Confidential to Momerina: Yes, “My Adrienne Rich Problem” is a riff on John Thorne’s “My Paula Wolfert Problem.” Nice catch, Mom.

I am aware that in posting this, I will be angering and/or breaking the hearts of a lot of people who I really love, and for that, I’m sad. Keeping silent on this issue, though, makes me sadder (and is wrong, to boot).

Adrienne Rich died last week. When I was in high school, I devoured her poetry and essays on feminism and social justice. Because I was a poetry geek, I would yammer on about “Reliquary” and “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” to anyone who would listen. With that in mind, a few people have asked me why I haven’t commented on Adrienne Rich’s death, or contributed to memorial events to her.

Here’s why: Even as she was a brilliant poet, a fierce activist, and a coalition builder (who was not shy about telling white feminists that they needed to step up their game on advocating for women of color), Adrienne Rich had “read through...in all its stages, and provided resources, creative criticism and constant encouragement” to Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire, the most hateful, damaging screed against trans women ever written. I am not engaging in hyperbole when I say this. It is impossible to overstate the damage this book has done to the world in which trans women live. And Janice Raymond not only thanks Adrienne Rich for her help with the book, but also reproduces a conversation with her in the text of the book.

Rich’s defenders have pointed out that Janice Raymond is not a credible source, and that it’s possible that Raymond overstated Rich’s contribution to the work, or that Rich’s attitudes towards trans women became more enlightened in her later years. It’s certainly possible. On the other hand, in the 33 years between the publication of The Transsexual Empire and Rich’s death, she has never repudiated the work, or stated that Raymond had misrepresented her point of view.

The bottom line: I cannot, in good conscience, call myself either a feminist or a trans ally if I’m willing to look the other way when Adrienne Rich contributes to a toxic body of work, no matter how much I love her poems. It does, indeed, matter.

Postscript: In addition to the You’re Welcome essay linked above, these essays are also excellent and worth reading:
My complicated mourning: RIP, Adrienne Rich
Another Complicated Mourning of Adrienne Rich

Postpostscript: Over on Facebook, a friend asked me what I’d hoped to accomplish by writing this piece, as it won’t affect the role that The Transsexual Empire plays in society, and would only serve to discredit Adrienne Rich’s body of work for some people. Here is my reply to her question:

Well...hmmm. I’m not entirely sure that it needs to accomplish anything to be worth discussing. (Upon typing, that reads as kind of snarky, but I promise, [name redacted], I’m not being snarky, and I *am* both reading and answering in good faith.) Are we “accomplishing” anything when we point out that an asshat writer on Two and a Half Men made gross comments about women in an interview? Probably not. Is it worth discussing? Absolutely.

I have no illusions that my little post here will affect anything vis a vis the availability of The Transsexual Empire. That ship sailed 30 years ago. But I don’t know if it will continue to have its power and resonance within the establishment, simply because trans civil rights activists are pushing back like hell on it. I’m more concerned with its power and resonance among feminists. Not all feminists are transphobic (or transmisogynist), but the ones who *are* transphobic are, in my opinion, an embarrassment to the sisterhood. The hate rhetoric they spout about trans people, particularly trans women, is almost indistinguishable from the hate rhetoric of the right wing. Right-wing ‘phobes may call them perverts, while radical feminist ‘phobes call them men trying to appropriate “real” women’s space, but the net result is still the same: a refusal to recognize trans women as women.

So what does all this have to do with Adrienne Rich? She may not have created the idea that trans women are not real women, but she certainly facilitated it. And that’s shocking to me, because Adrienne Rich was a vigorous critic of white feminists who refused or neglected to address issues affecting women of color. She recognized that black women needed more than an “inclusive” environment where white women were nice enough to invite them but not necessarily to let their voices be heard. So to hear that a coalition builder like Adrienne Rich not only didn’t include trans women in the coalition, but also provided constructive feedback to a woman who described trans women as monsters and sleeper agents in a plan to replace “natural” women with “artificially-constructed women”...well, it’s a shock. Kind of like it was a shock when I learned that Dostoevsky, who wrote the most beautiful prose in the world on how to live with grace and humility and love, had a little bit of an intense-hatred-of-the-Jews problem.

Ultimately, I guess I’m just pondering that old question about how we think of people who make beautiful art, yet think or do ugly things. We hear this question over and over again—how do we think of Ezra Pound? Of Leni Riefenstahl? Of Roman Polanski? It’s not an easy question to answer, but I know how I don’t want to answer it: Adrienne Rich did so much good for so many people that it’s mere hair-splitting to call her out on an issue that only affects a certain group of people. That certain group of people comprises my friends and sisters, and they matter.

Here is what happens when you take the California bar exam. Let’s assume that you graduate from law school in May. Unless you feel like you won’t be ready for the bar in two months, and would prefer to wait until February (like my friend Lea, who, from my vantage point, is a genius for doing this), you have already registered to take the bar at the end of July. If you have signed up for a fancy-pants bar prep course, you will be living this course for the next two months. With any luck, you’ll have some means of support, like a bar loan, so that you will not have to work during your bar review period. Finally, the day arrives. You show up at the testing center with your laptop, admission ticket, i.d., and any back support you might need. You spend the next three days, six hours per day, taking the test. When day three ends, you may feel triumphant, or you may just feel lucky to have not exploded in the middle of the test. Hopefully you’re feeling good, because you won’t know your results for four months. California releases July bar exam results on the Friday before Thanksgiving.

Most of us, if we have not already secured a job, spend the next four months job-hunting, which is not fun during the best of times, but is brutal in a down economy. I was lucky enough to have to report for jury duty the week after the bar. I sat through four days of voir dire, at the end of which I was sent on my merry way. I secured a few days of freelance work, took a few more days to recover from the test, and the joined the chain of hopefuls, looking for a job, a fellowship, anything that would allow me to pay rent and not default on my student loans, whose deferral period would end on the same weekend that bar results came out.

No surprises, the job search was dispiriting. But Fate took a little pity on me, by way of a fellowship at my now-alma mater, Santa Clara University School of Law, where I am working as a graduate fellow for one of my favorite professors. Unfortunately, the pay would not keep me in rent or pay my loan, never mind both, but hey, it’s money! And the work experience is terrific! I become more employable with every completed assignment. Then last month, Fate threw me a little more love, in the form of the lawyer for whom I freelance. He has a trial coming up. Big trial. Lots of discovery to do. A few months’ worth, at very least.  So, for now, at least, I’m earning a living wage, even if I’m earning it in fits and starts.

But I digress. Here is what happens when bar results are released. In the good old days of the 20th century, you pretty much had to wait until you got your letter from the State Bar, sending congratulations or regrets. Here on the other side of the bridge to the 21st century (thanks, Mom, for the metaphor!), you still get the letter, but the letters are mailed out on the same day that the Bar makes the pass list available to the people who took it. You go to the website, follow the links to the exam results, post your bar file number and your test i.d. number, and wait.  If you have passed the bar, you get a message saying, more or less, “the information entered matches a name on the pass list,” and displays your name. If you have not passed, you get a message saying “the information entered does not match any name on the pass list.” The next day, your letter arrives.

Remember that word “heartbreak,” back in the first sentence? Dear friends, you can probably ascertain what that means for my bar results.

Much to my surprise, I did not burst into tears. That came later—and in fact, I never burst into tears, not for the whole miserable weekend. Instead I leaked into tears. I called my parents, maintaining a tone that, if not cheerful, was at least chatty. I decided to rip the (Adhesive Medical Strips!) off by posting my non-passing status to Facebook. Not everybody loves the open-bookness of Facebook, but my feeling was that I wanted to get it out there, acknowledge it, and then feel free to congratulate or commiserate with my classmates. (I also did not want to be swanked by anyone who *did* pass the bar, asking me pointedly what my results were.) And I did. Even through the fog of bad news, I genuinely celebrated each “I passed the Bar!” status that filled my feed. My friends spent the past four months in the same fog of anxiety and uncertainty that I did. I loved them. I wanted them to succeed. And I knew that every passage was good for the law school. It was good for all of us.

It is a weird, thing, though, to have the same piece of news bring you so much happiness and so much misery at the same time. Every time I saw a new status, my heart lifted, and then crashed again. When the congratulations started rolling in—yes, even *my* congratulations—my heart crashed yet again. And when those same friends returned to my Wall to commiserate, and to offer soothing and encouragement, and to generally be as kind and supportive post-bar as they were in school, my heart pretty much shattered into a thousand pieces, and I thought I would never feel better again. I loved them so much. I was so happy for them. I was miserable for myself, and for the friends who didn’t pass, all scarily-bright, well-prepared people, the kind you can easily envision in court, or running nonprofits, because they give off an air of Being a Damn Good Lawyer.  I couldn’t wait to celebrate, except for when I just wanted to die.

