Here is today’s tip for having a positive attitude:  When an obnoxious person sends you an obnoxious email for no point other than, it seems, to be obnoxious, delay responding for as long as you can.  As long as you have not responded, you are in control, by willfully creating a state of entropy.  The longer you go without responding, the longer you go without having to deal with the inevitable obnoxious response to your response* and you can just blissfully occupy a state of willful ignorance.  Of course, really all you are doing is biding your time in the calm eye of the shitstorm, but maybe that’s really the best place to be, all things considered.

(This is a variation on a technique I used when I was dating that guy who never answered my emails or returned my calls because, it turns out, he was dating probably about 57 other women who looked exactly like me at the same time.  ”He can’t not respond to my email if I don’t send him an email!”  FOOLPROOF LOGIC.)

Anyhow, I am developing a theory about how all attitudes are, in fact, positive attitudes.  Because as long as you have an attitude, you are having feelings, right?  So you haven’t completely lost your soul.  Ergo, even a bad attitude is a positive attitude because it’s better than having no attitude or emotions whatsover.  Or maybe I’m grasping at straws.

*Which is obviously very polite and diplomatic and professional.

Anyhow, here are three things that I think are going to be helpful to me in maintaining my positive attitude:

1.  Coping Bundts.  Is there anything more comforting and delightful than a pudgy, round little cake?  Nothing.  I have decided to make myself the most popular lady in every unpleasant situation by appearing bearing Coping Bundts to share with the people I like (and only the people I like).  My Gentleman Caller got me this double bundt pan for Christmas, and it is perfect because you can get about four little bundts out of one regular recipe of bundt batter.  And also, you can hold it up to your boobs and pretend it’s a really great breastplate.  And then when you are stuck in an interminable, hours-long union meeting where someone insists that Roberts Rules states that anyone can do what they want and that there are no actual rules, you can just sit there with your personal-sized bundt and put cake in your face, staving off that feeling of lurking despair for at least fifteen more minutes.

2.  The “FUCK IT!!!” Point.  THIS!  This is revolutionary.  This will change dissertation writing forevermore.  I have realized that whether or not a dissertation chapter is finished has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it is finished, ie.: done, complete, as good as it can be, well argued and cogent, etc.  Instead, it is done at the moment when one divests all emotional attachment with it, says “FUCK IT!!!!” and closes the word document forever (or at least until it’s time for final revisions).  I have found that the “FUCK IT!!!” point comes suddenly, without warning, often after a period of protracted despair.  But when it comes, it is the most glorious and liberating feeling in the world.  I just LIVE for the “FUCK IT!!!” point.

3.  Baskerville and Franklin, Cats.  Ugh, you guys, how are you so cute all the time????  I can’t even handle it.  Ok, fine, here are some gratuitous cat pictures:

Baskerville’s interests include hoarding receipts, candy wrappers, and other small things that make a crinkly sound in a secret spot under the bookshelf; hiding his collar where nobody can find it; and sleeping beside your legs in such a way that you are trapped in bed in the morning.

Franklin’s interests include racing across the room to steal my desk chair whenever I stand up, sitting on top of the refrigerator and glowering down upon his underlings, and the ladies.

1.  Greyound buses;

2.  Shared rooms in hostel-like accommodation (this is actually something that I declared myself Too Old For at the age of 22, an ambitious declaration to make at the age that might be really considered prime hostel-dwelling age);

3.  White zinfandel, or really any rose, unless it is the kind of rose I make myself by pouring the end of a bottle of red and the end of a bottle of white into the same glass (A LADY IS NEVER TOO OLD TO INVENT HER OWN WINE);

4.  Getting a bottle of Bailey’s from my grandparents for Christmas every year because of that one Christmas at their house when I was 15 and drank a lot of Bailey’s because I hadn’t really drunk before and it tasted like milkshakes, a seemingly innocuous event that returns to haunt me in the form of a giant bottle of Bailey’s every Christmas;

5.  Any kind of musical event that involves being outside in the burning sun (or, more likely pouring rain) with a bunch of people who are/are dressed like hippies;

6.  Camping, much to the disappointment of my Gentleman Caller, who often alludes to willingly spending the night in the great outdoors as though it is actually a fun past time;

6.  Skirts that fall above the knee, which have the effect of making me look like an overgrown five-year-old.

I have transformed them into cherry and frangelico-striped oranges.  VOILA, HOLIDAY MIRACLE.

