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(Cross-posting to PTMYB and to Flickr, because I’m a cow that way.)

If you watch cartoons the way Lloyd and I watch cartoons, you have probably seen all of the old Tex Avery Droopy cartoons about 5,000 times.  Thus you would be familiar with the theme of Droopy attempting to fight a bull/slay a dragon/win a competition to win the heart of a princess/starlet/some other beautiful girl, only to fail, repeatedly.  In every cartoon, Droopy sits down, pulls a photograph of his lady love out of his coat pocket, cries, "Oh, my darling, I’m a failure," and bursts into sobs.  As poor Droopy cries his heart out, the bull/dragon/nogoodnik peeks over his shoulder, pulls out a pencil and draws a mustache on the picture of the girl, laughing meanly as he does so.  At that point, Droopy dries his tears, walks up to the villain, stares eyeball-to-eyeball and announces, "You know what?  THAT MAKES ME MAD." Then he proceeds to beat the hapless villain senseless, swinging him back and forth by the tail, smacking him roundly and then throwing him off into the horizon.  He gets the girl, of course.

Dear friends, it’s been a long, tedious 2007, pretty much a never-ending font of that moment when Droopy is convinced he has failed in his quest.  It has been a year of disappointments, losses and heartbreaks, and each week has been worse than the one that preceded it.  The few real moments of sweetness I was able to achieve vanished into a puff of recrimination, failure and hostility within days, if not hours.  This past week, for reasons too numerous—and personal—to enumerate, has been a horror show, one in which I have not been able to sit still for fifteen minutes without bursting into tears, where the voices of more than three people at a time made my skin hurt (a real problem if you live in a city of eight million people), and where I could actually feel my own body compressing, curling in on itself, like a boiled shrimp.  Riding the train into work yesterday, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the subway window, knitting a sock.  My head was bent, my shoulders hunched to my ears, my shapeless black clothing doing me no favors.  I looked ancient.

Today started pretty much as yesterday had:  a series of slow, dreadful dreams; oversleeping to the point of missing the gym; dragging myself into the living room, hoping that the tv and the coffee and yesterday’s NY Times food section would provide even a little distraction from the terrible thoughts pinballing around my head; a commute into work that made my skin hurt again; a day full of LuthorCorp-based indignities, an urge to bolt for the door and run, run until I could find a car or a bus or anything that would get me as far away from my physical surroundings as possible—last time I checked, I was in Thermopolis, Wyoming—and only, only after I’d exhausted myself from running, would I call Lloyd and tell him to get his ass on a plane and run away with me.  I had spent the previous week trying to sort out why I was on such a precipitous slide, alternating hours of frenetic talking with hours of Easter Island silence, back and forth with Lloyd, with Momerina, with Bunni, with my blogging pals, with my good friends at the office, with girlfriends and boyfriends online and IRL.  I had talked and talked and talked, raged and wept and popped Excedrin and ranted about how I felt like I was catching a cold without actually catching a cold.  I made the decision to postpone the LSAT until December, knowing that there was no way I could take this pinball brain into the test center, and then instantly hated myself for postponing.  I had fallen asleep sitting up, laid awake listening to myself blink, went to work and stared at nothing for hours.  Nothing helped.

At least I thought nothing helped.  I suspect now that I was wrong, that all that talking and raging and Easter Island silence were pushing me toward something that I just couldn’t see.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that at 4:30 this afternoon, something snapped, or clicked, deep inside.  I thought of every moment of pain, fear, sadness and dread that have been clanging in my head, and I heard a voice:  "You know WHAT?"