This was my weekend. I received some of the best letters in the world, from people acknowledging that yes, this is heartbreak, and it’s the real thing. That made me feel a bit better, although the tears still leaked out as congratulations continued to roll in. One of my friends said that if she could give her pass to me, she would.  Several people reminded me of all of the great lawyers and scholars and leaders who didn’t pass the California Bar on their first crack at it. Hell, Kathleen Sullivan, the former dean of Stanford Law School, the “Sullivan” in Sullivan & Gunther, who wrote the Constitutional Law casebook that practically every law professor uses! Kathleen Sullivan failed the California Bar on her first try, too! And this was *after* she was the dean at Stanford Law!  They were right, of course, and that should have helped me be more philosophical. It didn’t.

I have heard lots of advice on the best way to cure a broken heart, from vigorous exercise (which, truthfully, is going to kick me in the ass thanks to about two months of working-from-home-based sluggatry) to buying a new outfit to reading a good book to indulging in the Great Country & Western Music Catharsis. All of these have their place, of course, but for this particular brand of heartbreak, the way out is—or will be, since I’m not out of it yet—a combination of finding the exact source of the heartbreak, and engaging in activity at which one is really, really good. I will not bore you with details of the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy; suffice to say, it worked a treat here.  There was a reason that the commiseration and the anecdotes about smart people failing the bar didn’t get through to me, but the heartbreak did. Specifically, I felt like I had lost my community. I could celebrate for my friends, but I could not celebrate with them. We had all traveled together, more or less at the same pace, to get to this place; now, they were moving on, and I was staying put. At some point, a lightbulb went on over my head, and I found the simile for my state of mind, which I proceeded to share with about eleven million people.  I felt like we were all at the After-Bar Party, at a really fabulous club—say, the Peppermint Lounge circa 1983. The room is happy, the music is outstanding, the food has been catered by outside caterers, the drinks are reasonably priced. And then the passage list comes up, and everyone who passes shuffles off to the VIP Room, and I’m stuck on the other side of the velvet rope. But nobody closes the doors to the VIP Room, so we can all still see each other.

It was like flicking a switch. It didn’t make me feel better, but it took some of the sting out of feeling worse. It gave the madness a little bit of method: I didn’t wish that my friends were on the other side of the rope with me. I just wanted to be in the VIP Room with them. I gave myself a few days to wallow, during which I listened to Nick Lowe sing “What’s Shakin’ on the Hill” for hours at a time, and laughed a little at how good I was at wallowing. I knitted like a fiend. I went to the library and picked up the Terry Pratchett books I’d had on hold (Going Postal, which I’m halfway through now, and Making Money). It all helped, even though I still felt like a bag of dirt, only not as pretty.

Yesterday I went to visit a friend at work, another scarily-bright woman who, to the shock of all of us, did not pass the July bar, either. “How are you feeling?”, she asked. “Like a bag of dirt, only not as pretty,” I answered. We then proceeded to decompress and debrief, and to discuss our study strategies for February. At one point I mentioned my Bar After-Party simile to her, and she smiled. “You know what that is?,” she said. “That’s ego. That’s your ego talking.” I had a brief second of “no, wait, it’s not my ego! It’s my community! I’m mourning the loss of my community, dammit!”, and then realized—she was right. My community hadn’t gone anywhere. They were still there, still supportive, still ready and waiting to celebrate with us when we *do* pass the bar. The heartbreak I was feeling came from not being able to celebrate my moment at the exact same time that my friends were celebrating theirs. That is Ego talking.  That went a long way toward reducing the sting: there’s a big difference between a bruised ego and the true loss of community. It doesn’t fix everything, of course. I’m still a little sore at the Santa Clara County Bar Association sending me a flyer with the dates, times and locations for the swearing-in ceremony for new admittees to the bar. But that’s the way heartbreak works.  It’s really, really awful, until one day it isn’t.

Luckily, the bad news about the bar doesn’t seem to have wiped my skill sets completely clean. I will be forever thankful that one of the things I did to keep myself busy in the countdown to the posting of the pass list on Friday was to start soaking beans for black bean soup. (I used Midnight Beans from Rancho Gordo, whose bitch I have now become thanks to their Good Mother Stallard beans, which are so delicious that they deserve an entire post, if not an entire encyclopedia, on how great they are.) By Saturday, easily the hardest day of the weekend for me, they were ready to cook. 

Black bean soup is one of the best things you can make, because unless you keep the heat too high and burn the beans, it really is foolproof. You can use homemade stock, broth in a can, or water. You can spike it with yogurt, buttermilk, smetana, or miso. You can eat it as is, or you can puree it all, or you can puree some of it and pour it back into the pot; the broth will be creamier, but you’ll still get a nice variety of textures. You can eat it hot or chilled. You can add other vegetables, although I would hold off on tomatoes until the beans cook through. Remember the advice to never salt beans at the start of cooking, because salt toughens beans? It turns out—and years of kitchen-wrangling has confirmed this for me—that it’s not salt that toughens beans. It’s acid. So be sure to leave out your tomatoes, your vinegar, your sugar, your vinegar-based pepper sauce, what have you, until your beans are tender but not mushy. Keep your acids waiting and your heat low, and, I guarantee, you’ll have something that makes you feel better for both eating it and making it. If you like it enough, you can eat it all winter long, and come May or June, when your name is on the pass list for the February bar, you can think back to those bleak, low-light winter days, when black bean soup, and your competence at making it, carried you through.

Black Bean Soup to Carry You Through
Serves six at a dinner party, or one for a week of lunches

This is less of a recipe than a methodology. It is cobbled from several sources, particularly Barbara’s Black Bean Soup in New York Cookbook by Molly O’Neill and Laurie Colwin’s black bean soup in More Home Cooking. Like most bean dishes and all soups, it’s better the day after you make it, although it’s no slouch on the day of.

1 1/2 cups (12 oz.) dried black beans, soaked overnight in water to cover
1/4 - 1/3 cup olive oil
1 large yellow or white onion, peeled and diced
2 stalks celery, peeled and chopped, along with a few leaves
6 cups (48 oz.) stock, broth or water (Barbara Scott-Goodman uses chicken stock and Laurie Colwin uses canned beef broth, but I’m a fan of roast vegetable stock in this soup)
salt and pepper to taste
juice of 1 lime or 1 lemon (whatever you have, or prefer)
Optional: 1 can peeled plum tomatoes, diced, along with the juice from the tomatoes; celery seed; dry sherry; yogurt or buttermilk; thinly-sliced lemons for garnish

Drain the black beans. In a large, heavy-bottomed soup pot, heat the olive oil, add the onion and celery and cook until softened, about 5 minutes.  Add the beans, give a quick stir, and add the stock, salt and pepper. Bring the beans to a boil, then turn down the heat to a simmer and let them cook for about 2 1/2 - 3 hours. You want a simmer that’s faster than an occasional “gloop,” but not a rolling boil.  When the liquid is reduced and the beans are tender, add the lime or lemon juice. Taste and adjust the seasoning. You can stop here and put the soup pot in the fridge overnight, if fiddling with a blender is not in your immediate plans. Otherwise, decide what kind of texture you would like for your soup, and puree accordingly. (If your soup is still hot, be careful to not overfill your blender. 8 ounces of liquid, max. Trust me on this.  The boredom of pureeing a cup of soup at a time is nothing compared to a steam burn.) I usually puree it all, put it back in the pot, reheat it, and spike it with a little dry sherry; dry sherry is great in black bean soup. Lemon slices are not necessary, but I like them.

1. You are no longer being greeted by the still-store of my cheesy Eyes-n-Teeth expression on the last post. No matter how thankful you are for this, you are not nearly as thankful as I am. Really. It haunts my dreams, that still-store.

2. The banner now reads “Prepare to Meet Your Juris Doctorate.” This is not a sign of permanent change to come. ‘mouse posted this on the day I graduated from law school this past May, partly to congratulate me for making it through, but mostly to prod me into waking the blog back up.  He tried that a few times, poor ‘mouse. At one point, he even referred to me as a “former blogger,” and the more I insisted otherwise ("DUDE, I’m not a FORMER blogger.  Former bloggers let their server space subscriptions and domains lapse. My site is still LIVE. I just need to WAIT until I have better CONTENT to post, AWRIGHT?"), the more he would reply, simply, “Okay...Former Blogger.” And yet I still did not rise to the bait. And he *still* gave me a present for graduation. What a nice guy.

3. Really, though, it’s all about getting Eyes-n-Teeth off the front page.

Okay, not really.  It was never my plan to disappear for two years.  I figured I’ve have plenty of good stuff to share, especially because I was done with the boot camp that is the first year of law school. We had settled into our new place in California, and I was getting more comfortable with working on a completely different stove.  What could possibly go wrong?

While nothing went wrong, I’d be fibbing if I said that life got easier. There’s an ancient law school cliche that says when you’re a 1L (first-year law student), they scare you to death; when you’re a 2L, they work you to death; and when you’re a 3L, they bore you to death.  I can attest to the truth of the 2L portion.  I had survived the first year of law school. I could pick my elective classes. Since I hadn’t actually flunked out of school, as I’d feared I would, I felt more comfortable about joining extracurricular clubs and serving on committees.  I was so comfortable, in fact, that I might have overextended myself.  By the time 3L rolled around, I promised myself that I would scale back. Not so many clubs this year. Pick a club, maybe serve as an officer of the club, don’t load up on too many demanding classes. Let myself be bored to death, in other words.

