Baking Addict: Brioche Adventures

I was wracking my brains to try and come up with something to write for this late post--rushing as usual because I should have already posted it and the hours left in the day for me to get the rest of my work done are slowly dwindling. Nothing was coming to me and then I started thinking about how stupid I was to have spent all morning baking for the philosophy class feast we are having Monday and Tuesday. Not even for the baking in and of itself--I mean I could have made like chocolate chip cookies, or brownies etc., things I have made a million times, could basically pull together with my eyes closed. But no, I decided that if I was gonna go to the effort of baking that I might as well try something new, it wouldn’t take any longer right? Lately, I have been in that baking mood. It usually creeps up on me--after not having baked anything for a while I suddenly feel this urge to make cookies, or a cake, or macaroons, whatever--and I will sacrifice my work to make it happen.

In school on Friday, I was scrolling through recipes on Epicurious (a recipe website) and came across one for brioche. Brioche can come in many different forms, but essentially it is a really light and airy, and kind of sweet bread. Sometimes it comes in a loaf, but usually it is cooked in small muffin-tin like containers. Brioche is one of my favorite desserts ever--especially when there is chocolate or glaze or anything else sweet involved. This particular recipe was for chocolate brioche and I immediately was reminded of Mirabelle’s brioche, which I love. So, to make a long story short, I decided to make it. I think like 95% of it was the picture the recipe provided--the brioche looked so cute and delicious and light and I think I was hungry because it was right before lunch so combined, I felt like not making it wasn’t even an option.

I had never made brioche before but I had glanced at the recipe--there were no unusual ingredients, it didn’t look to bad. This morning everything went smoothly at first. I basically was supposed to dump everything into a bowl minus the butter, mix the bowl’s contents, and then slowly add the butter. I guess I didn’t realize that my old and puny hand mixer might not be sufficient for the job. By the time everything except the butter was mixed, the dough was like thick and gooey bread dough--which I should have known. I tried to incorporate the butter with my hand mixer and although it was kind of mixed in, it was nowhere near the even consistency called for. I had to stop when the mixer started to smoke. Forced to be creative, I tried using a blender type thing--the kind where the top has a big chute to dump ingredients in. After like ten seconds, this too started to smoke, creating dense curls of putrid black nastiness. What to do...the recipe said the dough was supposed to be elastic, and that to get it to that point required 10 minutes of mixing. At this point, the dough was little more than a lump that sagged--nothing “elastic” about it. 

Finally I decided to put it in our ultra strong ninja blender and after being chewed up in five small sections as to not overwhelm the ninja blender, the dough was finally done. It looked like an alien substance, kind of shiny, still droopy but very stringy. It almost seemed like it was forming weird shapes of it’s own volition. After that, it was a piece of cake--knead the dough, let it rise in a bowl, and then stick it in the fridge, where it is residing currently. After a night to enjoy it’s newly created life, the dough will be rolled into small pieces, folded around chocolate, pressed into tins, and baked!

Burlesque!

Today I was introduced to a subject that I had never really given much thought to before. At my weekly Teen Awareness Group (TAG) meeting, a former TAG coordinator and Planned Parenthood intern, James Haas, gave us a mini-lesson in burlesque; what it is, but also how it has evolved in the past 25 years to where it is now. As a burlesque performer, James discussed not only his own performance experience as a queer “boylesque” performer, but also discussed the intersections of this art form with gender identity, gender expression, fluidity, masculinity/femininity, theatre, sexual performance, sex work, and all things queer and fabulous.

I had thought that what he had to share was fascinating and incredibly valid for everyone and so I am going to share some of it here. Burlesque originally was a kind of side show that caricatured society etc.--it was satire meant to get people to laugh. The show was typically dramatic or musical, but it was very different from what we would associate Burlesque with today. Instead of women taking off their clothing, the cast was primarily men, with few women (although they were definitely present). As time went on, the women’s role in the show became much more prominent. The woman at first was a pretty figure, cursory to the main events, but that evolved into women dancing, or even doing strip teases, while there were still other figures. That aspect of the performance became increasingly popular, hence the image we have of burlesque--big bosomed beautiful women doing a strip tease, typically alone, on stage. It’s important to note that burlesque performers were viewed, and viewed themselves, similar to the way we would a stripper. Their performance was for the masculine gaze which was part of the reason that their appearance conformed to conventional beauty standards of the time.

