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Only phoning it in a little?

Once again, it is Friday, and once again, things are a little crazy today which makes it a little hard to carve out writing time. (Not to mention the vague writing-malaise of the week: it has been hard to come up with something to write about. From which I mainly glean that I need more shit going on in my life. Thanks, COVID!)

For now, here’s a little link roundup for the day.

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There is still life after twenty-five, you know

This morning’s review of Arts & Letters Daily turned up this little personal history from someone who (as the essay states) used to sing opera. As someone who was into an array of performing arts in school, I feel this.

I mean, for me the performing side was never all that likely to happen; I am too big a girl to be seriously considered for casting in any of the most desirable roles. Always was – though oh boy did I ever get cast as sexy/slutty characters for a while there, presumably thanks to the…generosity of my endowments. I hated it; didn’t I have it in me to be intelligent, thoughtful, spiritual, whatever? And, of course, I do…but that doesn’t matter a bit when all that anyone will really care about is whether you have the “right” look for whatever they’re casting.

Perhaps fortunately for me, I really enjoyed the other half of theatre work – running lights and painting sets and managing costumes; seeing to it that all was in readiness for the big night, then watching it all come together. The technical folk seemed a bit less…highly-strung, shall we say, as well (not so odd perhaps, considering.)

Still. I can relate to this experience, I think. The intensity of pressure, that “well, goodness, you’re twenty-five so if you haven’t made it by now it’s basically over.” One wonders if anyone who attempts to go into performing arts professionally actually gets to have any fun with it; perhaps the amateur space is where it’s at in more ways than one. If only doing it didn’t require one to be basically nocturnal! (I mean, okay, I would be basically nocturnal if I were following my chronotype, but most of the rest of the people and things in my life are diurnal instead, so we’d have a real Ladyhawke thing going on.)

Last night I went to get my booster for COVID at last; again I find myself marveling a bit at just how efficient they’ve made everything. (Those poor people at registration though, having to say over and over and over again “have you been out of the country? do you have fever?” and so on seventy billion times a day.) So far so good on the symptoms front, though my left arm is absolutely killing me this morning.

And tonight I make tacos.

And I feel a little flicker of something like anger at how boring I feel writing this out. (Frustration. Related to anger, but mostly about the sensation that there are forces I can’t control that are preventing a desired outcome. Also the dominant feeling of the last couple of weeks. Sigh.)

Delightful thing of the day: this selection of abandoned villages and towns. Sort of spooky and weirdly appealing at the same time.

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WIBTA if I gave a guy a potion to make him forget his girlfriend and fall in love with me? (Gotterdammerung, part 1)

A lot of people who write tales of grand, mythic, sweeping epic things seem to feel compelled to end them with the disintegration of all of the things that make them grand and epic and sweeping. Magic fades; the legendary folk go into the west; the world is left a safer place for the Ordinary Folk who remain, perhaps, but without any of the things that made it so marvelous a place to get lost in for a series of books or films or what have you.

I’ve never understood why this is, really; adult me figures it must have something to do with the way that people who are old enough to write things have had some time to internalize the concept of entropy, and perhaps that if one is telling a just-so story about how things came to be the way they are one must eventually come to the point where…well, things become the way they are, which is almost invariably less vivid and exciting than the way they were.

Kid me, on the other hand, was regularly driven insane by this. Why on earth would you conjure such wonders only to kill them all off? (Or worse, pull off the mask and reveal that, surprise, you’ve been reading about Jesus all along, like some sort of hyper-sanctimonious episode of Scooby-Doo. I have never quite forgiven C.S. Lewis for that.)

Why did everyone seem to think that the right and proper way for the world to be was a place without any magic in it, where all there was to look forward to was laundry and paperwork and grocery shopping every week forever? It was maddening.

Is maddening, I guess; a good part of me still feels that way, and believe me, if I ever found a door into Somewhere Else I would be off like a shot, especially the way things are now.

