Miscellaneous Musings
let's catch up!!!!
Unemployment is going great, thank you for asking. Honestly though, the EI approval hit, I picked up a little temporary side gig, I am reading, I am writing, I am knitting, I am rage baiting myself by watching Law and Order, I am living the dream.
But also, everything is kind of bad. I think you guys know about this. The badness. It’s making trying to find a job feel a bit futile. I mean, yes I am applying to jobs talking to people etc, unfortunately I can’t be unemployed forever, but yeah. Feels dumb to be like “I am a relationship builder” and “I held xyz quota” or whatever when they are shooting people in the street right across the border. When my taxes have been going to committing genocide at home and abroad. When I can see people struggling and hurting when I am out at the store picking up milk. And I’m sitting here in my warm apartment trying to keep track of it all. I don’t feel defeated necessarily, but I do feel that feeling you get when the cracks are showing, when the jig is up as it were. And I hope it is.
Ok, I suppose I just wanted to come shoot the shit a bit, I just applied for a bunch of jobs and now I want to do something fun so here I am. I know the previous paragraph isn’t screaming fun but….you know how I am. Okay so, some fun things:
We are all in the grips of Big Snowstorm at the moment and on Sunday I went out in the thick of it to meet up with Kate for a drink. We met at a favourite bar of ours, and they were having a Robbie Burns day celebration, which I love due to having an affection for Robbie myself and honestly when he said the best laid plans of mice and men go oft awry……he was fucking cooking. Anyways, I am so glad I was convinced to leave my house in the insane snowstorm, it was so fun and whimsical!!! What are you doing with your one precious life if not galivanting in the snow with one of your best gal pals!!!!!!
What’s better than the sound of two women laughing maniacally:
A couple weeks ago I used my Toronto Public Library access to secure a free pass to the Textile Museum, I booked the pass for last Friday (the pass was for 4 people including myself, amazing deal!), so myself and some friends went to check it out. I have never been in all my time living in Toronto and I would recommend. It’s a small museum, you can get through everything in a couple hours and they had some cool stuff. Lots of clothing from all over the world through different time periods, humans do in fact like to have that shit on. After, we went to Vidal’s place and had some drinks and snacks and it was truly a lovely afternoon even though it was -25C. Use your library card for this shit! In December I went to the Gardiner Ceramics Museum on a TPL pass and it also ruled!!
Thank you to Bernita, I am in a book club right now where we are reading a book I had never even heard of before (my fav) a modernist Icelandic tome called Salka Valka by Halldór Laxness. It is so good, I love when literary fiction is also fairly explicitly Marxist and Laxness is also pulling from Freud and Lacan and it is really wonderfully written and quite funny. This is the second book club I have been in in the past year (shoutout to Karl Marx book club) and it’s really nice to have other people along for the ride when you tackle a big ole book. This is why I loved getting an english degree really, it was just academic book club.
I have been trying to make myself sweets instead of buying them which means I have made a couple cakes recently (shocking I know). If you like to bake (or even if you don’t, honestly) I think that a really nice cookbook to have in your collection is the one called Snacking Cakes by Yossy Arefi. This is a great book, it’s organized in a really smart way (she sorts the cake recipes between fruit cakes, warm and toasty cakes, chocolate cakes, and a base vanilla cake), and she writes every recipe with variations on the flavour and theme so one recipe can actually be like 3-5 recipes. I love this book because the recipes all follow the same method but just switch out the ingredients, so for example, one cake recipe will have a neutral oil as the fat while another will use melted butter but the method for mixing and baking will be the same. This means that if you are a beginner you can follow the recipes to the letter and they will turn out great, but if you know what you are doing, you can easily substitute ingredients based on what you have. For instance, the other week I made her recipe for a black- and blueberry ricotta cake but I didn’t have ricotta and I wasn’t leaving my house to buy it but I did have some plain cream cheese and some milk so I just weighed out my cream cheese, topped up the amount I was missing with milk and the cake ended up perfect. I could have done the swap with sour cream or yogurt or mascarpone if I had those things on hand, and that is why I love this book. She does other great stuff in here like including all the weighted measurements and making every recipe fit in an 8” square pan (with instructions for using a round or loaf pan included), and has a really great intro section around the methods and the very few pieces of equipment these recipes require. If you want to step your cake game up I really think this is a wonderful jumping off point and if you just really like eating cake well, it’s good for that too.
I mentioned I was rage baiting myself by watching law and order (stupid sexy Sam Waterson) and just yesterday there was a back to back episode about Israel and then one about the Black Panthers and I will just let you guess how deftly these things were dealt with and how much yelling I was doing at the screen. I need to rewatch Monk to calm down. I also started watching Industry (stupid sexy Ken Leung) and it is truly amazing, I mostly love that I was a business bitch for so long, I worked like, adjacent to finance and shit but I simply rarely have any idea what they are talking about when they talk about work on the show and I love it. Just like in real life, the stock exchange is made up.
Kind of been throwing it back re: music, and just listened to Art Angels from front to back and damn remember when Grimes was kind of on a tear? Wonder what happened to that woman.
Wow that was fun! Now off to make myself mad with another episode of Law and Order see y’all later xo
God, you’re a recipe writer’s dream reader!!!!