Happy Mardi Gras!

Let’s make a king cake and …

This is a heinous misuse of Photoshop. Mardi Gras is tacky. Get over it.

So I couldn’t make it home for Mardi Gras yet again this year, despite my sister’s valiant attempts at baiting me. What’s worse than missing one’s favorite holiday is knowing everyone at home is gorging on king cake at every single event between Jan. 6 and Fat Tuesday. It’s akin to being in a foreign country for Thanksgiving, except it lasts weeks.

Unfortunately for me, king cake doesn’t exist north of Hattiesburg, Miss. It morphs into some hardened cinnamon thing, takes on French pastry-like qualities (King cake is not galette des rois!), lacks the best part — the filling, ends up with blue sugar instead of purple, or — heaven forbid — skips the sugar in favor of just icing. I could go on. I wrote an entire column my freshman year of college about the blasphemy that is king cake beyond the reaches of the Gulf Coast. Just say no, and make your own.

Groundhog Day: Beasts of 2011

It’s Groundhog Day, so what better way to celebrate a meteorologically challenged* whistle-pig than toast his brethren I had the pleasure to meet in 2011?

Joe Cool, I mistook you for a llama.

People often mistake me for someone who doesn’t like animals.

Thoreau, You Make Me Nervous

Do you ever get stuck in a book for fear of betrayal? The writer makes a foray onto some foreboding cliff where you, the reader, are hesitant to follow. So you shut the book and refuse to open it for fear the writer will take the dive, all the while knowing he well may continue to appease. I keep having this experience as I read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.

Thoreau, you make me nervous. I want to love you so badly, but I fear the next paragraph will get too far into economics and we’ll be over. I keep putting you down, and strangely I don’t pick anything else back up except you in another few days. It’s funny I haven’t yet learned to trust you, but you write with such authority (and probably would condemn our modern accommodating style) that I tread carefully through your words (as intended). So far, all you’ve built is admiration, and I enjoy reading critically even if it does make the going all the slower.

Naturally, I’m loving Walden. I don’t know why I’ve never read it, but now is perfect. I spent a lot of my summer exploring the outdoors from my second home and feeling very Walden (even if I didn’t know exactly what that was). I finished Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums earlier this year, so I did have a keen sense of fraternity in step with Kerouac’s lightweight rucksack expedition to Matterhorn Peak and his wild love for Desolation Peak. I much prefer camping in the woods or on the beach to spending a weekend indoors or at the bar. I wish it were every day I scaled Mount Washington (the long, hard way). I’m in love with our national parks.

At the top!

I leave you with some Kerouac:

Holy Matrimony

Call it cliché. I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. The cover makes me want to throw the thing across the room. People might think I’m reading … a romance novel? Chick lit. Wedding porn.

It’s got some real gems like this comment from Balzac, describing the married women of his era:

Boredom overtakes them, and they give themselves up to religion, or cats, or little dogs, or other manias which are offensive only to God.

Liz Gilbert can be annoying at times with her modern prose that’s just a little too accessible. She overshares. But to be honest, my French lit teacher never quite pointed to that Balzac quote. I learned quite a bit when Gilbert wasn’t going on and on and on about herself.

Trimming the Fat

What do you do when life gives you lemons?

Well, life (aka: Harris Teeter) recently “gave” S and I some BOGO bacon. I know plenty to do with bacon, but this awesome buy turned out to be a dud. We ended up with a ton of bacon fat and a side of edible ham.* What to do?

For shame ...

We made lard. Mmm spreadable, edible fat at its purest.

Photography: Context Upon Request

Finally going through my Europe pics from the holidays. Here are the pretty, artsy shots. I could talk about my trip all day, so ask

Amsterdam

Bicycles.

Poem: Froot Loops

Just yesterday I wrote my grandpa a letter saying I had no poems to share. And today — a flood.

Froot Loops

It’s funny
how you’ll eat
that which you
despise:
Froot Loops
because they
remind you.

The colors
are like trying
to cheer you.

It’s the good fight!
says red (pink?).
don’t-give-up-green and
think-peace-yellow
rally with
happy-go-lucky orange.
I’ll be here, says blue.

And then purple.

Catch of the Day

My sister sent me this adorable little birthday present “sculpture:”

I’m slightly obsessed.

She attempted to paint him red to match my kitchen, but the colors always come out of the kiln different than you’d expect, she says. He’s not right for my kitchen anyway. I’ll put him in my living room across from my wooden cat in flight.

My dad looked at my fish and said his scales go the wrong way. Well maybe he’s not a fish of scales. Maybe he doesn’t want to judge and doesn’t want to trade. My dad would never understand this though — he’s a Libra. Maybe this fish isn’t trying to get anywhere at all. He wishes to be a coral, a polyp, a starfish. He’s quite flamboyant in that way and looks to be wearing almost a fur coat.

And, he’s clearly a left-handed fish as he swims counter-intuitively off this page. Against the current, upstream? His own path.

I will love him and adore him and name him Frank. After all, fish remind of us of the truth of our society. Sometimes you cannot outsmart the smallest of creatures. Sometimes you wait all day for something you’ll throw back. Once a great equalizer, today another “problem” to be solved. May we not catch all the fish.

My Year in Books

Last year I resolved to read more, so here’s my list. I said I’d finish 12 books. Well, how’s 9 ¼?

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

With Salinger’s death and in January, I decided to drop everything (Madame Bovary in its native French) and partake in an obligatory “adult” reading of Catcher. Like many adult rereaders, I saw the novel in a new light. As a high school junior, I didn’t “get” Holden. Maybe I was a late bloomer or bought too heavily into the world of phonies. Either way, I’ve always loved the way Salinger wrote. I read and attempted to internalize all his books in high school. It paid off. Without Frannie and Zooey, I never would have written that cool paper on the pilgrim’s prayer.

Infestation

Have you heard of the vermin known as the stinkbug? He’s indigenous to China and supposedly made his way over to the United States in a shipping crate. He really really loves northern Virginia, Washington, D.C., fruit orchards, and my house. It’s warm here, and he can father a bigger stinky family than in Asia. (Oh please, Snowpocalypse II, kill the stink bugs!)

That's him.

I’ve dealt with bugs for years. In Mississippi, cockroaches are pretty much just a part of life. If your house 10 years or older and not raised off the ground, there’s a pretty good chance you just live with intruders. While I don’t want a roach crawling over my face at night, I was used to their hideous presence in my closet, scurrying across the bathroom, whatever. We set traps, and I’d ignore the occasional run-in.