Oh hello there! In lieu of actual written content, this week we have photos! Well, a photo. I would write more, but I’ve been very busy visiting with friends and writing proposals and sitting around my apartment being intensely worried about things like my future, people hating me, and whether I accidentally plucked one eyebrow to be higher than the other. (I think I did. I constantly look like I’m gently mocking, which upon reflection is really truth in advertising.)

Okay, so as most of you know I’ve been trying to cook lately. I made corn chowder, and kind of semi-delicious brownies, and lasagne. This weekend I am going to make pulled pork. And something I have learned is that when cooking, one frequently uses the stove and oven. That’s right, you can tell your friends you read it here: ovens are useful when cooking.

Now, I am not known for being super nimble with the household appliances, but this is what I see when I look at my oven controls:

Because you are a reasonable person the first thought you had was likely: “Man, Jessica cannot focus a photo properly,” to which my answer will be, “Shut your pie hole, reader! God!” The second thing you might notice is that my oven settings are particularly inscrutable. I need a Rosetta Stone to figure out how to broil. Here is what I think, going in clockwise order from the top:

1. This is obviously the oven light control. I think.

2. I use this setting to cook things because it kind of looks like something in an oven.

3. This looks like an oven with nothing in it, so it is the setting to use if you want to accidentally leave the oven on all day while you go to work.

4. Minimalist setting! (I’m thinking broil?)

5. It looks like a mouse pointer clicking a splat. Maybe this is the setting to use regular expressions?

6. Set up the oven as a booby trap! With a falling pointy ceiling!

7. Set up the oven as an even more horrible booby trap — double pointy ceilings!

8. The “Fat Man” of oven settings: a falling pointy ceiling that sets off a nuclear explosion.

So, in essence, I’m pretty sure almost half of my oven settings are trying to kill me. This might explain a lot about my cooking.

I’ve been writing a lot lately. Not here, clearly (ha! ha ha ha!) but elsewhere on the Internets I have been throwing words around quite a bit. In fact, if we count from last Friday until this .. word.. right.. NOW — I have just over 3000 words in articles and blogs, 36 posts on my web community’s forum, and 1,192 lines of IM chat. And that’s not even counting private messages, cover letters (one of which I should be working on right now!), emails, and other forums.

It’s not, like, the wordpocalypse or anything, but suffice to say I have had a lot of opportunity lately to write and to ponder said writing, which brings us to today’s post topic. (Before I give the impression that I am busy or professional or whatever, it should be noted that I also spent 20 minutes this morning trying to drink my coffee without touching the mug with my hands.)

Jessica’s Writing Quirks

• Capitalization. I usually don’t capitalize “God” unless I’m writing for a very formal audience or referring academically to the Christian God. I realize it’s a little petulant, but I don’t believe in a god so he doesn’t get a capital. Also, my Mom and Dad get capitals, whereas everyone else’s moms and dads are in lower case. Sorry, everyone else’s parents. For what it’s worth, I still believe you exist.
• Sassmouthing. Speaking of god, I am always unsure how offensive “taking the Lord’s name in vain” is nowadays. Again, this isn’t an issue with a formal audience, but I frequently find myself wibbling over religious slang in more casual environments. I actually don’t swear that much in person unless I’m pretty upset but I am big on abusing Christian tropes. I just like the way they sound, honestly. I’m all “Goddammit” this and “Jesus” that and cursing people to eternal damnation in the fiery pits of hell. Perhaps I am just being too polite and Canadian, but this issue frequently gives me pause.
• Commas. I have written about commas before, and my campaign to bring serial commas to the world continues apace. However, lately I have come to realize that I use many more commas than necessary, and even worse I am developing an ugly comma splice habit. Look, this bullet point has three sentences so far and FOUR commas. It’s a comma infestation! I think part of the problem is that I talk with a lot of awkward pauses, mostly so I can wave my hands about in an agitated fashion, and so I throw in too many incorrect commas as part of “my voice” in writing.
• Spelling. I am actually blessed with pretty accurate spelling right out of my brain. I do spellcheck everything before it gets published, of course, but it’s more to catch typos than misspellings. There are two exceptions though: “weird” and “strength”. They are my spelling kryptonite. I managed years ago to teach myself mnemonics for the incorrect way to spell weird, and it just screwed me all up. And strength.. I get caught in a vortex of nggngnngnggn. So, in my writing, anything weird is strange, and anything with strength is just strong.
• Point of view. So okay, I set out a few months ago to start writing articles for content mills, yes? “How tough can this be?” I asked myself. “I can write 1000 words before breakfast for one of my blogs.. 500 word articles are easycakes.” In theory this is true, but the one thing I didn’t consider is that in my personal writings I am kind of always present. I think I am just fascinating, clearly, so sitting down to write 500 words that don’t involve me in any way was trickier than anticipated. And not abusing “you” is strange (NOT weird) too! I suppose in most of my hobby writing both YOU, the dear reader, and ME, the author, are pretty major characters, and without us I have a hard time knowing what to do with myself.
• I suck at final paragraphs.

That all being said, I wrote an article this week that I am actually kind of pleased with: Nerdcore and MC Frontalot Make Sweet Geek Music. It was my first article on a topic that I didn’t know intimately before sitting down at the keyboard. I actually did research! I feel like I managed to inject a hint of myself into the article without making it about me. Also, I like this sentence: “Nerdcore is a designation more indicative of lyrical content than musical composition.” It sounds all fancy-pants.

Anyway, enough dithering. Jessica write real good sometimes, and real we– strange other times. She is trying to write here on this blog at least once a week now. I’m sorry. Um, so.. yeah. The End!!

