Past Obsessions

SUMMER 2007

Fudge

I really, really want chocolate fudge.

When I was a kid, I made chocolate fudge every Saturday night and chowed through the pan with my siblings while watching an old movie. Hitchcock, Clark Gable, MGM musicals - chocolate fudge brings 'em all back, and vice versa. My best friend and I used to have fudge bake-offs, which he always won because he used that cheater no-fail recipe with the marshmallow whip that tastes freakin' amazing no matter how many phone calls you take while you're making it, not that you'd miss many if you didn't them them because it takes about five minutes to do.

I, being a fudge snob, would not stoop so low as to take such an easy, delicious route. I had a vast collection of fudge recipes. It wasn't just, Should we make fudge tonight? It was, Should we make Nana's maple fudge, or that chocolate one with the baking squares? What - we're out of baking squares? MOM! Stop forgetting baking squares when you're getting groceries! Okay, okay, we'll do the one that uses cocoa.

Every time we used the same heavy-bottomed pot and the same wooden spoon that the glossy dark syrup streamed down from whenever we took a break from beating to see if it was finally done. Beating fudge, ugh. I get tired just thinking about it. And eventually, when we were fed up and/or the movie had definitely started, we'd pour the syrup into a buttered pan for presentation purposes and then spoon it into our mouths. Sometimes we'd get it right and the fudge would thicken, but never when I was doing a fudge bake-off.

Eventually I found my dream recipe, noted merely on the scrap of the newspaper it came from as "Sour Cream Fudge." It was equal parts tangy, creamy, and chocolatey. I adored it. I made it so much I memorized it... and once I didn't need the recipe any more, I lost it. And then I stopped making it for some reason, possibly because I had moved to England and some of the ingredients weren't available there? And I've never been able to make it again.

All of which is to say that THERE IS NO CHOCOLATE IN MY HOUSE. Fudge.

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AUTUMN 2006

The Things You Learn...

The elliptical trainer at the gym I visit whenever there's something more pressing to do has a couple of neat features. One is a headphone jack so that you can listen to any one of five different TV shows being aired on overhead screens. (If like me you have the attention span of a gnat, you can even listen to one show while reading captions for the other four, or listen to a stream of comparatively pumped-up music while reading all five, if you can count The Bee Gees as pumped up in these post-disco days we're all dragging ourselves through.) The other is some sort of trigger that makes the sound stop coming out of the jack if you stop moving, for example to fall off said trainer to gasp for air on the floor.

It's amazing how many more calories you can burn just trying to hear Nick Lachey's voice long enough to find out what all the fuss is about.

The distractions of sound and pop star images and captions aren't enough to keep me moving any more, unfortunately. Lately, I've had to grab a couple of magazines as backup, to keep from noticing that my legs really aren't meant to do what they're doing and would be much happier tucked up on a convenient sofa. That's how I found myself this evening reading an article by a writer who used up a couple of perfectly good pages moaning on about the fact that her book has been branded 'chick lit', which she finds insulting, and not just because she thought she was writing literary fiction.

Whether or not she is right about her book being literary is not something on which I can comment, since I couldn't get past the first paragraph and, in spite of possessing a vivid memory for things I've read over the years, can't muster even the vaguest clue what it was about. Come to think of it, that does put her work in the same league as quite a few other 'literary' writers whose books I have attempted to read, so maybe she is right.

What interested me about the article was that I did not know Chick Lit is a derogatory term. Seriously! It's got 'lit' in it, doesn't it? And I don't know about anybody else, but I use the word 'chick' in a girl-power kind of way when I'm not referring to barnyard populations, which is something I do a lot of these days. Here's this poor girl lamenting the fact that the product of her years of hard labour have been tarnished by a genre tag, and here I am, trying not to think about the fact that my lungs are exploding and wondering if a book that falls into a category that even has a shot at the NYT bestseller list when not penned by, say, Janet Evanovich really counts as genre.