This, dear friends, is officially It.  No more tears.  No more insecurity.  No more terror.  No more worrying that I am a horrible fraud, and that it’s only a matter of time before everyone discovers what a nematode I really am.  No more use of words like "nematode" in self-description.  No more crying over anything that happens at work.  No more worrying if I could have effected a different outcome on circumstances outside my control.  No more contorting to please people who will not be pleased.  No more fat jokes.  No more turning away from mirrors.  No more wincing at my reflection anywhere.  No more running away from cameras as if they were live grenades.  No more apologizing for baking.  No more apologizing for knitting.  No more indifferent friendship.  No more curling up, shrimplike, when I could be running my fingers through Lloyd’s hair.  No more watching bad reality tv when I could be on the phone with my parents.  No more missing birthdays.  No more late Christmas cards.  No more thinking about the old boyfriends who broke my heart when I should be running logic puzzles.  No more sleeping in when I could be in the weight room or on the track or in the pool, swimming the silly little crawl that shouts out "First time swimming in 30 years," but still gets me from one end of the pool to another.  No more shapeless black clothing.  No more shrinking away when someone on the street makes a comment about my ass, as though it were my fault for existing.  No more false cheer.  No more lost bonuses.  No more sloppy seconds.  No more no more.

My beautiful friend Shauna is a walking sandwich board for the power of saying yes.  There are better things to which to say yes than all of the above.  This starts now.  It’s high time that I got the girl.  (So to speak.

Caution:  The following post is light on common sense and heavy on the photography, for which I apologize to my dial-up-using friends.

Call it Bakerina’s Paradox:  I’ve been a bit down of late, as those unfortunate enough to speak with me lately know, and even when I’m feeling just fine, I can be brought low in an instant by baking gone wrong, like a cake that falls apart upon decanting from the tin, or bread that collapses on its journey from brotform to baking stone.  Yet these would-be macarons, which are about as wrong as baking can get, left me not despondent but amused:

Before I deconstruct these little miseries, though, I do owe everyone who has visited this page, as well as those of you who have called, written, offered advice and goodies and generally been just plain good folks, a little explanation and a lot of apology.  Yes, I have been getting your messages; I’ve just been a pill about acknowledging them, and for that, I’m sorry.  (Confidential to Pauline:  The antipodean sunshine has been very, very, very welcome.  Thank you, my dear.) No, I’ve not been ill, although I’m slightly under the weather now with a mild cough/laryngitis cycle that may be part of the annual autumnal viral cloud, or may be something I picked up in LuthorCorp’s new office, which is literally being constructed around us.  Lloyd, however, was very sick through most of August and part of September with a bad bronchial infection.  He’s better now, and once again able to sleep on his back, to my deep and copious relief.  The LuthorCorp office move took place over Labor Day weekend, and about the only good thing I can say about it is that the people in my immediate cubicle bank are friends:  they’re smart, they make me laugh all day long, we all have each other’s backs when we need help, and we have each other’s ears when one of us needs to let off a little steam.  We are all sitting closer to a window that gives us more light, as well as a better view of Park Avenue and 49th Street, and I’ll never say no to more light.  On the other hand, LuthorCorp with more light is still LuthorCorp, and I’m still chafing at the bit, still longing to escape, but not in a bridge-burning, finance-ruining way, especially now that I’ve been reminded just how sexy health insurance coverage can be.  There is also the small matter of the LSAT, now less than two weeks away.  Until Friday evening, the LSAT was merely a looming deadline, a test where the prep this time around has been difficult and stressful, much more so than it was last year, probably because I’m feeling an increased sense of urgency about getting into school.  Friday night, alas, brought even more unwelcome news:  Because my supervisor is needed to cover the workload of an outgoing new mom, I am needed to cover my supervisor’s work—including a two-week business trip to Philadelphia, right smack in the middle of which is the test date—on which I am scheduled to be at a test center in Manhattan.  Fortunately, my supervisor is a friend and a kind woman; she knows all about the LSAT plan and has been both stalwart in her support and impressive in her discretion.  She swears that we will find a way to make this work, and she will find a way to keep me in New York for the test, but my already-tenuous concentration and confidence have both been broken, and I’ve been considering an option I had considered untenable until now, namely postponing the test and trying again in December.  Add to all this the usual hash of lack of sleep, lack of exercise, lack of deep green leafy vegetables and garden-variety insecurity, shake well and serve on toast points, and you have one weepy, navelgazing, utterly tedious bakerina.

But I’m sure, dear friends, that you did not come here for weepiness, navelgazing or tedium—which is good, because that’s not what I’m here for, either.  You are here for silly stories about food, and tonight I am more than happy to deliver.