Ha bloody ha.  Even if I had managed to scale back (note: three bar classes and a Supreme Court seminar in a single semester is not an example of “scaling back"), I had forgotten to include into the equation the amount of time I would prepare getting ready for the bar, taking the MPRE (a multiple-choice test on legal ethics that is a requirement of bar admission in every state), submitting information for my state and federal background check, and looking for a job after graduation.  During my final semester of classes, I added a clerkship at Transgender Law Center in San Francisco, which was brilliant, inspiring and one of the best things I ever did with my life—but which also added 16 hours of work and 7-9 hours of commuting on top of a full-time schedule.  I also remember writing a lot of seminar papers, although I’ll be damned if I can remember any of them right now.

Then came graduation madness, bar prep madness, and actual bar exam madness, which technically does not end until six weeks from tomorrow night, when we get our results. Considering that the bar exam took place during the last week in July, that’s a lot of time to lose to madness.

The past two months have been a mix of job hunting, fellowship applications, freelancing, and rainmaking for more freelancing. I won’t fib:  it’s been a little stressful. It should have been the perfect time for writing, too, but I wasted a lot of writing time worrying about how to keep the bills paid. If you have ever read Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell, you know what I mean. (If you haven’t read it, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and read it! It’s a quick read, and it will make you glad not to be the hero.) I spent more than a few days on my living room floor, urging myself to go to the gym, to get outside, to call some friends for lunch, *anything*.  More often than not, I sat on the floor, and obsessed over whether I was gaining weight.  Because that’s a useful way to solve problems, obviously.

Of course I couldn’t live like this forever.  Last week I attended a Bloggers’ Night Out with a few Bay Area blogging luminaries, including the magnificent Grace Davis, who hosted me when I came to California for the very first time, trying to decide whether to go to Northeastern or Santa Clara for law school. Just having friends with whom to talk shop cheered me considerably, and suggested that maybe my best writing days weren’t behind me after all.  This week, Lloyd and I were able to solve a financial issue that had been dogging us all summer—and we did it without having to file bankruptcy, which is a great relief to both of us.  This morning, while I was still contemplating our good fortune over this, a letter arrived from the law school.  I’ve been awarded a graduate fellowship, and will be working with a professor I really like.  It won’t take me completely out of job hunting and freelancing madness, but it will give me the opportunity to think for a living, which is exactly what I wanted from this adventure.

p.s. In other news, Lloyd and I adopted a cat, and I learned how to make cheese. Of course the full tales of both will be told. I can’t give it all away in one post, after all.

I’m sure it comes as a shock to no one who knows me that I have a lot of kitchen equipment, including a decent set of kitchen appliances.  Since I have been an adult for roughly half my life, I’ve had plenty of time to suss out what is useful for me, and what isn’t.  I’ve heard that the majority of owners of stand mixers don’t buy them to use them, but rather to have them sit fetchingly on the countertops of their meticulously appointed kitchens.  I am mystified by the thought of treating a powerhouse appliance as, essentially, an expensive knickknack, but de gustibus non disputandum est, I guess.  My commercial-model Kitchen Aid paid me back years ago what I paid into it, and continues to pay me back every day.  I never thought I needed a food processor until I got one for free, from a friend who received it for a wedding present and didn’t take it out of the box for seven years.  It is fabulous for making perfectly smooth hummus, and for shredding quantities of vegetables for fritters.  (I’ve never tried it for bread dough, although I know people who swear by it, and if you even think of using it for mashed potatoes, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.) And yet, even though the food processor is a workhorse, there are some mixtures which just work better in a blender than in a food processor—which is why I didn’t think twice about replacing my blender when the time came.  These gadgets may look snazzy and impressive, but they earn their keep.  Lest I give the impression that I’ll say that anything is useful, I point with some embarrassment to the juicer I bought at Woolworth’s right after Lloyd and I moved to Astoria.  Try as I might, I couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to drink my fruits and vegetables, especially when I saw just how much fruit and vedge was needed to make a small cup of juice.  Even Nigel Slater’s gorgeous and inspiring book Thirst didn’t move me, and the juicer went to a better home.

In short, I am probably the last person who should acquire another appliance, and yet… I resisted the siren call of yogurt makers for years, supported by three arguments:  1. I lived in a neighborhood where terrific yogurt could be had for a song, from a shop less than fifty feet from my front door.  2.  No modern fancy-shmancy yogurt maker could compare with the yogurt maker my mom had when I was a little kid. I was sure that without the heavy milk glass bowls that were a feature of Mom’s yogurt maker, the yogurt wouldn’t be nearly as good, and there was just no point in trying.  3.  You didn’t need a yogurt maker to make yogurt.  All you needed was a mason jar, a source of low heat (like a pilot light in a gas oven), milk, a little commercial yogurt for a starter and a set of foolproof instructions.  Armed with instructions from several county extension agents, as well as from Laurie Colwin, I made a few attempts at yogurt, all of which tasted terrific but none of which set.

I would like to say that I was finally moved to buy a yogurt maker out of nobler purposes, like wishing to crack the code on the ur-yogurt, or wanting to reduce the amount of yogurt packaging I sent to the recycling bin, but no, it was the always-cheering combination of vanity and groupthink that did it for me.  The vanity came from reading French Women Don’t Get Fat, in which Mireille Guilliano waxes rhapsodic about slender women with perfectly-tied scarves having a little pot of yogurt to take the edge off their appetites.  Apparently a lot of people had the same idea, because the King Arthur Flour Bakers Catalogue and Williams-Sonoma couldn’t keep them in stock.  Eventually, though, I got mine, a seven-pot unit sold under the EuroCuisine brand, for about forty bucks.  (The name may be silly, dear friends, but, like the other cast of characters in the kitchen, it knows its job and it does it well.) I bought some milk, plus a container of plain Dannon yogurt to use as a starter culture, and paint me yellow and call me a cab, it worked. The yogurt set.  It was a little on the tart side, and it was a bit overcooked on the bottom, but otherwise, it was the yogurt for which I was looking.

Over time, I fiddled a bit, experimenting with the amount of yogurt used to culture the next batch, the length of the cooking time (both on the stovetop and in the yogurt maker) and the variety of milk.  I found that lowfat milk cooked down more than whole milk did, and that I had to start with more milk to compensate for this.  Skim milk cooked down even more, and never really took on a good set.  I found that whole milk yogurt not only tasted better, it left me fuller, and thus less inclined to eat too much of it, or of anything else.  (WebMD has an informative, yet amusing, article about this.  It touts yogurt as the “French Women’s Diet Secret” and quotes Mireille Guilliano as saying that yogurt contains carbs, protein and fat, “which are what you need in every meal,” but then only gives nutrition information for fat-free yogurt.  The article also quotes WebMD’s “recipe doctor” as saying that yogurt is a great substitute for butter and oil in baked goods “because it adds moisture, volume and flavor without added fat or calories.” Okay, you’re not adding as many calories, or as much fat, as you would with butter, but even fat-free yogurt is not calorie-free.  You’re adding calories.) I have not yet tried using goat’s milk, or sheep’s milk, but would jump at the chance to try both.  Likewise, I have not tried using raw milk, which I can buy at the farmer’s market in California.  This is mostly because raw milk is expensive, consigned to an occasional luxury, but also because I need to learn more about how it behaves.  Part of the yogurt making process is to scald the milk, then to cool it down.  I don’t know if raw milk will retain its flavor if it’s heated to scalding.  There are alternative methods for thickening yogurt at lower milk temperatures:  one involves the addition of nonfat dry milk to the milk being heated; the other involves using gelatin, which I really don’t want to put into my yogurt.

Begging your patience, dear friends, but this is an excellent time for a digression about milk.  I have ranted in this space before about the increasing difficulty of finding heavy cream or half-and-half that have not been ultrapasteurized.  Ultrapasteurized dairy products have been pasteurized at a higher temperature, at a shorter time, than pasteurized dairy products.  The resulting cream has greatly improved shelf life, but it also has an odd, palate-coating, “cooked” taste.  Ultrapasteurized cream is also tricky to whip; I’ve found that it doesn’t reach the volume that pasteurized cream can reach, and the line between stiffly-beaten and overbeaten is tricky to suss out.  I have skirted this issue by buying cream at Trader Joe’s, or the Milk Pail, two stores that carry pasteurized cream.  There was once a time when health food stores were a sure source of non-ultrapasteurized cream, but now that Horizon and other large-scale organic dairies are ultrapasteurizing, this is no longer a sure thing.  (When a New York Times food editor called ultrapasteurization “the savior of the organic dairy industry,” I could not help but wince a bit.)

What does all of this have to do with yogurt?  Last week, I went to Safeway to pick up some milk for yogurt.  I picked up a carton of Horizon whole milk and saw “ultrapasteurized” on the carton.  For the love of Mike, I thought, Horizon is ultrapasteurizing *milk* now? Reluctantly, I picked up a carton of store-brand milk, wondering where the “pasteurized/homogenized” text on the carton was.  Near the top of the carton, I found something else, in a smaller font:  “Now tastes fresher longer!” That’s when it hit me:  ultrapasteurization of milk is now the industry standard.