With the advent of the puritanical forties, burlesque died out of the mainstream until around 1990 when neo-burlesque was born. Neo-burlesque essentially harkened back to the initial spirit of burlesque--and focused the shows around performance and artistry; for example, the strip-tease focused more on the tease than the strip. With neo-burlesque came more freedom to mold burlesque, and thus male performances started to become increasingly common. While at first male performances were constrained to masculine images and “vibes”--men with six-packs and the typical masculine body--performers increasingly started to play with feminine costumes and gender bending performances. Additionally, burlesque as a whole became much more inclusive of non-perfect bodies, LGBT people, and people of color.

James was introduced to burlesque through Carnivale Debauche, Champaign-Urbana's only vaudeville burlesque troupe. He described his performance currently as feminine in some ways. He wears heels, feathers, sequins etc., but he described how despite that, he does not ever feel like to perform he has to shed his masculinity. Rather, preforming enables him to embrace the many facets of his masculinity and feel sexual and powerful. James is not transgender and he chooses to dress in a typical masculine-normative way in his day to day life but performing allows him to bend gender expectations--he is still male and masculine, yet as he put it, “with softer edges” and all of it is sexy. James also talked about how despite not having the perfect body etc., performing enables him to embrace his sexuality and feel smokin hot while performing. It is not about pleasing someone in the audience, but rather owning the stage and your performance.

Both James and our TAG coordinator Jamie do burlesque, and they each said that the people who hit on them after shows were not typical. James, a gay man, has been hit on by a straight male, and a lesbian female--speaking to the universal sexuality of burlesque performance. That, James said is perhaps what separates burlesque today from both drag and stripping. Drag, although it can be sexual, is not necessarily meant to be titillating yet is very much about accepting the performance. Stripping on the opposite hand, is associated much more with the sexual performance for the observer--especially the female performance for the masculine gaze. Burlesque falls between those two in its overt sexuality and it’s rejection of the performance as just “strip” but rather more about the “tease”.

Clothing War Zone

This morning I awoke to find that all my recently washed clothes were missing from the mini-mountain they formed on my basement floor. I started to panic...hadn’t my Dad threatened to throw them out if I didn’t put them away? In the fog of my morning sleepiness I vaguely remembered some admonishment of the sort, but I couldn’t be sure. I shook awake my sister, demanding an answer to where all the clothes had went--but she was none the wiser. After some vigorous calling of both my parents and house searching, I ventured outside in my short-shorts and low and behold, there they were dumped in a trash bag and thrown on my porch--looking crumpled, cold, and neglected. Why had my dad “thrown them away”? I have to go back a bit to explain. The clothes had gone through the traditional cycle of being thrown down the shoot (yes, we have a laundry shoot), washed in several loads, and then stuffed into 2-3 baskets, that then sat for about a week. At that week point, my Dad deemed it necessary to dump all the clothing out of the baskets and onto the basement floor--and after the clothing sat on the floor for 2 days he “threw it away.”

If someone were to ask me the topic of deepest contention in my family, I would say it was the cleanliness of my sister’s and my clothing. My Dad can’t stand it when we don’t put away the laundry (which we generate quite quickly), my mom is constantly yelling at us to clean up the clothing strewn about our room, and they both find ways for us to get rid of clothing--as my Mom is fond of saying, “quality over quantity!” In short, they think we have too much of it (which we do) and can’t understand why we are both so drawn to clothing (and why we always want more).

The thing is, I kind of agree with them--I do have way too much clothing, but it always feels like I have no clothing as well. I can’t really remember when my love of clothing and style started to manifest--but I think it stems from my Grandmother who shares my passion for clothing. In middle school I loved looking through copies of 17 Magazine, which evolved into Vogue (and their website which I guiltily spend way too much time on) the New York Times style section. With the discovery of thrift shops and all of my Mom’s old clothing in the basement, it became so easy to just acquire more and more. Even if a shirt on its own is just ok, the more you have, the more unique outfits you can make..and the cycle just repeats. But the question really is, when do you have enough. Currently, my room is taken up with two pretty sizable dressers (if it’s not apparent, my sister and I share clothes), two bins of sweaters, and a pile of clothes on the floor. Weather I like it or not, they subtly take over, sucking away all my space and sanity--because if I don’t clean them immediately then they slowly pile up and up, transforming my room into an unrecognisable war zone.

