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roast this

I’m feeling a little guilty about this, a little scared to admit to it, but I guess the only thing to do is ‘fess up and hope for the best.

I’ve started a new blog, but it’s not what you think.

I asked for green coffee beans for Christmas. That’s coffee that hasn’t yet been roasted. My family has a $15 gift limit, so I figured I’d get a pound or two of coffee — just enough to try it out, see if it was something I’d be interested in doing on a regular basis. Instead, though, my grandmother, who is not bound by the limit, gave me something like eight pounds of beans.

It’s taken until this past week for me to gather the equipment, time, and guts to try roasting. It was easy and fun, and the coffee that resulted was so good and so different from any coffee I’ve ever had before that I was pretty much immediately hooked. Also, I still had almost eight pounds of coffee left to roast. All the coffee roasting sites I’ve read say you should keep a log of all your roasts — and since I found it hard to believe that I’d actually take pen to paper, well, I figured I’d start a blog.

You can find it at www.roastthis.com. I don’t plan on it replacing this one, but no promises on frequent updates. As if you didn’t already know that.

done

I just spent the drive home from Westminster thinking about, among other things, what I would blog now that I no longer have anything I can point to as more pressing. I figured I’d write something about how it feels to have written my last (undergraduate) paper, what my McDaniel experience has meant to me, and what the hell I’m going to do with my life. It turns out that all I want to do is veg.

If you haven’t gleaned it already, today I completed the last of my work for the last of my classes. I also tied up all kinds of loose ends related to a number of extracurricular activities, checked my campus mailbox, and cleared the remaining balance off my student debit card (which cannot be converted to cash) via the purchase of a sweatshirt.

All that’s left is the graduation ceremony, a week from tomorrow. For now, I’m going to go do something mindless.

snow day hooray

I am home today, enjoying a surprise day off due to the snow. I know, I know, it’s not really that bad out there — but two of my on-campus commitments were canceled anyway, and at 8:30 this morning I was worried that the 45-minute return drive on back roads might not be safe. And so, here I am.

This semester is going well so far, although somehow I think it might be my most work-intensive one yet. The fact that it’s my last semester just makes it all the harder to deal with.

I’m taking History of Modern Philosophy, a Spanish class which I originally thought was going to be way over my head but may actually turn out to be okay, Rhetorical Approaches to Non-Fiction Literature, and a couple of PE classes. I was taking a class on Jane Austen, but I didn’t need it, it was a non-trivial amount of work, and I was feeling overwhelmed. So I dropped it, but have been doing the reading and going to class anyway. It’s pretty much a perfect arrangement — I get to read and think about books I love, but I don’t have to write any papers or take any tests.

The last couple of days, though, I’ve been thinking not about Northanger Abbey, but about Israel. It started because I read excerpts from Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Palestine for Rhetorical Approaches, but what I ended up contemplating was not so much the legitimacy of the Israeli state, but the American political attitudes towards the Israeli state.

Israel wasn’t something I heard talked about much until I got to Hampshire College, where a large percentage of the student body is Jewish. Israel was an important topic, and nearly everyone supported it wholeheartedly. A number of my friends harbored fantasies of joining the Israeli army. I didn’t have much of an opinion myself, but I thought of support for Israel as a liberal stance.

Fast forward eight years to our current day post-9/11 world. While I get the impression that no one wants to be on record as being anti-Israel, I’m encountering more and more liberals who at least have Palestinian sympathies. Did I misunderstand the issue before? Or is this a shift that’s taken place over the last few years?

If it’s a shift, where’s it coming from? A reaction to the neo-con support of Israel? Or something about the issue itself? I certainly can understand taking it up as a human rights issue — but why now?

As was the case in 1999 when I first heard about the issue, I still don’t feel like I know enough about the situation to have anything close to an easy to explain opinion about it. However, though obviously one-sided, Palestine woke me up enough to start wanting to know.

ho wah holiday

Last night my best friend and I found ourselves sans our respective significant others. Though Tammy and I became friends in high school while we were both perpetually single, since then we’ve never been single at the same time, and as a result it’s been more difficult to find time for just the two of us. She got married this past fall to a guy named Neal who, among other things, brews his own beer. More importantly, Neal’s the kind of guy every girl hopes her best friend will marry. So it’s okay that when I see Tammy it’s usually in conjunction with Neal — but it was still great to get a chance to have a girls’ night out.

