Johnny's World-Famous Pumpkin Pie Recipe

My friend Johnny is famous in certain internet circles for making the best pumpkin pies known to man. Assuming I can get his HTML to format correctly, I am reposting it to help spread his fame. My only point of contention with Johnny is that he doesn't make his own crusts. Crusts are tricky; however, I spent one whole summer making cartloads of peach pies in an attempt to perfect a crust recipe and technique. When I find my notes from that summer, I'll post them here as well. In the meantime, get yourself some ready-made pie shells, some "pie pumpkins", and get to it!
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So you want to make the best pumpkin pie known to man hhhmmm? Well here's how you do it.









First off, you need pie pumpkins. The little pumpkins... They are smaller and sweeter than large pumpkins. This recipe will produce two 9" pies. You will need one pie pumpkin.



This is what they look like.





To cook pumpkin, wash and cut it in half crosswise. Remove seeds and strings.



PRO TIP: the seed and goop scooper that comes with Pumpkin Master carving kits works great for prepping the pumpkins.



Your pumpkin should look like this.





Place it in a pan,
shell side up and bake it in a 325deg (162.7C) oven for 1 hour or more, depending on size, until it is tender and begins to fall apart.



Like so:





Scrape the pulp from the shell and put it through a ricer or strainer or blender.



PRO TIP: This isn't terribly important... Once I scrape all the pulp from the shell into my mixing bowl I'll sometimes take a plain ol potato masher and mash them around a bit. I actually think this adds to the awesomeness of my pumpkin pie. But sometimes the pumpkin especially large pumpkins can be a bit too chunky so blending the roasted pumpkin up a bit with a hand mixer solves that.



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As for pie dough goes, pie dough and I don't get along... Never have, and probably never will. So I just pick up two
premade keebler graham cracker crusts. They rock, everyone loves them, and you could probably pass them off as your own if you really wanted to. If you really want to make fresh pie dough, you're on your own because I have no clue.



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Line a pan with a pie dough.



Preheat oven to 425deg(218.3C)



Mix until well blended:

2 cups cooked pumpkin or squash

1.5 cups fresh creme

1/4 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ginger

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/8 teaspoon cloves

2 slightly beaten eggs





Pour the mixture into the pie shell. Bake 15 minutes at 425degs(218.3C), then reduce heat to 350degs(176.6C) and bake about 45 minutes longer or until an inserted knife comes out
clean.


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PRO TIP: once you roast your pumpkin(s), set out all of your ingredients. Then when you add each ingredient, put it away right after you use it. This way you won't accidentally double dose on something and ruin your precious pie that you worked so hard to make!



Also, I've found that you can add up to three times the amount of cinnamon if you so choose to. This batch I decided to add two teaspoons of cinnamon instead of the recommended one. But whatever.... I dig cinnamon and all that jazz...



So, Check it out...



Here is a cooked and scooped halve pumpkin. Notice how I still left some on there, you don't want to get too close to the rind, but you know, don't worry too much about it, a little won't hurt... It's just that the rind is bitter and not as tasty.





Here we have the pumpkin pulp which I've mashed up a bit with a potato masher.





Here's all the ingredients ready to be added together.





Here we have the pumpkin pulp and the brown and white sugar.





With the creme and spices added.





Some of you might not know what beating actually means. It's different than mixing in that you are actually hitting your substance hard enough to toss air into it. With "slightly beaten" we only want to beat our
eggs around 20 times or so. They should look something like this, not quite consistent, but not too separated either.





With the eggs added.





And here we have all of our ingredients blended together.





The pie filling poured into our pie shells.





And finally, our finished pie. Beautiful isn't it?





And if you're sexy like me you can roast the pumpkin seeds while you are making your pie filling...

I have a lot of catching up to do. The big news is I was supposed to go to California this week and do a WHOLE lot of stuff, including meeting Dr. Charles Tart... and it didn't happen. Horribly frustrating.

I don't know how else to start catching everyone up. I'll just post my last blog entry from today, and then start trying to stay on top of everything again from there.

Comboobing
When I go outside onto the patio to work with my laptop, I generally carry it open, one hand grasping the bottom part while the top supposedly balances gently against my side. I don't realize half the time that it's not balancing quite so gently, and let me tell you, it's amazing what my boobs can accomplish, hitting the keyboard on a 20 second walk outside. I've renamed files, updated programs; this morning I added an event to Google calendar.

Way to go, girls.

Left Foot on Danger

My iPod decided to shuffle directly from Laibach to Snatam Kaur this morning, which suddenly gave me one of those common-sense epiphanies... you know, things which are obvious, but which if you actually stop to think about seem kind of profound.

It really is amazing the different planets people live on. There are people who live their new-age or Buddhist or mellow lives, striving for and dwelling in peace and gentleness every day, drinking their chamomile tea and smelling flowers and smiling a lot. All the time. There are people who live their anger, stomping about in their combat boots and rivets and chains and drinking their Jager. Every day.