I could keep my methods a secret and I could claim my magical act of orange transformation was achieved through the powers of alchemy, but instead I will err on the side of honesty and admit that I learned it from a book.  Specificially, I learned it from Jellies and the Moulds, by Peter Brears, which I purchased at the British LIbrary bookshop and which has proven to be the single most important book purchase that I have made since I upgraded to a new copy of Harriet the Spy.  Brears is a food historian, so this is not just a recipe book, but is really a social history of jellies in the UK, from the middle ages (MEDIEVAL JELLIES!  My eyes have been opened to a new and slightly revolting world) to the 20th century.  I have learned so many things from this book:  disgusting things about boiling calfs feet until they became gelatin; fascinating things about flummeries, which are soft gelatins made by boiling gultinous stuff like wheat and rice down and extracting the goo; the use of gelatin as a food for sick people, which was useless as it has basically no nutritional value; and about the manufacture of moulds, which grew more and more elaborate and fussy through the 19th Century.

The stripey oranges are called Oranges a la Bellevue, and the recipe dates from the British Regency period, although, according to Brears, it enjoyed popularity well into the Victorian era.  I don’t know a whole lot about the Regency period, but from what I’ve seen (ie: fancy jelly recipes and the Brighton Pavilion) I have to say that I really appreciate the spirit of utter idiotic frivolity that characterizes the Regency-era approaches to both decorative arts and cuisine.

Anyhow!  Here is how I made my Oranges a la Bellevue.  The original recipe calls for the jellies to be orange and almond-flavored, but I opted for cherries and booze because I can’t leave well enough alone.  The results were delicious!  One warning:  I am impatient and tried to rush the setting period for the jelly layers by popping them in the freezer.  This resulted in some expansion and contraction of the layers, so they weren’t as perfect as they could have been, and they shrank a bit once they’d thawed.  If and when I do this again, I will put on my patience pants and just wait for things to set at refrigerator temperature so that the oranges are prettier.  Also, I used regular gelatin, but I think this recipe would be an excellent candidate for using agar agar to do a veggie-friendly version.  Agar agar sets a bit firmer and crunchier than gelatin, which I think would work well for slicing and presentation here.

On with the oranges!  Click an image to enlarge and to show recipe steps.

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In addition to dead people tourism, we also went DANCING! and it was GREAT! because unlike other places in the world (ahem, Los Angeles) it was so much less of a scene and so much more about just DANCING!  And also you can get a bottle of wine for, like, three euros, which is cheaper than a god damn shitty cappuccino in Londontown.  This makes dancing even greater.  Not uncoincidentally, I sustained a larger number of very minor but still inconvenient flesh wounds (got thumb stuck in door jamb, fell off curb and banged up knee, etc.) during my three days in the city of light than I normally do in, like, a year; and I also managed to ruin about one pair of stockings for each day that I was in Paris.  Life is not easy when you are a fashionable young lady in a city where the wine is cheaper than the water!

ANYHOW, here are some pictures of cemeteries, etc.

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One thing I will miss about London, though, is the way it enabled me to wander.  And wander and wander and wander.

I like wandering both purposefully and aimlessly; with a goal in mind mind or simply to while away an afternoon. Is purposeful wandering an oxymoron?  I don’t think so – sometimes I will deliberately set out with the goal of wandering to a specific place.  I like wandering by myself, because then I can truly go wherever I want and and not feel like I have to worry over whether or not someone else is having a nice time. But I also like wandering with other people, because sometimes you need to witness the world with someone else there, so that you can laugh, ensemble, at the ridiculous and delightful things are in the world, which, I think, one is more attuned to whilst wandering.