In high school, Tammy and I frequented the now-defunct Mandarin Restaurant on the Carlisle Pike. It was in the boat-shaped building that now houses a mediocre Mexican restaurant. This and Taco Bell were probably our favorite spots. Anyway, I guess we’ve left behind the days when Taco Bell constituted a nice dinner, because last night we tried a Chinese place neither of us had been, Ho Wah in Lemoyne. Those of you who’ve been there probably know that Ho Wah doesn’t really constitute a “nice dinner” either, but, as I gather everyone else in the area knows already, the food was very good. I’m not sure how it differs from other Chinese food, but I do know it was better. Or at least that I enjoyed it more. (As a side note, I should mention that most West Coasters don’t like East Coast Chinese food, claiming it to be inauthentic. It might be, but I prefer it to the supposedly authentic West Coast Chinese.) It would, however, probably be better for take-out than for dine-in, as the service was pretty poor: I never got my soup, the entrees took waaaay too long to come out, and we had to make eye contact with the server several times before she gave us an opportunity to ask for boxes.

Ultimately, though, we did make it out of there with our leftovers and headed down to New Cumberland to the West Shore Theatre to see The Holiday. Before you say, “You saw what?” let me remind you that this was a girls’ night out. It was the perfect girls’ night out movie — predictable and sweet. And co-starring Jude Law. That’s important.

But more interesting to me than Jude Law was the overtly self-referential nature of the movie. Part of the movie is set in LA, and one of the main characters produces movie trailers. So right off the bat you’ve got elements of a movie about movies. Not that unusual. But there was also a character, a retired screenwriter, who named elements of the movie — in movie-speak — as they were happening. And there was the scene where the movie — which, at least at the West Shore Theatre, began without previews — interrupted itself with the green screen that alerts the audience a preview is about to be shown. What I’m saying is that this movie, in most ways just a typical romantic comedy, made a point to frequently remind the audience that this was a movie. Add to this the basic premise that by watching enough movies and living someone else’s life for two weeks you can change your own life — well, I think this may have been the first mainstream overtly postmodern romantic comedy I’ve seen.

This is not to say that it was, in any way, an intellectual or even thought-provoking film. But it did have Jude Law. What else do you need?

packing up

What is it about moving that makes even a much-wanted relocation so depressing?

When I first moved into my Westminster apartment, I was coming from two low-ceilinged rooms in my grandmother’s attic, where I’d lived for about a year and a half. The plentiful windows, ceiling fans, and large rooms of the new place made me feel like I was on vacation, even as I was scrubbing the former tenant’s grime from the floors.

A year and a half later, it’s my grime to be scrubbed from the floors. The apartment no longer feels like a vacation home, but more like the spartan, rundown, thin-walled hovel that it is. And yet today I found myself looking over the living room full of boxes feeling a little wistful, and not just because of all the work still left to do.

I’m moving in, as many of you know, with my boyfriend. We’ve been living together in a lovely little house since mid-November, so I figured it was probably time to have all my stuff join us. One of the problems, though, is that since the boyfriend came from a six-bedroom house, we already have more than enough stuff to fill our three tiny bedrooms. So as I’m packing, I’m thinking, “Where the hell am I going to put this?” One possibility is to put off the unpacking until after graduation and a subsequent move to a more permanent residence.

And that brings me to the other problem, not so much a problem, really, but the other reason for my wistfulness.

I, of course, moved to Westminster to go to McDaniel. I was excited, scared, and unable to see the other end of the journey. That would be the end of the journey I’m now rapidly approaching, and my time at McDaniel has been far more rewarding than I ever imagined it could be. The fear about what comes next is beginning to set in. So leaving the apartment, something I assumed I would do in late May, feels like the beginning of the end for this somewhat unexpected respite from the working world.

And that’s enough to make anyone wistful.

tradition

Monkey monkey monkey & Happy New Year.

I have been cooking somewhat obsessively lately. I’ve been spending way more time cooking than I have, say, blogging (duh). Additionally, while in Virginia Beach visiting family last week, I finished the book I was reading (The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers, which just won the National Book Award, indicating that it must have been a mediocre year for literature, because while I enjoyed the book, Powers’s tendency toward florid prose would keep me from giving it any awards), and picked up Julie and Julia at Barnes & Noble. This was a much better book, albeit slightly less, erm, intellectual. It’s about a woman who decides to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One in a year. This is a woman who clearly cooks a lot more obsessively than I do. But she inspired me.

To make pork & sauerkraut because it’s New Year’s Day. This is, apparently, a tradition, although not one in which I have ever partaken before today. So, having no family recipe to use, I made the pork & sauerkraut recipe from Joy of Cooking, because I happened to have it with me in the car when I decided we just had to go to the grocery store.

It turns out that none of the four eating creatures who live in this house really enjoy pork, and only one of the four eating creatures enjoys overcooked vegetables, which, ultimately, was what I thought this dish tasted like. Not really in a bad way — I think if one enjoyed pork and sauerkraut, one would enjoy this — just in a stewed vegetables sort of way. I’m taking the leftovers to my dad tomorrow; I think he’ll appreciate them more than we did.