All of which is sort of a roundabout response to having started Gotterdammerung, which we did last night. I say “started” because it’s a Project – this one’s long, guys. And it’s very much of the “and now the mythic world crumbles” school, beginning as it does with the three Norns first prophesying an end to it all before losing their gifts of prophecy forever in the first scene. (They also imply that the world tree, Yggdrasil, is dying – and, moreover, that the reason for that death may be in part because of that spear Odin crafted out of it. You know, the one that got shattered last opera. Nice job breaking it, Odin – again.)

Notably, from that point forth there is almost nobody onstage representing the powerful, legendary forces that have driven literally everything else up to this point: the vast majority of the cast are assorted mortals. We’ve got Siegfried and Brunnhilde, of course, who spend WAY longer than is strictly necessary seeing each other off before he, inexplicably, leaves her on her mountain to go questing, leaving her the Ring as a token of his love.

We’ve got three scions of the Gibichung clan, descended from a king local to…wherever this is. Gunther, oldest son, is advised by his half-brother Hagen that really, it’s about time he and his sister Gutrune got married. Problem: How to find partners for them both that will increase their prestige? No worries, Hagen’s got an answer: see, there’s this legendarily amazing woman named Brunnhilde who’d be perfect, and this hero named Siegfried who’d make a great partner for Gutrune.

The part where the proposed partners for these folks are already in a relationship with each other doesn’t seem to matter a bit to anyone, so this rapidly turns into a breathtakingly awful plan straight from Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” wherein Hagen reveals that he’s got a potion that will wipe all of Siegfried’s memories of Brunnhilde and make him fall in love with her instead. She is…a lot more fine with this than I would be.

(Reddit verdict: Everyone sucks here.)

Anyway, this being the Ring Cycle the plan is put into play immediately and goes off without a hitch. Siegfried shows up, trustingly drinks the potion, forgets all about Brunnhilde and goes absolutely wild for Gutrune, so he’s all about it when Gunther proposes they head to this mountain and pick up this Brunnhilde chick, whoever SHE is.

So…yeah. Brunnhilde gets a visitation from her sister Waltraute, one of the very few representatives of the mythic folk in this part of the story. She gets to tell us all what’s going on with the gods: Odin has apparently just straight given up (which may I guess explain why we haven’t seen him on stage at all). He’s ordered what remains of the now weak and fading Yggdrasil chopped down and piled all around Valhalla, ready to burn, and is now just sitting on his throne brooding about the impending end of everything. All he has said on the matter is that if only the ring were returned to the Rhinemaidens, all would be well and Valhalla could yet be saved.

But of course Brunnhilde cannot bring herself to part with Siegfried’s love token, so she tells Waltraute in no uncertain terms to fuck off – and then is promptly given cause to regret it when someone who sure looks a lot like Gunther (actually Siegfried, wearing the Tarnhelm) shows up, claims her as his bride, and rips the ring right off her finger.

Back at the Gibichung hall, we learn that the probable force behind this asshole plan is…Alberich, who apparently swore off love but not sex: he’s Hagen’s father, and there’s some manipulation going on behind the scenes to get that pesky ring back. There will certainly be plenty of distraction going on, what with the double wedding and all – Siegfried to Gutrune, and Gunther to an extremely depressed Brunnhilde.

…Well, an extremely depressed and enraged Brunnhilde, once she spots Siegfried and realizes he seems not to know her and is apparently totally willing to just let her be married off to some asshole – and, moreover, is still wearing the ring that was taken from her. (Siegfried may be ensorcelled but he’s still not very quick on the uptake.)

Well, Hagen needs that ring back, and Brunnhilde’s feeling pretty vengeful, so when he proposes a little old fashioned murder she’s into it, revealing that although she did cast a number of protections on him before sending him out into the world, she didn’t cover his back. All righty then, no problem: arrange a convenient hunting accident and vengeance will be hers (and the ring, doubtless, Hagen’s.)

I’m sure everyone can see where this is going, though we left off there last night.

It occurs to me that the Ring hasn’t actually DONE much here besides be a MacGuffin – at least, not onstage. Sure, we hear that it’s supposed to grant world-dominating power, but it couldn’t even let Brunnhilde keep herself from being violated when push came to shove. Shouldn’t it be seen to…do…something, before all of this is over?