I think, personally, it's a far more interesting life to have one foot on each end of the spectrum. In fact, I think my life is basically laid out on a Twister board. I've got fingers in so many pies and facets in so many directions... one day I will meditate to Tibetan singing bowls for 3 hours and be very quiet. One day I will laugh and shimmy and be raucous. One day I will rage. Call it moodiness if you like, I call it diversity. And yeah, like a complicated game of Twister, when you've got appendages planted all over the board, it feels off-balance sometimes. But I think I wouldn't trade this for any kind of consistently immersed daily routine.

The only problem is that we only get one go-around in this lifetime, most of us. Decisions have to be made. I panicked when I was about 5 and asked my mom when I had to make a solid decision about what I wanted to be when I grew up. She laughed and said I didn't have to worry about it until at LEAST junior high when I started deciding which schools, programs, and classes I wanted to be in.

By age 19, far past that time, I was still all over the place. There were days when I forsaw myself married to a French-speaking diplomat, playing politics and the role of the good first lady and walking the grounds of some European estate with gardens. There were days when I saw myself living in a tree house with some crazy architect, fully hippie-fied. Days when I saw myself striding confidently down some metropolis avenue with a latte in one hand and that day's court briefing in the other. Or perhaps parked in some uber-modern Bay area anti-cubicle, riding my Segway from one end of the compound to the other as I helped revolutionize the world online.

I guess I've settled, in that degree. I am not going to be Mademoiselle Wendy des Jardins. Nor "Wendy, the funny lady who carves windchimes on the house up the mountain". Nor Wendy, esq. Nor Wendy, CEO of eTalk Velocicompany.

But this is ok. At the end of high school--which I'm not going to lie, was a brutal time for me (and not in the metal sense of the word)-- I was lying an a hospital bed and my sister brought me a mixtape. I haven't listened to it since because it makes me cry. It's got the song from "The Fox and the Hound" on it: "When you're the best of friends." It's got "Winter" by Tori Amos on it:" When you gonna love you as much as I do." But most profoundly for me was one of Tori's lesser known songs called "Girl".
From in the shadow
She calls
And in the shadow
She finds a way
And in the shadow
She crawls
Clutching her faded photograph
My image under her thumb
Yes with a message for my heart
She's been everybody else's girl
Maybe one day she'll be her own
Everybody else's girl
Maybe one day she'll be her own

It was true. I had been everybody else's girl for far too long. And now, I may be teetering on a Twister board, but by god, I'm my own.

What They Don't Teach You In Grad School

The posting below gives some excellent - and at the same time humorous - advice
on completing your PhD. Yeah, I know I and my educational colleagues are Master's students at this point, but I still think it's relevant.
It is Chapter 2 - The PhD, in the book What They
Didn't Teach You in Graduate School: 199 Helpful Hints for Success in Your
Academic Career by Paul Gray and David E. Drew. who are professors at Claremont
Graduate University in California, one in information systems and the other in
education. Between them they were students in 6 graduate programs, taught full
time at 7 universities, and mentored over 50 PhDs, many of whom are now tenured
professors. Copyright 2008 by Stylus Publishing, LLC. Cartoons copyright 2008 by
Matthew Henry Hall. Published by Stylus Publishing , LLC, 22883 Quicksilver
Drive Sterling, Virginia 20166-2102.

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7. Finish your PhD as early as possible. Don't feel that you need to create the
greatest work that Western civilization ever saw. Five years from now the only
thing that will matter is whether you finished. If you don't finish, you are
likely to join the ranks of "freeway flyers," holding multiple part-time
teaching jobs.

8. Be humble about your PhD. You don't need to flaunt the degree. Everyone has
one. Many of your colleagues, both in your institution and outside it, will be
put off if you sign everything "Doctor" or "Jane Jones, PhD" In fact, the main
use for Doctor is making reservations at a restaurant. When you call and ask
for a table for four for Doctor Jones, you will get more respect and often
better seating.

9. Remember that a PhD is primarily an indication of survivorship. Although the
public at large may view your doctorate as a superb intellectual achievement
and a reflection of brilliance, you probably know deep in your heart that it is
not. It represents a lot of hard work on your part over a long period of time.
You probably received help from one or more faculty to get over rough spots.
Your family, be it parents or spouse, stayed with you over the vicissitudes of
creating the dissertation. You stuck with it until it was done, unlike the ABDs
(All But Dissertation), people who complete all the other requirements but bail
out before they finish their dissertations.

10. A PhD is a certification of research ability based on a sample of 1. The PhD
certifies that you are able to do quality research. Unlike the MD, which
requires extensive work with patients followed by years of internship and
residency, the PhD is based on a single sample, your dissertation. The people
who sign your dissertation are making a large bet on your ability to do quality
research again and again in the future.