I hasten to add that I’m not unsympathetic to the concerns of the dairy industry, or of the grocery business.  The economy is not out of the toilet yet, and of course businesses—and consumers—want to minimize their losses.  I hate discovering a carton of milk gone bad as much as the next person, and I really hate finding milk that’s gone bad before the carton has even been opened.  But I don’t think it’s elitist nonsense to point out that ultrapasteurized milk, despite its superior keeping quality, does not taste like pasteurized milk, or, really, much of anything.  You can certainly make yogurt with it.  You can even make good yogurt with it.  But, as with cheese, the better the milk, the better the yogurt.  I’ve made yogurt from both pasteurized and ultrapasteurized milk, and I know which one I prefer.  Trader Joe’s still sells pasteurized milk, and yesterday I was lucky enough to score half a gallon of Straus creamtop milk at this excellent grocery in my neighborhood.  I’m going to keep buying it—and I’m going to let these merchants know that having this choice available is important to me.  If it’s important to you, too, please, please communicate this to your grocers and your dairy.  Here endeth the lesson.

So we know why you make it and what you make it with, but Jen, what do you do with all this yogurt? I’m glad you asked.  I eat a minimum of a pot a day, usually half with my breakfast and half late in the afternoon.  If I know I won’t be eating lunch until after 2, I’ll have a whole pot at breakfast.  I have used it as a substitute for mayonnaise in salad dressings—it is particularly great with Penzeys Green Goddess salad dressing blend mixed into it, along with a little cider vinegar and salt.  I have also used it as a substitute for buttermilk in pound cakes and in cornbread.  I have beaten it a bit to thin it out, added lime juice, cardamom and a little brown sugar, and used it to dress fruit salad.  I have melted it into plain lentils.  It is used to build a starter for one of my favorite flatbreads, from More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin, an English-muffin-like griddlecake, flavored with black onion seeds (also known as black caraway, charnushka, nigella or kalonji).  It is a terrific marinade for chicken and fish, and it also features prominently in rogan josh, a fiery, cardamom-rich lamb stew from Rajasthan.

If you like Indian food, you can really go to town, yogurt-wise.  One of my favorite cookbooks, Purobi Babbar’s Rotis and Naans of India With Accompaniments—which is something of a misnomer, as those “accompaniments” include drinks, vegetable dishes, meat dishes, sambars, chutneys, pickles, raitas and desserts—contains at least 50 recipes in which yogurt is either featured (lassis, raitas, yogurt sauces) or functions as a flavor-delivery ingredient (rotis, uttapam, dosas, the fabulous steamed bread known as idli, the equally-fabulous lobia, or blackeyed peas in gravy).  Truth be told, I don’t know exactly how many of Mrs. Babbar’s recipes contain yogurt.  I keep losing count because I keep getting distracted by how much I want to eat all this stuff, followed by a little dish of sweetened yogurt, enriched with saffron and pistachios.  Or maybe I’ll abruptly shift cultures and turn the last of the cherries left over from last week’s pie into sour cherry borscht, which my beautiful friend Julie taught me to make, and then float a little yogurt on the top of it.  Or I could cut up the rapidly-softening white nectarines I bought at the farmer’s market on Sunday, throw them into that hardworking blender, add yogurt and zizz until drinkable.  Or or or...or I could just quiet down and eat it as is.

Yogurt, my way
makes about 6 cups (or 7 EuroCuisine pots)

Note:  If I haven’t made it obvious by now, I’m a big fan of the yogurt maker. If, however, a new appliance is not feasible or desirable, and you want to try the mason-jar way, WebMD has the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recipe here If you try it, do let me know how it turns out.

1.575 liters (about 6 1/8 cups) whole milk (I usually measure this by taking one of the yogurt jars, filling it to the brim and pouring it into the pan seven times)
2 tablespoons - 1/4 cup plain yogurt (I use the former, but I encourage experimentation to see what works best for you.  Use a good commercial yogurt for the first batch, then hold back a quantity from the finished yogurt to start the next batch.  The more often you do this, the better it will taste.)

Scald the milk over medium-high heat.  When the surface of the milk looks a bit “puffy,” with tiny bubbles rising to the surface, and when a skin starts to form on the milk, it’s done.  Pull it off the heat and set the pan on a trivet to cool down.  As the milk cools, skim the skin (also known as casein) off the surface.

While the milk cools, place the yogurt in a bowl big enough to accommodate all of the milk in the pan.  When the milk cools to about 110F/40C—you should be able to keep your finger in it for 10 seconds—slowly whisk the milk into the bowl with the yogurt.  Whisk it just long enough to incorporate everything.  If you have a lot of foam on the surface of the milk, skim it off with a ladle.  You will probably have a lot of milk solids sticking to the bottom of your pan.  Do not scrape them into the milk/yogurt mix.  Just throw the pan into the sink and let it soak.  You’re done with it.

Ladle the milk into 7 clean yogurt jars.  If you don’t have a funnel, make sure you keep a damp sponge or paper towel close by.  (Of course, you might not be hopeless at getting milk into jars without spilling a drop.  If you are, feel free to point and laugh at me.) Place them into the yogurt maker in a ring of six, plus one in the center.  Do not put the lids on the jars; that comes later.  Place the cover on the yogurt maker, set the timer on the machine and turn the machine on.  You can keep the yogurt warm for as little as two hours, or as long as 15.  I usually opt for 12.  When I cook it longer, the bottoms tend to overcook and separate, and I haven’t had the nerve to experiment with shorter cooking times.  When the machine shuts off, cap the jars and refrigerate the yogurt for at least 8 hours before serving it forth.

I missed the presidential election.  Considering how much handwringing I did over the last one, you’d think I would have taken a moment to give thanks for the difference four years makes.  (I believe I’ve made my leanings fairly obvious over the years, but in case any questions lingered: My guy won.) The day after the election, of my professors was elated and vaguely tearful, not just because my guy was her guy, too, but also because young adults were such a key part of this election, and she loved, loved that young adults were finally taken seriously, because when she was a young adult, and first becoming politically engaged, young people were not taken seriously. Rather, she said, young adults were largely dismissed, seen as troublesome naifs with no idea of how the world really works, told to stop being so noisy and destructive and to let the real adults make the decisions for them.  How I wish I’d written it down while it was fresh.  I also wish I’d acknowledged the painful result of the election, the sad and shameful passage of Proposition 8 in California, and the spectacle of millions of dollars of out-of-state money being spent to deprive Californians of true marriage equality.

I missed law school, every last blessed bit of it:  How the lion’s share of my classmates were born the year I graduated from high school, but they never once made me feel like a dopey, stupid-question-asking, middle-aged killjoy.  How it didn’t take me long to realize that Everything I Know is Wrong.  How I had to learn—fast—how to present an argument and then immediately argue the counterpoint.  How I was not looking forward to studying Torts, dismissing the whole body of law as nothing but slip-and-fall cases, and how my mind was changed by my Torts professor, a quick-witted, scarily brilliant, warm and humane woman, who taught me about tort law as one of the earliest vehicles for civil rights.  How hard I worked, struggling to make sense of it all.  How my grades ranged from the excellent to the shocking, and how I couldn’t reconcile how hard I’d worked for that shocking grade, in a class I’d found interesting, for a professor I liked a lot and longed to impress.  How I was sure that something was wrong with me.  How I was right, but not in a way I’d ever suspected.  How I became a Constitution geek, and a Supreme Court geek.  How I embarrassed myself in public by yelling at a tv on which Jeff Sessions was explaining why reading a Supreme Court nominee’s published legal opinions was not an effective way to determine what sort of Justice that nominee would be, but parsing her speeches was.  How thrilling, exhilarating, frustrating, depressing, and funny this whole process is.  How I have no idea what I’m going to do at the end of it.

I missed my five-year blogging anniversary.  It was on December 1, 2003 that I started writing on the silly yellow page, with absolutely no idea of what I was doing.  All I knew at that moment was that after three years of training and researching and business-plan-writing and working my heart out, I would not be opening my bakery.  If you had told me that five years from that moment I’d be studying for final exams at a law school 3,100 miles away, I’d have asked you where you got the stuff, and if I could have some, please.  The only thing I knew with any certainty was that I did not want PTMYB to be an exercise in solipsism, filled with nothing but meticulous descriptions of the inside of my own head.  It embarrasses, writing that now.  I cast my eyes over what I’ve written thus far, and all I can see is I, I, I, me, I, my, I, I, myself, I, I, freakin’ I. It would be funny, if only it weren’t.

