Episode 500: Back where it all began

There is a well-named handmade pasta shop in the Wedgewood neighborhood of Seattle called, simply, La Pasta: “The Pasta.” 

Inside the shop there is another, equally beautiful, sign next to which is hand lettered in chalk “CHI MANGIA BENE VIVE BENE.” This is the Italian philosophy of life summarized in five words: “Who eats well lives well.”

The holiday baking, part II

I've been needing some good cold-weather running gear for years, so I was excited yesterday when my new merino wool socks and quarter-zip base layer arrived. I especially like the base layer, which is soft, breathable, and odor-resistant. It's also black and fits pretty sleekly. In my own mind, it gives me a smoky George Harrison Quiet Beatle loved-him-a-black-turtleneck kinda look. I checked in with Mom seeking some words of affirmation, more specifically, how hot I looked in the new shirt. Mom's response: "Black is a good color on you." Which is not exactly a rejection of my bid but is certainly no better than neutral. Mom subsequently confirmed, as I suspected, that she didn't want to tell me I'm hot in front of our boys, who were quite amused by our exchange.

  

Twenty years too late

Remember when Mom used to roll out that chart of y'all's chores for the week, and you used to moan and groan about it? Well, there's scientific proof that she was doing you ingrates a favor, even if it did come 20 years too late. 

 

For example, three doctors [1] from the University of Virginia Children's Hospital (Go Hoos!) analyzed data from almost 10,000 children entering kindergarten in 2010 to 2011. The kids' parents reported how often their children did chores. When the kids were in the third grade, they responded to a questionnaire regarding their perceived interest or competence in academics, peer relationships, prosocial behavior, and life satisfaction. They also completed direct academic assessments for reading, math, and science. The doctors analyzed the data and found, among other things, that "[t]he frequency of chores in kindergarten was positively associated with a child's perception of social, academic, and life satisfaction competencies in the third grade, independent of sex, family income, and parent education," and that "[p]erforming chores with any frequency in kindergarten was associated with improved math scores in the third grade." This led the UVA docs to conclude that "performing chores in early elementary school was associated with later development of self-competence, prosocial behavior, and self-efficacy."

 

Pizza Day!

It's a big day today! No, not the Super Bowl, who cares about that? It's National Pizza Day! (And apparently World Pizza Day too.) I tried to make a big deal last year, but everyone pooped on my pizza parade. This year I insisted though, and Dylan was on board because pizza is his favorite food, which got the ball rolling. So I made Shortcut Sicilian-Style Italian Pizza:

Outsourcing my blog, episode VI: Above and beyond the call

[Moriah spent months perfecting this recipe so that Mom could have a reliable recipe for making gluten-free sourdough. Talk about going above and beyond the call!]

 

 

Karen makes a huge sourdough loaf every week for the family but can't eat it herself! I wanted to perfect a gluten free sourdough recipe so Karen can enjoy the fruits of her own sourdough-labors. After a lot of research and four attempts with tweaks, it turned out better than I could have imagined. 

Outsourcing my blog, episode IV: Mom finally takes her turn

The long and patiently awaited blog post about sourdough bread!

One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic was my learning how to make sourdough bread. The bread was so well received by my family that I have continued to make it weekly. It’s the least I can do for my wonderful husband, who made sure our children didn’t go starving when they moved out on their own by developing this wonderful blog. He’s wonderful in multiple other ways too, but this blog is an amazing illustration of how he managed his worries about his kids in a non-obtrusive yet incredibly effective way (a skill I have yet to develop). 

Anyways, back to the sourdough.

My epitaph

At my longstanding Saturday morning breakfast yesterday with my running buddies (few of whom actually run anymore), the subject of movies came up. One friend asked if anyone had seen Barbie, which of course I had. I gave my (solicited) opinion, noting especially the scene where America Ferrera's character shouts the whole point of the movie at anyone too dense to understand it for themselves. I also noted how you all told me that was exactly what you would have expected from an old white guy. This at a breakfast with a bunch of white guys who are all at least a decade older than me.

That led one of my friends to say that he had read a piece in the New York Times Book Review in which the author described Henry James's work as being too male, pale, and stale. My friend, who has a Ph.D. in English and loves the classics, was irked enough to go back and re-read The Portrait of a Lady, which is a massive undertaking.