11. A PhD is a license to reproduce and an obligation to maintain the quality of
your intellectual descendants. Once you are a PhD, it is possible for you
(assuming you are working in an academic department that offers a PhD program)
to create new PhDs. Even if your department does not offer a PhD, you can be
called upon to sit on PhD examining committees either in your own or in
neighboring institutions. This is a serious responsibility because you are
creating your intellectual descendants. Recognize that if you vote to pass
someone who is marginal or worse, that PhD in turn is given the same privilege.
If candidates are not up to standard, it is likely that some of their
descendants will also not be. Unlike humans whose intergeneration time is 20
years, academic intergeneration times are 5 years or less. Furthermore, a
single individual may supervise 50 or more PhDs over a 30-year career.

12. You must have the PhD in hand before you can move up the academic ladder.
The world is full of ABDs. We talked about them briefly in Hint 9 and will
again in Hint 161. ABDs may be much abler and more brilliant than you but they
didn't possess the stamina (or the circumstances) to finish the degree. In our
judgment, being an ABD is the end of the academic line.

13. Be aware that the key danger point in any doctoral program is the one where
you leave highly structured coursework (Phase 1) and enter the unstructured
world of the qualification examination and the dissertation (Phase 2). Here are
two strategies to help you navigate Phase 2:

1. Stay in touch with your professors, especially your adviser. One of us
insists that students come in for a meeting each week, even if nothing
happened. Just the fear of not being able to report anything stimulates the
mind.
2. Meet regularly, ideally every week, for lunch or dinner or afternoon coffee,
with two or three fellow graduate students who are also struggling with Phase
2. Compare notes and progress.

14. A special note for the part-time student working on the dissertation.
Although all PhD students used to be on campus and often worked as teaching or
research assistant part-time, in many fields today that attract midcareer
students (for example, education) the norm is to work at an off-campus job
full-time and on the PhD part-time. Others, such as computer science students,
develop an idea for a start-up company (e.g., one of the founders of Google)
and drift from full-time to part-time. We applaud part-time PhD students. This
hint is addressed to these students.

If you are working on your PhD part time, you will find it difficult enough in
Phase 1 to tell your boss that you can't attend that nighttime budget crisis
meeting or tell your spouse that you can't go to your child's soccer game
because you must be in class. It is even more difficult when you're in Phase 2
to tell him or her that you won't be there because you must be home, in your
study, staring at a black computer screen trying to get past writer's block.

As a part-time student, you need to find ways (in addition to suggestions 1 and
2 in Hint 13) to be physically present on campus. You can do so in many ways,
such as spending time writing in a library carrel (1). Physical presence is
important psychologically. If you never visit campus and become caught up in
your work and family activities, you face the danger that your uncompleted PhD
program can begin to seem like something you used to do in a faraway time and
place.

15. Avoid Watson's Syndrome. Named by R.J. Gelles, this syndrome is a euphemism
for procrastination (2). It involves doing everything possible to avoid
completing work. It differs from writer's block in that the sufferer
substitutes real work that distracts from doing what is necessary for
completing the dissertation or for advancing toward an academic career. The
work may be outside or inside the university. Examples given by Gelles include:
* remodeling a house
* a never-ending literature review (after all, new papers are being published
all the time and they must be
referenced)
* data paralysis-making seemingly infinite Statistical Analysis System (SAS) and
Statistical Package for
Social Sciences (SPSS) runs
* perfectionism that doesn't let you submit until you think it is perfect (and
it never is perfect)

If you suffer from Watson's Syndrome, finding a mentor (see Hint 5) who pushes
you to finish will help you get done. For many, however, particularly those who
always waited until the night before an examination to begin studying, the
syndrome is professionally fatal.

16. Celebrate your PhD! When you hand in your signed dissertation and pay the
last fee that the university exacts from you, go out and Celebrate! Celebrate!
Celebrate! You've achieved something marvelous, and you are one of a very small
number in the population who can say you are a PhD. A rough calculation shows
that about 3 of 400 adults in the United States hold a PhD. Attaining a PhD is
a big deal! Honor that.

A PhD, like life, is a journey. It marks the end of one stage and the beginning
of what lies ahead. Don't fail to appreciate the moment of your accomplishment.
Yes, other big moments await you. But like almost every PhD, you never had a
moment this big, and it will be a long time before you have another one that
matches it.

Notes
1. The library is a large building filled with books and journals. It functions
sort of like Google, but deeper.
2. This hint is based on R.J. Gelles, "Watson's Syndrome," Inside Higher
Education, June 19, 2006,
http://www.insidehighered.com/workplace/2006/06/19/gelles

click in the box below.

Should Science Be Free? A Modest Proposal.
by Daniel Jones

Thought provoking piece by a friend of mine, including the discussion that occurred on Facebook afterwards. Posted with author's permission. Original post is here.

