Ugh.

Ugh ugh ugh. It's been a trying week.  A lot of instability at work that I can't really talk about, save to say that my work is not immune to the public sector constrictions that are happening everywhere as a result of the global economic crisis.  Any way you slice it, it's bad for morale.

It's not helping that my mum and Big D are continuing to use me as their filial whipping boy.  I would have thought that having spent the majority of her years in North America, that my mum would be able to resist the sexism of Chinese culture, but no.  The boys will always get a free pass.  My sister will always be the "good" child, which leaves me as the repository for all their frustrations.  I don't "behave" properly.  I'm not "obedient" or "accommodating" enough.  It gets incredibly frustrating and demoralizing.  Emails are flying back and forth with this weird blanket caveat "we're not showing favoritism" but then my name gets flung in there and weird comments get made about how my proclivity for prioritizing my friends over my family has been noted, purportedly without prejudice.  The expectations of me are so much more and it's annoying that my brothers get a free pass.  They basically get to flit in and out and do as they please, without being held accountable for how they're not being "accommodating" or "helpful" enough.

I get that kids are going to get treated differently.  I do.  But what I do resent is being the ONLY kid who gets consistently s**t on and being held to a different standard than my equally capable siblings.

One of the big issues is scheduling.  We can't see eye to eye on this matter at all.  My parents insist that I try to have things done according to "my" schedule and refuse to be accommodating to their scheduling needs and only try to arrange things when it's convenient for me.  The big, gaping lacuna in their logic is that EVERYONE IS TRYING TO WORK THEIR SCHEDULES OUT SO THAT IT'S CONVENIENT FOR THEIR OWN, EQUALLY BUSY, LIVES.  So, when my sister said that it would work better for her and Uncle Rico to have my grandma's birthday dinner on a Saturday instead of Sunday, presto changeo! Dinner is on Saturday without comment.  When I send an email stating what blocks of time we have free to do something, then suddenly it becomes that I'm making demands, and not requests.  It's completely illogical and irrational.

It's like trying to set up a meeting request in Outlook and then flipping out when you want to have a meeting on Monday at 2pm and two of the attendees have something from 2-2:30pm and that time is blocked off.

Blargh.  That's just the tip of the iceberg.  I'm also my own worst enemy, because I have somehow sublimated some of that Confucian filial piety thing so that I still feel guilty.  Which is my own problem.  I gotta accept it and move on.  My new mission is to ignore and play the part of Bruce Wayne.  Do what I like when I like, don't try to organize things in advance, and let them howl.

There is also a valuable takeaway here, and it involves parenting and like, NOT PLAYING FAVORITES.  Haha. No really; I'm currently reading Alison Bechdel's new comic memoir (ie. it's not a comedy, but it's a memoir presented in comic form), Are You My Mother? and it's got a bunch of psychoanalysis type stuff based on her own therapy sessions, her readings of Virginia Woolf and most of the major psychoanalysts (Freud, Jung, etc.), and based mostly on this dude Donald Winnicott's theories on the transitional object and more importantly, the true self and the false self.  Basically, the true self is the confident, self-actualized, creative you.  Living your true self is awesome.  The false self is when you internalize or subsume your true self and model the behaviour that's expected of you, so that you become more like your mother, father, caregiver, etc.  It's an unconscious process, and you can trick others and even yourself into thinking that the false self is who you really are.  But what ends up happening is that even if you're successful with your false self, you feel kind of sad and empty and lonely (obvi!)

If I were to armchair psychoanalyze myself, I would say that Mom and Big D have problems dealing with my true self and want me to be more of a false self.  The problem is, I can probably say that from, say, BIRTH, I've never been a false self kind of person.  This is a positive in some respects (I tend to be very happy/content and confident and creative) and negative in others (I can be tactless and have problems seeing things from other people's perspectives).  Mom and Big D just can't handle my true self.  Does this mean that I'm off the hook from humoring them?  No.  I'm not so unreflexive as to think that.  But at the same time, our clashes seem to always come down to the fact that I don't behave the way they want me to.  Am I doing something horrible?  No.  I just have my own way of scheduling the life of myself, my partner, and our young son.  Because it's such a minor thing, I don't really think it requires changing, especially since every OTHER aspect of my life is helped along by this one tendency (ie. my tendency to be organized and be a planner).

Ultimately, we both have to love each other for who we are, not for who we want the other person to be.  I think I can safely say that I don't really expect or want anything from my parents on the regular.  I don't want or need them to change in some fundamental way in order for our relationship to change.  I just get irritated when they call me out and single me out for rando s**t.  But whatever.  As the Dotytron is fond of saying, HATERZ GON' HATE.

Tonight is softball and it is very close to our house and I am very excited about that.  Last night I went home and we had clam pizza for dinner and a lovely beet salad over arugala and CSA greens with goat's cheese and candied pecans.  Momma D came over for dinner and a visit.  It was yum.  And I treated myself to a decompressing-from-stress fudgesicle.  The kids went out and put on their boots and splashed in the post-rain puddles.  If that pic above isn't one of the cutest things you've ever seen, then you must be living in Sanrio World in Japan.