 

I searched for the book review but immediately hit upon this article instead: "Too Male, Too Pale, Too Stale: Why Academia Is Turning Its Back on William Shakespeare." The article explains that the Globe Theatre in London, "Shakespeare's home turf," is giving fans "trigger" warnings about upsetting themes in Romeo and Juliet and offering a number to call for emotional support after seeing the play. But at least the Globe is still mounting productions of Shakespeare's plays, as the article also reports that English departments "are binning the Bard in favour of classes on Lady Gaga and Game of Thrones." I'll let you form your own opinions on that one. In the meantime, you have a good epitaph for my tombstone (were I actually to have a tombstone, which I will not):

 

Too male, too pale, too stale

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Panzanella

Panzanella is something I used to make frequently, before gluten became a bad word. Mom made two loaves of sourdough (still waiting on her guest post) to bring to the beach, and one of them was definitely past its best, so I looked up this version of the dish and made it as a side. GF Mom liked it so much she made it again with the rest of the leftover loaf. You can't beat a dish that reminds you of both the beach and Tuscany.

 

Social fitness

I've been reading lots of stuff lately saying that the quality of your social relationships (your "social fitness") may be the single most important factor in your happiness and well-being. A couple of new studies offer slightly different viewpoints on determining what kind of social relationships to foster.

  Photo by Duy Pham on Unsplash 

The first study was led by a couple of Harvard Business School professors and summarized in a recent article on the HBS website. Because it's a business school study, the authors used some unfortunate jargon to make their point, which is that you should "diversify" your "social portfolio" to get the most bang for your relational buck. In other words, the authors found that "interacting with a variety of connections had greater bearing on a person's happiness than how much of the day that person spent interacting with other people."* Despite the annoying investment terminology, the idea makes some intuitive sense. As HBS professor Michael Norton explained it, “If you spend 12 straight hours with your spouse, maybe adding the thirteenth hour isn’t as good for you as using that hour for a new relationship with a different person.” (To bleed the economics analogy completely dry, Norton likened this to the law of diminishing returns.) If you're with someone other than your partner or another close tie, you have to make more of an effort to be friendly and ask questions and just generally try different things, which opens up the range of emotions you experience, as well as "sparking connection and feelings of well-being." To that end, the authors suggest reallocating some of your social time to fostering connections with different people, such as (everyone's favorite in these studies) "chat[ting] with your local barista." (Does everyone out there spend that much more time in coffee shops than me?) Other options include "strik[ing] up a conversation with a colleague [or] reach[ing] out to an old acquaintance."

 

The last of those options was the subject of the other study, out of the University of Kansas, which found that "just one quality conversation with a friend during the day makes you happier and less stressed by day's end." While a face-to-face communication is best, even a telephone conversation will do. And it doesn't even matter so much what you talk about. The authors studied seven types of communication—catching up, meaningful talk, joking around, showing care, listening, valuing others and their opinions, and offering sincere compliments—and they were all effective in increasing well-being and reducing stress. What mattered most was just the "very act of intentionally reaching out to a friend in one of these ways."

 

So, two different studies but with compatible findings. Broaden your social circles a little bit and spend some time socializing with people other than your partners—such as by talking to strangers or having a nice conversation with a buddy—and you'll be happier and less stressed out.

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*And not just your happiness but your health too. An earlier study found that test subjects exposed to a cold virus (via nasal drops—they had to pay each person $800 to sign up for that misery!) were four times more likely to get sick if they regularly engaged with only one to three kinds of social relationships as opposed to subjects who engaged with six or more types of social ties. The different kinds of relationships were: spouse, parents, parents-in-law, children, other close family members, close neighbors, friends, workmates, schoolmates, fellow volunteers, members of groups without religious affiliations (e.g., social, recreational, or professional), and members of religious groups. The study's conclusion was that "[m]ore diverse social networks were associated with greater resistance to upper respiratory illness." Keep that in mind during cold and flu season.

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Things I learn from a crossword puzzle

Here are some things I learned from the New York Times crossword puzzle (which you can find online from the Seattle Times if you don't have a NYT subscription) for Friday, December 2, 2022:

• Poor Courteney Cox was the only Friends star who never got an Emmy award;
• "Life hacks" include using frozen grapes as ice cubes (so your drink doesn't get watered down) and binder clips as cable organizers, even if "hacks" is a hackneyed word;
• "Codswallop" is a great synonym for "rubbish," as in "the opposing party's argument to the contrary is codswallop"; and
• Onyx is a type of "chalcedony," which unfortunately didn't help me understand what "chalcedony" means but spurred me to look it up at Merriam-Webster online: "a translucent variety of quartz of various colors and waxy luster."

