Not since the film The Birds have birds quite disturbed me in the way they did this morning.
While driving along, scanning the roadsides, shrubbery and forest areas for large animals, like moose, a giant bird flew quite low and crashed directly into the grill of my car. Later when I hopped out to assess the situation, I was treated to a gruesome scene of bird innards and feathers twisted around part of the grill. I had to use the handle of a small dustpan-broom to pry the carcass out and fling it into the parking lot.
Not long after, some other kinds of birds sailed in, started squawking with proprietary intent and began feasting.
The tension and irritation has been building up in me for a long time, even though I was unaware of its presence and imperceptible growth. I am not an athlete nor am I someone who has been vocally feminist for much of my life. I had a few conversations with former colleagues – women who were much older than me, who had been through some of the trials of being the only woman working in a completely male-dominated workplace (an air traffic control center). It’s not as though women are not expected somehow – still – to take notes and make the coffee, but back then it was not just understood but was blatantly stated as a requirement and not questioned. Fighting against these slights in daily work life has never been a conscious part of my life. But strides made by women who came before me paved the way for me not to have to think about such things (as well as the installation of automatic coffee machines!).
I believe wholeheartedly in equality for everyone – and I mean everyone – but when I undertook a master’s program in gender studies, the extremes of feminist theory put me off by being so anti-man. I have not personally suffered – to my knowledge – for being a woman, and I am sure that in some measure this is because I am a white woman who, in the Nordic countries where I live, blends into the scenery and enjoys the privilege that comes from so many different aspects of the accident of my birth and the conscious choice of where I live (which is another layer of privilege – having the choice to decide where to live and to go there).
Similarly Scandinavia conscientiously attempts to lead the way on matters of equality. It does not always succeed, sometimes tripping over itself trying to be “too fair” or politically correct and coming out looking foolish. But the thinking is in the right place. I also say that I have not “consciously” suffered because I don’t know that we are always aware of the things we are numb or indoctrinated to. While no man is outwardly making lewd remarks or insisting that I do something degrading or something that is anything other than equal to what he would do, there have probably been times that I was perceived or treated as “lesser than” because I am a woman. I have been blissfully ignorant to this, if and when it did happen, because my life has still been lived on my terms and has been relatively easy to boot.
Revealing this as my backdrop, I can’t really explain what incensed me and pushed me over the edge about sexism, misogyny and racism in women’s athletics. Not even looking at the flat-out stereotypes any longer (as though all women athletes must exist at caricature-like extremes, i.e. either women who appear as masculine, steroid-pumped sportsmen-lesbians from Cold War era East Germany or ultra-feminine, would-be fashion models who look cute in a short skirt). Either direction these stereotypes travel, they smack of objectification and are on display for the criticism and analysis of the world (and it’s not just men engaging in the bitterest criticism). Not because they are athletes in the public eye but because they are women.
We can see this dynamic quite publicly and visibly played out in the form of Bruce Jenner, former Olympic champion, who is now known as Caitlyn Jenner. As Bruce the athlete, no one would have questioned how he looked or would have sexualized his existence to the degree that all women athletes put up with today. And as Caitlyn, she is suddenly subject to this kind of scrutiny. Jon Stewart explained it best in a recent episode of The Daily Show. Now, suddenly, as a woman, Jenner’s worth is all tied up in her “fuckability” and her beauty.
All of this is frustrating but not quite the infuriating push I needed to get really angry. Instead, Serena Williams’s win at the French Open this weekend finally made me seethe with rage. Looking at her winning history, she is singularly the greatest female tennis player ever to play the game. Can she be recognized simply for these record-breaking achievements in athleticism and sporting victory? No.
If all female pro-athletes, particularly in a “demure” arena like tennis, are treated like sex objects who should be supermodels, what can we expect? And when the kind of racially charged, barely veiled racist language cues come into play on top of the sexism and objectifying, shouldn’t every woman be angry?
**Edited later to note that The Atlanticpublished a piece on French Open men’s champion, Stan Wawrinka, which states: “It’s that Wawrinka doesn’t look or comport himself like a Grand Slam champion. From his bright pink “pajama” shorts to his faintly dadboddish physique, the Swiss native looks more like someone you’d find at Home Depot than Roland Garros.” Finally someone jumps on what a man looks like and how he “comports” himself. Equality, right?
