The Funniest Word In The Universe

(Click on cartoon to enlarge.) We must hear the word butt twenty times a day.

 Ever-reasonable sister does dramatic reading/critique of comic.

 Butt-man responds to dramatic reading.

In Praise of Plan A

Let's begin with a re-cap of my blog post Death to Plan B.

What Plan B says: I got your back, bro. Go for it.
What Plan B means: You're going to fail, loser. Come move back home. You can live in the basement.

Plan B is not necessarily evil. When it is doing its job, that is, supplying a fulfilling and/or lucrative source of income while also providing time and encouragement to pursue your own creative projects, it's lovely. But when Plan B hisses in your ear to stop writing, painting, or researching ancient Nordic magical encantations because your ideas aren't worthy of the time you're giving them, and instead use your energy to give your already robust Plan B even more attention, then we have a problem. In general, the stronger the Plan B, the weaker the Plan A.

Why is this?

Let's take a look at your typical Plan A:
• silly
• impractical
• appeals only to people like you
• does not provide an obvious and/or immediate income-generating path
• makes you giggly, happy, and giddy
• little precedent for it
• none of your friends have done it
• none of your friends want to do it
• your friends have tried it and failed
• books are written on how many millions have failed at it
• looks strange on your resume
• parents are not able to describe it
• creates hopes of fame and grandiosity followed by waves of shame and self-loathing for allowing you to think expansive, wonderful things about yourself
• requires you attend expensive classes, workshops, conferences, and seminars
• tempts you to travel to places you've never been with money you don't have
• demands that you network with people you've never met

Look at your typical Plan B:
• has worked in the past
• capitalizes on your experience
• exists within an established market
• success is measurable
• affirmation arrives regularly, in the form of compliments, gratitude, and cash
• your parents can mostly explain it to their friends

Who wouldn't want Plan B?

Plan A is that great idea you have, like a post-apocalyptic clothing line, or a diaper composter, or glasses that change their prescription as your eyes change, or shoes that let you bounce like Tigger, or Asian/Dragon themed underwear for women (go ahead and steal these ideas, Plan B has already talked me out of them). Fun, exciting stuff that makes people go: "Cool! Too bad it's totally impossible for people like us."

I'm writing a novel. I've been writing it for eight years. The first chapter won an award. A NYC literary agency read the entire manuscript and said it's not finished. It has some traction out there in the world. I have been three months from finishing the novel for the last two years, writing anywhere from 0 minutes a day (sometimes for months at a time) to 6 hours a day (three times total). Things like work and kids and howling doubt get in my way.

During those eight years I have worked at graphic design almost every day. Kids and howling doubt and writing don't get in the way of work. I work hard, sometimes at night, sometimes on weekends. My design has improved immensely in the past eight years because of the energy I've put into it. I never used to refer to myself as an illustrator, except to say oh yeah I'm pretty good in this one cartoon-y style, but then I drew one cartoon-y thing, then another, and now I've fully illustrated two educational card games (coming to stores near you this spring)!

Here are two cards from one of the games.

Are they not the cutest things you've seen in your life? Thanks! I'm an illustrator! We get better at something the more we do it. We become what we do. If we only put the same effort into our day jobs that we put into our personal creative projects, we probably would have been fired. And if we work to please our creative muse as hard as we work to please our colleagues, our projects won't be shoved into corners of time no one else wants (née 11:42pm). We have to nurture those babies and create time and energy and resources for them. Which is why I'm here to tell you: my novel will be complete in three months. Now, I must go write.

Death to Plan B

The single greatest impediment to the success of Plan A is to have a really solid Plan B. 

Plan A by nature is more true, daring, and risky. It comes from the heart, from the gut, from unexpected successes, flashes of insight, moments of pure confidence. But for Plan A to become more than a bubbling in the belly and  real in the world, it must first push through the bullet-proof scrim of Plan B.

Plan B, ever practical and durable, is an extremely good liar. It tells you that you you don't need to give up security to achieve a dream; you can have your cake and eat it, too. That is true, if you like your cake crumbly and dry with no frosting or non-pareils.

Plan B crosses its legs and you looks straight in the eye: if you have a dream like writing, or singing, or performing—can't you work on that at night after your kids have gone to sleep? There's a good two hours of time right there. Imagine what you could accomplish with your exhausted, end-of-the-day brain if you used your night hours. It's your dream, so stop whining that your creativity is more ripe, bursting, and explosive first thing in the morning. That's a cop out, Plan B tells you, plucking a cat hair off its black turtleneck. 

Devote some time to your dream, Plan B continues, of course, but don't forget to put the lion's share of your energy toward that which enervates you. Work hard to stay exactly where you've already been. Cultivate the same solid, secure, goals and sources of approval you achieved ten years ago. Be safe, be assured, put food on the table and money away for taxes. Route the sewer. Replace the roof. You're reaching the age where you also probably need to up your life insurance.