Laurie Colwin once wrote that terrible things can happen in the kitchen to anyone, even experienced cooks, but it’s still cold comfort when it happens to you, especially when that terrible thing is still in your kitchen.  These were supposed to be blackcurrant macarons, a variation of the beautiful recipe posted by Jen the Bread Freak at The Barmy Baker, who, in turn, found it at Tartelette.  Because I am a mad fool for blackcurrant desserts, I bought as many half-pints of blackcurrants as I could this summer, and turned them all into blackcurrant puree, ready to be turned into something wonderful.  I found that wonderful thing in the dream of a blackcurrant macaron, almond-based macarons flavored with blackcurrant puree, sandwiched together with blackcurrant buttercream.  It sounded like heaven in a teacup—and, to be honest, still does.  In hindsight, I should have remembered that if you replace a solid flavoring (like espresso powder) with a liquid (like fruit puree), you need to either subtract an equivalent amount of another liquid ingredient, or increase the amount of dry ingredients.  I did neither of these, and when I ended up with a batter so loose that it poured out of the pastry bag before I could even give it a squeeze, I knew that only trouble could lie ahead.  I soldiered on anyway.  What I got was certainly edible, essentially 50 little discs of blackcurrant-flavored pavlova, but nothing that I could get off the sheet pan intact, much less sandwich together with buttercream.

Ah, well.  I still have some blackcurrant puree left, and I think I know what changes I need to make for a workable recipe.  In the meantime, I can appreciate how pretty this stuff looks as you put it together:

Really, I should look this good when I fall short of expectations. 

The good news, dear friends, is that I managed to bake something else today, and had much, much better luck with it.  Stay tuned.

Apologies, dear friends.  This is not the post I wanted to write after nearly three weeks of radio silence.  There are better words in me than these, but I can’t seem to get them onto the page this morning.  I suspect that fatigue has something to do with it, for this August has been a tiring month.  Any rest and rejuvenation that came from my week of archive-diving in Connecticut pretty much evaporated on my first day back at LuthorCorp, where the usual box-based hilarity was augmented by our upcoming office move, taking place this weekend.  Under the best circumstances an office move is a pain the neck, but this particular office move has been a difficult one for me, calling up feelings I thought I had buried long ago.

(Well, yes, there is a story behind that somewhat provocative sentence.  One of these days, I really should tell it.)

In addition to this emotionally interesting office move, as well as the normal course of business in the box factory (including covering for the busiest woman with the most thankless job in the whole organization), I have also been living under the looming shadow of the LSAT, which is just under four weeks away.  I’m running a lot of drills, trying to improve both my speed and accuracy on the logic puzzles, but every time I try to breathe deeply, absorb the fact patterns and decipher the unwritten assumptions in each puzzle, I can literally feel my mind running into the brick wall that separates it from full comprehension.  Depending on what time I start studying at nights and on weekends, I run into this wall anywhere from four to ten times a night.  You run into that many brick walls at a time, and after a while it starts to leave marks.  I have been reminded by friends, parents, spouse, champions all, that if I keep working at the puzzles, the outcome of this test will be much, much better than the one I took in December.  I know they are right, but I’m not feeling it just yet.

I will also admit to a little distraction—hell, no, outright worry—because Lloyd is in the grip of a bad, bad bronchial infection. Two weekends ago he picked up a cough, which we thought was viral, passed on to him by the woman who sat behind us on the bus from Hartford to Danbury, coughing all the way.  A week ago, his cough getting worse and worse, Lloyd woke up and told me that one of his ears was numb.  Within 24 hours, he emerged from the doctor’s office with a battery of prescriptions for antibiotics, decongestants and cough suppressants.  He is now midway through his antibiotics, and while he is getting better, he is far from well, and he still has to sleep in a sitting position if he wants to get any rest.  I am amazed that he hasn’t cracked a rib from coughing, and I am well beyond frustrated at my inability to do anything to make him better.  I can make tea, and that’s about it.

If this all sounds depressing, or tedious, well, it is.  But I also know that it’s all temporary—we’ll settle into the new office, Lloyd will get better, the LSAT will be over soon enough, and at any rate is just a test—and that there will be better stories to tell.  I know they’re right around the corner, because I have proof:

Confidential to ‘mouse:  Relax.  It’s only a little yarn porn, it’ll be over soon enough, and when it is, I promise you’ll be smiling.

