An Entire Post About Waffles

Last year, I bought a waffle iron. In college, the dining halls had Belgian waffle makers you could use to make waffles for yourself, and I would wake up weekend mornings dying for waffles slathered in whipped cream. (Just whipped cream- no syrup, no butter, no fruit.) I still order waffles a lot when I go out for brunch, so I figured I should probably get something so I could make them myself when the craving struck me.

Just one problem. I couldn't get it to work.

A waffle iron should not be that hard to use. You pour the batter in, close it, rotate it, and wait for the light to come on. I did it all the time in college. It was simple.

Except this time it wasn't. On three separate occasions, I followed the instructions exactly and still ended up with either burnt batter that smelled awful or gooey, undercooked strips of something in an indefinable shape. And all three occasions involved multiple rounds of failed attempts at waffles followed by a lot of scrubbing. It was quite tragic. To steal a line from my sister, a fellow fan of BC waffles, "There is nothing worse than really wanting waffles and not getting them."

This morning, I tried it again. Rounds 1 and 2 produced a substance that was edible but not in any way shaped like a waffle. But Round 3?

Or something like that. It was the result of getting it set to the right temperature, NOT waiting for the "ready" light to come on, and immediately unplugging the iron as soon as the waffles were done. They were still slightly burned and certainly weren't the best waffles I'd ever tasted, but they were definitely edible and made for a great breakfast.

I think this is a good omen for the new year, don't you?

2009 Recap

Almost the end of the year- and the decade. (Did we ever settle on a name for the decade that’s about to end?) My mom and my sister and I have decided that the last few days of the year are like Mardi Gras—you spend them indulging in all the bad habits you want to give up in the new year. So the past few days have been spent eating junk, not exercising, staying up too late, not getting writing done, watching too many reruns of 90s sitcoms, and bringing work home with me.

2009 was an interesting year for me. Outwardly, it doesn’t look like a lot changed or anything monumental happened. I’m still single, I still have the same job, and I still have the same apartment with the same roommates. But internally, a lot changed for me. As you remember, I started the year feeling a bit overwhelmed. Not long after that, I started experiencing symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder—something I’d experienced in the past but hadn’t expected to return. That pretty much dominated the early months of 2009. Eventually I realized that I needed help and started seeing a therapist, which has helped a lot. I’ve had some personal epiphanies and gotten better at being able to talk myself out of irrational worry.

I am still single, but I’ve made way more progress on that front than in any previous year. I don’t know if it’s my increased confidence or if I’m just meeting better guys, but most of the dates I went on this past year were not horrible. Even if they were dates with guys with whom I didn’t want to pursue relationships, they gave me hope that a relationship could be in my future.


I have the same job, which I still love. I did, in 2009, apply unsuccessfully for two jobs within my company that I didn’t get. The second time, I came very close to getting a job that a lot of people applied for, which was encouraging (although the long interview process left me kind of drained). But my mindset, when it comes to work, has improved a lot in the last year.

I had a lot of fun this year, too. Continued to sing in the Somerville Community Chorus, took a terrific Grub Street class that encouraged me to continue what I’m writing, had some drinks with friends, had some drinks with colleagues, sang some karaoke, went to some fun parties, joined my company softball team, which was a lot of fun even though I sucked and we lost most of our games. Saw some good movies, listened to some good music, watched some good TV, and read a lot of good books, which will probably warrant their own post.

I feel more secure in my friendships than I have in a long time. I’ve had a lot of neurotic doubts about my relationships with friends, which I’ve documented here, but I feel like with every day that goes by, I’m more convinced that people are more alike than different, and that most people are worth getting to know, and that those who are kind outnumber those who are unkind. Not to be cheesy and quote a ten-year-old movie or anything, but “it’s hard to be angry when there’s so much beauty in the world.”

And not to become one of those people who prefaces everything with “my therapist says,” but my therapist recommended making a list of ten goals for the new year—just ten, which for a compulsive list-maker like me isn’t many. I’m not going to say what they are, but check back here in a year and I’ll let you know if I’ve achieved them.

I’m hopeful about the new year and the new decade. I think it’s going to be a great one.

Christmas On the Internet

I love everything about the Christmas season. I love going to the mall and buying presents, seeing everything decorated, Christmas music (my Christmas playlist has over 160 songs on it), the TV specials and movies, making Christmas cookies, everything. I can't wait until we get a good amount of snow so that it looks more like Christmas.