And one thing I knew before doing the puzzle but was glad to be reminded of is that Aldo Leopold advocated "thinking like a mountain" in his seminal essay of that name in A Sand County Almanac.

 

FYI if you want to build your puzzling skills: Brad and I do the Friday and Saturday* New York Times and Newsday crossword puzzles every weekend and there is no comparison—the Newsday puzzles, especially the "Saturday Stumper," are consistently more difficult, clever, and fun than the puzzles in the NYT, despite the latter's lofty reputation. The NYT does, however, have a good primer on how to solve crossword puzzles.

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*The other days' puzzles are not up to our skill level. 😎

 

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Kitchen tools, episode II

There's not much better than a finely crafted kitchen tool. The first time I saw my buddy Ed after the start of the pandemic, he gave me this little item he'd had stored away for me for a while:

 

It's basically a tiny, but very heavy, cast-iron mortar and pestle used for grinding up small quantities of herbs and spices, like peppercorns, coriander seeds, and the fennel seeds in Tofu Taco Bowls. This device works a lot better for this job because the bottom of the top piece (the metal piece on the right in the picture) is textured, so it grabs onto the spices and makes short work of them without having to hunt and peck like in a regular mortar and pestle.

My latest addition is the piece de resistance though. This Männkitchen Pepper Cannon was my Father's Day gift from the fam, led my Dylan, who rightly swears by this thing. Ed, who signed on for one of these when it was still being funded through a Kickstarter campaign, had already sent me the link not once but twice. So, I was very happy to see the fancy box the Pepper Cannon was packed in and knew immediately what it was.

It's worth heading over to the Männkitchen website to read the description for yourself, but this will give you the general idea: "The Pepper Cannon produces extravagant quantities of fresh ground pepper. Decrease the coarseness and crank less if you can’t handle the full power." Not only does this thing look a little like Darth Vader, it even talks like him!

 

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Fast food, episode X

I've been informed that the UaKS "fast food" episodes are such "grad school staples" that there's been a request for a tenth installment in the franchise. Ever happy to oblige my adoring fans, I went to Libby and borrowed a copy of America's Test Kitchen's The Best Simple Recipes, which is filled with over 200 recipes that can all (allegedly) be made in 30 minutes of less. Unfortunately, about 90% of the recipes have meat in them, which didn't make the book particularly useful for two of you.

 

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A new addition and an old favorite

I used to make these cinnamon buns for you all once in a while when you were little, but it's probably been at least a decade since I made them last. They popped into my head as something different to make when we were bringing breakfast over to Andi and Adam while we met Aubrey (so cute!) for the first time last weekend.

 

Just like when you all were babies, but with a lot more gray hair (me, not Aubrey)

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So funny I forgot to laugh

"So funny I forgot to laugh." I have no idea if that's an expression people even use anymore, but it was certainly big when I was a kid. It sprang to mind again on Father's Day.

 

Some of you wanted to get me something, so I picked out: (1) a spatula that has a better angle for flipping pancakes than what I currently have (and only came in a two-pack; stake your claim to the other), and (2) The Life, Carrie Fountain's new book of poetry (here's one I like about a student who pulls Derrida into every conversation). I opened the spatulas first, then wondered about the second, which was shaped like a box, not a thin volume of poetry. I had really been looking forward to starting on the poems right away, so I asked Mom, sounding kinda crestfallen, "Was the book out of stock?" Mom, to her discredit, kept a straight face and said nothing. I tore the wrapping off the box and saw this:

 

The old gag gift. Except that it was, thankfully, just a gag box with The Life tucked safely inside. This is apparently Cassie's idea of humor (I blame Mom's genes, not mine), as she has reused the box on several occasions, to great effect for her and Mom on this go-round. Good thing she still has months remaining for me to forget this incident before her birthday.

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Getcheroni

There was a funny little article by Roz Chast in the April 26 & May 3, 2021 issue of the New Yorker called "Fending." That is the term Chast and her husband use for when they make a meal by picking around the kitchen rather than cooking something or ordering out. (I think of avocado toast as one of the ultimate "fending" meals.) Chast got to wondering what other people call throwing a meal together on the fly like that, so she asked the question on Instagram and got more than 1,700 responses. Some of them were just weird, like fossick and schlunz, while others were pretty clever, like anarchy kitchen. There were several acronyms, one of which I like: YOYO (you're on your own). But my favorite term is probably getcheroni, for the obvious pasta association.