It’s one thing for me to say all of this, and it’s another thing for me to do anything about it. No matter how much getting rid of some of my clothing would make my life easier, it’s hard to bring myself to do it. That’s not to say that I don’t ever get rid of stuff, I do, but it usually is the clothing that has been sitting in the back of my closet for like five years--never the still large amount of clothing that I wear...or consider wearing...or can’t bear to get rid of because of the sentimental value. It’s a very first world problem, and sometimes I wonder if it’s even bad at all that I have a lot of cheap, yet cute clothing. I’m young, no one needs to be impressed by my sophisticated clothing. It’s merely a way to express myself--and the more “material” I have to do that, the more creative I can be. So, any thoughts? Is having too much clothing a bad thing? Or for the time being am I ok to live in excess?

Back-cracking

With all the stresses and frustrations that the school year has brought by the end of first quarter, summer seems miles away. It’s crazy how much can be felt in just the span of some nine weeks, but I guess it’s longer than we think it is. So, perhaps to try to regain some of my summer piece-of-mind, I am going to revisit those sunnier days.

This summer (such a typical start to a story), I went to summer camp (omg even more classic), the same camp that I’ve been going to for the last four years pretty constantly. The camp--Merrowvista--is an outdoor adventure type of thing, and so as you get older, you are never really at camp, instead you go on longish biking, backpacking, and canoeing trips. This past summer (my last as a camper), I went on a 16 day backpacking trip on the last 115 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Before I go on, I always hesitate to talk about “summer camp” too nonchalantly, because I don’t want it to seem like it’s a privilege that I take for granted. I recognise how much of a luxury it is to be able to go to summer camp, and I am grateful that I have that privilege.

Backpacking. Leading up to the trip--and even before that, I had this kind of odd sense of myself in relation to outdoor activities. You know when you see a commercial or ad for athletic gear and the people in it look sweaty but hot, sporty yet contemplative, and spontaneous but appreciative of the nature around them? That was sort of what I expected going into the trip. Not really, obviously, but I definitely had this idealized picture of backpacking, even though I had done it before some years ago. Needless to say, that was not what backpacking was like. I knew coming into the trip that I liked to hike. I had vague memories of backpacking being hard; but all I was remembering was the top; the view of lakes sprawling out beneath and peaks in the distance.

Obviously, my expectations were unfounded. Backpacking was f****** hard. Fifty pound pack + uphill + tiredness made some days frankly horrible. Adding to that, although my group hiked pretty fast (on some flat-er days we pumped out like 9 miles by lunch), I was one of the slower hikers. That was really hard for me at first, because I felt like I was holding the group back--but gradually over the course of the trip I came to accept my relative slowness and even enjoy it. It allowed me to chill in the back of the pack, and actually have some very meaningful conversations with other people.

Even with the hard work of going uphill, we didn’t always have a view at the top. We would be in the midst of thick trees and a small sign would proclaim: summit of X mountain, X feet. That was the reward. No view, nothing special. But that also was good, because much more often, the effort of painstakingly climbing upwards and getting to that summit became the reward in and of itself--that challenge. One other kind of unrelated thing that surprised me was that even though the region itself was so isolated (I mean it’s called the 100 mile wilderness), I felt a strong sense of community throughout the trail. We were hiking at a time when many through-hikers (those who do the whole trail, from Georgia to Maine) were finishing the whole trail, and so at every lean-to there was someone new with interesting things to say. Everyone had a trail name that others had given them--the rule being that multiple hikers had to agree with it--and it usually fit something about them. One guys name was Rennaisance, another woman’s was Wired another Sunshine. Sometimes when we ran into someone on trail, they would already know who we were, via other hikers who had spread the word. All in all--despite the hardships--backpacking will be something I do for the rest of my life (and maybe I’ll through-hike someday!).

        

photos of my group + mountains

My Own Art Museum

Today we have e-mail, texting, snapchat, facebook, and instagram—and it can be hard to remember that most of our parents had…the landline telephone? So, when my Mom was growing up in the 60s and 70s she, like so many others before her, used postcards as a way to communicate with those not in her immediate surroundings, and that habit has continued throughout her life. My Mom doesn’t like to throw things away and so in my life, her love of postcards has manifested in a household collection of what must be well over 2,000.