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Tuesday’s not that great either

I’m sure this is not a controversial opinion, but February kind of sucks. By that time it’s been winter long enough that everyone is getting sick of it, and it’s still far too long before spring will get here, and the only holiday in sight is one that tends to…induce stress, shall we say. (Not for me, not this time; I tend to favor relatively modest “let’s just have a nice time” celebrations, and have already ordered a little surprise that unfortunately was a bit spoilt when a certain someone got to the door before me. Well, whatever; it will still be enjoyed.)

Factor in a week full of adulting-commitments taking up time in the evenings (at least one of these is my vaccine booster, so there’s that) and…yeah. Vague dissatisfaction ensues.

Trying to name this feeling. What is it? Frustration? Boredom? Both?

Things aren’t bad, is the thing. Everything is more or less fine, or at least as fine as “fine” gets in the world in which we live. (Depressing that we have to knock a -2 modifier off everything for the general aura of the world.)

But I keep picking up books and putting them back down. Starting the day with the intent to move around regularly and maybe even burn an extra calorie or two and then somehow just…not getting up from my desk for three hours. Catching myself zoning out midway through a podcast I am listening to, stabbing angrily at rewind, taking 20 minutes of time to finish 5 minutes of audio as it happens again and again and again.

Nothing is really wrong. I mean, what is the worst I can say: that sometimes I feel unappreciated? That it’s a bummer that it’s been hard to find people to play games I want to play with recently? That I feel tired and irritable and would rather like to eat half a chocolate bar except I am trying to be at least kinda sorta mindful about calories, and the sense of deprivation makes me feel a bit like chucking the nearest chair out a window? These are barely even first-world problems, let alone actual problems.

Vague feelings of unmet needs are a thing right now, I guess. I do not know what you call this. I cannot even be a Karen and demand to speak to the manager because there is no manager; no one and nothing to direct my frustration at, justified or otherwise.

Perhaps frustration is the word then. There’s a lot going on I can do nothing about that sure seems to be stopping things from being as good as they might otherwise be. Well, ok, I could in theory do something about the chocolate bar part, but I am supposed to be being A Responsible Adult.

At the moment I feel about that rather as I do about February.

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I think I’d rather have had the madeleine.

Has anyone reading this ever had a moment like that famous one Proust had with his madeleine? Where something just hits you and you are suddenly swept up in a torrent of memory and emotion?

I have not, though I have always sort of wanted to; I have wondered what it would be that triggered such a thing for me. The foods of my childhood were mostly processed, and it’s hard to imagine having a huge, nostalgic wave of feeling over a Little Debbie snack cake or a box of what they call Kraft Dinner here. (I mean. Perhaps it’s possible, but my inner aesthete objects to the notion, and my palate has…adjusted…after some years of cooking for myself. I doubt very much I would still enjoy many of the things I used to subsist on.)

I have had a recent incident of something triggering unexpected feelings, though: I listened to a song. Not a favorite, or even one I was all that familiar with; I had perhaps heard it once before, in the kind of “shuffle songs” situation that comes up when you are exploring an artist or a genre.

And, for no apparent reason, I cried for almost an hour as though my heart were absolutely broken.

And then I felt like maybe it would be a good idea to check and make sure people were okay, just in case I was having some kind of premonition. (They were; I was relieved but felt rather stupid for acting on such a thing.)

And then I felt rather confused (and maybe a bit ashamed as well). That was weird.

I have since been advised that perhaps I should consider any such unexpected emotional outburst in a bit more depth. The song in question is, as I interpret it at the moment, about striking out on one’s own when those around you are unable to take care of you; it does not appear to be going well for the speaker, so there is a strong undercurrent of loneliness and of the loss of relationship(s?), perhaps of identity as well, after a fashion. The new world is hard and loud and cold, and in it it is easy to forget one’s name.

Considered with a little distance it is not difficult to see how that might possibly have some impact on my reptile hindbrain, but the degree of the reaction is still a bit of a surprise. I haven’t really been having that bad a time. Things are stressful in the usual areas of adult life (work and sometimes finances and so on, compounded of course by the pandemic and all of the business down south), and yes, I’ve spent almost two years holed up mostly in my house but I’ve worked very hard to reach out to people consistently and to try and keep some semblance of a social life going.