She even played the gender card, noting that books written by men for men don't get similarly labelled. Well, they did in my family, dear. My dad, who read a new one every day, called them Shoot-Em-Ups, and my brother, who was once kicked out of class (at university in communist China) for reading one instead of taking notes, dubbed them Junk Novels.

Hey. If it entertains, and it sells like hotcakes, and it's actually well written without any glaring holes in the plot or off-putting affectations, who cares if it's literary or not? Yeah, I know who. And it's not the girl who sweated off 350 calories just thinking about it.

Covers and the Judging Of Them

I don't know if you've come across the octopus-like marketing phenomenon known as Thomas the Tank Engine, but once you're exposed to it you find out that it is insidious and all-pervasive and hugely expensive and impossible to block out. Though, actually, you might be tempted to be selective about doing that because Alec Baldwin voices some of the shows and actually appeared in the great stinker of a full-length Thomas movie back when he was still pretty cute.

Mr. Baldwin aside, it's not just the shows and the really expensive toys and the vast video library and of course the books that started it all: it's the songs. The really terrible songs parroted out by a choir of British children, bending words until their natural pronunciation snaps in two, so they'll rhyme with the ones at the end of the next line. Once you've heard them a few times it's weeks before you can get them out of your head.

Fortunately, one of them prompted this journal entry, repeating as it does over and over again that you mustn't judge a book by its cover.

Okay, fair enough. I was taught them same when I was a child.

Still, do we have to perpetuate such an inaccurate phrase to the next generation? 'Don't judge somebody by the image you perceive them to be presenting to the world' might be a mouthful, but at least it but it's kinder to graphic designers who work for publishing houses. These poor people toil away in their jobs day and night, with killer workloads leading up to the two key selling seasons every year, under enormous pressure to come up with covers that will please editorial executives, sales teams, and booksellers - to say nothing of authors who want their mothers to have something nice to show off to their craft group, or readers and their gift-giving friends who one hopes will judge the book by its cover and buy the darn thing.

So be proud when you let the cover of a book entice you to pick it up off the table, and even if its first paragraph is so forgettable or purple or otherwise awful that you put it straight back down again, be sure to spare a complimentary thought for the cover artist and the designer who hired her. Or him, of course.

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SPRING 2006

What's in a Name?

I came in from a walk yesterday with a red nose, so I guess it's not just March, but winter at last - time to stop putting off writing in my winter journal!

Appropriate really since lately I've been obsessing about names. Not so much about winters that aren't wintery as Mary Keenans who aren't me. There are a lot of us around, I know. And why not? Two pretty common names… though Mary, as my doctor once told me when I looked around the crowded waiting room to be sure I was the Mary he was calling in, stopped being popular around a hundred and eighty six years ago, shortly after I was born.

Ever since I got this website I've been meeting other Marys. There's a real estate agent, for one. And a district attorney in Boulder, Colorado, for whom I feel a particular sympathy, having redirected to her many a generous person who wrote offering me support in my upcoming election. She recently changed her name. Married? Divorced? Either way I hope she's doing great. There's even another writer who lives in the same city I do, but we don't write the same kind of thing and, though I won't say which, one of us is sufficiently younger than the other that nobody would mix us up if we ever had side by side booksignings.

No, what's got me down is the e-mail I got recently from a guy who knew me way back when. He didn't give his name but he knew what I'd been doing the past few years so I figured that all the learning-new-stuff-to-ward-off-memory-loss I've been doing has not been paying off, since I didn't have a clue who he was. Apparently I even look exactly the same as I used to.

Which, as it turns out, means that there is another Mary Keenan out there who not only has been living a life much like mine, she looks just like me too. I mean, what's the point of being me if there's somebody else already doing the job?

Unless she can't eat the entire world's supply of Mary Keenan-designated chocolate by herself. That's something I can definitely help out with.

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AUTUMN 2005

Achievements in Procrastination

Vinegar and baking soda are my new best friends. Really! What writer trying to justify not writing wouldn't love a household staple that removes hard water deposits from the no-man's-land that bridges the bathroom taps and sink? Or, in the case of baking soda, cleans said sink? I put the vinegar in a spray bottle to make it more fun and got a little trigger happy, so all my windows and mirrors are clean again now, too.

