit to the person who had the good fortune to be near enough to these little guys to take the picture, but the photo/website has since been taken down, so the world will never know the identity of this lucky, lucky person.)
Seriously. Look at the face! And the puffy, stubby tail! I love everything about red pandas.
Anyway…back to the topic at hand…
Last year, I finally admitted to myself what I want to do with my life. I want to write. I want to be published. I want to spend my days staring at a computer screen and writing terrible first drafts and editing like mad and watching those terrible first drafts become something I would actually let another human being read. So three of my five 100s are related to this goal:
1. One hundred books read
Just as I would not trust a pastry chef who never ate cake, I also don’t trust writers who don’t read. It teaches me. Reading Elmore Leonard is how I learned to write dialogue that didn’t just sound like my characters puppeting my own voice. Reading poetry is a reminder to be picky about word choice, particularly when editing. Reading is vital to writing well.
2. One hundred thousand words written
I will finish Fishbowl this year. I will finish Fishbowl this year. I will finish Fishbowl this year.
I am committing to writing at least 100,000 words toward fiction or poetry – projects that, ultimately, I would like to submit for publication. This might seem like a lot, but really, it’s only double the goal for NaNoWriMo, and I’ve been known to do that in just one month. It’s less than 10,000 a month. It’s 275 words a day. This post is going to be longer than 275 words, and it will only take me about half an hour to finish it. An average of half an hour a day spent on fiction or poetry is not a lot. So surely, I can reach it.
3. One hundred blog posts
Now that I’ve actually managed to start keeping up with a blog again (and by “keeping up,” I do mean “I have posted at least once a month for a year.” Don’t get your expectations all raised.), I remember how helpful it is to have a place where I speak in just my voice, not through the voice of a character. It helps me differentiate between the two. It helps me edit.
It also keeps me connected to people, which is important because I sometimes forget to do this on my own. I don’t have a lot of followers, but I do have a faithful few. And I appreciate you all!
So those are my word-related goals. If you want to follow my reading list, you can follow/friend me on Goodreads. I will try to post an update here once a month in order to keep track of the other two goals.
Next, there’s my health situation. Last year was a healthier year than the one before, as I successfully avoided the emergency room, but there is still room for improvement. I still don’t know what’s going on with my digestive system (my doctor has suggested a full scan, so that’s a fun thing I get to do this month), but we’ve narrowed it down enough to identify some things that trigger my episodes, and the main offender seems to be lactose. Sad times. I love me some lactose – specifically, cheese. Fortunately, most of the time, if I don’t overdo it, I can offset the problem with a couple of enzymes in pill form. There are, therefore, very few items I have to give up entirely. Cheesecake is one of them. Never again. Cheesecake is delicious, but there’s not a cheesecake in the world that is worth what I went through last month, and there’s not a pill in the world that can compensate for the ridiculous amount of dairy in a slice of cheesecake.
But even though taking a pill is an option, I don’t wanna. I don’t want to have to take a pill every time I eat something. That’s not what a proper solution looks like to me. So my fourth resolution is:
4. One hundred vegan recipes, tried and successfully eaten without taking a pill or getting sick
This will ensure at least 300 meals, snacks, or treats for which I will not have to medicate. I estimate an average of three servings out of most recipes, as most of them are written for at least four people, so an average of three will offset the count for the relatively few recipes that are single-serving. To keep track of this goal, I have created a Pinterest board where I will post pictures and recipes that I have tried and successfully managed sans pill assistance.
And last but not least, my One Word for 2014 – beauty. I am looking for it. I’m not sure what I’ll find. I’m not even sure what to call it when I do. Pictures of beauty? Examples of beauty? Ideas about beauty? I imagine that I will be writing about beauty, but I don’t want to stifle discovery by limiting expectations. I want to remain open to whatever I need to learn from it. So here’s the last goal:
5. One hundred moments of beauty
I have also created a Pinterest board to track this goal, so we’ll see how that works out. My first wordy post about beauty is on the board, along with a picture of one of the beautiful things in my apartment that doesn’t get much use as it was originally intended but is still beautiful nonetheless.
