Cake = delicious

I have recently crafted the most delicious and perfect carrot cake ever. Good recipes are hard to find, and usually take 2 or 3 tries to get right, so I'm going to immortalize this one on the intarweb, here and now, for anyone to use.

Carrot Cake of Joy

Ingredients

Cake:

4 eggs
3/4 cups vegetable oil
½ cup Apple Sauce
1 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
3 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
3 cups grated carrots (using large/cheese side of grater)
3/4 cup chopped pecans (optional)
8 oz can of pineapple, drained (optional)
Shredded coconut to taste (optional)

Frosting:

1/2 cup butter, softened
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
3.5 cups confectioners' sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour the pan(s) of your choice. This could be a 9 X 13, or two 9 inch pans, square or circular.

2. In a large bowl, beat together eggs, oil, apple sauce, sugar and vanilla. Mix in flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, nutmeg and cinnamon. Stir in carrots. Stir in pecans and other fruit (if desired). Pour into prepared pan.

3. Bake in the preheated oven for 40 to 50 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. Let cool in pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack and cool completely.

To Make Frosting: In a medium bowl, combine butter, cream cheese, confectioners' sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Beat until the mixture is smooth and creamy. Frost the cooled cake.

If making a two layer carrot cake, you can fill the layers with some of the cream cheese frosting, or with a flavored whipped cream. I prefer the whipped cream approach since the frosting is so rich, and having a layer of cream ties everything together without being too sweet and overwhelming. For the whipped cream, whip 6 ounces of heavy (whipping) cream with 1 TSP vanilla and 2 TBSP confectioner's sugar. This can be flavored with extracts, liquers, jam, or juice, depending on what taste you want. For instance, if you used pineapple you might want to add a few TBSP of pineapple juice. If you used coconut, use some coconut milk or extract.

This recipe is fairly easy, except for the grating of the carrots, which is tedious. I reccomend getting a minion to do carrot duty.

Handy tip: If you're out of vanilla, you can use maple (pancake) syrup. Yes! Yes you can! This goes for all recipes, not just this one. I can't tell the difference when substituting syrup for extract.

They make springform SQUARE pans, which are easier to use and better crafted than their circular brethren!

From the Annals of the Unemployed

Indeed, I am still of the unemployed variety, although I doubt it will last very long. I have an offer I'm tempted to take, so things should get at least monetarily better shortly.

After my unexpected cessation of employment, I spent several days understandably upset. On the 14th, my boyfriend flew me down to the Cayman Islands to join him on a Caribbean vacation. It was extremely romantic, and warm and sunny and awesome, and very good for me. On our last day there, we were having lunch at the bar/restaraunt at the resort we stayed in. The bar/restaraunt was on a little dock out in the water, which was cute because you could sit and eat and watch the fish and the water. We were all kind of sluggish, reluctant to leave, and we were just sort of zoning out waiting for the food. I noticed a boat out on the water, a boat that seemed very old and seemed to be sinking. The back end was so low in the water I thought it was submerged, and I pointed it out to my companions. We were alarmed, but there was a motor boat headed towards the distressed vessel and we watched as it pulled up beside it, and then returned to the dock. Obviously the boat wasn't in any drastic distress or the motor boat would have helped. We watched, bemused, as the overladen boat came closer and closer to the dock.

The boat had a blue hull, and a makeshift mast that was little more than just sticks tied together. As it came closer, I said "That looks like Cuban refugees", making this ignorant observation off of pictures in magazines like National Geographic. I was joking, I thought, because surely that couldn't actually be the case.

However, it was the case. The tiny, decrepit boat pulled up to the dock, where an official met them and kept them from setting foot on Cayman territory. The boat was very close to us, and I have never felt so filthy as I did there, sitting in an over-priced, unnecessary resort bar, eating over-priced gluttonous portions of food, while just yards away a boat full of destitute, starving, abused people are trying to win some sort of life back. It was humbling and horrifying, to say the least. I wanted to walk over there, give them my food, tell them how sorry I am, and then get in the boat with them. I wanted to apologize to them that America isn't the bountiful, beautiful, wonderful place that it's talked up to be. That they'll face persecution, hatred, prejudice, exploitation, and violence if they make it to American soil. And I wanted to cry to think that they came from something so much worse, that America looked good to them.

The people at the resort gave them sacks of food, new full jugs of water, and escorted them back into the ocean. They were headed to Mexico, where they would work themselves up the Mexican coast and then somehow into America. There were 12 people in a boat that was smaller than my living room in this tiny apartment. I hope that they find a better place and that they get to where they want to be, wherever it is.

I have a lot of opinions on this, especially since I have been homeless and destitute before. America sustained me, but a lot of the time it seems like it is only a living death I live here. There is so little life here, so little vibrance. I am not going to put any of my opinions on immigration here, because it is not theory that should decide this issue. It should be the dirt and blood and tears of reality that force a decision, a compromise, a solution.

Put yourself there, in a barstool in a resort restaraunt, surrounded by enormous wealth, so close to people stuck in a decrepit boat, starving. What could you say to them? How would you handle it?

On the Art of Dehumanization

I was "laid off" at my job on Friday. I have since been in varying states of depression, rage, and shock.