Tonight we had pimento cheese, mortadella, and pickle paninis with chips.

And I made a key lime pie ice cream base which I churned this morning so it will be ready to be my post-softball treat.

There is something magical that happens when you mix eggs, condensed milk, and lime juice.  It thickens up so nicely on its own.  I've posted my recipe below for any and all of you who have an ice cream maker, along with Christina Tosi's graham crust, which I baked off and chunked into the ice cream to give it that real, key lime pie flavour.

Fin.

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Key Lime Pie Ice Cream


1 1/2 c. whipping cream (you could probably use coffee cream)
1 1/2 c. milk (I used 2%)
1 can of condensed milk
4 egg yolks
1/2 c. lime juice
zest of two limes

- heat the milk and cream in a saucepot over medium heat until the mixture comes to just under a simmer.
- add the lime zest and let this steep
- whisk together the condensed milk and the egg yolks and the lime juice
- slowly temper this mixture with the hot milk-cream
- pout the tempered eggs back into the pot and cook over low heat, stirring/whisking constantly, until the mixture just comes to a bare, bare simmer and thickens
- cool the mixture overnight and churn as per your ice cream maker's directions.

Momofuku Milk Bar's Graham Crust
tweaked with my minor, minor adaptations


1 1/2 c. graham crumbs
1/2 c. powdered milk
2 T. sugar
1 t. salt
4 T. unsalted butter, melted
1/4 c. whipping cream

- preheat the oven to 250F
- in a bowl, toss together the dried ingredients until evenly combined.  Add the liquid ingredients and stir until wet, sandy "clumps" form.
- dump these clumps onto a silpat  or parchment-lined baking tray and bake for about 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes or until the clumps are toasted and feel dry.
- break the clumps into smaller pieces and fold half this amount into your churned ice cream before you freeze.

Major. League.

Yesterday I had to shower in the morning so the Dotytron took over the dealing-with-the-newly-awakened-Boobla duties.  The Big Yam likes to greet each day by dropping a steaming pile of bass in his drawers.  It's his thing.  Whatever.  I don't know his life, I'm not judgin'.  So when I came downstairs to eat breakfast, I asked the Dotytron, "did Big Yam poo this morning?" to which he replied, "Uh, yeah.  Major. League."  I started laughing and I was like, "Ummm...I don't even know what that's supposed to mean."  LOL!  So now any time we're trying to describe anything, we're like, "Two words for you: Major. League."  It's actually an amazingly elastic descriptor.  

I was laughing about it all yesterday, really.  I found out recently that people I know are splitting up.  The reason given was that their relationship had gradually become more of a business relationship and the so-called magic was gone.  Maybe it's because I grew up in a broken home, but I'm always like, super paranoid that that's going to happen to us.  Or I'm always sizing up our friends thinking, who do you think is going to get divorced first?  I mean, you never get hitched or start living with someone thinking that it could happen.  BUT IT COULD.  It can happen to anyone!  ANYONE.  So of course I get all worried and I asked the Dotytron whether he thought our magic is gone and he rebuffed me by saying yes, of course.  His preferred way of dealing with me when I'm being irrational is to NOT be comforting and basically say the exact thing that is going to send my paranoid irrationality into overdrive.  It's a strange  methodology.

A couple of weeks ago, when we took the Big Yam sledding, we ran into our neighbours, the ones who gave us their baby sled.  They were out on the hill with their bigger sleds and offered us the use of their disks and fancy snow sledding gear to take a few runs down the hill.  I was asking the Dotytron if he was going to go and he said yes, and then he asked me if I wanted to go and I said, no.  And then he asked if it was because I was scared, and just joking, I said yes.  BUT THEN HE TOLD MY NEIGHBOURS THAT IT WAS BECAUSE I WAS SCARED.  I was so pissed!  I wasn't ACTUALLY scared.  I just hadn't gone out of the house emotionally and mentally prepared to go sledding myself.  I just wasn't in the right head space for it.  I was so mad at him (like, jokey-mad, mad.)  I was all freaked out by what the neighbours would think of me being scared to go down a baby hill and what their assumptions would be.  "Why did you tell them I was scared!!!" I hissed.  

Anyway, for some reason those above examples came to mind when I was constructing my internal "relationship magic" litmus test.  The fact that I find the Dotytron hilarious and that we can be jokey-mad at each other is a good sign, I think.  This is what Mindy Kaling said in her book about great marriages:

"My parents get along because they're pals.  They're not big on analyzing their relationship. What do I mean by pals?  It mostly means they want to talk about the same stuff all the time. In my parents' case, it's essentially rose bushes, mulch, and placement of shrubs.  They love gardening.  They can talk about aphids the way I talk about New York Fashion Week.  They can spend an entire day together talking nonstop about rhododendrons and Men of a Certain Age, watch Piers Morgan, and then share a vanilla milkshake and go to bed.  They're pals.  (Note: they are pals, not best friends.  My mom's best friend is her sister.  A best friend is someone you can talk to ad nauseum about feelings, clothing, and gossip.  My dad is completely uninterested in that."