So that’s my year. What do you hope for your year to be?
Posted in Beauty, Books, Food, Resolutions, Writing | 5 Comments »
Beauty is my one word for 2014. As soon as I knew that beauty was what I was dealing with, it started popping up everywhere. I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s no mystery why poets and writers and lovers and prophets and dreamers are obsessed with beauty – she is fragile and elusive and strong and everywhere. There’s such a wealth of words to say about this one word, beauty. So I chose a few beloved others to help me start my year of saying it.
“She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.”
– Lord Byron –
Beauty hidden
The most beautiful aspect of a scene or person is rarely what’s out in front – what sees the light of day. It’s usually something that takes a little time and a measure of gentleness to find. I hope this year teaches me to slow down enough to see beauty.
“Beauty – be not caused – It Is –
Chase it, and it ceases –
Chase it not, and it abides -”
– Emily Dickinson –
Beauty found
Beauty is hard (impossible?) to manufacture. Oh, but we try. Our culture spends billions of dollars a year, chasing beauty, trying to force her hand. Trying to make her show herself to us. Trying to make her happen. And when something we make is beautiful, we think we’ve succeeded, but the truth is that we just uncovered the beauty that was there all along. I hope this year teaches me to find beauty.
“To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.”
– Isaiah 61:3 (KJV) –
Beauty redeemed
I sort of cheated last year. I didn’t figure out my one word until May. And it was not really one word. It was more a set of various words within a theme. Bravery. Courage. Risk. And looking back, that’s what the year was. It was a good year. It was a year when I took back my life (still not clear from whom or from what, but I am sure that now it is MINE). It was a year of making hard and scary choices. And I learned that scary choices are exhilarating and exhausting. Scary choices taught me that they are worth it – they will always teach you something – but that sometimes, the best choice isn’t the scary one. Sometimes what feels like fear is your brain saying, “Hey – that’s actually a bad idea.” Burning bridges and burning out will teach you where that line is. It will also leave you with a lot of ashes. Somewhere in those ashes, there is beauty. And I’m past ready to see her emerge from them.
“…it was a forbidden object…a useless and therefore a self-indulgent one. I asked her what purpose it served, and she told me, It doesn’t do anything obvious. But it might be able to do something in here. Then she touched her hand to her heart. Beautiful things sometimes do.”
– Veronica Roth, Allegient –
Beauty transforms
This is the hardest part to articulate. How will beauty change me? And please, oh please, let it do so. But how? What will it look like? Will I even recognize it? I hope so.
“Let the beauty we love be what we do.”
– Rumi –
Beauty does
There is a push inside of me to be more than an observer. To be the catalyst. To stop waiting for what I do to be noticed. To do the things (good things – no nefarious plots afoot, just to be clear) that cannot be ignored.
“Let the beauty we love be what we do.” YES.
This is the year of beauty.
Some of the most beautiful people I know, I met here – Story Sessions.
Posted in Beauty, Hope, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
Resolved:
Wanting Delicious Straight Male
What I Need
Why It Matters
What To Do
Happy Lazy Love Story,
Changing What I’m Into –
Wine, Bikini, Pie, and…
Unholy Longing
Happy Little Minute
I am From
Days of No Welcome
Excess Feminist Ramblings
Running Out
Too Much
Irritability
Ordinary Myth
Southern Talk
Visiting Phase
Not Eating
Not Planning Together
Sugar Saints
Perfect Food
Making Peace
Going Home
Unpopular Questions
Freedom.
[If you can’t tell, I’m having a lot of fun with my Story Sessions sisters in 40 Days of Poetry.]
Posted in Hope, Poetry | Leave a Comment »
This was a weird month. It’s the first time I’ve been at a church that observes the liturgical year. It’s the first time I’ve really “done” Advent (does one do Advent? Is that something that’s done? Or experienced? Or watched? I’m not sure which verb goes there.).
I’ve also been sick most of the month, so food choices have been limited. It also limited my coffee consumption – I went completely without for a week and a half – which, as you might imagine, put me in a fantastic mood.
