Standing out, no fault of his own

We’ve got an albino squirrel that lives in our backyard (or nearby, at least). I don’t see him too often, but every once in a while when I go out on the balcony for a smoke there he is, pigmentless fur and red eyes. He bounds around the yard, climbs the trees, gets into the garbage cans like the other squirrels. However, there are two significant differences:

1. He is always alone.
2. He is FAT.

I don’t know much about the social habits of squirrels, but in the springtime they seem to frolick in pairs, running around taunting each other with discarded food scraps, or chasing each other through the trees.

But not this guy. If he’s around, no other squirrels are there. Which is, I assume, why he’s so fat, as he’s not squabbling over food.

Are the squirrels scared of him because he looks different? Do they revere him? Do they not engage him in their squirrel games? Or is his isolation self-imposed, conscious of his differences, probably taunted as a wee one, so sticks to himself as a means of protection, and in turn has created the fear by his own actions?

I looked up stuff about albinos in literature to see if there was much justification for my working theory about squirrel.

Silas in The DaVinci Code. Solitary villain who brings about his own downfall, not unlike John Locke, by trusting in the one institution that reaches out to him.

Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingird. The feared recluse who is just misunderstood and becomes the hero.

Moby Dick.

The list goes on.

I’m fascinated by the way that people (and other creatures) either capitalize, or allow themselves to be hindered, by the ideas or traits or whatever that separates them from the crowd. Do we choose to gravitate towards those who have the same differences as ourselves (and therefore are “the same”), or do we just not care? And what do we use as our defining “difference” in our vocabulary (because we all in our own way have a multitude to pick from)?

The albino squirrel can’t be anything but albino. I suppose he could roll in the mud, but what would he do in the winter? Or the desert (do they have squirrels in deserts)? Besides, he’d still have red eyes.

And does the fact that he can’t hide it make it easier or harder for him? Or does he not know, because it’s just the way he is?

So where is this ramble going? I want to know about your inner albino squirrel. A story about the time you realized there wasn’t something about you that was unique. And what you did with that. Did you hide it? Did you put it out there for everyone to see? Do you now surround yourself with people who share that uniqueness?

So, there’s today’s challenge. Have fun.

Hmm

So, I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a podcast. I’m looking for a way to reach audiences that’s greater than a blog, something that’s entertaining, and keeps me writing. All those, coupled with City Pages’ recent description of me as possessing a “polished, radio-style delivery” makes me think this might be a really cool and fun thing.

So…what kind of things would you like to hear? I’m thinking it’ll probably be a mix of NPR’s Fresh Air and Cast-On.

But, since you’ll be listening, your ideas are welcome and awesome.

Cupcakes for St. Patrick’s Day

All right, I’ve been tantalizing people with this recipe, so here it is. I made a couple changes to it, so those are noted as well.

Guinness, Jameson, and Bailey’s Chocolate Cupcakes
Found on sassy radish!

For the Cupcakes
1 cup Guinness
2 sticks unsalted butter
3/4 c. unsweetened cocoa powder I used Hershey’s Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
2 c. All-purpose flower
2 c. sugar
1 and 1/2 tsp. baking soda
3/4 tsp. salt
2 large eggs
2/3 c. sour cream

For the Ganache Filling
8 oz. bittersweet chocolate I used Ghiradelli 70% cocoa bittersweet chocolate bars
2/3 c. heavy cream
2 Tbs. room temperature butter
1 to 2 tsp. Irish whiskey I kind of misread that step, and used 2 Tbsp whiskey. But it was good

For the Frosting
3 to 4 c. confections sugar I only used 1 and 1/2 c. powdered sugar–it seemed like it was getting sweet
1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
3 to 4 Tbsp. Baileys I used 3 Tbsp. Baileys with Caramel

Make the cupcakes:
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 24 cupcake cups with liners. Bring 1 cup stout and 1 cup butter to simmer in heavy large saucepan over medium heat. Add cocoa powder and whisk until mixture is smooth. Cool slightly.

Whisk flour, sugar, baking soda, and 3/4 teaspoon salt in large bowl to blend. Using electric mixer, beat eggs and sour cream in another large bowl to blend. Add stout-chocolate mixture to egg mixture and beat just to combine. Add flour mixture and beat briefly on slow speed. Using rubber spatula, fold batter until completely combined. Divide batter among cupcake liners, filling them 2/3 to 3/4 of the way. Bake cake until tester inserted into center comes out clean, rotating them once front to back if your oven bakes unevenly, about 17 minutes. Cool cupcakes on a rack completely.

Make the filling:
Chop the chocolate and transfer it to a heatproof bowl. Heat the cream until simmering and pour it over the chocolate. Let it sit for one minute and then stir until smooth. (If this has not sufficiently melted the chocolate, you can return it to a double-boiler to gently melt what remains. 20 seconds in the microwave, watching carefully, will also work.) Add the butter and whiskey (if you’re using it) and stir until combined.