Dear friends, I fell far and fell fast.  First I stopped writing letters, then I stopped making phone calls, then I stopped answering my phone.  I spent hours reading, and then promptly forgetting everything I read, only to half-remember it later.  From time to time I would bake, a loaf of sandwich bread here, a batch of cookies there, feeling panicky because I should have been studying, dammit.  When friends asked me what I was baking, or when I would start blogging again, I would assure them, through clenched teeth, that it wouldn’t be long now.  During the break between fall and spring classes, the rainy season rolled in, cold and dark.  I started wearing sloppy oversized sweaters, knitting for hours at a time because even as I longed to write, I just couldn’t write.  Over time, I stopped writing, baking, knitting, photographing, thinking.  I found myself vowing to punch in the nose the next person who asked me when I planned to start again.

Fortunately, instead of alienating friends and loved ones by punching them in the nose, I went to a neuropsychologist, a nice man who ran me through four hours of tests.  When he told me I had moderate anxiety and depressive disorders, I was not surprised, but when he told me that I had ADHD, you could have knocked me over with a feather.  It’s too early to say that I started the right combination of medication and therapy and lived happily ever after, but I do seem to be getting more done in a day.  I have no idea when, or if, I’ll get my writing muscle back—I still can’t read my old posts without feeling more than a little pain about what I used to be able to do, and how I can’t seem to do it anymore—but if/until I do, there are a few small things I can do, and do well, and I can capture them while they’re fresh.

Here’s what I didn’t miss.  We put in a garden this year, a garden of our very own after 14 years of watching other people plant their gardens.  I’m definitely on a learning curve—three weeks ago I nearly lost all of our tomato plants to rust mites, but our tomatoes are tough little buggers, and healthy new stems, blossoms and fruit are emerging from what we thought were dying plants.  By September, we should be elbow-deep in fruit, and next year, the garden will be even better.

I didn’t miss sour cherry season.  We buy our produce at the Mountain View farmer’s market on Sunday mornings.  It is a grand and glorious market, but I’ve not yet found pie cherries there.  I thought I was restricted to stone-fruit pies—not that there’s anything wrong with that—and that homemade cherry pie was something I’d left behind in New York.  Silly me.  “We have sour cherries!,” trumpeted the banner at this wonderful place.  I snapped up three quarts of these:

and turned them into this:

And I absolutely, positively, could not miss this:

This would be my brand-new nephew Cameron, who arrived on Bastille Day.  I have yet to meet him—his mom snapped this picture and sent it to me—but it’s fair to say that I’m smitten.  Come Christmas, just try to keep me away.

In the meantime, since the negative covenants are growing restless, I can at least share a little news:

1.  Today I am a for-real-and-true Californian.  Two hours into my morning study time at the library, I realized I left a book I needed at home.  I swore gently, dropped off some of my books in my locker, and set off on the 20-minute walk home.  Since I had a little time to kill, I decided to make a cup of tea.  As I went into the bathroom to wash my hands, I heard a banging sound from the back of the house.  Holy cow, I thought, someone’s trying to break in, and I stepped out of the bathroom gingerly, just in time to feel the floor roll underneath me.  It took seven months, but I have finally lost my earthquake virginity.

2.  Today I may be a for-real-and-true Californian, but come this July, I will be Auntie Jenny in the eyes of the law, as well as in the eyes of my best friend’s kids.  The brother who used to send me smartassed letters from science camp, and who charmed an office full of publishing professionals when he was ten years old, has grown up into a responsible young man, and he and his awesome (and awesomely patient) wife are having a boy this summer.  Of course I kicked into full auntie Monty and made him this:

Baby boy, there’s more where that came from, I promise.

3.  To answer the unspoken question:  Oh, my god, I just want to get through this semester without flunking out of law school.

Okay, lovely ones, just for sitting through this nonsense, you deserve some pretty pictures at the very least. 

Let the disclaiming begin.  Dear friends, I had plans for some Cookbook Love essay or other, maybe accompanied by some arty-fantastico food photography.  This will be coming soon enough.  In the meantime, I found myself awake at a ridiculous hour of the morning today.  Since there’s nothing more depressing than studying at 5:30 in the morning, I decided to seize the moment and participate in the 25 things meme, on which several people tagged me on Facebook.  The damn thing took me such a long time to write that I decided to cross-post it to PTMYB.  Most of these 25 things will be old news.  Many more of them will be tedious, the epitome of “today I ate a burrito for lunch/I hate my job” blogging, to use my friend Tristan’s excellent phrase.  But in the end, exercises like these dust the cobwebs off my brain, and in the end, I can’t complain about that.  You certainly may, though.

1.  I have a freckle on my top lip, the result of increased sun sensitivity after I started using Retin-A as a teenager to clear up my skin.  Usually it can’t be seen because it’s under makeup, but I just like knowing it’s there, for some reason.

2.  My mother did a terrific job (and, really, still does) at setting good examples for me.  When I was little, my mother read as much as time would allow; she loved art and art history, and would let me look at her college art history textbooks; she was an early believer in local, sustainable farming and used to shop for vegetables from the truck farmers in Wilmington, Delaware (and she used to bring me along); and as much as she loved me, she didn’t live through me and she didn’t treat me as if I were the center of the universe.  I have reaped only good things from this.

3.  I skipped fourth grade.  This meant that from fifth grade through college, I was frequently the youngest person in the room.

4.  I am no longer the youngest person in the room. Frequently I am the oldest person in the room. I used to feel weird about this until I heard Bill Clinton lament that he had just left a meeting where he was the oldest person in the room, and I thought, “dude, you were SIXTY YEARS OLD before that happened to you.  Do you think any of us will have to wait that long?  Try working retail for a while, dude!”

5.  My second job out of college was in the special sales department at Viking Penguin (now Penguin Putnam).  I started working there less than a year after Viking had published The Satanic Verses, and four months after Ayatollah Khomeini declared the fatwa on Salman Rushdie.  By the time I started, the bomb threats had largely dried up, but every once in a while, someone would feel the urge to call a bomb threat in.  I didn’t panic, mostly because my coworkers were old hands at building evacuation, and this was all in a day’s work for them.

6.  When people ask me if I miss New York, I say no, but that’s not entirely true.  The New York I miss is not the New York I left in August; rather, it was the New York I used to visit as a teenager, and the one to which I moved when I was 21.  It was never easy or cheap to live in New York, but it was easier, and cheaper, and if you were resourceful, it was possible to do a lot with relatively little.  That New York is long gone, and I don’t know if it’s ever coming back.

7.  Before I met my husband, whenever I fell in love, my immediate response was to think “It’s love!  It’s love!  It’s love!  I’m in love! Love love lovvity lovvity love!” (repeat x1,000,000) The day after my husband and I had our first date, my immediate response was to think, “Okay.  This guy is not like all of those other guys.  This guy is different, and if it doesn’t work out, you’re not going to find something this good with anyone else...so for the love of God, DON’T SCREW IT UP.  Don’t scare him off.  Don’t do anything stupid.  Just be good to him, because this is a REALLY GOOD THING.” That was about the moment I suspected I might want to marry him.

8.  I often struggle with focus and attention span issues.  After a lifetime of study skill classes and time management seminars, I am only just beginning to consider that it might be a brain chemical issue.  The jury is still out on that, though.

9.  The only flavor I really don’t like (with the exception of the usual suspects like microwaveable scrambled eggs in a tube and frosting in a can), and have not grown to like, is caraway.  For years I wouldn’t eat rye bread because I thought I hated the taste, but after I had my first taste of seedless sour rye, I knew that what I hated wasn’t the taste of the rye, it was the taste of the caraway seed.  The only place I can tolerate caraway is on a kummelweck roll, the roll used for the mighty Beef on Weck sandwich.  Other than that, I still find it really unpleasant.

10.  When I was 10, I was in a car accident that, by all laws of physics, should have killed me.  I still don’t know how I managed to survive.  I have a permanent lump of damaged tissue on my right shin, as well as a scar from where my leg was cut on the door handle, surrounded by 16 smaller scars rendered by sloppy stitching at the hospital.

11.  Lloyd and I have no children.  This was not a choice on our part; we decided to see what fate had in store for us, and to take the hand we were dealt.  So far that hand does not include kids, and since we’re getting longer in the tooth every day, I don’t think it will.  Sometimes this breaks my heart, because I think Lloyd and I would make decent parents and we could have a great little family.  Other times this fills me with the purest relief.  I certainly wouldn’t be in law school if we had kids—and yes, I worry that I would end up unwittingly screwing up their lives, or Lloyd’s.  Having said all that, when people ask me if we have kids, I still automatically answer “Not yet.”

12.  After one of my coworkers saw David Bowie at Lee’s Art Supply on West 57th Street, I used to hang out there for hours, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.  I never did, although I was told that he was a regular customer.

13.  Among my closest friends are my college roommate, who has been a dear friend for 25 years, and my childhood pen pal, who I met by filling out a “Do you want a British pen pal?” coupon in a teen magazine.  We started writing to each other when we were 12; I met her for the first time when I was 22 and flew to England to meet her and her new baby son; she was maid of honor at my wedding.  With both of these friends, I can go for months without keeping in touch with either of them; yet once we starting talking, it’s like we never stopped.