And let’s not forget North Texas’s little Icetember adventure. Because large quantities of ice are so rare in Texas, it’s not really cost effective to keep the resources to deal with it. It’s cheaper to just shut everything down until it passes. So we did. Happy 4-day Icecation to me! I got home at about 4:00 on Thursday, and I did not even walk out the door to get the mail until the following Wednesday morning. Ah, introvert bliss.
One might think that, between being iced in and having to stay home sick and getting two weeks off from work for regular holiday vacation, I would have gotten a lot of writing/reading/TV watching done.
Heh. Not really. Not any more than usual. My house is pretty clean, though.
Here’s what I was into this month, besides deep, leisurely cleaning.
To write:
I wrote a lot of poetry this month. I participated in Story Sessions’s 40 Days of Poetry. I guess it wouldn’t be a lot to people who usually write poetry, but for me, the nine or ten poems I wrote is more poetry than I wrote the rest of the year combined. So for me, that’s a lot.
I also ranted about freedom of speech, which a couple of friends picked up and shared on Facebook without my sharing it first. I didn’t have to point it out to them. Translation: my friends read my blog and like what I write. Sweet! Thanks, friends. That made my week.
To read:
As inspiration, I also read a lot of poetry this month. I reacquainted myself with the likes of Neruda and Donne, and I reread Adrienne Rich’s Fox collection.
I mentioned last month that I jumped on the Divergent bandwagon, and during Christmas, I finished the last two of the trilogy. In a day and a half. I haven’t been sucked into something that completely in a while. I have a confession, though. Unpopular opinion #427 – I liked the ending. I’ll try to tell you why without giving anything away to anyone who inexplicably has not read it yet. Any other ending would have been, at best, a contrived mess. I would even go so far as to say that the ending that a lot of people wanted would have been a betrayal of the craft, because when an author foreshadows something so blatantly, she ought to make good on it. I mean, I read a lot of YA fiction, so I have a pretty high tolerance for teenage angst, but if I had sat through three books of it and ended up with no learning curve or subsequent resolution, that might have merited a nice, healthy tossing of the book across the room. And that would have been problematic, as the book was large (hardback), and I was at my mother’s house, and she has many breakable knick-knacks. So, for knick-knack’s sake, I am glad that it ended the way it did.
To watch:
This month that has meant reruns of Gilmore Girls, How I Met Your Mother, and The Office. This month has also meant made-for-TV Christmas movies, because that’s what Mom likes, and Pawn Stars, because that’s what Dad likes. I’m not opposed to either choice, but the hours upon hours spent…let’s just say that, while the trip to their house was lovely in many ways, I’m really happy to be home, where I’ve spent the last two days watching the second season of Castle.
To hear:
I have been obsessed with The Bangles this month. You know how you wake up with a song in your head every day, and it stays with you for most of the day (no? Just me? Okay, then)? At least half the month, that song for me has been a Bangles song. You’d think I would be sick of it, but no. I blame Lorelai Gilmore and growing up in the 80s.
To taste:
The Sickness put a bit of a damper on my meal choices this month. I’ve apparently been really into vegetable broth, potatoes, applesauce, and peppermint tea. I had to cancel Supper Club one night, because I wasn’t sure I could even take the smell of the meal I had planned.
But around the 20th, I started to feel better, so I got brave and had some toast, then some peaches, and by the 25th, I was able to enjoy my dad’s crock-pot turkey, roasted in a citrus gravy, which was either the most delicious thing I’ve eaten all year, or I was just really happy that it wasn’t broth.
So that’s how 2013 ends for me. What are you into?
Posted in Books, Food, Poetry, TV, What I'm Into, Writing | 5 Comments »
I’ve been avoiding social media this week because of the Duck Dynasty fiasco. It’s not because I harbor any ill will against Phil Robertson. I generally find him amusing (or at least I did, before reading his unsettling remarks about how he could tell the slaves were happy because they were singing…that gives me considerable pause), and I have watched and enjoyed the show. I mean, I have absolutely zero need for duck calls or any hunting-related paraphernalia in my life, but the show is entertaining, for what it is.