Fill the cupcakes:
Let the ganache cool until thick but still soft enough to be piped (the fridge will speed this along but you must stir it every 10 minutes). Meanwhile, using your 1-inch round cookie cutter or an apple corer, cut the centers out of the cooled cupcakes. You want to go most of the way down the cupcake but not cut through the bottom — aim for 2/3 of the way and circle it around until it comes out with the cake part inside. A slim spoon or grapefruit knife will help you get the center out. Keep those to snack on – I did! Put the ganache into a piping bag with a wide tip and fill the holes in each cupcake to the top. (It helps to slightly chill the ganache after you put it inside the piping bag – that way you can control how much you squeeze out.)

Make the frosting:
Whip the butter in the bowl of an electric mixer, or with a hand mixer, for several minutes. You want to get it very light and fluffy. Slowly add the powdered sugar, a few tablespoons at a time. By adding the sugar slowly, you get a smoother, less chalky taste to your frosting.

When the frosting looks thick enough to spread, drizzle in the Baileys (or milk) and whip it until combined. If this has made the frosting too thin (it shouldn’t, but just in case) beat in another spoonful or two of powdered sugar.

Ice and decorate the cupcakes. the pictures on this site are the ones I made. As you can see, we only did one round of stars, and then I dusted with more of the unsweetened cocoa powder

ENJOY!

Oddities next door

I’m not sure how I feel about the house next to ours. Don’t get me wrong–I love where I live. The quiet two block street next to the made up Bible college that no one never knows about. A little hidden spot in Downtown Minneapolis.

And, as those little hidden spots tend to be, there are some shady figures around, mainly in the house next to ours.

A few months ago, there were a few fights that sounded like they were turning violent emanating through the wall and into my cracked window. I felt scared. I called Amy at work, and she filed a police report on it and had someone check it out.
Apparently the house had been checked out in the past for inoperable cars on their property and on the street, but nothing else.
There was another day there was a funny smell coming out of their basement, and they kept saying watch it, don’t let it burn!
Meth?
I called that time to report it.

There was no action around there, until a couple days ago. I was coming home from work, went around front to get the mail and came around the side of the house to find someone had pulled a plastic chair up to a window, and was currently entering the house through the window, but was having some trouble with his fat ass. I didn’t know what he was doing, nor did I really want to attract attention to the fact that I was about five feet behind him.

Right now, in their backyard, are four old cars, two guys with hoods completley covering their faces (granted, it is cold), and they look like they’re removing parts from one of the cars, adding stuff, and placing them in another car. At 11pm in the pitch dark (or as pitch black as it gets in a city).

Part of me thinks I should be calling the cops. Another parts of me thinks that I’m from Minnetonka and shouldn’t judge. Maybe these cars need to be worked on, and they’ve been out working all day so now it’s time to be mechanics.

Then Amy noticed one of them had a blow torch.

Chop shop?

I pulled my eyes away from the two hooded men and got my bearings on my vantage point, the second floor balcony on the side of our house. Right across, no more than ten feet from me, is a window into their house. Usually at night all I see is the reflection of the tree that stands between. But tonight their light was on, and I saw a crib. A simple, wooden crib with a pink ribbon tied in one of the rails, and nothing else in the room. No signs of joy for a small life. A wooden crib and industrial cream walls.

I don’t want to keep that baby in danger by not calling. But if my spidey-sense is off, I don’t want to put that baby in danger because I am admittedly elitist.”

I’m going to think about that empty crib room for a long time.

Breaking News

It’s official: Allegra will be in the 2009 Minnesota Fringe.

Updates will follow.

Worth a watch

“Fidelity”: Don’t Divorce… from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

The ghetto-ization of the gay community, part I

Read this.

I was on the cruise ship with this family when this happened.  What the article neglects to mention is that is was a gay family cruise–so the shock of going from such a gay-friendly environment to the attitudes they encountered at the hospital was just that much more atrocious. Please read, and my thought on the ghetto-ization without federal civial union / marriage laws for the gay community coming tomorrow.

The lost letters

I was at the bar last week with the Mamba and she was telling me that she had sent a package to someone and, as you normally do, enclosed a note / letter in there.  But she was concerned, because it had been a few weeks since she’d heard from the package’s recipient, and she was wondering if putting a letter in had been “too much”.  Up until this point, they’d been having semi-regular email conversations, past the formalities of “how are you” and “check out this video on YouTube!”

I’ve been thinking a lot about communication in our digital age, and there are elements to it that downright scare me.  It started a month or so ago when I was finally getting around to going through a few boxes of old things from high school and college that my parents had brought over to get it out of there house.

Throwing things away is incredibly difficult for me.  Maybe it’s because my primary source material for my writing is myself.  Maybe it’s because my memory isn’t reliable.  Maybe it’s because it feels like I’m erasing my past and discrediting my experiences by designating them to the trash.