…I do sort of feel lonely anyway. There is a…hunger, I think the same one that for some reason often translates into a craving for cake. (I don’t think I quite understand that, either. Cake is a special-occasion food, certainly, but I do not remember having any particular kind of special relationship to it as a child, other than being happy to see it on said special occasions. Why that particular sweet, brain? Why not chocolate or cookies or ice cream? A doughnut, even?)

This is preposterous, exasperating; I have literally talked to someone, at least digitally, every day all this time, and I live with a partner, who is generally good company and might justly wonder what on earth I meant by that and whether they were chopped liver or what.

I feel the same irritation looking at this feeling as I might watching a little kid have a meltdown because the packaging of the chocolate bar you have just bought them is the wrong color, and no amount of telling the kid that it’s just the packaging that’s different and the contents are exactly the same seems to make a bit of difference and everyone is staring at you and you find yourself perhaps wishing you could invoke a bolt of lightning to end this and all other awkwardnesses forever.

It IS the same chocolate bar, right? Everything is fine. What the hell is wrong with you?

I guess I’ll have to sit with this one for a while and keep thinking about it.

Still hoping to have a bit of a nicer version of this experience some day, though.

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At least it’s Friday?

Today hasn’t been a great day for writing. Thanks to yesterday’s snow I had shoveling taking up the morning timeslot, which is great for bolstering my failing attempts to build an exercise habit but less great for building a writing habit. Lunchtime involves…well, lunch…and this evening we’ll be busy with groceries and whatnot, so…yeah. This may not be the best day for something thoughtful and complex.

In the interest of not having it be a complete wash-out, here are some odds and ends:

  • This website collects games that include “dark patterns” – sneaky tricks that are intended to keep a user playing…or, even more sinister-ly, paying. Helpfully, it also explains what a number of these dark patterns are, and lists games that are more healthy – so if you find your favorite game on the “dark” list, you may be able to find a nicer alternative at the same time. Just mobile games for now, but I kind of hope this takes off; we could use more resources to aid in vetting such things. (via BoingBoing)
  • A favorite local chocolatier is doing a Valentine’s Day-themed array of goodies. If you’re thinking of something to send a sweetheart, consider giving them a try (they’re excellent!)
  • Lots of us (…me included) have been playing the silly little word game Wordle. Enough of us, I guess, that there was a little game jam recently to play with the concept, resulting in a bunch of variations on the theme that Polygon has done a roundup of. Check them out!
  • I have learned a lot about Nicholas Cage today.
  • To pick up on the recent theme of emotions and the naming thereof: this is an interesting article over at the Baffler on the subject. Can naming our feelings – and changing the names we have for them – change how we deal with some of the big Things we face in our future?
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But who will teach him fear?

So this week we made it through to the end of part three of the Ring Cycle: Siegfried, or as I call it in my head “The Broventures of Siegfried.”

Ok, so, as we may recall from the end of Die Walkure, Brunnhilde gets sent to do the Sleeping Beauty thing, but in the process she rescued Sieglinde and sent her off to live in peace someplace. And she was pregnant at the time. “Call him Siegfried,” Brunnhilde suggests, all eagerness.

Spoiler in the title: Sieglinde does indeed call him that.

Unfortunately that’s the only contribution she’s going to make to this story, as she conveniently dies in childbirth, leaving us to spend almost the entirety of Act 1 watching Siegfried grudgingly engage with the only caretaker he’s ever known: a nasty little Nibelung we may all recall from Das Rheingold: Mime, brother of Alberich.

This may at first seem especially baffling considering that neither of them appear to like each other in the slightest, but Mime does spend a lot of time monologuing to himself, and so it is we learn that this is really just an attempt at a very long game: He’s banking on the idea that Siegfried will become the hero he is prophesied to be, and kill the current holder of that pesky ring of power this whole saga gets its name from: Fafner the giant, who thanks to the Tarnhelm has turned himself into a dragon. (Oddly, he hasn’t really done anything ELSE with either his draconic powers or all that gold, just appears to be hanging out with his hoard, sleeping a lot. Living his best life, I guess?)