H'mmm. Clean House = Cry for Help?

Ha! More writing! I've been so productive I didn't even notice it is still steamy hot in October. Ha.

Use It or Lose It

Using your brain a lot is supposed to help protect you from dementia when you're older, so I'm making a point of trying to learn new things. This decision not only increases the likelihood of my becoming an interesting and well-rounded person, but provides me with a long To Do list and consequently increased opportunities to procrastinate. Instead of just Not Writing, I can be Not Learning Bridge and Not Tap Dancing.

The thing I am trying to learn right now is how to read A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow. This is the kind of book that really puts you in your place.

Let's take a closer look. On one side of the armchair, we have a nice hardcover volume. As the title suggests, it's designed to be easy to understand (or easier to understand than the original, at least), and it's got lots of pictures in it. It's slim and comfortable to hold. On the other side of the armchair, frowning and squinting, we have me: university educated, an obsessive reader, a reasonably intelligent person not quite reasonably well rested, curled up in an idyllic pool of lamplight. Yet there I am, rereading every paragraph at least three times before I can safely move on to the next. Two days after giving up the attempt, I've forgotten everything I managed to grasp before, and now I have to start all over again.

It's enough to make a girl want to sit down and write. Or at least move on to learning the piano.

Baubles, Bangles, and Beads

Whoever invented bracelets has my undying gratitude. Bracelets are perfect for the procrastinating writer. You can never have too many; one size really does fit all; they come in many fabulous sizes and colours and materials; they never go out of style; they identify the person you feel like projecting today. And most importantly, a bracelet gives you something to look at when your hands are poised unproductively on the keyboard. I'd like to see a pair of diamond earrings or glittery necklace do that.

Okay, okay, rings do the job too. Maybe I will obsess about rings when I have more bracelets than I have pairs of shoes. Which reminds me, I need more shoes.

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SUMMER 2005

Perplexity, thy name is Mary

August's Vogue spotlights Americans who wear their cosmetic surgery bruises with pride… but decline to give their real names for publication. I don't get it. But then, I don't get elective cosmetic surgery--at least, not when it's done to restore your youthful looks, because it doesn't. Somebody else's youthful looks maybe, but never your own.

Hollywood types who get lifts and tucks and facial implants prove my theory. They're under the most pressure to do it because their face is their fortune, and that very fortune implies they can get the best there is. So if cosmetic surgery is so great, how come a lot of them still end up looking more like their Madame Tussaud's counterpart than the person they were ten years ago? If they continue to resemble themselves at all. I mean, if those guys can't get it right, is an eye thingy going to make anybody else look eighteen again?

All of which leads to one of my favourite procrasinatory websites: awfulplasticsurgery.com. Visits here have answered many of my most pressing questions, like, why does Paris Hilton look like her face is sliding off? even as it raises new ones, like, if you're going to get breast implants and then pretend you just blossomed, why let your stylist talk you into tops that reveal your surgery scars?

I have been writing. Ha! Nothing like accepting your inner procrastinator to make you outwardly productive.

Fashion trudges onward

You know it's summer when girls are wearing next to nothing and guys don't care. This is especially noticeable on public transit. The unsexy smell of Limp and Clammy seems to circulate through the air conditioning system, and if it's crowded and you have to touch a neighbouring rider's arm, you get the added allure of Damp as your respective skin sticks together. Ew. No wonder I never see anybody staring lustfully at a curvy girl's cropped cami anymore.

Heatwaves tempt people to dropkick fashionable dressing off a cliff, but that will be particularly true next year if the rumours are right and modest dress makes a comeback for the fall.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I mean, the time we girls will lose pulling a pants zipper higher than the currently popular one inch! Not to mention yanking a shirt over our heads and then having to tuck it neatly over our tummies. No, wait, modest dress implies 'not fitted.' So maybe pants will just haul up over our waists and hang there, and tops will fall down loosely over our hips. Ohhh, and dresses that are really bags with holes for heads and arms! Maybe even made out of a flocked sort of burlap material to really emphasize how chaste we are!

