• walking the line

    Dear Reader,

    One of my favorite sayings is “Never trust a writer.” The same goes for photographers or actors or composers, whatever. Because here’s the deal: writers, rather, bloggers (let’s pick on them for now because obviously) take great care to choose only exactly what they want their audience to know. They work their butts off to make their words tidy, condensed, attractive, witty, meaningful, and inspirational.

    But that’s not the whole picture. Life isn’t tidy or condensed. Life isn’t even all that pretty.

    There is a line between wanting to make oneself look good and telling the truth. But the line is blurry, sometimes almost invisible. Some truths aren’t appropriate to share (TMI, you know), and details can be sloggy-boggy. Telling the truth artistically is hard especially since art is all about making impressions—good, interesting, beautiful, creative impressions. Art is about Selling Our Perspective.

    I have a fairly large, built-in BS detector. I read blog posts about some blogger’s cozy Saturday mornings and look at the photographs of syrupy, stacked pancakes and I can’t help but think, “Oh, come on. You aren’t irritated that your kid woke you up with his dead-animal morning breath? The pancakes didn’t get cold and mushy while you fiddled to get the perfect shot? Show the dirty dishes in the sink! Talk about how you miffed your husband by fiddling with his pannycakes! Talk about how you used up the last of the syrup for the photos and the kids had to use honey and they acted like they were dying because they hate honey on their pancakes. TELL THE WHOLE STORY, PEOPLE!”

    Maybe this reading-between-the-lines habit is a defense mechanism to protect me from getting too depressed with my own chaotic, helter-skelter, raw existence. Maybe it’s sour grapes. Maybe it’s because I know how much I don’t say.

    Because I’m guilty of making my life look good, too. Not that my life isn’t good, because it is—parts of it are downright gorgeous—but I often make it look better than it really is. I beautify it. I edit my photos—to lighten, brighten, heighten them. The same with words. I leave out whole chunks of the story. I polish the parts I put in. Do you have any idea how long it’s taken me to write this post? A long time. Like, hours and days.

    You’d think that with my BS detector I’d be drawn to only the rawest of blogs. But that’s not the case. I enjoy blogs that are put together, beautiful, erring on the side of too nice. They are pretty to look at, inspiring in their simplicity, clean. But I also enjoy blogs that are painful in their rawness, the ones that talk about depression, illness, and the ugliness that each of us has inside. These blogs, though, are almost always witty. I don’t know if I could handle them without the humor.

    So anyway. Last week I wrote a post about the end of summer. It was a little rosy. But the truth is, I have been loving this late-summer season and feeling sorta glowy about it. So that part was true.

    But it was also true that:

    *the weather was a little too warm for those cozy pjs
    *the bed sheets were slipping off the mattress because they don’t fit our bed right
    *my husband was dumping out the tomatoes, not laying them out (though I didn’t know that until later)
    *the downstairs reeked of rotten tomatoes because the little buggers insisted on hiding their rotting spots and then oozing out their stinky insides all over the shelving.
    *the target-throwing game soon turned into bathtime and there was a lot of yelling, pounding on doors, and too much water running down the drain
    *the end of summer equals allergy season, so we all walk around with itchy, burny eyes.

    The line between art and truth is hard. Writing (photography, etc) is supposed to crystallize our experiences, focus them. And yet, the end result is supposed to be enjoyable to read (look at). So how are artists supposed to make real life, which is so rarely pretty, consumable? How to find a balance?

    On second thought, maybe this is more about communication than art. Maybe it’s more a question of self-presentation than it is about Artsy-Fartsy. Maybe…?

    In any case, have you figured out how to walk the line?

    xo,
    Jennifer

    PS. The “never trust a writer” saying? I think I made it up. But I’m not positive.

  • puppy love

    My older daughter has been wanting her own dog for quite some time now. A small dog, she said. A beagle.

    “You’ll have to pay for it,” we said. “It will be expensive. Food, shots, the works. Do you really want to pour all your money into a dog?”

    “Yes,” she said.

    So we started a leisurely search. We looked at ads in the paper and researched small dogs online.

    Then yesterday she asked me to put something on Facebook. I obliged. “My daughter is in the market for a border terrier puppy,” I wrote.

    By evening, we had a lead. There were some mix puppies at a pet store in town. (I was not aware that our town had a pet store. Which just shows that we were, indeed, leisurely going about this puppy-finding business.)

    I called the store this morning, got the information, and called my husband. “I may go over to that part of town later,” my husband said.

    About fifteen minutes later, the phone rang.“It’s pretty cute. And there’s one left. You should bring the kids in to see it this morning.”

    Only then did I tell my daughter that we maybe found a puppy for her. She was over the moon.

    “My stomach hurts,” she half-whimpered, half-giggled on the way there. “I’m too excited.”

    And then we got to the store and there was this ugly, ratty dog and no cute puppies and I was like, Is my husband out of his mind? But then a guy took us out back and there she was. My daughter scooped her up and that was that.

    She is a beagle-Jack Russell-border collie mix. They say that although she’s only ten weeks, she’s nearly full size already. Of course, since we rushed headlong into this purchase, we know nothing about this sort of dog. She could turn out to be a yappy, howly stupid thing. Or she could be sweet as pie.

    I’m hoping for pie.

    PS. Her name is Charlotte.

    PPS. I am in love with her floppy ears.

    This same time, years previous: oatmeal jacked up, why I don’t teach my kids science, losing my marbles

  • grape parfaits

    The other night my daughter asked to make something special for dessert. She didn’t have any clear ideas—she just wanted to cook.

    “Well,” I said, “there’s grape filling in the fridge…. Oh, I have an idea! Watch this.” And then we proceeded to beat cream cheese and whip cream and thicken grapes and toast graham crackers.

    I instructed her to get the wine glasses from the cupboard and showed her how to fill them—a blob of cream cheese, a plop of grape sauce, a sprinkling of crackers—repeating the layers until everything was used up.

    It ended up looking like a put-together dessert rather than the hodge-podge of ingredients that it was. It tasted right classy, too—rich, fruity, and cool.

    Grape Parfaits
    This looks a lot more complex than it actually is. I was just winging it—no recipe and no measurements, using up what I had on hand.

    No grape filling? Sub in another pie filling such as sour cherry, blueberry, rhubarb and strawberry, apricot, etc.

    For the grape filling:
    2 cups of grape sauce, skins in, seeds removed
    1-2 tablespoons Therm-Flo or cornstarch
    ½ cup sugar

    Combine everything and bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and chill.

    For the cream cheese:
    8 ounces cream cheese
    ½ cup confectioner’s sugar
    1 teaspoon vanilla
    1 cup whipping cream

    Whip the cream. In a separate bowl, cream together the cream cheese, confectioner’s sugar, and vanilla. Fold in the whipped cream.

    For the graham cracker crumbs:
    1 ½ packages graham crackers, ground into crumbs
    2 tablespoons sugar
    4 tablespoons butter

    Melt the butter in a skillet. Add the graham cracker crumbs and sugar. Cook, stirring constantly, until the crumbs are toasty and a couple shades darker. Immediately remove from the skillet so they don’t burn.

    To assemble:
    Get out 6 to 8 of your fanciest goblets. Put a spoonful of cream cheese mixture in each, then a spoonful of grape sauce, and then a sprinkling of graham cracker crumbs. Repeat the process until all the components are used up or the glasses are full, whichever comes first.

    This same time, years previous: chocolate yogurt cakeroasted tomato sauce, pasta with sauteed peppers and onions