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It is interesting. People DEMAND knowledge. You expect your therapist to be up on the most cutting edge research on how to treat your given disorder. You expect public policy to be based on scientifically proven evidence of what is most effective. You expect teachers to use the most effective teaching tools at their disposal. Public health messages to use the most persuasive messages and up to date facts. Cancer screenings to be more accurate. AIDS tests to be precise. Economic policies that actually help all those involved...Legislation about criminals that is most effective at keeping crime off the streets....On and on it goes...

It may come as a shock to some, but all of that is based on HUMAN RESEARCH....and ALL of that research requires PEOPLE as participants.

It reminds me of the "henny penny" story where everyone wants to eat the bread, but no one was willing to help in its baking.

Without volunteering for participation in research there would BE NO SCIENCE. At least none that informs the human condition. But of course our greedy society demands FREE information and access to all science, but also to be PAID or COMPENSATED in some way for helping in the process....does that make sense to you??

So here is my proposal: You don't want to participate as a subject in research studies. Fine. Don't. But next time you go for therapy, you should have to pay extra for a therapist that actually knows what she/he is doing. Furthermore, do you want access to scientific information? Well then the public library should start charging anyone and everyone for primary source articles (because they themselves should have to pay a hefty price for access to them). Secondary source articles should be illegal (because you shouldn't permit the dissemination of information for free). We should go so far as to keep them behind glass cases and only permit access to them via lock and key upon payment....or perhaps for easy access you could swipe your credit card through a machine that will allow access. It should be a felony to disclose what you read to a third party without that third party paying a fee for information.

All I'm trying to get at is next time you look to an authority for help of ANY KIND, or public policy of any kind, and remember refusing to participate freely in a study, you should be ashamed of yourself. Why should we (the scientists) have to PAY a subject to participate in a study, when the subject can turn around and have free access to the outcome and profits of the labor?

What I think is doubly sad is that when I do send my research link to some (particularly guys) they won't click on it for fear that it is a virus or porn. Shows where society is headed. And they are doubly disappointed when it ISN'T porn. Can't win.

My whole point is that you think nothing of taking a cute little "What flower are you?" survey online for your own personal amusement. Why not next time participate in something that might benefit OTHERS as well as yourself???.....just a thought, and a modest proposal.

-Dan
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TOM BRACE: Tom Brace at 4:29pm May 5
Fair go, but consider this:

Science, especially that which addresses and seeks to treat/augment/enhance "the human condition" would not be possible unless experiments/tests, studies, etc. are performed upon PEOPLE. So, seeing your proposal from "the other side," any person you (scientists) wish to perform those procedures upon should, as it follows, be compensated for their time and their bodies/minds.

Think of it like this: You're an artist. You live down the street from an art supply store. Would you expect the purveyor of said store to just GIVE you the materials to produce your art? Would you expect the model to just DONATE their time and likeness without any recompense? So it goes with any commodity. Supply/demand, my friend. Everyone benefits.

And holding information at arm's length and keeping it forbidden from "the great unwashed masses" without the money to pay or the "need" to know is equally problematic. I don't presume to know what was in yer head and heart when you wrote this, but it seems like you're (theoretically) trying to have it both ways, saying that people who charge to be studied must not only not expect payment for services rendered, yet must pay for the results of those services (or not expect to have access to the information).

Further, I don't think too many people who read your piece will "be ashamed of [themselves]", nor would they take too well to being told that they should. That's just human nature.

Remember, the "what flower are you" quizzes are FREE, and whomever takes them knows going in that they are inane and just time-consuming Facebook distractions. But when actual, real scientific research is involved, if I may quote Jesse James (not the historical western outlaw) when he says...

"ya gotta pay up, sucker!"

DANIEL JONES: True, and good point. However, the scientists is NOT paid by the publication...artists are. Advertising with models, selling paintings, music gigs, record deals...all these things have a bottom line pay off. There IS no bottom line payoff for a scientist to produce MORE science that benefits woman/mankind.

So I would expect someone to invest their own money in something that could yield a profit for them in the long run...but why should I bankrupt MYSELF trying to do something that I will never (and should never) get paid for....which is helping others.

Grants do NOT go in the pocket of the researcher. 100% of a grant goes to the institution, only 50% of which is at the scientists discretion. So doing good research yields no financial reward whatsoever. Pats on the back, maybe, but the reality is that a full tenured professor with 50 published articles makes the same amount of money as a full tenured professor (at the same institution) that has 500.

TOM BRACE: Scientists don't get paid whatsoever for their work? Ever?

Who would want to be a scientist, then? Everyone's gotta eat! :-)

In regard to your point on the bottom line payoff: Many (some would say too many) artists toil in obscurity, too, with no apparent payoff. Some have achieved greatness only long after their deaths (not a pleasant career outlook, if yer a starving artist, eh?). MOST of them do it for the sheer love of their art. We both play(ed) hockey at the same rink. Did we ever get paid? No, we did it because we love to play, and we find it hard to not play. So it is, I believe, with some scientists. They "do science" for the love of science - the joy of discovery, the thrill of the scientific process, the exercise of their abilities and gifts in that field.

