With a few noisome and tedious exceptions, my colleagues at LuthorCorp are some of the kindest people one could ever work with. I realize what a rare thing this is, working with such kind people, and when the time comes for me to leave the company for good, I will not miss the job but I will miss them. Thus it is that I wish I could muster more of an enthusiastic response when they share their good wishes with me. Don’t get me wrong; I certainly know what great good luck it was for me to receive this fellowship, and I certainly have no regrets for it. But it has been such a long journey, getting here, that now that it’s almost upon me, I don’t quite know how to react to it. In the past three days, I have heard multiple variations on a few themes: “You must be so excited!” (Well, yes, I am. Or I will be, as soon as I stop obsessing over how many chargers I’ll need to pack for all of my electronic equipment, and wondering if I have time to pick up extra socks and underwear at Macy’s, particularly those little charmpot socks with chain-stitch renderings of sushi all over them.) “I’ll bet you can’t wait to get out of this office.” (Considering that the last day off I had from the office was my grandfather’s funeral on October 31, yes, I can’t wait to get out of the office. As soon as I meet with all the people who will be covering for me while I’m gone. Am I forgetting anything? What if I forget to warn people that a big order is coming up, and it doesn’t get run? We can’t lose any more business this year...) “Will you even want to come back?” (*sound of crickets*) “Is this the first time you’ve flown since 9/11?” (*more crickets, maybe with the cry of a hawk added for resonance*)
The biggest question, though, has been “what are you going to write about?” This one is actually fun to contemplate. I had planned to write the outline for the whole book, but the more research I do, the less idea I have for what the final structure of the book will be. This led to several weeks of mewling, puking and generally making Lloyd wonder why he hadn’t married an easier woman. Yes, yes, go ahead and say it. “Didn’t think there was an easier woman out there than you, Bakerina.” Rimshot. Har de har har. Okay, let’s try this again..."several weeks of mewling, puking and generally making Lloyd wonder why hadn’t married a woman of sweeter temperament, particularly one whose great-grandfather invented and patented something useful, like oxygen or razor blades. (In case you’re wondering, Lloyd has earned his marital Purple Heart with me this year. His reward for all this is getting to live in peace and quiet for four weeks, by himself in beautiful uptown Astoria.) But I digress. I have decided there’s no shame in writing just one chapter of the book, suitable for journal publication, that examines the paradox of the availability:use ratio. Once upon a time, eggs were much more seasonal than they are now: because chickens’ laying cycles depend on light, they tend to lay eggs like mad in the summertime, only to scale back dramatically as the days get shorter. Now, of course, the egg industry has found a way to muck about with the available light in their hatcheries, subjecting chickens to near-constant light to encourage near-constant laying; yet despite this, if you follow the development of certain bread, cake and custard recipes, the ratio of eggs to other ingredients has dropped considerably. Thus we are at a point where eggs are cheaper and more plentiful now than at any time in history, and yet we are hedging our bets with flour or cornstarch in our custards and chemical leaveners in our cakes, rather than use greater quantities of those increasingly-affordable eggs. I’m sure there are a lot of factors, including the cholesterol panic of the 1970s and 1980s, and the replacement of hearth cookery with iron stove cookery in the 19th century. (Iron stoves were not nearly as effective as the hearth for roasting meats and preparing stocks and sauces, but they were great for cakes. If you read 19th century cookbooks, you can trace the spread of the iron stove by the increasing number of recipes for large, fluffy, sugary cakes.) There is a tale waiting to be told here, I’m sure of it.
In the meantime, dear friends, I ask you to consider this: Since my online time will be greatly curtailed while I am away, I had contemplated closing PTMYB for the duration, even though I found the thought somewhat depressing. Fortunately, the kind and excellent Snowball, another victim of my puky mewlingness, asked me if I had considered guest hosts to blog on PTMYB. This is why Snowball is the Queen of the Roost ‘round these parts, and why I merely tread water in her wake. So consider this a call for papers: If you are interested in guest blogging in this space between June 15 and July 14, please click on that handy dandy “e-mail me” link to the right and let me know. I don’t have a particular suggested theme, but if you do, feel free to share it. (I already know that at least one of you has done this. Confidential to You Know Who You Are: your suggested theme is interesting but ultimately daunting, as I think I’d discover just how ripe for parody I am. But I like the idea of you guest-blogging here. Come on, dear, say yes.) Unless there is overwhelming popular demand (and thus I hear the sound of a million swigs of cola being snorted through a million noses over a million keyboards), I will probably try to pick a list of six guest bloggers. All proceeds benefit the “Keep Bakerina’s Page Hits From Falling Into the Basement” organization. Shameless, yes, but I never claimed to be otherwise.
For my next trick, I will continue fretting over what to pack. I have already committed an error by buying the only mosquito repellent I could find at my local drugstore behemoth chain. (Note to my fellow New Yorkers: Is it an accident that these places are sprouting like mushrooms, and that the company name rhymes with Pain/Bleed?) I snatched up a packet of mosquito repellent towellettes and added them to the basket full of Q-Tips and Coppertone. When I got home, I took the packet out to pack it in my suitcase and read the following instructions on the back: DO NOT GET ON CLOTHING. DO NOT USE INDOORS. WASH HANDS THOROUGHLY AFTER USE. WASH ALL CLOTHING AND BED LINENS AFTER TREATMENT. DO NOT LET CHILDREN OR ANIMALS NEAR THIS PRODUCT. DO NOT DRIVE HEAVY MACHINERY OR COOK OVER A GAS FLAME AFTER APPLICATION. DO NOT SMILE AT IT. DO NOT WEAR OVER MAKEUP. DO NOT WEAR UNDER MAKEUP. DO NOT—WELL, JUST DO NOT. JUST DON’T, OKAY? Hmmm, I thought. I wonder what the active ingredient is? I turned the packet over and looked at the front label. Sure enough, these things are full of DEET. I might as well just go to the spa where I will be getting my hydro/aromatherapy treatment on June 18 and ask them to throw a little DDT in with the grapefruit and lavender oil mist. Do not ask me why I didn’t bother to read the package before buying the damn things. Just don’t, okay?