Anyway. Siegfried’s super keen to get going on this whole heroing thing, or perhaps just to get the fuck away from his skeevy pseudo-parental figure, but before he can do that he needs a decent sword, and Mime’s been promising for years that he’ll fix up that busted one his Mom had when she died (Nothung, the sword extracted from the tree at Hunding’s place back in part 2.) Problem is, Mime hasn’t been able to mend the damn thing, despite his obviously strong smithing skills.

Cue the arrival of Wotan, not fooling anyone (…in the audience, anyway) by turning up dressed like a Neil Young cosplayer. In this disguise he wagers his head against Mime’s and we get one of those old-school “answer these questions” games. Mime isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is, so this is probably not going to go well for him, but we do learn a little something that may point to why he’s never had any luck with that sword: Only someone who doesn’t know what fear is can repair it.

And wouldn’t you know it, we happen to have just such a fellow right over there.

What follows may be summed up rather simply: Siegfried, who has no idea what it means to be afraid of anything, resolves the sword-forging problem himself – rather than attempt to repair a broken blade he files the whole thing down and forges himself a new one. (Whether there is a comment here on artists who are excessively careful in their output, and whether or not it is deliberate, I don’t know – but I do wonder if more of us might not benefit from melting our own swords down, whatever those swords may be.)

From there we’re off to the races – Siegfried sets out to the dragon Fafner’s cave, where for some reason Alberich is hanging out waiting for someone to do something about it so he can get the ring back. Along the way he has a pleasant chat to a little forest bird, who of course just sings wordlessly along.

Taking out Fafner is…not really any big deal at all, in the end; in what feels like just a few bars the former giant is sprawled on the forest floor, his blood already beginning to taint the nearby spring. It’s very hot blood, too; when Siegfried pulls the sword out the blood burns his hand, and he thoughtlessly sticks a finger into his mouth. In our world, this would be a terrifying health hazard, but in this world, it means he’s just gained the power to understand the speech of animals, so from his little bird friend he learns that there are two very particular items of treasure he might want to pick up – the ring, and the Tarnhelm that enabled that draconic transformation.

He has just time to pick them up before Mime makes his appearance, all set to murder him and take the reclaimed ring for his own. Unfortunately for him, Siegfried’s new language-comprehension powers extend to (strangely) the ability to comprehend Mime’s thoughts, and so it’s not that long before Mime joins Fafner on the forest floor, with a general air of “good riddance.”

You’d think this would be Alberich’s chance, wouldn’t you? But…no. Weirdly, for some reason, he does nothing, even as our hero sits there lamenting in an extremely bro-ish fashion that even slaying this dragon thing didn’t teach him how to be afraid and that sucks. (Why it is he wants this knowledge is unclear.)

Oh well. Whatever! The little bird has another quest flag piece of information for him: High on a nearby mountaintop is a beautiful woman he can claim for his bride, if he is brave enough. Sounds like somewhere you could find fear, yeah? So off he goes.

Everything else from here is a foregone conclusion, really. Wotan shows up and (for some reason) puts forth a not entirely convincing resistance to letting Siegfried climb the mountain where Brunnhilde sleeps, and Siegfried shatters his spear (!) in the process. (That’s not going to have consequences or anything.) Siegfried climbs up the mountain, navigates the flames, and beholds the first woman he’s ever seen.

We get a lengthy and somewhat odd scene between Siegfried and Brunnhilde where Brunnhilde realizes that she’s in love with Siegfried (that was fast) but also is feeling the onset of mortality and cue existential crisis but also oh my god isn’t this dude hot, and where Siegfried at first thinks he’s learned fear but wait no actually maybe it was just the onset of his first experience of lust. Oh well, what the heck, now he has a woman!

The end.

This production of Siegfried is a bit more compelling than the last one we saw – possibly because the performers for both Mime and (crucially) Siegfried himself were a lot more into their roles, hamming it up from time to time and injecting humor into the proceedings as our somewhat exasperatingly-self-confident-yet-uninformed hero derps his way through Germanic Mythology-land doing his own personal riff on one of the lesser-known tales of the Brothers Grimm. The effects are also particularly spectacular in this one, with the piles of projected fallen leaves skittering away as Siegfried kicks at them, or a digital version of the little bird whose beak somehow is able to follow along with the singer’s voice exactly.