One of my favorite things about living in rural Sweden is being able to see the moose/elk all the time. If I go outside in the middle of the night, which I do at least once a week, I am almost guaranteed to see at least one. Many people who have lived in cities and have not spent a lot of time roaming the countryside tell me that they have maybe seen a moose once or twice in their entire lives. This always makes me feel lucky that I see them all the time.
TV shows appeal to people in different ways – just like everything else (you know how you love, say, Chinese food, and I hate it and want to gorge myself on Indian food, which you hate… well, that’s what I mean. We’ve all got different tastes, no doubt).
With TV, also as with many things that just reach a saturation point, I have noticed, depending on when you jump onboard a specific show, you will feel differently about it. Early adopters of Breaking Bad, for example, sung its praises and loved it. Then mainstream adoption made the show highly visible and much talked about – talked to death, really. People who might have been the sort to adopt early or at least enjoy the show had it not been overblown end up not really liking it – but would they have had they seen it earlier, had they seen it before it became overblown and expectations heightened? If they waited a few years, and all the hype died down, and they just turned it on and watched… what would the experience have been then? I wonder this sometimes because there are shows like that for me – that I joined late (The Sopranos comes to mind here).
If you have the whole show to watch at one time, perhaps long after the show has ended, do you have a different experience and gain a different perspective or take away, than someone who watched episodically, week after week and season by season?
You know how it is when you get all fired up to do something, and if you don’t strike while the iron is hot, the impetus to act dissipates or entirely disappears? Specific topics in writing are like that for me. I can’t count the times I have collected notes and links to articles that inspired or informed my thinking but then don’t write what I want to write immediately. Soon the inspiration is gone, and anything I would write later on the subject is devoid of the passion and sometimes entirely of the point I wanted to make.
(This is a different problem from being inspired and researching and drawing in a lot of information from a lot of sources, only to lose all the gathered information in one horrible technology crash. This also happened recently. Rest assured, I don’t think any of us is suffering or losing sleep over these articles I won’t be writing!)
I have already admitted to being a TV addict, half-watching copious amounts of the stuff while doing other things. Only giving it half my attention means that unless something is truly remarkable, I am not taking much away. I still, though, feel compelled to chronicle all this multitask erstwhile viewing, and if I don’t do it right away (either after watching a particular episode or finishing a season), I might as well not do it.
But here I am a few days after someone recommended the show The Leftovers to me. Usually I have already seen everything there is to see, so recommendations, while welcome, greet me as old news. The Leftovers is no exception. I watched it during its original run and was sometimes confounded, sometimes disturbed. I have no argument with the mostly powerful performances delivered by a large ensemble cast. But the fact that I almost remember nothing about the show, and a lot of its themes have been jumbled in my head with what I’ve seen in the disappointing US version of The Returned, makes me less than enthusiastic about recommending The Leftovers, even though I was drawn in at the time and will watch season two. Perhaps my TV addiction amounts to “too much of a good thing…”.
I can’t count the number of times I have written about lemon bars. The ease of making them originally, the failures of the middle years and finally the adoption of a new recipe to just forge my own lemon bar making path.
Most recently I made some much praised lemon raspberry bars and have chosen to continue using that recipe. Most recently when I made them, I didn’t have raspberries on hand so I skipped that step… but following the recipe otherwise, it all turned out beautifully and the lemon bars were once more one of the most popular things.
Once baked and cooled, I used a handy-dandy “cupcake holer” tool to make uniform holes, which I filled with dulce de leche/caramel (made by mixing a can of prepared dulce de leche with about a half tablespoon of milk, just to make the filling slightly less thick).
Then I made some Swiss meringue buttercream and flavored it with vanilla bean powder and two tablespoons of Kahlua.
Decorated with sprinkles I had had for too long (don’t like to keep stuff like that just sitting around).