I realize I sound like an over-earnest loser, but I don't care. This is one thing about myself I hope never changes. I know there are plenty of reasons to stress out over the holidays and that those reasons increase as you get older and have children, but I hope I'm always able to look past them. It's only a small portion of the year, and we need to enjoy it while it lasts.

Okay, I'm done with that. Moving on- in previous years, I've blogged about Christmas on the radio and Christmas on TV. What's left? Why, of course- the Internet!

Here's "The Christmas Tree." This guy does a lot of videos with a wig, dark glasses, and a thick New York accent. I think he's imitating his mother. My sister showed me this last Christmas, and at first I didn't think it was that funny, but the more I watched it, the more I liked it.



The title of this one makes it sound sketchy, but it's not- just hilarious. David Sedaris's "Six to Eight Black Men" tells about some strange Christmas traditions in the Netherlands (and how it's legal for the blind to hunt in Michigan). Scroll down a bit to hear Sedaris's own reading of Six to Eight Black Men.

And finally, a word from my girls Garfunkel and Oates, on the phenomenon known as "Present Face," which has befallen all of us when we get an unwanted gift.

Let Us Now Praise Betty Draper

WARNING: Herein lie massive spoilers for pretty much every episode of Mad Men that has ever aired.

An awesome season of Mad Men has just ended, and I’m sad that I have to wait until next summer to see more of Don Draper & company. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce? While the whole season was leading up to at least some characters leaving, that was completely not how I thought it would happen.

However, there’s one thing I keep hearing from all over the place that’s been bugging me, and I want to address it here. People on the Internet, people I know in real life, and professional columnists have all been bashing Betty Draper. Sometimes their dislike of the character extends to January Jones, the actress who plays her.

I think Betty deserves a post in her favor, and that’s what I’m going to offer here.

I could point out the worse things that other characters on the show have done, but I think that would be pointless. If you watch the show, you know that no one is completely likable. Virtually every main character has had an affair or said or done something offensive at some point.

But Betty seems to get on people’s nerves like none other. I actually think one of the main functions of her character is to make the viewer uncomfortable, and the writers accomplish this by making her more than a stereotypical 1960s housewife. The stifled-in-the-suburbs thing has been done to death, both in mid-20th-century settings (see: Revolutionary Road, the “Mrs. Brown” parts of The Hours) and modern times (Little Children, American Beauty, even Desperate Housewives, to some extent). The idea that a 1960s woman could feel unfulfilled as a mother and housewife is hardly new. So the writers didn’t make her someone obsessed with making the perfect dinner, feeling pressure to always have a spotless house, wishing for an occupation in which she’d get to use her brains, etc.

Instead, Betty’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s not that she sits around pining for a life other than that of a suburban housewife—it’s that she’s unhappy but doesn’t quite know what to wish for.

Betty did go to college and had a career before she met Don. The significance is in what her career was—a model. This past season, Betty’s father mentioned that she was a fat child, but I’d forgotten that Betty herself mentioned that in the first season while recounting how she didn’t realize how much weight she’d lost until her high school home ec teacher pointed out that the pajamas she was making were too big. Betty’s mother, who died shortly before the start of the show, was apparently very concerned with appearances, and I think Betty’s career as a model was a reaction to that—validation that she was beautiful to other people. Betty talks to her shrink in the first season about her mother , saying, “She wanted me to be beautiful so I could find a man- there's nothing wrong with that." She’d been taught that beauty was all she needed to get by, and when she landed a gorgeous, successful, smooth-talking husband, she likely thought that was her happy ending. But that, of course, wouldn’t have led to the backlash against her that inspired this post.

It amazes me that some people think Betty is a dumb bimbo. Is it just because she’s blonde and pretty? She can be childish and naïve, but we’ve seen plenty of evidence of her intelligence. She reads books like Mary McCarthy’s The Group, she majored in anthropology at Bryn Mawr, and she speaks fluent Italian. She said herself in one episode, “We all have skills we don’t use.” The thing is, though, I don’t think Betty consciously wishes for a life that’s more intellectually fulfilling, and that’s because she can’t fathom a life without a man. We saw something similar with Joan in the first season—Joan was genuinely surprised when she realized that Peggy wanted to become a copywriter for her career’s sake rather than to spend more time with Paul. It had just never occurred to Joan that she could find fulfillment in a career rather than marriage, and I don’t think it’s occurred to Betty yet, either. Subconsciously, I think she might want more out of life than being a housewife—after all, the happiest we’ve seen her all season was when she and the Junior League were successful at stopping the water tank, small as that accomplishment was. But that’s not really the point.