The problem with getcheroni night around here is Mom always wants a salad when we hunt and peck, and it always falls to yours truly to make the salad, so it's no longer really get-your-own-y. We had actually planned a getcheroni dinner last night to deal with a mounting leftover situation. But then Dylan texted me in the afternoon with a link to a recipe for "AMAZING" pumpkin bread. As it turns out, there's a great recipe for pumpkin muffins on UaKS but not one for pumpkin bread. So I couldn't resist, and baking that bread got added to making a salad on my list of no-longer-getcheroni night tasks.

 

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Fractal expressionism

Another one of the cool things I learned about reading The Nature Fix by Florence Williams is what the physicist and painter Richard Taylor has called "Fractal Expressionism." Taylor's term is a play on Abstract Expressionism, the post-World War II American art movement characterized by the use of abstraction, rather than traditional processes, "to convey strong emotional or expressive content." Abstract expressionists include Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, and Jackson Pollock. But Pollock alone makes up Taylor's category of Fractal Expressionism.

It took a physicist and painter to figure this out because "fractals" were discovered by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in the 1970s while looking at a new form of geometry to describe the patterns left behind by the chaotic processes that underlay how natural systems, such as the weather, change with time. As Taylor describes it, fractals "consist of patterns that recur on finer and finer magnifications, building up shapes of immense complexity." Mandelbrot showed that the visual complexity of many natural objects, such as clouds and tree limbs, results from fractal repetition. And many aspects of human physiology are also built on fractals. As Taylor explains in another article, "fractals are so prevalent both inside and outside our bodies that they've earned themselves the dramatic title of being the 'fingerprints of nature.'" Not surprisingly, then, people are drawn to fractals. In fact, fractals of a certain dimension of complexity (measured by a D value between 1 and 2) actually have a physiological effect on people, putting them at ease.

 

And this is where Jackson Pollock comes in. Incredibly, his method created paintings, like Blue Poles, with D values in the exact range preferred by observers. In other words, Taylor says, Pollock "painted nature's fractals twenty-five years ahead of their scientific discovery" by Mandelbrot.

So, can anyone drip paint onto canvas, like Cassie and Mom did years ago, and produce a fractal expressionist painting that exerts such a draw on people that they are willing to pay up to $140 million for a single painting?

 

Sorry, but no. Taylor explains that "fractals are not an inevitable consequence of pouring paint but are instead the product of Pollock's particular technique." Contrary to popular belief, Pollock actually had a unique method that involved much more than just splattering blobs of paint onto a canvas. Rather, Pollock "developed a cumulative painting process of returning to his canvas regularly, building layer upon layer of poured paint." This ended up being very similar to nature's processes, such as the Grand Canyon being carved over eons by the Colorado River. Pollock seemed to understand this instinctively, as two of his more famous quotes are that "[m]y concerns are with the rhythms of nature" and "I am nature." (No one says Pollock was self-effacing.) So the next time you're looking at a piece of modern art and some philistine says "my kid could do that," you know the truth.

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Boosting my food

Just in time for Saint Patrick's Day, I've returned to one of my obsessions and rethought brown soda bread a bit. It's been more than five years since I posted the recipe I finally settled on, after many tries, to make a simple bread for Brad and Cassie's lunches when I didn't have time to deal with the bread machine in addition to the rest of the weekend baking. At the time, I opted to skip the wheat germ that many recipes include to help mimic the nutty-textured wholemeal flour used in Irish brown soda bread in favor of two things I always have in my pantry: quick oats and flaxseed meal.

 

A trip to the ER

You know when you're watching a sporting event and those ads come on for Viagra or other ED drugs and they say to contact your doctor if you have an erection lasting more than 4 hours? Believe them!

 

When Mom went to the ER last week,[1] she could hear everything in the room next door, and what she heard was a 38-year-old dude suffering from Viagra-induced priapism [2] and hollering his head off. In the spirit of a trip to the DMV, here are the highlights of our ensuing text exchange [3]:

 

Mom                                                 Me

Guy just came in with priapism.

He in some serious pain. 

                                                       Seriously? Priapism? How does that                                                        happen?

Viagra?

Sounds like he is in labor.

                                                       Ouch! Can't he just beat off and have

                                                       an orgasm and then it'll go down?

Apparently not. Going to surgery.

                                                       Oh god, dick surgery! This is prime blog

                                                       material [4]

 

Good advertisement not to use

viagra. String of cussing coming

from next door.

 

                                                       Good thing I don't need it

                                                       [wink Memoji]

He says it's gonna pop

                                                       His dick? I thought he went to surgery

Not yet. I think he is going now.