(There you go, ‘mouse.  I’ll bet you’re already feeling better.)

Okay, in fairness, we did not actually bring the cake back from Connecticut with us.  It was one of the great ironies of the trip that the UConn campus is a short driving distance from at least half a dozen farmstands, all promising lush, height-of-season summery produce, but because Lloyd and I did not rent a car on this trip, opting instead to travel on the cheap by bus and then stay in a nice hotel on campus, we could not actually buy any of this stuff, and thus had to wait until we were back in New York to buy fresh-off-the-farm produce.  (Confidential to McBeth:  Yeah, honey, I know it’s cracked.) I’d had big plans for wandering around the market on Saturday, as a gentle re-entry back into All Noise, All the Time after five days of quiet work in an archive, but by the time I made it to the market (having had to detour to the yarn store for a cable needle to replace the one I’d lost on the bus), the teeming masses were so teeming that I decided to stay at the south end of the market, pick up only what I could get without having to fight a crowd for it, and get the hell out of there.  Fortunately, I was at the same end of the market as the local apricot people.

Local apricots are such a tricky proposition for me.  Because they are rare, luscious, short-seasoned jewels, I always feel a little wasteful when I do anything except eat them out of hand.  Unfortunately, there are so many other things you can do with them, and for the most part, those things are improved a hundredfold if you use local apricots, as opposed to the ones from two thousand miles away.  Even though my favorite apricot jam is made with dried California apricots, I’m always a little keen to see what using the fresh ones would do.  But wait!, cries my subconscious.  What about ice cream, or that gorgeous apricot curd that Julie makes?  And didn’t you say you wanted to learn how to make your own apricot lekvar, now that Paprikas Weiss is gone and you can only find prune lekvar at Economy Candy?  Make with the lekvar, already!

Well, maybe if there are any apricots next week, I’ll make with the lekvar, but by Sunday morning, I knew what I needed to coax me back into workaday life.  I needed Honey-Poached Apricot Cornmeal Crunch Cake, a dazzler of a cake from a dazzler of a book, In the Sweet Kitchen by Regan Daley.  Like cherry pie, this cake is best made when the fruit is in season, and like cherry pie, it is worth the wait during the five-sixths of the year.  Of course I know that I’m not going to get far without at least promising to share the recipe—I know you, dear friends —but tonight is the night that LSAT study kicks into full gear, so I’ll have to wait until I can crack my knuckles and really share.  In the meantime, I can describe it thus:  you split your apricots in half, remove the pits, put them in a pot with some water, sugar, a vanilla bean, a cinnamon stick and the most flavorful honey you can find (although I’d stay away from buckwheat or chestnut), poach them all together until the fruit almost, but not quite, collapses.  From there, you strain out the fruit, return the poaching liquid to the heat and boil until it becomes a moderately thick syrup.  While those are cooling, you prepare a streusel with cornmeal, white flour, brown sugar, salt, baking powder and cinnamon, blending it all together as you might for pie crust.  You get a nice big 10” springform pan, butter it and line it with parchment, tamp down half the streusel mix into a layer, spread the apricots over the bottom layer, crumble the rest of the streusel over the top, pour a little syrup over it, and bake until your house smells like warm, sugary toast.  When you’re ready to eat it, pour a little more syrup over the top of the cake.  Take a bite, make the little “happy to be eating this” dance with your fork, and take another.

Lest you think I brought nothing back with me but halfassed travelogues and maddeningly vague instructions on how to make a cake whose season is wrapping up rapidly, I promise you, dear friends, that I brought much more—namely, 36 pages of notes on the state of the U.S. poultry industry from 1920 to 1923.  I know you’re looking forward to that.  Okay, I’ll play nicely.  For those of you who love bucolic splendor, I brought home this picture of a crabapple tree in front of a graduate dorm, a tree that taunted me every day with apples I did not have the nerve to pick:

For the knitterinae, I have a nice shot of Blankie in Progress, on which I worked every night in the hotel after being reduced to a gibbering idiot by farm reports:

I even managed to find myself some food for thought in the student union:

These UConn kids, they take their student activities seriously.  Daunting, man.

