audrey says stuff

I love people who can write. Rather, I love reading stuff written by people who can write.

(Thanks to Karen for the tip-off). 

Ladies and gents - JK Rowling on the importance of failure and imagination (as empathy).

Only flaw in her speech? The location. Duh. 

http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

Ya know, I actually get sugary headaches, kinda, when I have too much sweet stuff.
Given the activities of this weekend, though (please don’t tell my mom), I think my descent into pre-diabetes just got a hefty shove.

But oh-so-yummy a shove. :)

Behold - the ugly remains of a custardy cherry-ey clafoutis. (Saturday).
And the pristine smoothness of a yet-to-be-torched peppermint-chocolate creme brulee. (T-minus-one hour of chilling).

I have raspberries, and whipped cream.

Yeah, it’s over. See ya’ll on the other side.

May 3rd: How’d it get to be May already, and so littl

*blink*

…yeah, um.. now May’s almost over.   A mini heat wave, beach time, bay to breakers, and cherries.  So much for draft blog posts.

Gear up for summer, people!  It’s coming up fast…don’t let it sneak up sidewise. (Like a wave, when you’re holding a boogie board and turned around talking to friends and not paying attention and SMACK down you go.  Although really, that’s kind of fun too.)

Comcast has been flaky lately.

Makes me grumpy.

And now the weather’s gone and gotten chillyish again.

Someone turn up the thermostat, please?

Today is really hot. By really hot, I mean 100+ degrees Fahrenheit/38ish Centigrade. I’ve decided not to go to Big Dance, despite a pretty steady streak of attending (when in town) over the past, hm…8 years.

For the blissfully un-subcultured, Big Dance is an all-night social dance … dance, held in a gym at Stanford, helmed by Richard Powers. Lots of undergrads, grads, and alums floating around, lots of live bands, local dance group performances, and as the night goes on, ridiculously fun contradances (think paint-by-numbers square dancing). It’s the spring analog to a series of quarterly dance events, the fall and winter ones being the Ragtime and Viennese Balls.

Swing and waltz being of some interest to me, I attended Big Dance starting in 2001. I only managed allnighters from sophomore year, though, due to some sad insecurity freshman year. (I didn’t want to be one of those hard core weird dance freaks, you see.)

If you make it through the night (’til sunrise!), through the evil Lullaby Gauntlet of sloooow waltzes at about 4am, then your name goes down in the annals of Big Dance record keeping. Multiply by three, and you earn yourself a Triple Crown (tshirt.)

I’ve been in 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, and 2007. I actually made it through the night in 2002, 2005, and 2007. In 2003 and 2006, I was out of the country. In 2001 and 2004, I didn’t make it all night. So I’ve just barely gotten a Triple Crown myself.

Like I said though, I’m not going tonight.

The heat is one factor. Another is the fact that I have archery practice at 8:30am, followed by Bay to Breakers on Sunday. I’ve done the finish dancing - take a nap- go spend 8 hours shooting arrows - thing, in 2007, and my ankles really didn’t appreciate it.

Some may recall the circumstances for me NOT lasting the full night in 2004. That year, I stayed until about 5am, (sunrise is at 6:30 ish), then grabbed Jen, hopped in a car, and drove 4+ hours to Yosemite. We woke some friends up at a hotel, and headed straight for a hike up Nevada Falls. Grumpiest hike ever. Everyone there was inexplicably stupid and inconsiderate. No clue why. You could argue that under those circumstances, some archery and a 7 mile walk with regular er, refreshments, should be no problem.

You’d be right. The real reason seems to be that I just don’t care to go this year.

Maybe I feel old and disconnected from the community - like I’ve outgrown it, or it’s outgrown me. Perhaps we’re no longer mutually relevant. At this point, it’s obvious that I won’t get really good at dance unless I put a lot of time into it, and well…I’m too picky to want to be mediocre all the time, and too discerning to be happy doing the same 3 moves over and over with various iterations of undergrad. My posse is wearing thin, and it’s awkward to make small talk catching up with people I never see otherwise. I’d rather just dance…

So maybe really, I’m not going because I don’t want to be disappointed. Wonder how often I do that with real stuff. :)

I’m back from Spain, as of Sunday.  The 67 (really, I couldn’t cut it down any more) pictures shuffling above will give you an idea of what we were up to. 

Spain makes you stay up late, but they make it worth it, with such yummy things as freshly fried churros and thick chocolate. Not just “chocolate” but chokoLAHtay (if you get my drift).  This stuff is dark, drippy, dense, and DELICIOUS.  (And after extensive research, determined to taste better in Barcelona than Madrid).  

I need me a deep fryer, so I can try to replicate these guys someday. Mmm…

1. I have a soft spot for mashups anyhow.
2. Jason Mraz’ lyrics (well, one in particular, are pretty amusing.)

The mashup (thanks Amanda) is fun, but this line makes me chuckle (okay, I don’t really chuckle) every time I hear it.

“I tried to be chill but you’re so hot that I melted.”

Okay maybe now that it’s posted, it’ll get un-stuck from my head. (Maybe).

I like working where I do. Except when the printers get hungry…

(Happy April Fool’s!)

Look, it’s a cassette tape! But…it’s online :)

I never actually made a real one of these, but here’s my stab at an online muxtape.  

I can’t get itunes to export the playlist I made in any normal format, or I’d paste the stuff here. Sorry.

Muxtape’s pretty firmly in the pseudo-legal realm, but I like it, because it doesn’t try to be too many things.  It’s got a metaphor, and it sticks to it.

If you make one, let me know! 

I was sitting today, and wondering why Easter is “Easter.”
People always mumble about the reduction of Christmas to Xmas or Santa stuff, but Easter can’t really be abbreviated. And what does it mean, anyhow? Look east-er? Sunrise is in the east, so um…in the sense of the sun rising again, so does resurrection make sense?

Wikipedia had an interesting explanation.

The modern English term Easter developed from the Old English word Eastre, which itself developed prior to AD 899. The name refers to the Eostur-monath, a month of the Germanic calendar which may have been named for the goddess Eastre in Germanic paganism.^[4]

…which makes no sense to me, given the Christian nature of the holiday. Other people call it something related to it’s Greek name, Pascha (passover, pesach), in Slavic languages, it’s the “Great Day/Night”, and apparently Croatians just say “The Resurrection.”

They make a lot of sense, those other languages.

Otherwise, the non-commercialization of Easter vs. Christmas was the topic of this article. The author makes a good point about the non-fuzziness of wearing an iconified, dying human as fashion accessory.

(To sum: Everyone likes a feel-good family story, no one in their right mind particularly likes guys being tortured on crosses).

And yet, it’s Happy Easter, because Easter’s the happy ending to the gruesomely sad story.

Happy Easter, all.