Poor dude. That was some

serious pain

Mom was discharged soon after this last text, so we didn't get to hear how the story ended. But man, talk about learning your lesson the hard way. [5]

 

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[1] Maybe I should have led with this fact. She's fine now.

 

[2] The Mayo Clinic defines priapism as a "persistent erection [that] continues hours beyond or isn't caused by sexual stimulation." According to NBC News, the condition is "[n]amed for Priapus, the Greek god of fertility who sported an oversized, eternally-erect penis (so large, in fact, he used it to frighten away anyone who tried to plunder his gardens)." I bet that would work way better than a scarecrow! I wonder if our homeowners' association would let us put up a full-sized statute of Priapus to keep anyone or anything from plundering Mom's gardens?

 

[3] Due to COVID-19 restrictions, I was not allowed to go into the ER with Mom.

 

[4] Never say I didn't teach you to always keep your priorities straight. 

[5] Sorry, I couldn't help myself. 😈

 

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The capacity to give a shit

During our car trip to Georgia and back,* Brad and I listened to multiple episodes of The Happiness Lab with Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos, which is my second can’t-miss podcast after Poetry Unbound. We listened to almost all of the “bonus” episodes from early in the coronavirus lockdown. These included lots of good information that is useful even when you're not living through a pandemic.

For example, the episode on how to coach yourself through a crisis introduced the idea of "psychological distance." Ever wonder how you can be panicked about an issue, but Mom and I can discuss it with you much more rationally and help you problem-solve? That's because, in the end, it's not our decision to make, so we can brainstorm ideas without the emotional overlay. It turns out you can gain some psychological distance from your own problems just by thinking about them in the third person, like LeBron James famously did when making "The Decision" about what team to join in free agency in 2010 ("One thing I didn't want to do was make an emotional decision. And I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James and what LeBron James was going to do to make him happy."). Dr. Santos discussed this idea with Ethan Kross, a professor at the University of Michigan who co-authored a study finding that this kind of "third-person self-talk" is a relatively effortless way for people to "think about the self similar to how they think about others, which provides them with the psychological distance needed to facilitate self control." So the next time you're fretting over a problem, don't think, "What am I going to do?"; instead, try, "What is [Brad, Cassie, Dylan] going to do?" It sounds ridiculous, but there is good science behind it.

In another episode, Dr. Santos discussed some tips for keeping your relationship healthy during the pandemic with Eli Finkel, a professor of social psychology at Northwestern who studies romantic relationships. One idea really caught my attention because it involves, in essence, bringing the "principle of charity" into your relationship with your significant other. For Dr. Finkel, one option for dealing with what you perceive could be an unkind remark from your partner flows from Marcel Proust's observation that "Mystery is not about travelling to new places but about looking with new eyes." Dr. Finkel asks, "Can we look with new eyes when we think about our partner?" He discussed promising psychological research showing that we actually have a lot of power when interpreting our partner's statements. In particular, we get to determine whether they said something because they're disrespectful and don't appreciate us, or, alternatively, because they're overwhelmed and trying to do the best they can in difficult situations. Obviously, drawing the second conclusion has different, and much better, consequences for your relationship.

While the conversations we listened to all had useful information, by far the most entertaining was with Dan Harris, ABC newsman and author of one of my favorite books, 10% Happier. In answering Dr. Santos's question about loving-kindness meditation, Harris offered his definition of "love," which is "the capacity to give a shit" about others (and ourselves). This ability is deep-wired into all of us because people needed it to survive as part of a tribe when we were evolving on the savannahs. And we can tap into this innate capacity we all have to care about other people by doing loving-kindness meditation, which the research has shown promotes compassion and psychological well-being. Like addressing yourself in the third person, it sounds like some new-age nonsense, of which Harris himself was at first skeptical, but he is now an enthusiastic proponent. In the words of a meditation teacher he quoted, "if you can't do cheesy, you can't be free."

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*It wasn’t the main purpose of our trip, but I did say a quiet “Thank you” to Georgia as we crossed the border from South Carolina.

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Punk rockin' with "Die Hard"

In one of Cassie's internship interviews, she was asked to improvise on "The Wheels of the Bus" in the style of punk rock. How bizarre is that?! Cassie was flabbergasted because she didn't even know what punk rock is, so apparently I neglected to educate her in the music of those great Queens punk rockers the Ramones. It’s never too late to discharge your parental obligations, I say. So here is your 4:27 introduction to punk rock—with the greatest bridge ever—courtesy of Guyz Nite and Die Hard:

 

 

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