Edit: Longtime readers, who may remember the merrily lunatic commentary of my pal orionoir—heck, you might even have been fans of his late and much-missed blog—to you, and to all, I am happy to report that he is still with us, living the charmed life of a flickr celebrity, still vigorously alive nearly three years after being told by an oncologist he’d be lucky to live much longer than 12 months.  Lloyd and I were lucky enough to go to coffee on Tuesday with Mr. O and his daughters, the women formerly known as e1 and e2.  They are smart, funny, wondrous girls. 

Despite my brooding about not being able to play along this year, in the end it was just as well that I did not participate in Blogathon.  Now that our cable modem—or rather, the ‘net connectivity in our neighborhood—is behaving itself again, our wireless router is not, and latest weekend was a veritable symphony of profanity as Lloyd and I found ourselves connected for 10 minutes, then disconnected for five.  I promise on all that is good and true that if I had been awake and posting for 23.5 hours, only to disappear and not reappear in time to post the last post, my walls would, to quote my boyfriend Lord Flashheart, be decorated in an interesting new shade called Hint of Brain.  Nope, this year’s Blogathon, chez PTMYB, was all about the bunni, and I am proud to say that not only did Bunni come through in the style to which we have become accustomed, she also managed to double her pledge total, and then some, in about 48 hours.  That’s my girl.  Not that I sat the event out entirely:  I tried to play the trivia game early and often, and I joined forces with the beautiful and kind Julie to fix Bunni the kind of dinner that would power a woman through a long night of sleep-deprived blogging.  Julie made an awe-inspiring platter o’ribs, collard greens and cornbread, I brought the corn salsa and yogurt (so’s we could all have the Cornbread Thing) and what would be the last cherry pie of the season.

I had hoped that because summer has been somewhat adventuresome this year—a long weekend on Block Island with Lloyd, my parents and my brother and sister-in-law, to celebrate my stepdad’s 60th birthday; a chance to meet up with some online friends, brilliant minds, visions of loveliness, dear souls all (Joel, Amanda and A.B.) on Joel’s Big, Big Road Trip from Knoxville to western Pennsylvania via New Jersey, New York and Toronto); the upcoming trip to Great Northeastern Agricultural State University, for which Lloyd and I will depart in about two hours—I’d be feeling somewhat chatty about it all, but oddly, the words still stubbornly refuse to dislodge themselves.  I am trying to look on the bright side, telling myself that I have a lot of plans in the works right now, and that I am conserving energy for what will soon become a burst of creativity.  This does not, however, preclude me from going out for tea with Bunni and moaning to her that this time I mean it, I’m really out of good ideas, and I’ll never amount to anything, and did I mention I have a Birthday with a Zero coming up?, and Lloyd should just go ahead and get my ice floe ready right now, because it’s time to push my underachieving ass out to sea.  Normally the sound of Bunni telling me to drink a nice big glass of Shut the Fuck Up terrifies me into behaving myself, but this summer I have been impervious to even the Fear of Bunni.  The only way the poor woman can get any relief is to head back to France for two weeks.  (Wish I’d thought of that.)

Again, I digress.  Astute readers will have noticed an almost throwaway reference to a trip to Great Northeastern Agricultural State University.  It’s true:  In two hours, Lloyd and I will leave our house, laden with overpacked luggage, laptops, CD and DVD entertainments and a box full of notecards; we will drag all this stuff to the subway, get off at Port Authority, switch to a Hartford-bound bus, switch again to an eastern-Connecticut-bound bus, and eventually find ourselves at the University of Connecticut, where my old pals at the Dodd Center will pull two boxes of old farm reports, poultry co-op journals, extension office mailers, newspaper articles and advertisements, and let me study them for five days.  Lloyd, meanwhile, will be meandering around campus, checking bus schedules, sitting in quiet green areas with his books, seeing what he can see and just generally unwinding from city life.  (Wish I’d thought of that.) With any luck, by the time we return to New York on Friday, I’ll have another big stack of notes, a better idea of how to organize the book, a few more hours of LSAT study time—because yes, I am still taking the LSAT at the end of September—a few hours of running around campus and/or swimming in the pool at the hotel, and plenty of optimism for the future.  Here’s hoping.