Los Angeles, I love you, but you are not always the most-wandering conducive. Sometimes you are! You are good when it comes to EPIC JOURNEYS, like walking to the beach from downtown, or walking home from school, which I haven’t done but which I keep meaning to do. Or, on a less epic level, walking through the residential streets between Santa Monica and Melrose, winding my way through mid-century low-rise land to the Fairfax trading post on a Sunday afternoon. But, Los Angeles, you are hot and sunny and sometimes you make me too tired for wandering. Also, you are a grid. A giant grid. Without tiny little sidestreets that might lead god knows where, I find my path can feel a bit prescribed . And while this makes not getting lost easier, sometimes I want to be a little lost, you know?

So, I’m sorry Los Angeles, but London is superceding you right now. It could be because I only have a week and a half left here, and I am feeling pre-emptively nostalgic, but what can I say? In London, it is CLOUDY! And on days when it is sunny, it doesn’t actually get hot! Cool weather is good wandering weather, it’s a fact.*  Also, there are streets in London on top of streets, streets so small they are just called paths, streets that appear and go nowhere, streets that go around in circles, streets that can be frustrating, but can also be fascinating.  And there are parks full of paths that mimic those streets; parks where you feel like you’ve stepped out of the city into the countryside, even if its only for a few moments.  The parks are full of ponds and trees and dogs that look like people dressed up in dog costumes (I have noticed that most animals in England look like tiny people dressed in animal costumes.  I’m not sure why this is).  And most of London’s museums are free, yay socialism, which means that even when the weather is TRULY terrible, there is wandering to be done.

And so, in London, I did lots of wandering, and here are some pictures of my wanderings over the past few weeks:

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*And, on a slightly tangential note, I’ve also decided since I’ve been over here that fall is my most flattering season because I can layer warm sweaters and tailored coats and look put together, whereas in Los Angeles, I’m always a bit afraid that I’m a hot, sweaty mess who is showing too much skin.

It’s an interesting difference in culture:  here, it seems like just about everyone rides the tube, whereas in LA, well, a colleague who shall remain nameless once said to me “the bus here just seems like it’s for the underprivileged.”  This is a very stupid and problematic statement that I shall not begin to unpack here, but I think it really gets at the difference in attitude towards transit that pervades the two cities.  Riding transit is a major part of my life, and a big part of the culture shared by myself and many of the people I know.  It is also a major part of the lives of anyone in LA who cannot or chooses not to have a car.  Lots and lots of people ride the bus, but the bus-riding population in LA is really seen as a marginal group. Here, in London, I think it’s taken for granted that just about everyone will ride transit.  There are many things that I think are good about a transit-oriented commuter culture, but one big one is that I think it’s healthy for people to actually just be in public spaces around other people.  Around lots of other people.  Around lots of different other people.  I am tired of rampant individualism, and I think that actually being around other people in the world can give people a sense of perspective and of place in larger social communities and structures. Maybe this is naive and idealistic.  Probably it is.  Oh well, whatever.

There are more practical, tangible things that I like about a city where transit is part of the culture.  I like that I never worry about feeling lost because pretty much anywhere you are you can walk until you hit either an Underground station or a bus stop where you can catch a bus that will take you to an Underground station.  I like that once I’m in the Underground, I never feel lost because using it is pretty intuitive (even though the lines all have names that don’t actually make logical sense, because they are all vestigial traces of when the London Underground was a bunch of independently-operating rail companies).  I like that on the weekend, when I went to a concert and I was worried about walking back to the tube in the dark afterwards, it turned out that I didn’t have to worry because all of the hundreds of people who were at the concert also took the tube there and so we all walked back to the station together and it felt totally safe.  I like that I don’t have to plan at least an hour’s travel time on either side of an event.  I am going to so many more things here in London than I do in LA, just because it’s actually easy to get places.  I’m always telling people that I love LA, but that it makes me tired.  The user-unfriendliness of public transit in the city is a big part of why that is.  (Having said all of this, obviously things are not perfect here – tube lines are sometimes frighteningly overcrowded, and everything useful always gets shut down on the weekend for maintenance.  Like this weekend, when they shut down the part that was going where I needed to go but I fail at informational-diagram-reading-comprehensions skills, so I didn’t discover this until I tried to switch trains and found my platform barricaded.)