Anyway, I suppose this marks the conclusion of the holiday season. I’m a little relieved. This was, as I mentioned in the last post, a good one — my New Year’s Eve may have even broken my streak of horribly disappointing New Year’s Eves — but now I have three weeks before classes start and no high-pressure events in the interim.

I plan to play some Civilization, do some laundry, and cook a little food. It’ll be a good year.

that time of year

By now the guests have departed, the boyfriend is doing the dishes, and other than the cat who thinks he could write a better blog entry than I (as evidenced by his insistence on walking on the keyboard), I have peace for the first time since six o’clock this morning.

Though a long one, this was a good Christmas, full of family and food. We started at my parents’ house, opening presents and eating the breakfast I spent yesterday prepping, then moved to my grandmother’s house just a couple of miles down the road, where we opened presents with the extended family, laughed, and spent a few minutes remembering the cousin who passed away earlier this year. Since those few minutes in which we pulled rubber ducks from a stocking dedicated to her, my thoughts have returned to her and her immediate family many times. This is the kind of thing I wish I could write about, or at least wonder if it would be appropriate to write about, but know that I don’t have the words.

After the presents were unwrapped, Fred and I headed back down to New Freedom to get ready for dinner with Fred’s son and his girlfriend. I made the recipe posted in the last entry, but overcooked the meat in the interest of Fred’s tastes. Never again will I cater to his poorly developed tastebuds. The sauce was excellent, but the meat was a shadow of what I believe it could have been.

Dessert, however, was good, and if you have a cooking bone in your body I highly recommend making this Winter-Spiced Molten Chocolate Cake with Rum-Ginger Ice Cream just as soon as you can.

I have come to believe that anyone who can follow a recipe can at least pass her(or him)self off as a good cook. This is the kind of cook I am. I very rarely develop new dishes, but damn am I good at following directions. You’re welcome to come to dinner anytime between now and when classes start again. I’m always looking for an excuse to make something extravagant. Just please don’t ask about the rubber duck sitting in the living room unless you like your food extra salty.

for the sake of posting

Diego’s right — I’ve got no excuse for not blogging right now. Except that I don’t particularly have anything to say. I haven’t left the house since Sunday afternoon, when we went to Ruby Tuesday for an exceptionally mediocre lunch. Since then, I’ve mostly been doing laundry, putzing around on my computer, and watching TV. Not much blogging material there.

Most of my putzing has involved using iPhoto and iDVD, both of which I like a lot, though I wish they were a little more powerful/flexible. I suppose it’s all about the balance between power and ease-of-use, and I likewise suppose it’s no surprise that the Mac software falls on the ease-of-use end of things. So not much there for me to talk about.

Other putzing has involved looking for something to make for Christmas dinner for Fred, his son, and his son’s girlfriend. Being responsible for a Christmas meal has me feeling very grown up. Not quite sure how this has happened. Anyway, I’m leaning toward Epicurious.com’s Beef Tenderloin with Roasted Shallots, Bacon, and Port, but with regular steaks instead of the whole roast since there will only be four of us eating.

More difficult than picking a recipe, though, is not feeling guilty while trying to pick a recipe when the front page of CNN.com is this:

new houses

I wanted to write this post, titled “New Houses,” right after it was confirmed that the Democrats would be controlling both the House and the Senate. It was perfect timing, you see, because the same week I began inhabiting a new house in a little town called New Freedom. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the clever connections I could make. But I didn’t write the post, and now all three new houses are old news, especially for those of you who also read Fred’s blog.

Instead of blogging, I spent most of November freaking out about my senior project, which I finally handed in (and presented) at the end of the month. McDaniel English majors usually write a 25-30 page critical paper, but last year I told my advisor I had no interest in writing such a paper and asked if I could do a creative project instead. After completing some negotiations with the department and a professor had agreed to oversee the project, I began writing a collection of poetry and a self-reflective essay to accompany the collection.

I’m glad I was able to do design a project that interested in me. But, I think it’ll be a while before I write another poem. Maybe I’ll recover over winter break. I hope so.

My last class ended at 4:30 this Thursday, I’ve got a final on Tuesday, and then a take-home final due on Thursday. Break is so close I can almost taste it.

I promise I’ll blog more frequently from mid-December through mid-January. Sorry this one is so boring. I don’t have time for anything more interesting right now, but I started receiving threats, so I figured I better post something.

miss me?

Miss hearing what I have to say?

Come out, this Saturday, to Sparky & Clark’s in York to hear me read at Poetry Brew:

Saturday, November 11th, 7:30pm

Sparky & Clark’s
284 West Market Street
York, PA 17401

I’m currently working on a collection of new poetry for my senior project at McDaniel, which means most of what I’ll be reading is brand new.

Even better than checking my blog for non-existent new posts!