The Wild Winds of Fortune

[This is my exercise in self-esteem.  Please feel free to ignore.]

My job coach told me to take time to appreciate myself.  In that spirit, I decided to reread my last two weeks of posts as though they were written by someone else.

I discovered that, although the writing was uneven, on the whole it was fairly good.  More importantly, I’ve decided that if the person writing this blog were someone else, I’d like to meet them in person because they seem interesting and amusing.

Maybe I should ask myself out to coffee.

After my post the other night, “Pretty and Beautiful,” I have been trying to tease out what I find beautiful.

Uniqueness.  The late great Amy Winehouse was beautiful in spite of all of her issues because she always came across as unabashedly her totally-unlike-anyone-else self. Uniqueness is not always beautiful (there is also unique horror, and unique evil), but it goes a long way.

Humor. Many of the people in my life whom I consider beautiful (male and female) have active senses of humor. As Jessica Rabbit said about Roger, I love them because they make me laugh. There is a particular type of humor that appeals to me: sly, intelligent, occasionally self-deprecating, and aware of the absurdities of the world.  These people understand — and appreciate — irony.*

Compassion, gentleness, warmth, intelligence, curiosity, critical thinking skills, fierce determination, emotional strength… the beautiful people I know have most (or all) of these.  Not all the time, but enough that I cannot help but notice and admire them. Not that they are perfect: perfect people are not interesting.  They have flaws ranging from insecurity to obsessive pursuit of given objectives** to anal retentiveness to flightiness to a tendency toward crankiness to occasional “fluffiness.” I am willing to overlook these, as they overlook my various issues.

I am also a sucker for people who write well.*** Staunch insistence on proper grammar and adamant refusal to use “leet speak,” or whatever the abomination so many people use in texting or IM is called, makes my pulse beat a little faster.  I am also captivated by creativity, by the ability to take nothingness — paint, light, metal, ideas — and turn it into art.

Beautiful people know that the world is a complicated place, while understanding that there are things on which compromise is not possible.  They are willing to recognize — and more importantly, admit –when they are wrong.

Note: not politics or social views.  The beautiful people in my life range all along the political spectrum.****  I don’t think all of them are right on everything, but then again, they think I’m dead wrong on some things, too. They like me anyway, as I do them.

Because they have so many of these characteristics, I have a feeling that the beautiful people in my life would enjoy talking to each other.  (Once all of them that are shy got comfortable.)  I keep having fantasies that they could be drawn together in one room.  (Preferably playing “Apples to Apples.”)

I think it would be a simply amazing party.

A beautiful party.

*That would be irony in the true sense, not in the Alanis Morrisette sense.
**See “Clarification.”
***On the purely physical side (because like every one else I occasionally can be shallow that way), I find I have a pronounced weakness for people with blue eyes or a Southern accent, or both.  
****I have to confess that a few people I heretofore had thought of as beautiful became Tea Partiers and birthers in the past few years, and they dropped off the list.  I do not have trouble with conservatism per se — I have some self-identified conservatives on that list — as long as there is a minimum level of intelligent thought behind it.  The birthers and Tea Partiers don’t pass that test.  I still love these people, but I tend to view them with sad bewilderment.

Happy “50% off all chocolate in red heart-shaped boxes” Day.*


*No, this joke is not original to me.  I first heard it years ago on LiveJournal. I’ve never claimed to be all that original.

Red Headed Menace: It was a really interesting exhibit on water usage. Did you know some large percentage of water in this county goes for landscaping? When people could set up systems using captured rains…
Me: Wait, what??!?!?!
RHM: What’s wrong?
Me: Oh, wait. I thought you said “brains.”
RHM: That would work too, but it would be far less efficient.

Chris Brown performed at the Grammys tonight.  The local newscast reported that it was the first time he had been at the Grammys since he dropped out of the 2009 show.

Funny.  They did not mention why he had dropped out.

Chris Brown dropped out because he brutally beat his girlfriend, Rihanna.  Somehow, that doesn’t seem to matter anymore.   What sort of message does that send to every victim of abuse in this country?

Sasha Pasulka at HelloGiggles answers that question.