This show is a beast, though, with a full production running something like six hours. Anyone’s attention span might well be flagging by the end of it, and I admit mine was a bit by the end of that odd little love scene. (Is it a love scene really?)

There is something really sort of irritating in having a hero who is a decent but remarkably incurious fellow who insists on reminding you every couple of minutes that by the way he’s terribly brave, you know, never been afraid of anything in his life. Siegfried’s all right and all, and the performer playing him does a great job with one of the most legendarily difficult roles in all of opera…

But I cannot help but feel that Brunnhilde deserved better. (Then again, I suppose we’ll be getting to that as the cycle concludes.)

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The calculus of “and”

When someone asks “How are you?” (or any of its many variants), there’s always a calculus, isn’t there?

Not just of “Well, how am I actually?” – which can be tricky enough, some days – but of “Is it okay for me to tell this person how I’m actually feeling?” or “Is it appropriate in this social situation for me to just spill my guts, and if yes, to what extent?”

I wonder if this calculus happens for everyone, or if it’s just a symptom of my own tendency to overthink everything.

I imagine a flowchart. Are you at work? Do you know the person who is asking? Do you know them well enough that you would speak with them in an un- or lightly-filtered manner about major life events? Follow the lines and arrows and eventually you will come to one of the outcomes that involves sharing more or less of what is really happening.

This is a little ironic, considering how very un-flowchart-like my thought processes tend to be when I am not following them carefully and deliberately. If I do not force them to slow down and write everything through, I more often find myself somewhere without really having much of an idea how I crossed the intervening space. I have an answer before I have really completely parsed the question. I have teleported to the moon unexpectedly.

(This is not to say that the answers I come to by such proto-thought-processes are wrong, necessarily – often they are correct – but more that my brain is a sort of eager street magician, too quick for the eye to follow.)

In any case, my response lately, should the result of that calculus come out to “Probably best to keep it to the surface level…” has been:

“Well, I’m not sick and the furnace is working. So, okay, I guess!”

This usually gets a chuckle, and it’s meant to. Sort of a badge of how low the bar actually IS right now when it comes to our interior landscapes. I am not actually and immediately suffering? Nothing in my house is actively on fire? Guess everything’s fine then!

This is of course not entirely correct. I am not sick right now, yes. In a pandemic that seems like it will never end and that may have upended most of how we do reality, that is definitely a good thing, though I do not think I am entirely comfortable with the notion that the right answer is for all of us to just get sick, the way everyone expects to get the chicken pox as a kid. Unlike the chicken pox, there can be long-term consequences to this, no?

And yes, the furnace is working. And in weather like we’ve had the last few weeks I am grateful for it, to be sure.

On the spectrum of loss in an article like this one I am barely inconvenienced, so far. All of my friends and family are well. Only one person I know with any degree of depth has gotten sick (though that sickness was, to be fair, quite scary.) I appreciate the author’s thesis that the “and-ness” of things is kind of essential to our humanness, that in the midst of the worst times we will sometimes find joy and in the midst of the most beautiful times, sadness.

Certainly if I take any amount of time to seriously consider how things are Outside – the ridiculous convoy, the climate disaster nobody with power to do anything about is paying attention to, the political garbage fire that is the land of my birth, the bottomless desire of Finance People to invade and monetize every instant of my life – it takes very little time for me to go from zero to literal shrieking rage. (I mean that depressingly literally. I yelled at someone yesterday out of sheer frustration with the fucking stupidity of humanity, and I feel terrible about it. After all, it wasn’t that person’s fault.)

But I also listened to a podcast episode about burrowing owls yesterday, and it was fascinating and delightful – moreso because there are people working to make homes and habitats for them in spaces that used to house less delightful things, like chemical weapons. Also, I mean, look at them.

And I Kickstarted a mildly ridiculous little nerdy thing – a page-a-day calendar that is also an RPG, with little dice and everything, and which would have been a feature at my desk this year if I were…well, more at my desk. And yes, it’s a little goofy. But the moment of levity in the mornings is helping a bit, I think. Just a tiny bite-sized chunk of an adventure every day.