14.  My first trip overseas was a summer program in the country formerly known as the U.S.S.R., between my junior and senior year of college, in 1987.  Two weeks before the end of classes, I was asked to leave the country by local government-types.  This was not for political reasons.  Yes, there’s a story.  No, it won’t be told here. >

15.  The most shocking thing about law school is how quickly I reverted to my dopey, awkward teenager self.  People will tell returning students that they are at an advantage because they have more life experience, they know that the world doesn’t turn on their grade point average, they have a better sense of what’s really important in life.  I have two words for these people:  Nuh Uh.  I have two more words for these people:  Contact high.

16.  Even though I feel perpetually dopey and awkward in school, I really love my class.  It is composed of brilliant, funny, warm and humane people, people who will laugh with you and will watch your back when your back needs watching, and I could not ask for a better group of people with which to be in school.

17.  While I like actual breakfast food, I love leftovers for breakfast even more.  The day after Thanksgiving is my favorite day of the year.

18.  I feel more at home, more comfortable in my own skin, working in a bread bakery than I do anywhere else.  The two weeks I spent in continuing education at the King Arthur Flour Baking Education Center in Vermont were among the happiest of my life.  I was doing something I really loved.  I was good at it.  I was training with people who I admired and respected, and I wanted them to find me worthy.  I was making a plan for the future.  At the same time, I recognize that I am lucky that I never opened that bakery after all.  Between the spike in commodity prices and the credit freeze, 2008 would have killed us.  We would be over half a million dollars in debt, and probably would have had to declare bankruptcy.  It is a sobering thing to look at your dream and think “thank God we dodged *that* bullet.”

19.  Counting the summer work I did as a teenager, I have worked as an office assistant, an intern at the Youth Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., a title searcher, a newspaper reporter/photographer, a sales assistant in both the publishing and cosmetic industries, a bookseller, a children’s book buyer at the store where I sold books, a temporary switchboard operator at an emergency homeless shelter run by the Red Cross in Brooklyn, a pastry cook, a breadbaker and a standup comic.  (That last one didn’t really pay, and I wasn’t good at it.) With any luck and plenty of hard work, I will also be a lawyer, working on either food policy issues or civil rights.

20.  I once called in sick from work because I was reading a book I loved too much to put down.  (Disclaimer:  Everybody gets *one* sick day in their lives like that.  I’ve had mine.  I won’t be taking any more of those.)

21.  I wish I could throw a baseball.

22.  The only downside to being married is that I can’t fall asleep listening to the radio anymore.  If I were single, that radio would be playing all night long.

23.  Although my grandmother taught me basic garter-stitch knitting when I was little, I didn’t really learn how to knit until I was 38.

24.  My heart still breaks much more easily than it should.  It doesn’t take much.  I keep waiting for it to toughen up a little bit, but it never does.

25.  I miss the way I used to listen to music when I was a teenager.  Call me a sentimental old fool, but I believe there is something almost chemical in the power a song you love has over you when you’re younger.  Occasionally I still find a song that makes me feel that way, and when I do, I feel like a new person.  Hearing a song like that feels like diving into clear water.  It feels like doing the work you were born to do.  It feels like love.

It has been so long since I’ve done anything around here but placeholding with angst-ridden internal monologues.  There is so much to share.  Yet I can’t share any of it.

At least I can’t just yet.  As I’m sure a few people are aware, I finished my first semester of law school last month.  I had big plans for the hiatus between the end of the fall semester and the start of the spring.  My mother and stepfather would be visiting for five days, arriving the day after my last final.  (They did, and we had a splendid time together, even though winter weather—or what passes for winter weather in Santa Clara County—arrived with a vengeance.) Bunni would be visiting the last week of break.  (She did, and we had a bang-up time.  Her photoset of her trip makes me smile.) I would write the letters left unwritten, get the house in order, get some practice driving our new Scion, update my resume, look for summer work, apply for fellowships to pay for my summer work (since it looks like any summer work I garner will be unpaid), pursue some other moneymaking opportunities, and, first and foremost, I would write.  Finally.  There would be no more curtailing my food crank impulses.  I would sit and write like I did in December 2003, when PTMYB was born.

You can guess where this is going.  What I did was sleep in past 7 every morning, change into a handknit sweater that grows increasingly ratty with each wearing, and knit.  I tried to read, but my attention span was shredded, and I couldn’t get past five pages without thinking that I should be doing something else.  The few times I sat down to write, the same horrible thing that happened during my year of unemployment happened again.  Two, three, four hours would roll by while I stared at a blank screen, writing a few lines, erasing them, looking at other people’s work for inspiration, feeling not inspired but depressed that I had fallen so far, so fast.  I knew that our current circumstances would not support seat-of-the-pants planning:  I would need to budget my time as assiduously as I budget money, making a plan and sticking to it, but I had no idea how to do it.  I began to wonder if my inactivity since December 2007, my lack of a full-day schedule, had destroyed my last tenuous shred of initiative, or worse yet, caused me actual brain damage.  I wondered if I would need Ritalin just to get through the Sunday New York Times.  I wondered what it would take to get me out of this, and if Lloyd would want to remain married to me after I was done with school. 

Now I know what it takes.  As shameful as it might sound, it takes feedback.  Specifically, it takes grade-based feedback.

That was indeed a coy way of saying that my grades were posted last week.  The good news is that I am not failing out of law school. The bad news is that while I’m not failing, it’s obvious that my fall methodology of Reading, Panicking, Weeping and Reading once more is not doing me any favors.  My grade spread ranges from the excellent to the worrying.  Fortunately, I have an opportunity to put the worrying grade right, but it’s going to take work, and help, and effort—the kind of effort that precludes staring at a blank screen for four hours, flouncing away tearily and temporarily hating the president who you helped elect because he took all the same first-year classes that you did, and you just know he aced them, hell, he probably ran practice exams for fun, and we HATE that in an incoming president.

(That was a joke.  Please don’t send me hate letters pointing out where the lack of academic rigor in a Commander-in-Chief has left us.  Believe me, I’ve noticed.)

At any rate.  It may be counterintuitive, if not ironic, to start writing more frequently now that my free time is over and the demands of school are rearing their ugly heads, but I’m keen to try.  Even if it means just weekly posting, or lots of placeholding interstitial folderol, it’s better than three months of silence.  I miss the foodish conversation, and I want it back, even if it means I only have two hours on Friday afternoon, or Sunday morning, to partake.

I did get one thing accomplished during break.  One day, Lloyd and I went out to the garage and brought in six boxes of my books, mostly cookbooks.  The boxes are in the bedroom, waiting patiently until our cash flow allows for a new set of bookshelves.  “I’m just going to pull a few things out that I want to look at right away,” I said to Lloyd. “Knock yourself out,” he replied.  He didn’t even blink when he saw what I consider to be a few things.

Dear friends, I can’t tell you how it feels to sit in this new place and hold my old books in my hands, the ones that got me through biting New York winters and sweltering New York summers.  I have my old points of reference back, the source of gingerbread and cold soba noodle dressing, baked cherry tomatoes and pickled greens, onion pie, buttermilk biscuits so tender they fall apart at a cross word, other buttermilk biscuits which are sturdier but no less toothsome.  To have them all back is a tonic, and with any luck—and with work, help and effort—they will take all that worry I’ve been carrying around, and they will peel the skin off it.

Postscript: It is a topic for another day—hey, I have homework —but I figured a little cheesy product endorsement would get the year off to a rollicking start.  My adored friend Sharon gave us this superb cookbook for Christmas, and from the day it arrived, I have been unable to stop cooking from it.  If you are a fan of The Splendid Table on the radio, you will eat this up.  (Not literally, of course—I mean, you want to keep it around so you can cook from it.) If you are unfamiliar with it, this might be the book to make you a fan.  Details will follow—maybe even next week.

To borrow a phrase from my Art Hero, Rene Magritte, Ceçi n’est pas une blog post.  I am less than 30 hours away from my last exam, and it’s a lulu, featuring an hour-long essay and 53 multiple-choice questions on a staggeringly complex body of law—and unlike our other exams, it’s completely closed-book, which means we can’t use the outlines we’ve been preparing all semester, as we could in our other exams.  I have my work cut out for me until then.

Nevertheless, the time comes when you have to step up and acknowledge the moment where a sea change has occurred.  Since school started, much has happened, and I’ve not been able to discuss any of it here.  I didn’t write about the election, or about Thanksgiving, or about the melting economy, or about the enormity of change that started on August 13, when I started law school and never looked back.  I missed it all, but I won’t miss the chance to say this:
What a difference a year makes.

See you Friday, dear friends, when I shall be able to think clearly again.  Hopefully.

All of this prevaricating is my way of saying that unless something spectacular (and unforeseeable) happens, I will not be free to write again until after 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 11, when I take the last of my final exams.  (The other three are on 12/1, 12/4 and 12/8; the take-home final for our writing class was 2 1/2 weeks ago, and was a special brand of hell for us law school whoosits.  I never want to live through something like that again, but since we have another semester of it in the spring, I will.) We’re not doing anything special for my birthday on Tuesday, nor will I be roasting a turkey on Thanksgiving.  It’s all finals, all the time, baby.  Well, okay, we’ll probably go out for Thanksgiving, and I’ll bet that I snap and make a Shaker lemon pie from the lemons off our tree, but otherwise, I will be living contract remedies, the major bodies of tort law, various ways to prosecute or defend man’s inhumanity to man, and more Federal Rules of Civil Procedure than you can shake a stick at.  (Disclaimer:  Please do not shake a stick at the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.  They work for you, not against you, even if you’re the poor bastard being sued.)