Filling process for filled cupcakes
Cappuccino cupcakes
1 cup brown sugar
1 large egg
1 tablespoon vanilla
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 cup flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons instant espresso powder (two or three packets of Starbucks VIA instant espresso powder)
Preheat oven to 175C. Mix all ingredients together. Put into cupcake papers in a cupcake pan. Bake 16 to 19 minutes until toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Turn the pan around once in the middle of baking for a more even bake.
When done, remove from oven, place on a rack and cool for a few minutes before removing the cupcakes from the pan onto their own cooling rack to cool completely.
Caramel/dulce de leche filling
Use a prepared can of dulce de leche and put it in a bowl, mix together with a half tablespoon of milk to achieve a slightly less thick consistency.
When cupcakes are fully cooled, use a knife or a cupcake holer tool to remove the middle of the cupcake and fill each hole with caramel. Reserve the very top of the cupcake when you cut the middle out. Place the tops back onto the filled cupcakes.
Kahlua Swiss meringue frosting
4 egg whites
1 cup sugar
3/4 cup unsalted butter
3 to 4 tablespoons Kahlua
(vanilla bean powder, if desired)
Over a double boiler, whisk egg whites and sugar. When sugar is dissolved, transfer the mixture to the bowl of a stand mixer – beat with the whip attachment until soft to medium peaks form. Switch to paddle attachment, start beating and adding in the butter a few tablespoons at a time. Once you have a frosting-like texture (which can take a long while – the mixture will possibly look curdled, like it cannot possibly come together, at some point, but it will come together – just keep beating), add the vanilla powder. When nearly ready, add the Kahlua and mix until well-combined.
I don’t relish the idea of being one of those people who gets attached to and goes crazy defending one platform or tool over another. I like to believe, perhaps foolishly, that I am flexible enough to accept different systems for their benefits and faults (because nothing’s perfect). But here’s one truth. WordPress. It’s the only blog platform I ever want to touch again. Everything else – kiss my ass.
My feeling that Norway is living eternally in the second half of the 1980s is not going to change, even if all the rest of my perceptions shift constantly. Evidence to prove this: every time I get in my car and drive somewhere, Norwegian radio is playing Michael Jackson. Never the same song, but it’s Michael all the time. And when it’s not Michael, it’s Richard Marx, it’s Bryan Adams, it’s Berlin, it’s Billy Ocean or some other thing I don’t want to hear – in the 80s or now.
As a corollary to this everlasting musical 80s timewarp, I have become known as the harbinger of death because I seem to trip over news of celebrity deaths accidentally (am watching or listening to news almost constantly) or just know about past celeb deaths.
I was in the car the other day, and got immediate proof positive of this 1980s assertion: Jermaine Stewart‘s one-hit wonder, “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off”, blasted from the radio. I listened to the lyrics as if for the first time and could not really figure our why a song like this would exist. And who the bloody hell would drink cherry wine?
My firewall and I spent the whole evening singing it and reveling in the cheesy nostalgia.
But then, being me, I just had to know: what became of Jermaine Stewart? One hit and then gone… well, DEAD is what he is. Apparently he died in 1997 of AIDS-related liver cancer. What? Maybe because he was not really that famous, his death came and went without much fanfare. Or I was just not paying attention.
Whether or not Stewart knew his infection status in 1986 when the song was a hit, knowing this information, I hear the song filtered through that mid-80s terror of AIDS. It is more a safe-sex anthem than anything else (like many songs of the era) but it had never once occurred to me that that song fit such a bill. But listening to it armed with this information, it’s like a completely different song.
But there are new filters and lenses for everything, really. I was listening to Jim Croce the other day, remembering listening to him and looking at an album cover (a close-up of his distinctive face) when I was 4 years old. My mom explained that Croce had died a few years earlier in a plane crash. He was 30. I recall even today what I was thinking when she gave me this background information, “So what? He was old. He did everything he needed to do.” The level of a 4-year-old kid’s reasoning: 30 seemed like a good, full life. Looking at it now, of course, I am taken aback reflecting on his youth, the promising career cut short, the 2-year-old son he left behind.
I admit it. I am feeling nostalgic, contemplative about the shifting filters and perceptions that come with age and time. I am feeling mortal.