PS: I just realized that I forgot to say Happy Birthday to my sister earlier this week because I am, as the French would say, “a bad, bad, bad, BAD big sister, omg so very bad”. So Happy Birthday, Sallypants. I hope you had a nice day.

I don’t care. I don’t care what you believe.
As long as you are in my heart, you’re just as real as me.
Maybe.. maybe even more. Someone who’s touched so many lives,
Can never never die.
- “This Is Not The End”, The Bravery

I remember a Christmas — I think it was the last one, or maybe the second to last — and I got Mom a laptop. I was kind of flush with cash that year, and I wanted to get her something really nice and useful. Her eyesight was going, partially just due to the passing of time, and partially due to the diabetes, and I wanted her to be able to sit on the couch and watch DVDs and surf her lefty blogs with ease.

I felt pretty clever about it. I wrapped only the battery and put it under the tree. When she unwrapped it, she was completely confused, and I feigned incompetence. “Oh, shoot. I forgot the rest of the present! I think that goes… with THIS.” I pulled out the laptop and handed it to her.

She started to cry. I kind of knew she would. I think she was always amazed that someone would do something nice, would be inspired to be generous to silly old her. That was Mom for you. I began to cry seeing her cry. It was remarkably silly, and sweet. We hugged.

She passed away three years ago this weekend. I find it kind of clinically interesting.. I know something in me changed forever when she died. Not, like, mortally, but I see families and death and my life just slightly different because of it all. I’m under no illusion that I’m the only one. The vast majority of people will lose a parent during their lifetime, and the majority of those people will have loved their parent dearly. (And that’s not even touching upon losing a spouse or child.) So we’re a world of slightly broken adults. It’s just part of the gig of being human.

In truth, while her memory propels this vodka-fueled weekend (and vodka-fueled post, honestly), I have kind of expanded this Deathaversary ritual to include all the fucked up shit that I don’t have time to mourn in my day to day life.

This weekend is the time for me to drink and cry for the dumb wrong horrible world. For the people who are lost, or scared. For people who feel alone, who need help, who miss someone. For 55-year-old loving, wonderful, good women who drop dead on their living room floor.

The world is so fucking unfair sometimes. I’m sorry I can’t make it better. But, tonight at least, fix yourself another drink and I’ll put on some more sad songs.

So I have to preface any recipes with assurances that I don’t cook. I microwave perogies and buy whole roasted chickens, which is more sort of getting food hot than any actual cooking. Lately, however, I have been struck by an urge for new creative pastimes, and true cooking definitely falls into that category. I perused recipe sites, pondered the cold, rainy weather, and decided to embark upon an epic quest for .. corn chowder!

Start Here
As usual, the critical first step is to write up a detailed shopping list and then leave it at home. This “recipe” also doesn’t have any measurements, because measuring is how The Man wants you to cook. This being a corn chowder of The People, I just kind of made it up as I went along. I ended up with enough for several meals, which was perfect.

Cooking!

1. Get a pot that is appropriately sized for the quantity of food you want. My pot was really big.
2. If you have a gas stove, speak encouragingly to it. I usually tell my stove that, yes, the whole gas thing makes me antsy, but I won’t blow up on it if it won’t blow up on me. Also, your stove may have something called a “wok burner” which heats up really really hot really really fast. This, as it turns out, is suboptimal for slow-cooking so avoid it.
3. Chop up a couple of onions and a few cloves of garlic in big chunky pieces.
4. Chop up a bunch of carrots in smaller pieces. I used baby carrots, because I dislike peeling. (Did you know baby carrots are just regular carrots that have been peeled a lot? They are not, in fact, cute tiny carrots. I lost a little faith in my groceries when I learned that.)
5. Cut up some bacon in spoon-sized pieces. Mmm, bacon. Cut up some chicken in spoon-sized pieces. I got skin-ful chicken breasts, but I am a heathen who likes animal fat.
6. Heat up your pot with a tiny bit of oil. You want it to be quite hot, but not “wok burner” hot or everything will char too quickly and you will make a squinchy face at the smell.
7. Add your meats. Let it brown.
8. Add your chopped veggies. Cackle a bit like a carnivore and rub your hands together as the onion sizzles deliciously in bacon fat.
9. Add spices. I almost went with a mellow, sagey flavor (note: I love sage and will put it on everything), but decided at the last minute to go with Southwestern pizazz. That means cumin and cayanne pepper, along with salt and pepper.
10. Stare at the jar of paprika quizzically. Try and think of anything you’ve had that tastes “paprika-flavored”. Recall that the anime movie Paprika had a ominous parade of mind-controlling toys, which could be a bad sign. Go ahead and throw some in anyway.. it’s a pretty color, if nothing else.
11. Once everything is at least mostly cooked, turn down the heat. Add in milk, cream, creamed corn, cream of mushroom soup, and cream of celery soup. (You could have just added in cut celery, but you are lazy. So very, very lazy.)
12. Mix it all up, then dump in a mess of frozen sweet corn and another mess of frozen cubed hash brown potatoes.
13. Put in two bay leaves. Who knows what they do, but you saw it on Top Chef once.
14. Start the “too much starch needs more water, oh no there’s too much water add more starch” dance. Continue this on and off for the next hour while the chowder simmers.

Serving!

1. Has it been an hour yet? How about now? No? How about now? Oh man, that smells good.
2. Yay, it’s been an hour! Turn off the gas stove, and thank it for not blowing you up.
3. Serve with a ladle into a hearty-sized bowl. Top with a spoonful of sour cream and a couple of crunchy tortilla chips.
4. Nom.