Anyhow, something I have been frequently going to on public transit since I’ve been here are late-night museum openings!  They have these in LA, too, but I have NEVER been to one because there is no good way to get, say, from West Hollywood to the Natural History Museum without taking at least two buses, probably three.  But ANYHOW.  And also, here, most (but not all) museums are free.  Because, socialism, right?

I’ve been to the Victoria and Albert late openings twice, because I love it there.  It is very unlike, say, the British Museum, which is always very very busy, and always feels kind of…plundery.  Something about the informational pamphlet they give you when you go in to see the Parthenon friezes, for instance, just seems a little too defensive in explaining why these priceless Greek treasures are really better off in England.  And while I know the V&A has just as much of a plundery, imperialist history (hello, Queen Victoria!), since it’s a museum of design rather than, say, art or history, it is so much wider in scope and so much less intent on selling a particular History of Civilization than the British Museum. AND the current special exhibit is on postmodernism and includes such delights as costumes that belonged to Grace Jones and Klaus Nomi.

And this is where the post that I started writing a week and a half ago and then forgot about and then remembered was abandoned! What was I going to say next?  I was probably going to say something about how I also have been to a late night opening at the Churchill War Rooms where I proceeded to get quietly drunk and then wandered around pretending I was a member of Churchill’s stenography pool while listening to an Andrews Sisters cover band.  Or maybe I was going to say something about how I went to a late nigh opening at the Tate Britain, where the theme was APOCALYPSE! where I proceeded to get quietly drunk, and watched some apocalyptic performance art until they started passing out haz-mat suits for the audience members to wear, whereupon I decided it was time to go look at some good, old-fashioned John Singer Sargeants, because generally I prefer to be on the “observing” end of performance art involving haz-mat suits, rather than on the “participating” end.

So basically, the takeaway of this post is that good public transit is really handy for the particular subset of people who enjoy going to museums at night for the purpose of getting quietly drunk in presence of art and/or history.

Last year when I came to London, I stayed in a closet-sized London School of Economics dorm room.  It was…fine.  It was fine.  The shared bathrooms were fine.  The lack of internet was fine.  The tour groups of Italian teenagers who I was sharing the bathrooms with were fine.  The lack of kitchen facilities was fine.  The tiny beds were fine.  It was all fine.  But it wasn’t good.   (The free breakfast, though, that was pretty good.)

If I were to really level with you, I would admit that I think I actually started to go crazy in my little tiny room after a while.  The trip was really fun and productive, but there were a lot of…long dark nights of the soul, mostly dissertation-related, that I think were probably exacerbated by living in a closet.

Now I am staying in a nice, big studio apartment in the attic of a nice old Georgian townhouse, and I have a kitchen and my own bathroom and it’s not even outrageously expensive (with the exchange rate, it’s probably costing me around what my rent is in LA, which probably is outrageously expensive, but in my LA-tainted mind, it’s totally reasonable).  It is good.  It is really really good.

Here is the view of the city on a sunny day that I can see from the window at the back of my apartment:

and here is my temporary Room of One’s Own.  I love:  The high ceilings, the big windows (these were taken at night, so you can’t see how bright it gets in here), and the tiny, miniature oven.

I was feeling all cranky yesterday because, well, because I hate dealing with people who are just plain mean-spirited and awful, and I had to deal with a mean-spirited awful person, and I was mad about it because it was related to a thing that I was hoping would just stay in LA and not bother me here.  I am not good at dealing with these kinds of things because I end up internalizing a lot of anger, and I’m uncomfortable communicating that anger because, I always second guess my own feelings and can never admit that they are valid.  And I also have a lot of anxiety about how people will react to me when I say what I think.  So that is to say, I end up spending a lot of time drafting fantasy angry emails that I never send.  So I was doing this yesterday, in my head, and then I realized that I was

a) sitting having a coffee at Ray’s Jazz Cafe, which is located in Foyle’s bookstore, which is a lovely place,

b) about to go see an off-West End show,

c) in fucking London, doing whatever the fuck I wanted,

and that maybe being angry was a waste of my energy.