        About two years ago I was visiting one of my favorite museums, the MFA (Museum of Fine Arts) in Boston, and they had a feature show on postcards. Curators sorted out about 400 postcards from a huge collection and organized them by theme, date etc. The collection tried to highlight the artistic value that postcards had—as many famous artists and some not so famous ones used the postcard as an artistic medium. Not only that, but the show presented an interesting lens through which to view the last century. Coming away from the show, I gained a new appreciation for the postcards my Mom has collected over the year—I felt as though I had unknowingly had access to a mini-art museum of my own my whole life.

For as long as I can remember, we’ve had a postcard rack in my living room. On rainy days or just when there was extra time, I remember taking out all of my Mom’s numerous post cards and picking a theme. It could be a color, like red or orange, or a place, like the Eiffel Tower, or an artist, like Van Gough…and sure enough there would invariably be 20+ postcards that fit into the desired category. The display will stay up for a while until we get bored, and then a new one will take its place. It can reflect the mood of the season (in winter it’s blue, and green, summer red, yellow etc.) or it can contradict it to remind us of what’s not here (like fields of flowers in the dead of winter and ski photos in the spring). If we are in a traditional mood, Victorian women in frilly frocks will stare back at us, but just as often, Picasso and Chagal tumble up and down the rack. Sometimes no theme exists except for the sender, or date. A huge number of the postcards in the collection are those my Grandpa sent to my Mom, but also my sister and I—so in honor of him and his excellent taste, sometimes only his postcards will be exclusively displayed.

   This constant postcard presence in my life has led me to treasure them as a really unique form for art, but also communication. On vacation, I would say my family purchases an average of 20-30 postcards without fail, wherever we are. My problem is that sometimes I love the image so much that I don’t want to send it—I usually will hang it on my wall instead. Recently, we went through and organized all of the postcards that my Mom has amassed. She did most of the work, but towards the end of the process I was flipping through to look for images to hang in my locker (at school). I started to read the backs of them, and it was fascinating to see the short notes people had sent to my mom over a period of 40 years. Some were about fun vacations, others jobs (a huge theme was dissertation work and woes), others simply about the daily routines of life—and it struck me that this was history in my hands. Some of my mom’s friends had continuously sent her postcards for over thirty years; reading them you could literally chart their lives. It’s crazy to think that in my lifetime, some of those postcards will be close to a hundred years old!

Go Ahead, Judge that S***

I hesitate to write this post because while it’s not necessarily controversial, it is judgey. I like that word, judgey. Being a high school student, I sometimes feel like my whole life revolves around judging. I am judged, you are judged, I judge, and you judge; pretending to not in my opinion is just a lie. Judging is an inevitable part of growing up (and let’s be honest, life in general)--and while judging is usually construed in a bad way, like in an,  “Oh, is she judging me?” way, I would like to think that generally it’s is more about finding your way in the world.

Let me explain. Everyone around you has a different way of being; different style; different interests; different goals..the list goes on. And throughout your whole life (although maybe especially in high school), you are trying to find and change and reevaluate your own way of being in the world. So to judge someone, to me, really means more to see someone and their way of being, and compare it to your own. You decide if you like the things that the people around you do, or wear, or [insert verb here] or perhaps dislike those things--and so judging is really a subconscious way for everyone to constantly reevaluate their way of being.

Judging is often misconstrued with hating, but for example, I judge when I walk down the hallway and see a skirt that someone is wearing that I like. And by that same token, I judge when I see someones shirt and dislike it. To be an effective “judger” in this world, it’s important to realize that your judgements may be wrong, and should change with time, and on that note, I’m going to do some judging myself--I’m going to be judgey.

Shoes. Shoes may or may not say a lot about the wearer. I’m inclined to go with the may not half, they don’t really say anything about the wearer--yet in our society, each shoe carries around a lot of judgement baggage. The baggage is not bad or good, it just is. Shoes place their wearers into stereotypes. And so when passing a stranger on the street--one way i “judge” them is by their shoes (with the full awareness that my judgement is probably wrong). The other day a friend and I were walking to Kenney. We had just come out of Seibol when we saw a guy--he appeared the typical, run-of-the-mill U of I student, jeans, a t-shirt, maybe a hoodie but I can’t remember, decently attractive by conventional standards, nothing out of the ordinary. But then in my quick passing-by scan, I got to his feet; he was sporting bright red chocos. For those of you who don’t know what Chocos are, they’re kind of like a ultra-outdoorsy sandal, good for any kind of outdoor activity that doesn’t require sneakers. But they're also simple, and in my opinion, look both athletic and “cute”.