Dear friends, with any luck, the next new content here will be written on Friday, December 12, from that nifty deck, while I drink my coffee and watch the hummingbirds.  I will have a few hours to kill until my parents arrive from Philadelphia to celebrate early Christmas with us and visit our new digs for the first time.  I won’t even be hung over.  Probably.

That is in fact myself, at my new teeny desk—I have a desk!—in our sunny kitchen, which I’ve found to be the best place in the house to study, except for the late afternoon hours.  Somewhere between 3:30 and 5 p.m., the kitchen gets so bright and so sunny and so warm that study becomes impossible.  When that happens, I screw up my courage, open the sliding door out of the kitchen and sit on the deck, remembering that those Cadillac-sized bumblebees drinking at the morning glories really don’t bother themselves with me:

From here I can peek out at the garden we were lucky enough to inherit from the previous tenant, surveying the zucchini and peppers and string beans and herbs, offering silent thanks to him for providing us with this good stuff.  I can remind myself that soon I will be able to order seed catalogs and make plans for our own garden—because as much as I used to love looking out our living room window at our landlord’s garden (and at the Triborough Bridge looming overhead), and how much I appreciated his sharing the garden’s bounty with us, there is nothing in the world like looking at a garden at which you can call your own shots.  Next year, we will have lime basil and graprao basil and good old-fashioned sweet basil; we will have oregano and marjoram (no more fighting wiry little line cooks for the last bundle of marjoram at the market!); we will hopefully have some sorrel and wild arugula and some form of cowpea or another; and you had better believe that we will have tomatoes, in a riot of colors, so many that I will be unable to leave the kitchen between August and October.

I am aware that I might sound a little boastful now, and I apologize for being so.  Contrary to what the words would suggest, I am not living in the sun, baking myself to freckly pink goodness while I pull oranges off the tree in the front yard and suck them dry.  There is the small matter of law school.  We are now nine weeks into the first semester, five weeks away from the end of classes, six weeks away from final exams.  This time last year, I was still at LuthorCorp, not knowing that I would be cut loose two weeks before Christmas, seeing nothing but long, glutinous failure on the horizon.  Being here, in a bright yellow kitchen, struggling to pull the key elements of law out of a case, boggles my tiny little middle-aged mind.  It is shocking and familiar, enchanting and disorienting, terrifying and thrilling, all at once.  I am biting my knuckles, trying not to make the easy and obvious joke of David Byrne hollering, “well...how did I get here?” Except...I guess I just did.

Before I had even made a final decision on which school to attend, ‘mouse had warned me that law school would rewire my brain, literally change the way I processed information and turned it into cogent thought and applied knowledge.  Kids, he wasn’t kidding.  Even as I write this, I am aware that I have fallen far from my old bloggy glory, which was never really all that glorious but was at least linear, and understandable, plain-spoken where it needed to be, multilayered where layers were both allowable and welcome.  Now, though, now things are different. It is all I can do to take subjects and verbs and objects and turn them into more than the sum of their parts.  I am no longer the same person who used to have conniptions over thousand-dollar frittatas, or the political hijacking of the events of September 11, 2001, or the silly and unnecessary maligning of English food, or the crime against humanity that is the value-added, shrinkwrapped russet potato.  In time, I hope I can be that bakerina again, but until then, I am left with subject-verb-object, subject-verb-object, almost like Hemingway, only without the evocative genius or the gaggle of adoring women.

What I can do, though, is thank everyone, every single blessed one of you, who called or wrote or sent care packages, wishing us well and asking us if we were okay.  Dear friends, it is good to know that you are out there, watching our backs, transmitting love with every word.  I can also answer a few FAQ’s, because even though people do frequently ask questions, I’ll be buggered if I can put up an actual FAQ page.

Without further ado:

1.  How is Lloyd?  Does he like his job?

I’m happy to say that Lloyd is the same brave, goodnatured dreamboat he has always been, and I am awed by his willingness to remain married to me while I turn into a keening, school-obsessed lunatic.  His job transfer did indeed come through, and he is now working at his company’s client satellite office at a certain Big Deal Computer Hardware Company.  Said satellite office is in Palo Alto, which leads to our next question:

2.  Are you two really sticking with that lunatic plan to have Lloyd commute to Palo Alto by bus every day?

Oh, sigh.  God knows we tried.  God knows we came to California with our environmental hearts on our sleeves, planning to continue living the mass transit-based life we lived for so many years in New York.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how many buses the local transit authority runs if the shuttle bus from the Palo Alto transit center to BDCHC’s office stops running at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.  So we sucked it up.  We bought the cheapest car we could find, a 1994 Honda Accord with 270,000 miles on it.  Lloyd drove it to Palo Alto every day, trying hard not to worry about those weird rattling noises it made every time he accelerated, braked, turned a corner or did just about anything else.  We had a mechanic look at it and he gave us bad news about the timing belts, i.e. These Things Are Going To Blow Any Minute, And If They Do, Your Engine Will Explode.  After a week or two of profanities and handwringing, we decided that as much as we hated the thought of more debt, we hated the thought of exploding engines even more, so we crossed our fingers, applied for a car loan, received the loan just minutes before the economy collapsed, and used it to buy this:

Yes, it’s a Scion, the station wagon for Gen Y.  Yes, I know that I have forever surrendered my Little Miss Eco-Friendly Mass Transit tiara by buying this car.  I’m still glad we have it.  It gets great mileage and it has a short turning base, an important consideration for someone who hasn’t parallel-parked in 20 years.  Moreover, Lloyd can drive it to work and I don’t have to worry whether the engine will explode on the way.  I’d say the car is worth it.

3.  How do you like law school?

If I had better coding skills, this is where I would insert the .wav file of Gir saying “I...don’t know.” Okay, that’s not entirely true. For the most part, law school is terrific fun, but it’s not easy terrific fun.  For the first three weeks of school, I wanted to cry after every class, wondering why they had let me in, if I would ever understand the material presented to us, and just what I was doing trying to make friends with younger, brighter, cuter, more optimistic and just plain overall hotter people than me.  (I’m trying to decide what was worse:  realizing that during the summer I lost my virginity, one of my best, smartest classmates hadn’t even been born yet, or realizing that one of the smartest professors on campus graduated from college seven years after I did.)

Before I go on much further with the silly neurosis, I do have to address a serious issue, a moment of real pain for all of us.  During the second week of classes, we lost a classmate, a terrific fellow named Timothy Pramer.  Tim fell from a third-floor balcony at the new undergraduate library.  The investigation is still ongoing, and we probably will never know what happened.  Based on conversations I’ve had with some of Tim’s friends, including his roommate, who I count among my friends, he loved his new life in California, he was excited to be in law school and he was hungry to learn, so I’m thinking that what happened to Tim falls closer to the “accident” side of the spectrum.  What I do know is that he was always friendly, chatty and amiable with me, and I wish I’d got to know him better, and I wonder—and miss—what he would have contributed to our in-class discussions.

So it’s been a complex nine weeks, to put it mildly, but I can’t say I’m sorry to be here.  Those bright young kids who terrified the living saliva out of me during the first week have become friends:  funny, kind, sympathetic, interesting friends, about whom no assumptions can be made except that we are all smart kids, and on bad days we wonder just how we’re going to get through law school—the answer being, of course, by being there for each other.  We are also lucky enough to have a really good group of professors showing us the way.  They are all funny, smart to a degree that makes me suspect they all get together and bend spoons with their minds during off hours, and, wonder of wonders, they want to help us become that smart.  They are teaching us the ways of criminal law (in which we learn that we *have* to be able to argue both sides of a case, no matter how open-and-shut the case may be, but the plus side is that class discussions are so much better than anything I’ve ever seen on Law & Order—and I love Law & Order); contracts (in which we learn that contracts scholars are, frankly, full of beans—fascinated by a subject that doesn’t fascinate too many other people, and just itching to crack wise about it all); torts (in which we learn that, contrary to what some politicians might tell you, tort law is about much more than slip-and-fall cases; at its best, it provides avenues of redress for civil rights violations, among other forms of relief for people who genuinely need it); civil procedure (in which we do our “grunt work,” learning what steps we need to take in filing or responding to civil complaints, trying to keep rule numbers straight all the while); and legal writing (in which we learn that everything we know about writing is good knowledge to have in general, but not necessarily useful for writing office memos or trial briefs).  More often than not, I’m glad to take a break at the end of an afternoon and watch Keith Olbermann for an hour, because frankly, this stuff is exhausting.  Having said that, I’m starting to feel the first stirrings of applied knowledge, and I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, I might be learning after all.