And then I saw a play, and it was good and made me glad.  And then I got home and discovered thatRaffi made a song out of Jack Layton’s letter to Canada, and even though I am typically averse to sentiment or even admitting that I have feelings (see above), it made me cry.  And I was like, you’re right, Jack, what am I even doing.  Sitting around feeling impotently angry is always a silly idea.

Also, I think I am giving myself a repetitive strain injury from sitting in the library too much, so I guess that means that tomorrow I have to shopping on the Portobello Road instead.  TOO BAD FOR YOU, library.

Anyhow.  I am so excited about my copy of the Girl Annual, that, were it possible, I would join the cover girl and stand on the top of a ski slope and grin until I was red in the face.

There is SO MUCH to learn from Girl Annual!  There is something for everyone!  Just look at the table of contents!  There is ballet, there are adventures, there are romantic castles!  You can learn about stenciled cushion covers, romantic castles, and fencing!  And somebody named Monsieur Potato!  (Spoiler:  sadly, Monsieur Potato is not a story about Mr. Potato-Head’s adventures in Paris, but is, instead, about Louis XVI thinking potatoes are a good idea.)

But let’s see what else we can learn from Girl Annual, shall we?

Eilly Bowers, Pioneer Millionaress!  Pioneers and millionaresses, these are categories that I assume to be mutually exclusive, based on my elementary school history classes and childhood love of Laura Ingalls Wilder, both of which taught me that pioneering was shitty because you were always living in rudimentary houses made of sticks or eating salt meat or dying of dysentery and/or consumption.  But now I have learned, from Girl Annual, that one can live the dream of a Little House on the Prairie, while also enjoying modern conveniences such as millions of dollars!

I read this story, and it is less about masks than it is about hairpieces.  Basically the story is:  Sandra is shy.  She goes to the masquerade and acts like her True Self that She Has Hidden All of These Years because she is in disguise so nobody knows that it is her!  BUT THEN it turns out that she forgot to put on her wig, and everyone knew it was her all along because of her curly hair, and they ALL LIKED HER ANYHOW.  What can we learn from Sandra’s story?  We can learn that I need another glass of wine before I read more Girl Annual.

Instruments of the world!  For the Girl who wants to be an ethnomusicologist.  My favorite is the horn player.  The caption reads “European playing a French Horn.”  I hope they mean European in the euphemistic sense, as in “his predilection for bowties and good grooming seems awfully…European.”

Clearly this story needs a subtitle, and that subtitle needs to be “A TALE OF TERROR by Stephen King.”

And speaking of Tales of Terror!  Do you know what more publications need today?  They need drippy horror movie font.  I love drippy horror movie font.  Back when I used to sing in a church choir in undergrad, the church ladies were having a tube sock drive for the homeless.  And the poster for this event was done in drippy horror movie font.  ”TUBE SOCK DRIVE:  A TALE OF TERROR.”  Anyhow, good font, well done, Girl Annual.

YES!  I am very excited to learn about America’s first SPACE GIRL!  I want to be America’s first space girl!  Hey, Girl Annual, tell us what it takes to become America’s first space girl!

How to become a Space Girl:  Get frozen in carbonite.

And speaking of ethnomusicologists!

This picture needs a new caption.  Here, I have thought of one:  Peggy Seeger has giant monster hands.  Her husband, Ewan MacColl, is from Williamsburg and plays in some band you’ve never heard of.

And no girl-oriented publication would be complete without a teen hearthrob!  Like…Burt Lancaster.  Who would have been a young, virile 50-year-old in 1963.  Nothing creepy here.  Moving along.

But, really, no girl-oriented publication would be complete without an important lesson about fashion that makes us feel inadequate!  Thanks, Girl Annual, for showing me that all girls, fat and thin, can all feel vaguely ashamed of our bodies TOGETHER!