Question: Why should one NEVER expect to get paid for helping others? I'm not advocating a hardline mercenary attitude toward it all, but I speculate that "help" is also a commodity of sorts, in certain regards. Police, firemen (excluding volunteer firemen), doctors, paramedics, armed servicepersons ALL get paid for helping people. Why should that not apply to scientists?

I'm of the belief that the worker is worthy of his/her wage, whatever field they're in. I also believe that information should be as freely accessible as possible (I do realize that some things should not be accessible to the public - for example, if it would compromise national security, or something like that).

Your proposal provides a banquet for thought. I'm just tossin' in my dollar, waiting for my $.98 in change..! lol

DAN JONES:I'm enjoying this intellectual engagement....thanks for the replies.

In response to your first line, scientists EAT because they TEACH...not because they do research. University profs will get paid the same amount of money if they teach required courses regardless of whether they do a day of research or not. The only exception is well funded government institutions (i.e., National institute of drug abuse) where they have a specific problem on the table that the government is paying them to solve, which in the long run saves the government money.

Your point is well taken, that most scientists DO do what they do (hahaha, I love that alliteration), because they love it. And I'm not saying that it should change so that we should get paid by the publication.

Metallica brought this issue to the table better than either of us with their lawsuit against Napster. If we take that situation as a analogy, you will see my point. Metallica put a lot of time, energy and resources into their music, and felt offended that people just "took" for free. But as scientists, that is EXACTLY what we do. Would you argue that I love my job more than Metallica loves theres?

Our playing hockey was certainly enjoyable, but we didn't do it because of obligation...and it didn't help society (well, it kept the angry Andy Kennard off the streets, and the Slovaks out of trouble) but aside from that...didn't benefit society at large.

All I'm trying to say is that you are right, the artist often does toil in obscurity, and does so because they love what they do. BUT, if you want to appreciate the artist's final product, you gotta pay up (buy the CD, purchase the painting, etc.)....Nobody is paying me for trying to solve the dilemma of unprotected sex in college students. Nor am I asking to be paid. All I want is to at least not have to empty my own pockets to try to help society. Which I am doing by paying for subjects.

TOM BRACE:I see your points much more clearly now - the Metallica analogy was a good one.

And I'm cracking up at your reasons for us playing hockey!

So lemme see if I got this straight: your point/issue is with the RESEARCH side of science as opposed to the teaching side of it. I'm gathering that you would appreciate it if the cost of your scientific "subjects" would not have to come out of your pocket, with no ultimate return to you. Did I get that right?

Hmmmmm... All I can say at this juncture is "good luck" in having that happen! :-) I suppose that such is the cost of doing science, as in any enterprise (shameless Star Trek plug!). Perhaps if you considered it an INVESTMENT, it might make your plight just a tad more palatable. I truly and respectfully hope so. Bon chance, mon ami!

I am getting a bit frustrated with the prefab, stubborn layouts and elements on blogger. I know there's a way you can climb out of the straps of the infant seat and do some real customization, but I'm not sure how. Must spend some time figuring that out.

In the meantime, enjoy my selling out! Yes, I accepted AdSense. I, who doesn't feel overly irked by it, would rather accept it voluntarily so that someone who feels strongly against it doesn't have to have it forced on them.

Anyway, if anyone has a link to a succinct bit of instruction on really *customizing* blogger layouts, please share!

A scent addict's tribute to mom

For as long as I can possibly remember, my mother has worn Shalimar. To me it's the scent not just of the woman with her hair in a bandana dusting high shelves, or cleaning the oven, or kneeling in the sandbox to make mud pies with the children... to me mostly it's the scent of the tall elegant woman who would appear once or twice a month on special occasions, flanked by my proud and dashing dad. I would marvel at her sparkling jewelry and oh-so-sophisticated high heels. And when the Shalimar was almost completely faded, overtaken by the smells of prefab pizza and babysitter's burnt popcorn, she and the Shalimar would waft back in again and settle us into bed, telling soft stories of starry nights and magical places.

Don't pull a New Zealand; get some sleep.

Don't know if you're familiar with EcoChallenge, or if they still air it. It's an "adventure race": They start teams of about 4 people out in some remote location-- I think the year in question they were somewhere in Fiji-- and the teams race to an endpoint using survival skills, orienteering, and extreme sports-type stuff. Whatever it takes to get to that endpoint, whether it be hiking, swimming, kayaking, mountain climbing, you name it. And they're RUNNING the whole time because it's a race. It's intense to watch. This one year the two teams in first place were Australia and New Zealand, who have a fierce rivalry going. It was down to the last few days of the race, and there were a few critical decisions to be made, including whether to climb over a set of mountains or swim around them, and whether to stop to sleep or keep going. Australia decided to sleep. The New Zealand team leader was gleeful that he decided his team should forgo sleep, because he figured it would give them the extra time to really get ahead.