I’m not even shocked by his statements. For a white man his age who grew up and has lived his whole life in the South, those are unfortunately not unusual opinions. Horrible and wrong, sure. But not unusual. In order to despise him, I would have to despise most of the elderly people I know, and I’m not prepared to do that.
What, then, irks me beyond my tolerance threshold when situations like this arise? Seeing statements such as this – “I guess A&E doesn’t believe in freedom of speech.”- in my Facebook feed.
*sigh*
Once again, the Internet has been faithful to reveal the piss-poor state of our educational system by throwing out hot button phrases such as “freedom of speech” and “violation of rights” in order to rile people up without going to the bothersome trouble of learning what those freedoms actually entail and what those rights actually are.
So let’s discuss what the First Amendment says about your freedom of speech.
The First Amendment, truncated for our purposes (but you can read the whole thing here if you want) states, “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.”
That is the entirety of what the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees you as a citizen regarding freedom of speech. With very few exceptions, you can say what you want to say, and it is not against the law.
It protects you from being arrested for simply speaking your mind. That would be a violation of your rights.
It protects you from being imprisoned for what you say. That would be a violation of your rights.
It protects you from the law – that is, the government – not from private entities such as individual citizens or, say, a television network.
It protects you from legal ramifications. I suppose, of course, that a person or company could sue you, but, provided that what you said cannot be proven to be libel or slander (examples of those exceptions I mentioned), they would not win unless you have a stunningly crapulous attorney and an idiot judge, because for them to win such a case would be a violation of your rights.
Now let’s discuss some things from which it does not protect you.
It does not protect you from people disagreeing with you and saying so. That’s just other people exercising their freedom of speech.
It does not protect you from criticism. Again, that’s just other people having the same rights as you do.
It does not protect you from a professor throwing you out of class when you say something disrespectful or otherwise inappropriate, and the professor gets to decide what is appropriate and what is not, because the professor is the one who is held responsible for what happens in his or her classroom.
And finally, it does not protect you from being reprimanded, suspended, or even fired when you say something that opposes the values of your employer, especially if you, knowing that your values differ, are dumb enough to say it at work, in a highly public forum (for example, an interview to which you were invited specifically because of your job), or while being recorded and/or reported. That is not a violation of your rights. That is your employer being true to the values to which they have committed, regardless of what it might cost them in terms of viewers or money.That is your employer exhibiting integrity, and their response to your behavior is called consequence, not persecution.
It could be argued that speaking one’s religious convictions is worth whatever consequences it might bring. That is a generous way to look at this situation. This cynic has questions, though. If one’s convictions on an issue are really so strong, would one work for an organization that not only blatantly disagrees with those convictions but also actively asserts its opposition to them? If one is truly concerned with taking a stand, can one still in good conscience take a paycheck from said organization? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, in word or deed, I have a hard time believing the conviction is real. I find it more likely that the so-called conviction is really more of a publicity stunt or an offhand, thoughtless comment. It makes it look more like he was just trying to use his privilege (because being famous and being paid to say things on TV and to reporters are indeed privileges, not rights) to promote his platform, and it backfired.
Posted in Rants | Leave a Comment »
Today is my first day of vacation. For two weeks, I am free from both jobs.
The downside is that I have lots of time to deal with my apartment. I’ve always said that the state of my home and the state of my mind seem to parallel one another. And this is true. Right now, both of them look a little like this:
That’s what the bench in my office area looks like after grading. That’s kind of how my mind feels, too. A chaotic whirlwind of thoughts and ideas and decisions that swirl around and land in one big heap.
All is not lost, though. The next two weeks, I’m putting home back together, and hopefully, my mind will follow.
Of all the places in the world, I want home to be the place where I find tiny pockets of the kingdom of God. I want it to be a place of creation. I want it to be a place where people are welcomed and fed, where the wine (and the coffee) never run out. I want it to shout good news.
The semester end falls at a good time. As in Advent we are preparing for Jesus, in this time off from my regular work, I am preparing as well. Preparing to be well and to spread joy and to welcome in the new year with expectation and hope.
I’m synching up with others on the topic of Coming Home here. Click to read more!
Posted in Hope, Seasons | 7 Comments »
M. Suzanne Terry 