2021 RoundUp

I finally got around to COVID baking. This is a "Tre Latte" cake, a traditional Italian sweet. It's a lemon chiffon cake made with olive oil, soaked in three kinds of milk: whole milk, evaporated milk and condensed milk and iced with whipped cream and mascarpone cheese. You're supposed to drizzle olive oil on it, too, but that seems like gilding the lily.

Along with this blog, and all the other writing I do, I keep a journal. What follows are edited excerpts of bits that, until now, I wasn't intending to share.

11 February - These are the depths of winter, even if the days are more bright than January. It’s where we all are in the long haul – and we’re hauling so much. Not just winter, but the loneliness of surviving the pandemic. 

8 March - The surest way to piss off my mother-in-law was to do something differently than she would have done herself.  Like putting jam and peanut butter on the table in little dishes instead of the jars they came in. If I did that, even in my own home, well, it was an insult, and would really sour her mood. 

15 March - I always enjoy the reunion part of funerals. 

29 April -  I’ve been watching Netflix and playing games on my iPad for more than 500 days. I’m a little rusty.

29 May -- I almost never watched Friends. I’ve seen maybe one or two episodes, but, for just about everyone else, it’s the most popular comedy of all time. According to the Internet, the show was about how important it is to have friends when you’re a young adult. For its viewers, the show fulfilled the wish for friends for those who either had no friends, or not the friends they wanted. And now that Friends has been off the air for fifteen years and all its stars are starting to look a bit time worn, the fantasy is not just about the friends you never had, but the youth you've lost.

26 August -- In the future, if there is a future, language arts teachers will astonish their students by showing how many of the common words and phrases they use every day came from Hollywood movies. And that should not be surprising. Shakespeare, who people still unconsciously quote, was great, but he was also popular. So, inevitably, Hollywood and other major cultural engines will provide the words we reach for but can’t find on our own. Titus Andronicus to Fast and Furious … it’s a traceable and unbroken progression.

1 September -- I became aware on Facebook of the ravings of an angry man who hates Feminists because, he explains, they cause chaos in the lives of forlorn men with their racing around in the morning going to work. A proper woman - one who is not a feminist - makes sure than when a man rouses himself from his slumber, his house is clean and full of the good smells of breakfast. Any woman who doesn’t do this should, according to this man, be dead. He says “The only good feminist is a dead feminist.”

So, I'm going to assume he’s pretty upset about something. Maybe his ex-wife had a job. Maybe he never had a wife, or a job. 

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Last year at New Years, I proposed that people should brace themselves for 2021 because of all the things that ultimately did happen - the worst days of the pandemic, the death throes of the Trump presidency, the Delta variant, and Venom 2. 

This year I'm going to go along with the small but growing chorus of voices proclaiming that Omicron is COVID's last hurrah so that, while the supply chain's in ruins and everything else is on the brink, the worst of the pandemic is behind us.

Might as well be optimistic.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading!

Karen