this post is about the future

questions
1. is this a responsible way to become a teacher?
2. does becoming a teacher come with nice sweaters and a husband?
3. will i have to teach the catcher in the rye every year until i die?
4. do i know, enough, about commas?
5. do i like high schoolers?
6. do i just want to go back to high school myself actually?
7. would i be cool teacher or strict teacher? 

answers
1. no
2. no
3. probably
4. definitely no
5. ... i ... don't know?
6. yes probably just realized that typing this
7. neither? teacher with hives bc of stage fright like my freshman yr college american history assc. prof. prolly 

i just liked learning about the meaning of color in the lord of the flies with ms bullinger so much more than anything else i've done since

notes from foreign correspondent

i'm at a coffee shop because today i got a snow day FROM MY JOB (i am no teacher). i woke up and i felt normal for the first time since 2013 and i checked my email on my phone and the email said something like: there is a higher power, you have a snow day. i scissor kicked my legs and pumped a fist in the air and squealed and took karmic credit and forwarded it to my mom because i am a grown up.

i began immediately ruining the day by planning an aggressive agenda for the 4.5 hours of remaining sunlight. because an open day that is not a weekend day? is different from a weekend day. in that you are allowed and in fact required to do productive but also indulgent and creative things, as opposed to a weekend day which you should spend texting on the couch. so in my head i was like "i'm going to learn to knit and go to 1.5 hours of yoga and make eggs and write 8 blog posts and put every single obligation for 2014 in my calendar and make, write, and send all of my christmas thank you notes and figure out how to become a high school english teacher and begin becoming one, if possible, today, and write all my resolutions down in glitter pen and finally get my gas bill to be e-paid and finish a novel and start a new one and try to figure out in my dumb head if i'm in love with my best friend and do all of this from my bed where i will be sleeping in + napping after changing the sheets and putting the bed ruffle back on which i took off a couple of months ago because i spilled coffee on it." and i forgot paint nails which is always on the t-d list.

but instead of that, and sort of because emily also had a snow blessing (BLAME EMILY jkjkjknever), i just wandered to this coffee shop and i bought/ate a bagel and two $4 chai lattes, which is a drink but is so creamy and carb-y getting it down is really more like eating, and now i'm here growing on to my chair. i'm an observer of coffee urchin culture, an ambassador from a very foreign faraway planet of 10-6 workdays and shared refrigerators and meetings with people who have children.

it is noon on a friday and i'm wearing leggings outside of my house and they are leggings that i extracted from beneath a dirty dish towel in my hamper because they are the least see-through. (i am at the west. if you want to come see.) i made fleeting and bashful eye contact several times with a guy wearing a lot of fashionable outerwear sitting behind emily. he looked european. one of the baristresses iphones is playing a combination of accessible david bowie songs and bon iver but it keeps being loudly interrupted when she receives texts. there is a polite young man reading a paperback called the art of recklessness. everyone knocks-before-entering the bathroom. i'm considering getting an IPA. what i am it's 2:15 now and i'm working by that i mean i'm making a list of books.

and running through my head, aside from the tired "what are all these people doing and how do they afford apartments in this neighborhood if they're here right now on a friday highlighting fiction novels" question that all of the parents ask and the times style section asks every third sunday when it doesn't have enough interracial or same sex weddings between socioeconomically homogeneous people to profile, is the larger question, how do i how can i do this where and how every day but also have it be meaningful especially if global warming is happening and ny is so expensive? or maybe that's the same question? ok i'm going to yoga.

~useless fran

i'm snow snow happy i got a snow day today

i'm at a coffee shop listening to cocorosie and animal collective and using photo booth i had almost forgotten what college was like but i just remembered

i'm also writing a really long boring blog post about all the books i read in 2013 (spoiler alert, not 52) and i fell in love but he just left so now i can focus again THANK GOD

ffrraannnniiee

happy new year

~~frannie

this post is too long

Who Are You Apologizing To This Holiday Season:
or, for the more hard-hearted among us, for those of us with hearts more similar in composition and texture to stale gingerbread, or peppermint hard candies found at the bottom of last year's stocking, or cookie dough right out of the freezer; for those of us with hearts that could use a little ripening, like a winter pear or clementine, can't imagine who i'm talking about here, can't imagine anyone like this,
Who Are You Trying To Forgive This Holiday Season?

heather and i saw the irish writer colum mccann speak at the 92nd street y last night (this means i will get to hashtag colum mccann again on this blog, making him the second most hashtagged thing after #dinner), and he referred to a little something called irish alzheimer's. according to colum, this disease is, you forget everything but a grudge. ah! a diagnosis! finally!

the name for this affliction comes in a season, month, week, where i find myself forced prompted, like scrooge, or perhaps more like matthew mcconaughey pre- his recent ascent to Great Movie Star of our Time, by a selection of personal ghosts to think about all my grudges of years past, how to work on myself, things i wish i'd done better this year, hope i'll do better next year, mistakes to rectify, the e-reader i want, must be on nice list, and importantly, how to forgive people, because it's the way to truth, and my ereader, and may make my psychosomatic shin splints go away.