The typical college student at the U of I however, doesn’t wear chocos. So I saw the guys shoes, and judged. Automatically I gave him more thought than I would a regular passerby--I liked the shoes--and frankly it made me more interested in him. He seemed like more of an alternative type, not the typical student. So blah, blah, blah, he walked past--and normally I wouldn’t have given that very brief passing encounter a second thought. But after my friend and I had passed, she turned to me and said, “Did you see his shoes?” And then something like, “he seemed kind of cool.” I started laughing because her judgement of him based on his shoes was exactly the same as mine. We thought that the guys shoes were a positive thing, but to someone else--they could be equally as negative. So I don’t really have a point here, but my Grandmother’s mother used to say, “that’s what makes horse races” meaning that if everyone judged the same way, then everyone would bet on the same horse. And, what fun would there be in that?

Surreal Beginnings

 We are creatures of our environment. Or at least I am. What I mean by that is that I am always thinking the most about wherever I am in life, in the school year, in my relationships--and it’s hard for me to remove myself from my immediate world. So, I’m not going to pretend that this blog will be a forum for whimsical or wordly writing. Instead I can do nothing else but focus on the random details of my life, however mundane or irrelevant and do my best to show you how I view them.

            As I sit here contemplating what my life is comprised of at this moment, several things come to mind, and none are particularly uplifting, though necessary rites of passage for most high school students. You know, the scintillating daily grind of school, homework (the occasional extra-curricular), sleep, and sports. The latter is what most interests me here--more specifically swimming, my sport of “choice.” Don’t get me wrong, I do swim on my own volition, but sometimes I think that at the beginning of the season something insidious inside of me peeps its head and whispers in my ear that swimming is somehow a good idea. Not that I hate the actual act of swimming; in fact, the second I jump in the pool and start the (at first) smooth strokes of my warm up I know that swimming is good for me, and that it’s all worth it. But, without a doubt the hardest part of the season is the thirty some minutes between my wake-up alarm at five a.m. and the collective mad jump into the pool at five thirty.

            Let me lay it out for you. In most of my life I feel pretty confident that I live in a realist world. Things align themselves according to conventional knowledge and I don’t second-guess what I see or hear. But in those thirty minutes before practice, different rules apply and my world seems surreal and confusing. I have some attachment to the idea of self reliance--not expecting my parents to do everything for me (even though I suspect it ends up that way anyways)--and for the last couple of years that has manifested in my perhaps misguided efforts to bike to practice every morning (at 5:10 a.m.), this experience being what is most surreal in my morning routine. Backing up ten minutes to give the full scoop; my morning begins at five a.m. when the first alarm on my phone rings--I can never seem to remember the sound once I am fully awake but during those moments in between sleep and semi-wakefulness, the less than five note tone seems to engulf my world and drown out any other thought. And it repeats five minutes later because I feel that I need that period between alarms where I have vague awareness of having to get up yet still feel no obligation to move. It’s weird how five minutes at the end of a class can seem like an eternity yet these five minutes seem like a snap of my fingers.

            Once I actually manage to rouse myself--an automatic thing for me now--once that 5:05 alarm rings, I instantaneously swing myself out of bed (because I know that any waiting and I will fall back asleep and miss practice, “god forbid!”), I follow a set of actions like clockwork. The house is silent as I throw on my suit and shorts, gather up my backpack, pick up my lunch from the fridge, and glide outside into my garage. Actually it’s more of a slow clomp, but I like to pretend otherwise. It’s hard to convey how this part of my morning is surreal, but I think what it comes down to is that I feel as though I am the only person alive. When I turn on my garage light I imagine myself as surrounded by a little bubble of warmth in a sea of darkness--and when I depart on my bike, I feel like I’m doing something exciting, risky, uncharted. Out of the corner of my eye I constantly see things that aren’t there--nothing ever discernable but shapes in the dark that look like looming figures. I’m never scared, but rather I feel that these things are a natural part of my six-minute journey to the pool. If I do happen to run into a stray person--usually passing on the opposite sidewalk or in a meandering car--I always wonder if I appear as bizarre to them as they do to me. Once I reach the pool the surreal feeling starts to recede. I always try to be the first one there so I can lay in the locker room in silence and try to sink back into the black hole of my consciousness. And then I make my way down to the pool through a dimly lit hallway, hoping that the door is open (some mornings all the doors seem to be locked for no explicable reason), sit on the deck, and jump in.