Hey, want to impress your loved ones — or your loved one’s coworkers — this Valentine’s Day? Don’t buy chocolate truffles, make them.  This Martha Stewart recipe is a good starting point.*  (There are more difficult recipes out there — most involve butter.  I like this one because it is, as Alton Brown might say, so gosh-darned easy.) You can adapt it quite nicely by using flavored chocolate, as long as it does not have lumps in it; Cost Plus sells some tasty chipotle chocolate.  And, if you are good at this sort of thing, you can carefully melt some chocolate and dip the truffles in them and coat them with things like very finely chopped crystallized ginger instead of the traditional cocoa.  It scales up and down, as well: the basic recipe is one ounce of heavy cream to two ounces of chocolate, although it is difficult with larger amounts to know exactly how long to let the mixture sit. You can get nice decorative boxes from party stores or craft stores.

So, am I doing this for Valentine’s Day? Of course not.  The Rocket Scientist is.

*Let the truffle mixture cool until it is just spreadable, and it makes a wonderful, if rather stiff, icing for chocolate cake.  The Rocket Scientist’s favorite cake from me is a dark chocolate cake, with truffle icing made from chocolate with 72% cocoa. The kids don’t like it because it isn’t sweet enough.  The Rocket Scientist once said it was “a cake for consenting adults.”

Yesterday, I spent the day running around looking for items for a party we were throwing at the house for the Resident Shrink’s birthday, and driving to Casa da Fruta to get the specific type of glazed apricots covered in chocolate she likes, and calling game stores and book stores and Judaica stores in a futile attempt to locate “Apples to Apples, the Jewish Edition.” (She ended up getting an Amazon.com printout of the game, due to arrive Tuesday.)  The day before I had spent trying to get a VGA cable and VGA-Thunderbolt adapter.* Oh, and going to the Giradhelli factory outlet*** store in San Leandro to get all the chocolate I lost in betting the Resident Shrink’s mother on the outcome of the National Conference Championship. (Had the Niners won, I would have gotten Real New York Bagels. Rats.) And my regular Thursday afternoon group.

Last night was the party at our house.  I was actually social for a whole three hours! I am not a party person.  Although I can spend hours on end with people I like and know well, three hours at a party was a stretch, since I was not engaged in a joint project or game.**** (Give me a game — almost any game — and I will hang out with even total strangers forever.)

Today was spent in appraiser training for Destination Imagination, a wonderful program for schoolkids that pushes them to exercise creativity and judgment in solving challenges.  One of the best parts is that no one outside the team — including parents — can help them.  At all.  Which from a parental standpoint takes a lot of pressure off, only to be replaced with the stress of having to bite your tongue to not say “That thing is never going to fly.” Four years ago, when the Red-Headed Menace was in DI,  I volunteered to be an appraiser and chose to be the Timekeeper/Announcer. I have been doing it every year since, even after I ceased to have a kid involved in the program.  Being TKA allows me to indulge the frustrated actor in me, and means I don’t actually have to judge anyone. I hang out with the kids beforehand for a few minutes, which is fun, and then present them to the audience.  (I always do the improv challenge.  It is amazing what really bright elementary and middle school kids can come up with in five minutes, given a relatively small amount of information.)

I have been cheerful and charming throughout.  But after all that, I think this t-shirt is very much in order.

*Note to self, before I forget it: You still need to hunt down the HDMI-Thunderbolt adaptor. Try Fry’s.** Or the Apple store.
**For those out of the SF Bay Area, Fry’s is Geek Nirvana.  Sort of like Radio Shack, only much much bigger and with more annoying commercials. Each store (at least of the original several — I don’t know if it is still true) has a different “theme.” I shop at the “Old West” store in Palo Alto — I seem to recall that the one in Campbell has a “Babylonian” Theme.
***I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea of a chocolate company having an outlet store.  And it’s just down the road from the Entemann’s Bakery outlet store, which just isn’t fair.
 ****Oddly enough, I am fine in a workplace situation, even a work-related social situation such as a coworker’s birthday party, perhaps because in those situations there is something to talk about.