Way to go, Mindz.  You basically summed it up pretty nicely.  Hopefully the Dotytron and I are pals, through and through.

Last night's dinner of beef, barley, mushroom soup w/ thyme and leftover bread that my Discerning Coyote friend brought over.

Tonights dinner: veggie shepherd's pie.  The vegetables were sauteed onion, garlic, carrot, celery root, butternut squash, and sweet potato.  I was going to add peas but then forgot.  Seasoned with curry powder, salt and pepper.  Topped with mashed potatoes, topped with cheddar.

Fin.

The weekend

This weekend, I almost made the Dotytron divorce me on account of how infuriatingly indecisive I was being about Friday Night Takeout Night.  I spent an unconscionable amount of time on Friday (considering people have like, real problems in this world of ours), waffling back and forth on what we were going to eat and whether to go out or bring it back and how the logistics would work if it was pick-up and blah blah blah.  I called the Dotytron no less than 8 times.  EIGHT TIMES!  I was being the worst about it.  In the end, we got Chinese BBQ takeout and I ended up having heart burn, so it served me right.  

Truth be told, I wouldn't mind getting a divorce.  One, because being a divorcée is dead sexy (in my books).  Two, because I kinda hate being married.  Just being part of an institution that I don't believe in makes me mad.  I hate that like, people can't just be common law or live together in a relationship forever nowadays.  Like, you still have to be MARRIED for your relationship to be considered legitimate.  It's annoying.  I hate that since getting hitched I get mail addressed to "Mr. and Mrs. I Dotytron."  It makes me SO MAD!  I hate how it's assumed that I lost my identity or autonomy upon getting married.  I gotta say, peeps can do what they want, but I'm not a fan of a woman changing her last name.  It's so wrapped up in patriarchy for me.  It's so outmoded and retrograde.  It would be one thing if the decision to take a last name was negotiated between the individuals...but it's not.  It's the woman taking the man's name and I think that's bulls**t.  I think our next kid is going to bear my last name.  Just to make a point about it.

Anyway, that proto-feminist rant aside, here is the obligatory, kid-in-pjs-under-the-tree shot, featuring the Boobla in his musical instrument jim jams that he's already outgrown (he outgrew them as soon as I bought them, actually):

And here are some bundled-up-for-the-outdoors shots.  Kids who are wearing a million layers that turn them into stocky, chunky tree trunk starfishes are so cute.  I love it.  We basically robbed him of the use of his joints by stuffing him into 4 layers of clothes to brave the cold yesterday.  He could take a few stiff-limbed steps and then he would face plant or fall back.  It was hilarious.

Why I love my street, part #996848481.  They opened up a Toys R Us Express at the mini-mall near our place and I was there on another mission and saw these little blue sleds on sale.  So I bought it.  I was carrying it back to our house when my neighbour said, "You didn't just buy that did you?" and then went back to his shed and got his old one and gave it to us.  So best.  So good to re-use and not just contribute to the garbage piling up in developing nations.  I love my street and hood so bad.  Here is us taking the sled out for a spin - it's pretty grainy - probably something with our camera settings.  One day we'll invest in an HD camera.

Last night's dinner - mushroom barley risotto and pan-fried lamb sausage

C-Hova came over last night to learn how to make beats from the Dotytron.  D'awwwww...he also wants to start DJing and throwing small parties, so I finally have knowledge that will be useful to him.  It's about time!  

I also made a recipe from the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook last night.  Christina Tosi (the pastry chef) is my hero but she's buck.  For a chocolate cookie recipe, I had to make a chocolate crumb component first before then incorporating that into the cookie dough.  Each cake recipe consists of at least 4 individual components.  I had to buy citric acid and glucose and acetate and a 6" round cake ring for the cakes I'm planning on tackling from the book, and I've devised a plan of attack that consists of making a component a night leading up to the assembly, which has to take place 24 hours before I'm planning to serve, because all the cakes get frozen and then defrosted.  It's bucktown.  But I'm totally inspired.  The chocolate-chocolate cookies pictured above are heavenly.  They're like a giant, cookie-r version of an Oreo cookie, salty, deep, dark, chocolatey, with a crisp-chewy texture that's to die for.  These would make amazing ice cream sandwich cookies, or a nice cookie to crumble down to mix with whipped cream or turn into a crust.  I happen to be doing a fine job eating them as-is, though.

Our Cleveland friends bailed so today we went with Momma D to Pacific Mall to pick up Chinese New Year swag and to buy an outfit for the Big Yam.  Spoiler alert: his outfit is awesomeness.  For breakfast I made us this outrageously rich eggs benny: poached eggs on oven-crisped proscuitto, on top of sliced avocado, on top of tater tots.  With hollandaise!!! Insane!

For dinner I roasted us a duck and roasted some potatoes in duck fat.  We also had brussels sprouts and sautéed rapini.

Fin.