Shortly after her victory with the Junior League, she and Don travel to Rome, where she impresses everyone with both her looks and her charming command of Italian. Upon their return home, though, it’s back to her regular, boring routine. Don tells her flat-out, although he means it as a compliment, that he wants to “show her off” at an awards ceremony. This is just before Don reveals the truth about his identity, which in some ways adds insult to injury. Don has come from nothing to achieve this life that he’s carefully constructed for himself—successful Madison Avenue career, house in the suburbs, gorgeous wife, cute kids—and she’s merely a prop in it.

The problem is that she’s not quite sure how to be anything else. In the first season, while divorcee Helen Bishop intrigued her, Betty didn’t envy her. In fact, she and her friends seemed disdainful of everything about Helen. While she kicked Don out in Season 2, I don’t think she would have divorced him even if she hadn’t gotten pregnant because I don’t think she knows how she’d function as an unmarried woman. It’s not until she meets Henry Francis, someone who she feels could rescue her—symbolized by the fainting couch he convinces her to put in her living room—that she seriously considers leaving Don. Henry is actually a pretty boring character, especially compared to Don, and I don’t think Betty is in love with him as much as the idea of him as her knight in shining armor.

The interesting thing is that I think that people’s disdain toward Betty increased as the show went on. In the first season, she was childish and anxious and sad, and I think people were more sympathetic toward her then. She had a lot of emotions that she didn’t know how to express, which manifested themselves through her lack of control over her hands or her sobbing to a child that she had no one to talk to. She couldn’t even trust her psychiatrist, who was sharing everything she said with Don. Who wouldn’t sympathize with her?

But between the first and second season, a little over a year passed, and in Season 2, Betty gradually starts asserting herself more. Through most of the first season, she was in denial about Don’s affairs, and when she finally acknowledged them, she was more sad than angry, but in the second season she confronts Don directly when she gets wind of his affair with Bobbie. We also see a lot more open resentment towards Don and her children in general, and she becomes more and more unpleasant.

This is the wrong time to be writing this, seeing as how she just bombed as a host on Saturday Night Live, but personally, I think January Jones does a great job portraying Betty. That she’s made people dislike her character is, I think, almost an indication that she’s doing her job successfully. Sexism is big theme on Mad Men, and most of the time it’s much more overt—we get Pete telling Peggy to wear shorter skirts on her first day and Joan, lacking a term like “spousal rape” to label her experience, quietly going on with her life after her fiancé sexually assaults her. The sexism in Betty’s situation is subtler. We’re not hit with “OMG life as a suburban housewife is so oppressive!” because Betty hasn’t quite formulated that thought herself, so it’s easy to dismiss Betty’s unpleasantness as a character trait instead of a manifestation of the sexist world she lives in.

The great thing about this show is that you keep thinking about the episodes for a long time after they air. I actually wasn’t crazy about the Rome episode when I first watched it, but when it was over, I began to realize its significance. The episode gave us a glimpse of the intelligent, sophisticated woman Betty could be in another life. Ironically, most of the women Don has cheated on her with have, in fact, been intelligent, sophisticated women. If that’s what Don really wants, he could have had it if he hadn’t forced Betty into suburban conformity.

Off to watch the special features on the Season 1 DVDs now. Is it summer yet?

Random Question

There's a great new frozen yogurt shop in my neighborhood called Spun.

Which got me thinking about something- does anyone else call frozen yogurt "frogurt"? That's what my mom calls it, and it's an expression I picked up. But whenever I say it, people look at me like there's something growing out of my forehead. Once, in college, at the Paris Creperie, I ordered "Nutella frogurt," and the girl behind the counter said pointedly, "You mean frozen yogurt?" I've heard "froyo," but do other people say "frogurt" or is that just some weird thing my mom made up?

With Friends Like These...

Recently, the Internet has been abuzz with outrage about a terrible piece of advice. If you haven't heard about it, be prepared for a massive spike in blood pressure. A woman wrote to Lucinda Rosenfeld at Double X, telling an awful story about how her drink was drugged at a concert and the two friends she came with not only went home without her when they couldn’t find her but, after she was taken to the hospital with no memory of what had happened, only grudgingly drove her back to her car when she called them. Rosenfeld’s “advice” was that while a significant other or a family member is obligated to help out in that situation, a friend is not. Infuriatingly, she also insinuated that the letter writer might have a drinking problem and was possibly lying about being drugged. You can read about the whole situation here, and there’s also a good discussion of it on Tomato Nation (Sarah Bunting, the founder of that site and co-founder of Television Without Pity, is a much, much better advice columnist, by the way).