Anyway, it was a disastrous decision. Sleep deprivation hit very, very hard, and of course it was the team leader himself that got hit. He was hallucinating, raving, walking straight off of ledges... it was amazing and horrifying to watch. His team ended up having to carry him, which of course lost them the race.

So when I'm in a deadline crunch and I decide to take time out to sleep, I generally say I "don't want to pull a New Zealand." =)

I got an email from a potential client inquiring about my availability for freelance editing. I responded with a sort of application-email, pointing out my strengths, which include attention to detail.

And of course, I made an error in the email I didn't catch until after it was sent.

*headdesk*

Thoughts on Self-Sabotage

My professor just wrote back to me and indicated that the paper should be 50% research, 50% personal reflection. Obviously this really changes my approach to the whole thing. I should stop combing the databases for more articles, I should stop poring over books pulling out references. I should just look over what I have and write it up: A simple overview of current literature. Nothing in-depth, nothing complicated.

And yet as I sit here literally surrounded, almost *buried*, in papers and books, I feel resistant. And disappointed. I have 5 days to finish this paper, PLUS the rest of the coursework, but I really want to do an in-depth research review. Why do I want to make things harder for myself? Why can I not accept, with relief, the fact that this paper is way easier than I thought it was going to be?

Which leads me to ponder the ways in which I self-sabotage, and why I do so. That's clearly what my behavior comes down to. It's not so much simple procrastination, rather moves that deliberately shoot myself in the foot, making it at least 5 times harder to do something than it should be. I feel like I hate this. I hate the stress and anxiety that result from these behaviors. I berate myself for them, I criticize, and I feel like I have no control. This leads to an inevitable point of despair.

But really, it's my behavior, so on some level of course I have control. And that, in turn, means that on some level I want things to be more difficult.

It's been suggested to me many times that maybe I'm just bored. And so to challenge myself I throw up roadblocks at every step. Supposedly I need the thrill of adrenaline that comes from walking into exams unprepared, and leaving huge assignments until the last day, even if the thrill feels unpleasant. This makes sense, at least from a pop psychology standpoint. But it doesn't feel right. I never think I'm bored. In fact I think that I find school, and the processes involved in it (reading, composing, taking tests, etc.) challenging.

And this pattern of self-sabotage extends to many areas of my life. Watch me eagerly accept, and even petition to be given, extra tasks when I'm already completely booked. Watch me let a problem lie until that stitch (that would have been in time) suddenly becomes nine, for no discernible reason. Even my marriage, the most stable and important thing in my life...I tried to complicate that last year, the month before the wedding. The problem is simple, and clear: Undoubtedly, I always make things harder for myself.

The answer as to WHY is not so simple or clear. But this paper, and my reaction to watching the assignment get clarified into an easier and easier task, is making me think that maybe those pop theories are right. I cannot think of another reason why I would possibly want to make things harder, other than the above-mentioned adrenaline rush that comes from stressing myself out on purpose. In the case of this paper: Yes, I'm interested in this material, but of course I could just read the research in my leisure time if it were just self-education and curiousity that were motivating me. I could write about it in my blogs if I wanted to write about it. But I swear, if I thought there was any way she would let me, I would be petitioning my prof to let me write a 20+ page formal research paper in 5 days, not sitting here feeling angsty over the forced simplicity of the thing.


Maybe if I take this boredom theory and run with it, just as an experiment, I'll find some workarounds that don't involve blood, sweat, and tears. It certainly would make my life simpler if I could figure out how to coax my brain into just letting things be... simple.

I've created a monster... or am in the process of doing so.

This term paper I'm doing is out of control. Seriously. I have enough material to write a thesis, no joke. I took a break from researching today to read the instructions for the paper again. And I see it's supposed to be 10 pages. Are they JOKING? I probably have 6 pages of citations alone! So I wrote to my professor and asked, does this really have to be 10 pages? Or can it be, like... 20? No, she says, it really must be 10 pages. Practice paring your research into a concise summary. Well, okay. I will do my best. But then I read further into the instructions and see that it's supposed to be in formal APA style... but we're also supposed to include personal reflection. How the heck does THAT work? Formal style pretty much is the polar opposite of personal reflection. So I have another email off to the professor.

The end of the instructions implore students to include at least 5 sources, and to try to make them primary. COME ON, what are we, in JUNIOR HIGH? I have 14 books and at LEAST 18 primary sources. How the heck am I EVER going to smash that much information into 10 pages, including personal reflection? Oy vey.

I think I've probably had too much caffeine at one go. I'm shaky, sweating, and I feel like I'm going to throw up.

Yet I also still feel like I'm about to fall asleep.