Of course it depends on whether the designers who rule our lives decide to ease us into 'modest', putting us into bags around 2008, or whether they've all bought fully equipped yachts and need us to replenish their bank accounts by buying entirely new wardrobes right away. It's all so exciting - I can't wait to find out!

Don't leave the grocery store without one

I am a tabloid junkie. What writer wouldn't be? Those tabloid reporters are amazing! They know their market, and they're so creative, they can put together a whole page on somebody walking out of a restaurant with a friend. Two pages if he or she leaps to the aid of some non-celebrity who's broken the heel off a shoe.

It fascinates me that there are enough people interested in a celebrity's clothes, makeup, lovers, personal crises, and home decor to justify all the different publications available to the average grocery shopper.

What is the appeal, exactly? I mean, sure, we were all heartbroken about Brad and Jen, but eventually you move on and stop needing minute-by-minute updates on her sexy new makeover plans and his denial that he and Angie hooked up. Besides, big news like that doesn't break every week. What keeps people coming back for more? Who decides which celebrities are worth covering? Nobody's asking me, or we'd see a lot more pictures of Luke Wilson stuffing his previously pristine dry cleaning into the back seat of his car.

Sometimes I think it's a comfort thing, a you're-not-really-so-old thing. Tabloids let us a peek back to the emotional intensity of high school, except this time you're allowed to make fun of the popular kids instead of the other way around. Or maybe it's the soap opera effect. Some of these people have incredibly eventful lives, and you can't wait to see what happens next.

Whatever it is, I feel for the actors who can't get out of the spotlight for so much as a cup of coffee. But like Tony Curtis says in the June issue of Vanity Fair (don't miss this exciting opportunity to see an 80 year old man wearing nothing but a pair of terriers!), "in my profession, you sell your freedom." And he's been around long enough to know.

Daily Bread

I've been baking my own bread lately, and I don't mean with a bread maker, either. Bread makers are designed for people who don't procrastinate.

The recipe I use is easy and takes just long enough to prevent you from accomplishing other useful tasks like cleaning the bathroom or washing the kitchen floor. It's not so time consuming as to interfere with going out shopping or to hear a lecture or concert. You don't have to knead it, and even if you stick it in the refrigerator to slow it down it'll pop out from under its plastic wrap in just a few hours. You can freeze it and use it for bread, rolls, or pizza crust. It's even got some whole wheat flour in it. Really, the only downside is that it's so yummy you have to make a new loaf every day or put up with bland store-bought bread.

Take that, Atkins. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the week I didn't have time to make any was the same week I lost two pounds.

What I'd give for a good old fashioned liberal media conspiracy...

A while ago I read two of three New Yorker articles about the state of the environment, and if there's anything worth going into denial about, it's that. I only read the second part because that wily Elizabeth Kolbert lured me in with an enthralling account of the ancient city of Akkad. Almost everybody who writes for The New Yorker is unbelievably gifted, which would be an excellent thing to go into denial about while in denial about the environment.

Since then I've been compulsively reducing my energy use on the off chance I can buy the planet a few extra days for my great-grandchildren to spend at the beach, and marvelling at how much human beings want not to see ugly stuff. Not counting 'Survivor' and to a lesser extent 'CSI', which are at least ugly stuff not happening to us personally. Weeks and weeks went by and not a single Letter to the Editor in subsequent New Yorkers disputing Kolbert's work! Usually at least one reader knows more than the writer and feels strongly enough about it to say so. This time, when I was really sweating, I didn't even see somebody complaining that global warming is a fiction created by the liberal media. Seemed like everybody but me was able to float peacefully in a shimmering pool of Everything Sure Is Great!

I'm all right now though. The debut fiction issue features three whole letters on Kolbert's articles, two of which point out perkier aspects she missed covering (rich people in the right countries will probably be okay; global cooling might be possible in time to help with all but our carbon dioxide problems.) Thank you, New Yorker! Maybe now I can enjoy this nice hot summer.

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