As discouraging as it is to read about this, it is, at least, a bit heartening that the vast majority of people who read Rosenfeld’s column are furious. So I’m not going to repeat the points others have made.

But the column did get me thinking. Rosenfeld apparently doesn’t think that friends are obligated to respond to a panicked 4 AM phone call, although not many agree with her. If someone called me at 4AM in a terrible situation like the letter writer’s, even if it wasn’t a close friend, I’d respond and help. And if I called someone in the same situation, I’m sure someone would help me, because that’s what decent people do.

This is my question: which friend would I call? My issue with the situation isn’t that no one would respond. It’s that whomever I called would respond, but I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t be surprised to be the first person I called. I can’t imagine calling anyone in that situation who wouldn’t be thinking, “She didn’t have anyone else to call? Really?”

The thing is, that letter raised a lot of interesting points about date-rape drugs, blaming the victim, the obligations of friends, and the assumptions that prevent women from reporting rapes. But a smaller point it raised was that sometimes the people we think are our close friends don’t actually see us that way.

And that is a huge fear of mine. I have made that mistake before. My freshman year of college, I had the unfortunate experience of realizing that some girls I’d considered close friends didn’t actually like me, or at least didn’t consider me a close friend. I know that was a long time ago and I should be over it, but the fact is, it still influences the way I behave towards those I meet and sometimes keeps me from getting too close to people. When I start to make new friends, I can’t help but think things like, Do these people really want me here? Do they actually like me or are they just being polite? Oh, no—should I have said that? Did I accidentally offend someone? Am I being annoying without realizing it? Maybe I shouldn’t have come. And if people don’t invite me to do something, is it because they forgot about me or because they genuinely don’t want me there?

I don’t think I’d be the first person anyone would call at 4 AM, either. Again, is that because I haven’t let anyone get too close to me, or because other people see me as selfish or unreliable? It’s occurred to me recently that there are people I consider friends whose phone numbers I don’t even have. What do those people really think about me?

This post probably makes me sound like a neurotic freak, but it’s not a new thing. I think about it a lot, because I always wonder what would happen if I left Boston. Would people forget about me? How many people would really miss me? What would happen if I left and then came back? How many people would really want to stay in touch with me?

Everyone likes to think that friendship lasts forever, but that’s not usually true, in my experience. Even if you don’t stop being friends with someone, eventually someone will move away or get married or move onto a new stage of life, and inevitably, the friendship will change. Someone you still consider one of your best friends might no longer be the first person you call when something good or something bad happens. You like to think that your friends care enough about your life to want to hear what’s going on with you, but ultimately, you care too much about their lives to be willing to subject them to it.

Wow, this post sounds really depressing. But I can’t complain too much—at least I haven’t been drugged and left alone to fend for myself in a hospital with no memory of most of the night. As that poor woman starts to recover from that horrifying experience, I wonder whom she’s leaning on, since her family is far away and she clearly can’t depend on her friends. I hope she’s successful in finding better friends. In the meantime, at least I know I have people who wouldn’t leave me alone in a bar and would willingly come pick me up if I called them from the hospital in the middle of the night—regardless of what those people really think of me.

The Cheno Fills Me with Glee

I'm watching and loving Glee, and I have to say, if this show isn't a runaway hit (which seems unlikely), it will not be the network's fault. Fox has promoted the hell out of it. I'm not going to do a whole post on it, though, because I don't really have anything new or insightful to say about it- it's just a great show that you should watch if you're not already.

Unfortunately, I'm also taking a writing class on Wednesday nights through Grub Street, so I'm not able to see Glee as it airs. I'm looking forward to tonight's DVR-ed episode, though, especially because the fantastic Kristin Chenoweth guest stars tonight.

If you've never heard The Cheno's song "Taylor the Latte Boy," here it is:




Most adorable song ever. When we did a CD swap at work, I put this on one of my mixes. I have a feeling everyone in my group was thinking, "What the hell is this? I want my pensive indie-rock!"

But this song never fails to put a smile on my face. Glee and Kristin Chenoweth seem like a match made in heaven.