I cannot win.


via videosift.com

I can't, I can't do it. Post personal stuff, that is. I'm just too nervous. So here, have a letter by Stephen Fry instead:

To my 16-year-old self:

I hope you are well. I know you are not. As it happens you wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self and it is high time that your future self had the decency to write back. You declared in that letter (reproduced in your 1997 autobiography Moab Is My Washpot) that "everything I feel now as an adolescent is true". You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self it would be a lie, a traducing, treasonable lie, a crime against adolescence. "This is who I am," you wrote. "Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal."


Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.

I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether that love is for someone of your own sex or not. Gay issues are important and I shall come to them in a moment, but they shrivel like a salted snail when compared to the towering question of love. Gay people sometimes believe (to this very day, would you credit it, young Stephen?) that the preponderance of obstacles and terrors they encounter in their lives and relationships is intimately connected with the fact of their being gay. As it happens at least 90% of their problems are to do with love and love alone: the lack of it, the denial of it, the inequality of it, the missed reciprocity in it, the horrors and heartaches of it. Love cold, love hot, love fresh, love stale, love scorned, love missed, love denied, love betrayed ... the great joke of sexuality is that these problems bedevil straight people just as much as gay. The 10% of extra suffering and complexity that uniquely confronts the gay person is certainly not incidental or trifling, but it must be understood that love comes first. This is tough for straight people to work out.

Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong (as they certainly will), when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault. We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature. They - poor normal lambs - naturally find it harder to understand why, in Lysander's words, "the course of true love never did run smooth".

Sexual availability, so long an impossible dream in your age, becomes the norm in the late 70s and early 80s, only to be shattered by a new disease whose horrors you cannot even imagine. You would little believe that I can say to you now across the gap of 35 years that we are the blessed ones. The people of Britain are happy (or not) because of Tolpuddle Martyrs, Chartists, infantry regiments, any number of ancestors who made the world more comfortable for them. And we, gay people, are happy now (or not) in large part thanks to Stonewall rioters, Harvey Milk, Dennis Lemon, Gay News, Ian McKellen, Edwina Currie (true) et al, and the battered bodies of bullied, beaten and abused gay men and women who stood up to be counted and refused to apologise for the way they were. It has given us something we never thought to have: pride. For a thousand years, shame was our lot and now, turning on a sixpence, we have arrived at pride - without even, it seems, an intervening period of well-it's-OK-I-suppose-wouldn't-have-cho

sen-it-but-there-you-go. Who'da thought it?

I know what you are doing now, young Stephen. It's early 1973. You are in the library, cross-referencing bibliographies so that you can find more and more examples of queer people in history, art and literature against whom you can hope to validate yourself. (lol I totally did this too) Leonardo, Tchaikovsky, Wilde, Barons Corvo and von Gloeden, Robin Maugham, Worsley, "an Englishman", Jean Genet, Cavafy, Montherlant, Roger Peyrefitte, Mary Renault, Michael Campbell, Michael Davies, Angus Stewart, Gore Vidal, John Rechy, William Burroughs.

So many great spirits really do confirm that hope! It emboldens you to know that such a number of brilliant (if often doomed) souls shared the same impulse and desires as you. I know the index-card waltz of (auto)biographies, poems and novels you are dancing: those same names are still so close to the surface of my mind nearly four decades later. Novels, poetry and the worlds of art and ideas are opening up in front of you almost incidentally. You spend all your time in the library yearning to be told that you are not alone, and an unlooked for side-effect of this just happens to be a real education achieved in a private school designed for philistine bumpkins. Being born queer has given you, by mistake, a fantastic advantage over the rugger-playing ordinaries who surround you. But those rugger-playing ordinaries have souls too. And you should know that. I know you cannot believe it now. They seem so secure, so assured, so blessedly normal. They gave Cuthbert Worsley the Kipling-derived title of his overwhelmingly important (to you) autobiography The Flannelled Fool: "these are the men that have lost their soul/ The flannelled fool at he wicket/ And the muddied oaf at the goal".

You look down at the fools almost as much as you fear them. The ordinary people, whose path through life is guaranteed. They won't have to spend their days in public libraries, public lavatories and public courts ashamed, spurned and reviled. There is no internet. No Gay News. No gay chatlines. No men-seeking-men personals. No out-and-proud celebs. Just a world of shame and secrecy.

Somehow, as you age, a miracle will be wrought. You will begin by descending deeper into the depths: expulsion, crime and prison - nothing really to do with being gay, but everything to do with love and your inability to cope with it. Yet you will, as the Regency rakes used to say, "make a recover" and find yourself at university, where it will be astonishingly easy to be open about your sexuality. No great trick, for the university is Cambridge, long a hotbed of righteous tolerance, spiritual heavy-petting and homo hysteria. You will emerge from Cambridge and enter a world where being "out" is no big deal, although a puzzlingly small number of your coevals will find it as easy as you to emerge from the shadows. Before you damn anyone for failing to come out, look to their parents. The answer almost always lies there. Oh how lucky in that department, as in so many, you are, young Stephen.