on monday i arrived at work in my normal monday mood, which is to say simultaneously over-caffeinated and drowsy, points if i can make it from the subway platform to my desk chair without looking up from my book, feeling distinctly able to focus on the bad but utterly OCD when it comes to prospect research, generally a human storm cloud, but dressed, and i checked facebook. i was recently explaining to my boss that i never check facebook unless i'm at work, then realized, terrible audience, but it's true, so i checked my facebook and LO AND BEHOLD over my stupid, self-pitying weekend i had received this totally unexpected and kind facebook message. it was just waiting for me there in the internet! and it included an apology from one of these ghosties mentioned above. from someone i really didn't need an apology from, from someone at least 3 apartments and 10 lbs and 4 jobs ago, but it was of course still appreciated, and, more than that guys, it was a cindy lou who shock to my grinchy system.

i was asking for this shock like a kid talking back to his parents. i've been operating under the influence of a pretty serious bout of irish alzheimer's for most of the fall quarter here and i wonder if i'm starting to see the light, or if it's just the christmas spirit, or if it even matters which it is, because while my ab muscles have developed from hanging on to all this tension, it hasn't been particularly good for my cuticles or the enamel on my molars and all i've been flirting with in 6 months is TMJ which isn't even to speak of what it's done to my typical cool chill manner!

 

i watch my roommates struggling with forgiveness, granting it or seeking it, while i do the same. we trace each other's footsteps through our tiny apartment, negotiating the small space, twinkling with christmas lights and crowded with our brooding. (or maybe not, guys, and i'm just so brood-y that i imagine it?)

and then, when it comes, forgiveness, it comes so easily. it is a flood of warmth that is so relieving, like walking inside out of the cold december night. it seems like you hardly had to work for it after all, you so quickly forget how bad and useless all that energy was, and then acceptance exists as a matter-of-fact truth, the truth that it's fine, i'm fine, we're fine, and worst case scenario there is absence and apathy in place of all that anger, but best case -- there is affection.

i'm lucky because every time i want to remember how that feeling is possible and how it is so good, all i have to do is go to this one bar in brooklyn. this guy, this ghost, he's important to me, and he's always there. and every time i look at him all of these piled up years are there, too. and i get to revel in this ridiculous feeling that's maybe like how mother teresa-george saunders type people feel all the time, and it's like my irish alzheimer's morphs into buddhist alzheimer's and i only remember nothing except for that it's nice to see him and we get to pepper each other with kisses and it's nbd and no one is angry ever and there's world peaaaace!!!!!

because i'm pretty sure that's the point of all of this, or at least this:

seasons greetings and love and acceptance (depending who's reading this heh heh),

 

fran

this post is about my dumb, dumb undergrad

i don't even want to embed this link because the url is so entertaining: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/13/education/2500-excited-applicants-get-news-from-fordham-youre-not-accepted-after-all.html?_r=1& don't be too disappointed guys! 

also have to say this sends reverberations of fear through me as a former database manager. the explanation is fittingly opaque. apparently, the error "occurred when data was transferred from a staging environment to [the] development environment." let me interpret this for you. someone copy and pasted the wrong column.

way 2 g fordie!

This post is another one about cooking

I've really been enjoying cooking recently. More than usual. I have about a 50% success rate with everything that I make, because as I have disclosed I am a) unexperienced b) pretty truly bad at following basic directions and c) sort of impatient. These are all probably related.


The other night, when faced with either writing my personal statement for grad school applications, sitting on the couch and staring passively into space, or baking something, I opted for baking. I wanted to bake something hard. Something definitely and obviously out of my skill range that would occupy all of my time before bed. And so I set out, in determined silence for the duration of the cooking time, to bake a Lemon Meringue Pie.

This is a pie that is totally out of season. I also started out with probably 2 out of the 7 required ingredients. I can't totally explain why I chose to bake it, except that all the other pastries I wanted to make required large food processors, which I definitely don't own and which felt more daunting in it's procurement than 7 lemons. I used this recipe for the filling and this recipe for crust, both from Heart of Light.

Here are the obstacles I faced:
1) Frannie left our pie tin at someone's house.
2) after initial grocery trip I had to make a second one because I forgot to buy cream of tartar.
3) first pie crust was a failure.
4) and post pie baking: the pie really does need to be consumed the day it's baked to avoid getting soggy and gummy, (bummmmer,) and I finished baking it at 11:45ish pm after both of my roommates had brushed their teeth.

The pie tin was the real setback. I sat down and ate half of one of Frannie's chocolate bars in retaliation and then used a cake pan, which actually worked perfectly well.

Cooking is a pretty prime example of something that you need to do a bunch to actually get better at it. Duh, I guess, but sometimes I am inexplicably good at things on my first try, which makes doing other, more difficult things, feel sort of irritating. I'm aware that that is a terrible reason not do things though, so next stop: souffle???

{Bruce, watching me bake.}

{product}

just call me martha,
(heather.)