I threw out nearly all the cassette tapes.  Bye bye, all the Kenny G tapes people gave me when I first started playing sax.  And “Some People’s Lives”, the Bette MIdler album I used to listen to constantly.  A sundry of others in various states of actual playability.

But I kept any recordings of me playing, and also some mix tapes.  I didn’t care about the songs themselves, but the cover work that someone spent a really long time making.

These were the days before photoshop was readily available in college dormrooms.

Notebooks that were actual class notes went away, but I had to go through each one to make sure there weren’t nuggets of memory and wisdom I wanted to keep.

Every card, from everyone, regardless of the state of closeness they are now, were kept in a box.

However.

There were quite a few printouts of emails that went right to the trash with nothing more than a perfunctory glance at its contents before putting in the toss pile.

I whittled down two bags and three boxes to half a box to keep, most of which were blank notebooks and 3 ring binders (still my preferred method of organization and tools of my trade).  And of course, all the handwritten cards.

I then looked again at everything, and realize I had just eradicated all but two or three items of communication from a significant period in my life, and that really hit me.

Now, those who don’t feel the need to hold on to things in the first place wouldn’t understand this.

But it was horrid.

There are definite positives to the digitial age on the Web 2.0 platform, where users control a vast amount of the information that is put online for others.  It’s immediate.  But it confines us to an impersonal screen and keyboard to communicate with everyone.  And when limited to 12-point Times Roman font (or plain text, god forbid) for all personal communication, limited to 140 characters on a Facebook Status Update or on Twitter, or 160 characters on a text message, how much can you convey?  Can there be nuance in pixilating conversation?

I want to have things to leave for my (hypothetical but hoped for) children to find, like I witnessed when I went through my Grandfather’s stuff.  Letters from girlfriends before he met my Grandma.  Letters between the two of them during WWII.  His report cards and spelling awards.

What do I have to leave now?  Birthday cards, a few letters between friends, and a slough of email addresses and logins / passwords to Facebook and Myspace.

There is a definite isolation from reality when one communicates and forms relationships primarily through the aid of technology.  Be it Facebook, or message boards, or (if you’ve taken that next step) email.

I understand the draw (lord knows I’m drawn to my laptop for the good chunk of my day).  I can get the answers I want quickly, reach the people I want as well.  And I’ve been able to reconnect with so many others who I’ve fallen out of favor contact with throughout my life.

It seems as though if you are relyinig soley upon digital socialization, there is a trap in which you can protray yourself to be whomever you want.  I don’t mean posing as another person, but if people know me through my Facebook status, reading this, twitter…

I think you’d probably walk away with an impression that I’m a tough-minded, stubborn, possibly schizophrenic genius who desperately clings to the tethers of reality which keep taunting me, just out of reach.

If you met me, you’d probably think I’m a weak-minded, pushover, schizophrenic genius who has no hope of reaching the tethers of reality.

Or something like that.

How can we combat this?

I don’t think it is a sin to be on Facebook.  It’s becoming not only a social networking site but also an invaluable marketing tool, especially in this depression (can we finally stop calling it a recession?  I think we’re way past that point).  But we have a false idea that because we are in contact with so many people just by the click of a button (as of right now I’ve got access to 452), we are close to those people because we know what goes on in their lives.  Somes several times a day (like me).

Amy and I follow nearly all the same people on Twitter.  Our mobiles ring in unison, alerting us when a new tweet has arrived.  Every once in awhile (and it’s diminishing) one of our text notifications will ring and we’ll realize it wasn’t to both, which means it probably wasn’t twitter which means…wait, an actual message to one of us that wasn’t also available to scores of people?

A loss of intimacy in technology, for sure.

I miss the art of letter writing.  The act of sitting down with a blank sheet of paper, scribbling out an update, the things on our minds that day, something funny, continuations of previous conversations.  That one blank page turns to two, or three, or (I think my record once) nine.  There is the act of placing it in an envelope, finding stams, and delivering it to someplace where the mailman will pick it up and send it off into the ether of the postal service, tubes with material that hasn’t been compressed into strings of electronic currents, and will end up in the recipients’ mailbox.

It might take a day or two, maybe four or five depending on where the letter is headed.

Yes it takes longer, but to me it means more than typing a few words and clicking “send”.

Am I alone in bemoaning the loss of letters?

If knitting and other handcrafts have made a resurgence in the recent years, letter writing has to be next.

So I’m starting a challenge.

Allegra Lingo

1605 Elliot Ave

Minneapolis MN 55404

Write me a letter.  I don’t care if this is Amy in the next room reading this, one of my good friends who I talk to all the time, or someone who reads this blog for who knows what reason.

Send me a letter.

And I will send you one.

And we’ll see what happens.  How the conversations are dictated by the medium upon which they were created.

Who’s gonna take me up on my challenge?

We just can’t lose the letters for any longer.

Yowza

This just landed in my inbox

and I found it a bit scary.