But don't kid yourself. For millions of teenagers around Britain and everywhere else, it is still 1973. Taunts, beatings and punishment await gay people the world over in playgrounds and execution grounds (the distance between which is measured by nothing more than political constitutions and human will). Yes, you will grow to be a very, very, very, very lucky man who is able to express his nature out loud without fear of hatred or reprisal from any except the most deluded, demented and sad. But that is a small battle won. A whole theatre of war remains. This theatre of war is bigger than the simple issue of being gay, just as the question of love swamps the question of mere sexuality. For alongside sexual politics the entire achievement of the enlightenment (which led inter alia to gay liberation) is under threat like never before. The cruel, hypocritical and loveless hand of religion and absolutism has fallen on the world once more.

So my message from the future is twofold. Fear not, young Stephen, your life will unfold in richer, more accepted and happier ways than you ever dared hope. But be wary, for the most basic tenets of rationalism, openness and freedom that nourish you now and seem so unassailable are about to be harried and besieged by malevolent, mad and medieval minds.

You poor dear, dear thing. Look at you weltering in your misery. The extraordinary truth is that you want to stay there. Unlike so many of the young, you do not yearn for adulthood, pubs and car keys. You want to stay where you are, in the Republic of Pubescence, where feeling has primacy and pain is beautiful. And you know what ... ?

I think you are right.

• This is an edited version of an article from the 25th-birthday edition of Gay Times, out now. For more details, go to gaytimes.co.uk

Hmm. Well, I gave up on Blogger a long time ago and have been redirecting people to LJ, but now it turns out I'm finding more and more people that are still (or now) on Blogger that I want to keep up with. I'm considering cross-posting things here again. Problem is, as far as I know Blogger is altogether public, yes? That's been one of its benefits in the past, I found some long-lost friends by paging them here and having it come up on Google. But if I'm writing about sensitive matters, I want to keep this locked. That has been an ENORMOUS bad point, as I learned the very hard way not to write about people publicly. So Blogger would be a very censored, compeltely vanilla version of what I write. I'm not sure it's worth it.

No, seriously guys, I don't use this blog anymore. Come visit me at LiveJournal... although most of my posts are locked so you have to have an account and be on my "friends list" to see them. Accounts are free and easy though.

I'm on melodramatic.com too, but that one's secret ;)

Dear Carl Hardzog,

I don't know where you are or what you're doing, and you'll never get this message unless someday you Google your own name. But today I went to the Police concert with my fiance and it made me think of you, of course, since you introduced me to the Police. It's still sometimes odd to me that I have a fiance and it's not you. We were young and silly when we talked about being soulmates but you did have a profound influence on my life and there's no chance of my ever forgetting you. My heart still twinges a bit to think of you. I saw you got married in Fiji back in 2004, I hope you are happy. And I hope sometimes you think fondly of the fun we had when we were young.

Love,
Wendy

First, of all, to the Valentine haters... it's okay to be bitter. God knows I was last year at this time, not just on V-Day but every freaking day. But to be really vehemently spiteful towards people who celebrate it, wishing painful STDS on happy couples (yes metaquotes, I'm talking to YOU), is just out of line. I've lost all but one grandparent... on Grandparents Day, I don't hate all my friends who still have theirs. I've lost my religion, I don't wish evil on those who have it, on Christmas. Relax, already. Watch your slasher films and stew if you must but give those of us who are happy a break.

Then, thoughts on getting older. I remember when I was little I was wishing I could be a grownup, so I could buy gingerbread cookies whenever I wanted and maybe a talking parrot. My dad sadly told me not to "wish my life away", that I would lose my childhood soon enough and be forced into a world of bills and responsibility and stress. I've definitely been thinking about that a lot recently as I deal with lots of bills and a fair amount of stress. Being an adult is stressful. But good lord, so is being a child. Remember disappointment? It wasn't tempered. When something disappointed, the world came crashing down. Remember not understanding and people not giving you a good explanation? "It just is," "Because I said so," "You'll understand when you're older." Not understanding the world around you and not having the freedom to make your own choices SUCKS.

Then I thought about being a late teen, early 20-something. People didn't get married yet for the most part, you could be best friends with a guy without pissing off his wife, or go out with your girlfriend without worrying about a babysitter. But no relationship was ever certain. People were still insecure enough that they were mean (hell, sometimes that never goes away, cough cough ex-best-friend). Jobs were insecure, you never had seniority, and if you did get sent on a business trip or get a paid vacation you couldn't rent a car.

Being a kid was glorious, while it lasted. Being a 20-something rocked, for a while. But I wouldn't go back. Everything in its time. Peter Pan said to die would be an awfully big adventure... I think to be 30 will be too.

My life as a Bene Gesserit...and no, that's not Photoshop. Those were contact lenses from hell.

I want to look like my Second Life avatar. I did have pink hair once...



By the way you guys know I don't update this blog anymore, right? If you have this page bookmarked please change it to my LiveJournal, under the name Shinywen.