4.  Why are you telling us all this when you *could* be talking about what you’ve been baking?  Sheesh.

Ah, honeybunches. I hope I don’t horrify the lot of you when I tell you that I can count on one hand the number of things I’ve baked.  Most of this is due to time constraints, but some of it is also due to our keeping our books stored in the garage.  It’s a roomy garage, but it’s not that roomy, and usually by the time I find the box that has the book I’m looking for in it, there are boxes spread all over the driveway, and I’m sweating, sunburnt and in a bad mood, never good states of mind for baking.  I have done a little baking, though, and as time passes and we get the garage organized, I’ll be back on my game in no time.  To date, though, I have made two raspberry pound cakes, two loaves of chocolate zucchini bread, a focaccia and a loaf of rice bread.  There is more to come, you bet.

5.  How about knitting?  Do you still knit?

I don’t know what I was thinking.  Even though I have four enormous Rubbermaid tubs of yarn in the garage, even though I haven’t finished the socks I started on the flight from New York to San Jose, even though just days before we flew out, I went to Philadelphia for a yarn crawl with Momerina and bought even more yarn, even though I’m still boring away on the Alice Starmore wrap I started after our return from Connecticut last fall, I still felt compelled to visit the sweet little yarn shop in San Jose, buy four skeins of Euroflax and use them to knit curtains for the kitchen window.  Let’s just say that they’re going slowly and leave it there for now.

6.  Are you eating properly?  Are you getting enough exercise?  Are you doing something about your considerable hinders?  Aren’t you going to talk about the election at all?  You do know that there’s a presidential election, right?  And that the Phillies have made it to the World Series for the first time since your wedding day?  Anyone in there?  Hello?

This just in:  Generalissima Bakerina is still dead. 

Dear friends, all is well, really well.  I have landed safely at law school, where I’ve been a brand new 1L for seven days, dancing with the usual suspects of a first-year law curriculum:  Criminal Law, Contracts, Torts, Pleading & Civil Procedure, and the timorous beastie known as Legal Analysis, Research and Writing.  I have made some friends, many of whom were in middle school when Lloyd and I got married, but they don’t hold that against me.  I won’t lie about the workload:  it’s been confounding, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to manage it.  It seems that I either read too quickly, and thus miss a lot of nuance, or I read too slowly and overparse when I could be getting a lot more done.  Fortunately I have a study group, and once we get together, I’m sure we’ll all have a lot to learn from each other.

On a happier, or at least more familiar note, our month of living in hotels is almost over.  Tonight we take a walk-through of our new apartment and receive the keys from our landlord; over the next couple of days we will bring carloads of stuff from our storage space—oh, wait, did I mention that we have a car now?—and on Friday we will check out of our scary hotel, and, after my last class, we will get the bed out of storage and move in for real.  Our new sofa and our cable/internet hookup arrive on Wednesday.  Between that, the unpacking of the kitchen utensils and the arrival of my orders from King Arthur and Penzey’s, we’ll *really* get something done around here.

Thank you, dear friends, for being so patient and kind at a time when I’ve been so spacy and disconnected.  It’s not been an easy process, but overall, it’s been a very, very good one.

The past week has been both so action-packed, and yet so quiet, that it’s hard for me to believe that at this moment seven days ago, Lloyd and I were holed up in the tiniest, most craptacular airport hotel of our shared experience, watching Law and Order: CI, trying to fall asleep so that we could wake up good and early for our car to the airport.  At the time, nothing loomed larger to me than the plane ride, of zipping across space and time, chasing morning across the country, watching the landscape change, bumping gently over the Great Lakes, noticing the ground suddenly becoming closer as we flew over the Rockies, descending into San Jose just before lunchtime.  (The last two flights I had in and out of San Jose, I flew at night, so I had never seen the ground below me before.  “We live here now,” I thought as I watched us descend over flatlands, hillocks and chapparal, and I wanted to laugh and cry all at once.) I had thought, honestly, that once the flight was behind us, the hardest work was behind us, too.  We had packed and shipped and junked our way out of New York City.  Everything else would be gravy.

I won’t say that our first week here has been harder than anything that has come previous to this—nothing, but nothing, will ever be harder than the Thursday the junk men came—but I can’t say it’s been terrifically relaxing, either.  We hit the ground running in San Jose.  From the starting point of the big fugly SUV we rented at the airport (which is too freaking big for most of the available parking spots in town, but works like a charm for moving boxes around, which is why we opted for an SUV as opposed to a nice hatchback or sedan), we have spent the past week travelling the Enforced Cultural Death March that is the freeway.  If I haven’t mentioned it lately, Lloyd is my hero.  He drives that big fugly thing onto entry and exit ramps like nobody’s business, he merges carefully but assertively, he occasionally shows annoyance but he never, ever, ever shows fear.  I, on the other hand, do.

There are about 500 lovely things to do on any given day here, from walking to the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden to visiting my dear Northern California-based friends who have waited patiently for us, but for the most part we’ve been tuckered out by driving from Fremont to San Jose, running a series of errands (getting our storage locker, greeting the big rig full of our stuff and unpacking it, opening bank accounts, etc.) and then driving back to Fremont.  Tomorrow morning Lloyd and I will go to the DMV and take our written test.  Once we have our shiny new California licenses in hand, we can arrange to get that special auto insurance that you get when you don’t yet own a car—so that when we *do* go buy our car, we can say “hey, look, we’re insured!” We’ll start car shopping.  We have finished bike shopping, and even as we speak, we are waiting to take delivery on our new Schwinns.  Monday night, we’ll try to score some groceries.  On Tuesday we finally take the big fugly SUV back to the airport and ride back to our neighborhood via the Airport Flyer.  At some point Lloyd will board a bus to Palo Alto to do a dry run of his commute before he goes back to work on Friday.  I, meanwhile, will be doing my required reading for orientation, which starts on Wednesday.  We’ll be doing all of this from a suite at a grotty little motor inn within walking distance of school.  When we booked the room, I was so thrilled to be in a place that didn’t involve Rollerball-like levels of travel stress that I didn’t care much about amenities, at least until our landlord said “gee, are you sure you want to stay there?” (I nearly answered, “well, no, but since we can’t move in until the end of the month, we aren’t exactly spoiled for choice.” But like our old landlord, our new landlord is a likeable guy, and I don’t want to piss hime off with my snarktastic tongue.)

All of this laundry-listing is to say that dear friends, I am so hungry to land in a place of our own that I can feel actual hunger pangs.  I don’t want to live indefinitely off of Trader Joe’s food, coffeebar sandwiches and Big Bags of Frozen Meat from Costco.  (Yes, we ponied up for a Costco membership.  I live for the day when I can bring home entire pallets of Fat Tire and economy boxes of Cheez-Its.) I want to unpack my pots and pans and cookbooks and baking sheets.  I want to bake a goddamned loaf of bread.  I want to go to the Capitol Flea Market and buy 30 pounds of apricots for jam.  I want to go to smaller, shaggier flea markets and buy butter lettuces and banana shallots.  Until we can get our hands on our own orange tree, I want to buy four pounds of oranges for a dollar and suck them all dry.  I want to make bright, beautiful food for our friends, but especially for Lloyd, to whom New York City was not especially kind, from a physical-health perspective.  Most of all, I just want to sit still for a while, in our living room or on the deck in our backyard, knowing that no matter how busy the coming weeks and months will be—and, make no mistake, they will be busy—we won’t have to plan the logistics of how we’re going to come or go.  We’ll just sit still, even as we’re also moving into something truly amazing.

I have to admit, I oversimplified a bit.  It hasn’t all been filling out forms and driving out to Fremont.  We’ve had a chance to eat some terrific food (although I think I picked up a little food poisoning at a taqueria, but I hope I’m wrong because I really want to go back and try their tamales), from machaca in San Jose to pho in Fremont.  On ‘mouse’s recommendation, we took a drive out to his flea market of choice, which was noisy and raucous and every bit as much fun as he promised it would be.  To the surprise of no one, I found the yarn store in San Jose, a short bike ride from our house and a short walk from my upcoming part-time job.  (Confidential to Momerina:  Come now.  No, really, right now.  Are you on the plane yet?) And, of course, as soon as we felt solid earth under our feet, we took a walk to the Municipal Rose Garden after all.  Those showy beauties are just too damn irresistible to not visit.

Happy start of the working week, dear friends.  With any luck, I will be considerably less truculent, and more voluble, once I have some interesting school tales to tell.

It will all be shared in due time, dear friends, from the pure joy of discovering what is considered “humid” in San Jose to the pure whimsy of stopping at a dollar store in Fremont to get some paper plates and plastic utensils following our Trader Joe’s run, and finding dollar packets of curry leaves at the register.  In the meantime, I can say that it’s quite something to consider:  in less than a week, we have gone from this:

to this:

Okay, in fairness, we don’t actually live there yet.  We are living in a hotel in Fremont until Sunday, and then moving to another hotel in Santa Clara for two more weeks.  But at least now we know we have a safe place to land, and that, to crib shamelessly from Robert Frost, has made all the difference.