I am a survivor. The life I've led has beaten it into me, over and over. If I were not a survivor, I would have been washed away ages ago. There's an instinct in me to fight back, to not take "no" for an answer, and to stand up for myself. This instinct is heightened, strengthened, by the need to survive. If you don't fight back, you will fail, and sometimes failure means something as terrible and as real as death. And so when I say I am a survivor, I want you to understand that every fiber of my being screams at me to fight back when someone treats me like I am less than human. For ~36 hours now I have been feeling this, deep inside me, in every crevice of my heart and soul, to stand up, to lash out at the people who did this to me, to reassert to them and to everyone that I am a person, and that I deserve the right to live and breathe and function the same as everyone else on this earth.

In a company of 11 employees, they laid off 6 of us. They herded us into a room like cattle, told us we were no longer employed, and that we had to leave that day and never return. None of us knew anything about it. We were rejected even the privacy of our own grief, of our own suffering, forced to share it with 5 other human beings. In the span of a few minutes, layers upon layer of basic human decency was stripped away. We were reduced to objects, we were beaten with words, and we were defeated with a packet of papers and sent off to start over with nothing.

Out of all of this, there is one simple thought that repeats itself, over and over, in my head: there should be something I can do. I don't contest that I was laid off; sometimes stuff happens, and honestly I think the company is closing anyway. I am angry that I and my fellow coworkers have been forced into a position where we are less than human, and there is nothing we can do about it.

I have felt this way before, at the hands of real-world tyrants, liars, thieves, and criminals. And I have heard people say, even in the most recent experience, that this is to be expected. This is not true. The art of dehumanization is reserved for the realm of murderers, thieves, liars, criminals, and deceivers. When you strip someone of their basic rights as a person, you are destroying your own claim to humanity and becoming something monstrous, something evil, something that, in a just world, would be put out of its misery with an iron fist. We are human beings, and we always have a choice. If I want to cry in public or in private, I can. If I want to handle a shitty situation with grace, I can. If I want to be juvenile about it, that's my right. In the light of evidence to the contrary, I am going to stand up and assert that nobody, ever, can make me into something less than human without my express consent. This will not happen again; it is simply not an option, because I refuse to live in a world that allows people to be dehumanized.

And so I am going to walk away from this, and move on. This is the last time I will feel like this.

Are you with me???

PS: To whom it may concern: stop being a self-centered bitch. If you don't have anything nice to say, shut the hell up, or so help me, I'm going to return bitchiness for bitchiness, and I promise you I'll win that battle ><

Bloggin' again

Holy crap, look who's back on teh intarwebz. Me! I want it to be known first and foremost that the catalyst for me starting this mess back up is Sir Josephus, who so politely forced me into this. :P The earlier post is something I wrote in July (obviously), but I like it, so it's staying.

So anyway, we'll see how this works. I'm pretty sick of people being jerks, so I'm gonna try and do my best to ignore the assholes this time around. Fingers crossed.

Parasitic

I had nightmares last night. I was running from something with Ed, and he ran into a tree and something punctured his eye. I went back to help him, and his hands were over his eyes, and there was blood and jelly oozing out, and it was just so so AWFUL...There was this rising feeling of horror and panic, and it was all so real. I woke up terrified, and it's stayed with me all day, this image of him laying on his back, bleeding, the remnants of his eye oozing between his fingers.

I feel like I have some disease. There's something terrible and alien lurking in my mind, producing these horrible images. I'm afraid sometimes to fall asleep, afraid of what I'll find there.

I had a dream once where my brother shot my mother, and then shot me. I've been afraid of him ever since. It was all so real, the terror and the horror, the hatred. I'll never be able to forget it, and it never happened. That scares me too. Something that never happened has irrevocably changed my life because I saw it in a dream.

I'm still not sure who I am. I think the true reason for living is to discover who you are. I don't think I'll find out until the day I die. I cry for my babies that died before I knew them. I cry about them all the time, and their absence eats away at my heart. But I'm not sure if I really want to be a mother. So I'm not sure what that means, really. They broke my heart. They took all my dreams with them when they died, I know that with a fierce surety.

Which brings me to the topic of things I know to be real, things I know for sure. I know my babies broke my heart in a way that will never be fixed. I know that I have loved many people, some of them at the same time, and nothing changes the fact that I loved them truly. I know that I am built to love, but sometimes I forget it. I know that death is one step away, at all times. I told my friend once that I should have died when I was 10. It's true; I would have died if not for a random decision my mother made at the last moment. I would have stayed, and died, if it wasn't for her. Anything that has happened after that is extra time. I'm flying under the radar for the rest of my life. And that gives me a freedom that other people lack, other people who haven't watched death miss them by inches. I have the ability to save people, and to kill myself, at any time. I saved my friend's life, and maybe she should have died as well. I think so, she wanted to. But I saved her anyway; I looked at death and refused him.

I'm in love with someone I shouldn't be. It's amazing, and I adore every tortuous moment of it. I look forward to every time I can be with him, be near him, speak to him. I look for him everywhere, and his presence makes me ache. I miss him terribly all the time. I love this feeling. And it makes me a bad person.