So. All of that and.

It makes “How are you” rather complicated.

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In which I find out what all the fuss is about

My birthday present this year was a real treat, as it turns out.

I am, as anyone who has spent any time here at all will have probably gleaned, an avid cook. And for many years I have done all of my braising and stewing and so on in a big blue Dutch oven – a sturdy Lodge, because that was in the Overton window of affordability for my twenty-something self.

And it’s been great. No complaints; I can heartily recommend it to anyone looking to experiment with cooking in a cast-iron piece like this. I’ve made all manner of stews and braises and pasta sauces in it; deep-fried things and baked artisan bread and tried out various culinary firsts like bourguignon and so on.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t still quite excited to try out the replacement for it that I got as a birthday gift this year – the Cadillac of Dutch ovens, a Le Creuset. It’s a tiny bit bigger than my Lodge, but lighter, strangely enough – the walls of it are surprisingly thin, making it quite easy to lift and use. And it is gorgeous. (I shall have to work to keep that finish as pretty as possible as long as I can.)

It’s also still blue. I debated going for the red or the orange, because those are both ALSO lovely. Perhaps if I splurge on one of those enamel-interior skillets one of these days.

Anyway, I’ve now at last got round to inaugurating it – with this recipe for braised Chinese-style short ribs with Soy, Orange, and five-spice powder.

I went ahead and shredded the beef for easy serving and packing-up.

The result is delicious – and, since it’s actually the second time I’ve made this, I got the salt balance right. (If you, like me, only have regular soy sauce around and not low-sodium, this is still quite doable – you just have to go very easy on salting the short ribs and whatever you’ll be serving the meat on top of; in this case, mashed potatoes.)

I feel a bit boring for not having something more interesting to say, but it was pretty fun to make!

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Reason # who-knows-what why it is nice to be a regular

That up there is a special sushi tray put together by our local sushi place. In this our era of not being able to dine out anywhere ever, it made a nice birthday dinner, and I find it rather heartwarming that when my husband went to ask them if they did anything for special occasions they basically said they’d whip something up. Sometimes it is nice to be a regular.

(I think my favorite thing was the row of rolls at left, just below the edamame; that’s a lobster-and-crab concoction that was lightly broiled on top and just a bit spicy. It was also delicious.)

At left, my birthday-cake substitute, also from a local place:

Clockwise from top left: Vanilla with sprinkles, chocolate raspberry, lemon meringue, and chocolate hazelnut.

The bakery has a very cute interior, with little tables with cozy seating, and once again I heartily wished I could order a coffee and sit and look out the window for a while. Sigh. Maybe later.

The day itself was pleasant enough: I spent a chunk of it puttering around taking care of business the way one always seems to on the first day of a vacation, before settling in for an evening hangout in an online game I’ll be talking about a bit tomorrow. Got the usual round of text messages (from younger friends and relations) and phone calls (from older friends and relations); got a walk in; took a little time to meditate.

Overall, it was a pretty good day.

My anxiety did show up in the middle of the night to torment me a bit about this and that – some upcoming paperwork, that creeping 5 a.m. feeling of existential meaninglessness, unease about some of the relationships in my world and whether they are okay – but at least it had the decency to leave me alone on the big day itself.

Today, feeling a bit tired from all that, with a nagging sense of longing that doesn’t seem to want to settle. Doing my best to let it go and re-center; I have a loaf of bread to make, and tonight there will be a mildly ridiculous kitchen experiment wherein I saw a recipe for salisbury steak and thought “you know, I’m not sure I’ve ever eaten one of those” followed by “wouldn’t it be hilarious if I reproduced one of those old-school TV dinners with, like, the mashed potatoes and peas and so on?”

And then of course I had to do that. So that will be tonight.

But first, another coffee.

Delightful thing of the day, via Boing Boing: Marginalia, a search engine that focuses on teeny-tiny sites. Its “random” page is quietly charming/addictive, a little peek into the weird corners of the internet where webrings are a thing and people are still creating shrines to their favorite ships.