Plan B's on a roll, now. It's a shame you can't take advantage of lower interest rates with your house being too far underwater to refinance and all. Too bad you're working harder to make less money now that half your industry has been outsourced to India. Just become indispensable. Become un-outsourcable. You know what you should do—you should learn Javascript. You'd be really good at coding because you are creative and logical. Who says art has to be limited to writing a novel? Live the creative life and let go of what creativity looks like. If you open your mind, you could be happy and have a good job. A web development firm with three weeks' vacation, a dart board, and free Intelligentsia coffee.

Plan B nestles in your ear, wallowing in its waxy cushion. Books are becoming extinct anyway, at least that's what it read on Yahoo! If you still insist on hitching your harness to the relic of publishing, at least write your novel while your kids are napping. What, your kids don't nap? Give them a twig and twine and tell them to go entertain themselves. That's what we did when we were kids. We spent hours building forts out of old newspapers and used Dixie cups. That's why we're so superior now, and why we give such great advice.

NEXT: A little more about Plan A.

Make Your Own Fake Petit Ecoliers

If you are anything like me (and why wouldn't you be?), you find Le Petit Ecolier the almost perfect cookie. Their buttery cookiness, their chocolately chocolateyness, their scallopy edges, the little schoolboy imprinted right into the chocolate. They're so compact, so tasty, so . . . expensive. At around $4 for a 5.29 oz box (plus the environmental nightmarishness of the plastic container inside the box), they used to be for special occasions only.

It really is a beautiful cookie.

Did I just say used to be? Yeah baby. Because I am going to teach you how to make your own Petit Ecoliers in no time at all for less than half the cost. And this isn't one of the ridiculous Pinterest DIY claims about making something just like something else for just pennies but actually takes about three days, requires buying specialty products (like silver spray paint, glycerin, and stuff like that) from specialty stores, and then looks or feels nothing like the so-called expensive original in the first place and would probably been more environmentally friendly to have gone and bought at Target. 

No, this is the real deal. I find that graham crackers and Nestle's chocolate paired together taste almost exactly as good as a Petit Ecolier. Particularly if you haven't eaten a Petit Ecolier in a long time and have forgotten exactly how perfectly buttery that scalloped cookie tasted. Turn off your memory, get yourself a box of Honey Grahams and a bag of snack size Nestle chocolate bars. Simply break the graham cracker in half, then half again (they are conveniently scored to make this easy.) Sandwich a piece of chocolate between two of the graham cracker quarters, et voila, you have a Petit Ecolier-like experience.

The pseudo versions lacks the visual panache of a Petit Ecolier, but has an appealingly rustic simplicity of its own.

I have not done a side by side taste test of the two cookies, but in my dim memory of my last Petit Ecolier, this little version stacks up pretty well. Feel free to disagree, and I may have to admit I've become one of those Pinterest DIY people. However, you will never catch me spray-painting a doormat silver, scrubbing it down with steel wool, hanging it on the wall, then claiming it looks just like wrought iron.

Packaging Pin-ups

I finally got to Cost Plus World Market for a packaging fix, and just in time. Another week without the candy colored rainbow super saturated colors and something bad was going to go down. I share my best of the week's pickings with you.

What's a packaging fix without a little Hello Kitty. Not one at all, right. Candy in a tin to-go container festooned with Hello Kitty. This one has it all.

Is this lunch-size hummus packaging the epitome of I-have-to-have-it? Personally, I prefer my hummus from the refrigerator section, but these super cool little packs almost made me cave. I can see myself tossing them into the kid's lunch, never to be touched or eaten.

 Boo-yah. See how gracefully you can age if you drink Longevity Brand?

 Mystifying mints. I like the two color theme of this and Hello Kitty.

 Nutella is the most overrated snack in history, but in single serving containers, it moves up a couple notches.

 These peanut butter packs are a little bigger than ketchup packs. Hand-lettered type is always a packaging plus.

And these maple syrup bottles are about the size of a fist. What is it about packaging something in the shape of the raw material of the thing you're packaging that makes it  irresistible? Come to think about it, syrup doesn't come from leaves. Make that the symbol of the country it comes from.

All packaging is improved by a smiling face.

See what I mean about smiley faces? This image is from their site, not my camera but it is way too cute not to include.

I was disappointed that the one thing I actually needed to buy (well I suppose no one ever needs to buy anchovy paste) came in a very boring package. I may have to re-design this and post to a future blog entry.

Alley Walks: The Illustrated Version

A few weeks ago, I discussed my daughter and my new tradition of walking the alleys. What that post lacked was pictures. So here they are. Our alleys are pretty boring, as you shall see, so these walks are a process of finding something magical in practically nothing, an exercise that serves one well throughout life. Just the fact of walking through alleys though, where people generally don't, confers something special and otherworldly on the event, and I love to hear her digressions of thought and the feel of her warm hand slipping casually in and out of mine as she chatters. 

Here is a garage roof on the ground. The new roof is on the garage, you cannot see it.

This huge parking area behind/next to a building appears to be constructed with some thought as it is made from materials that absorb rainwater, rather than sluice it straight toward Chicago's overburdened sewers. But in all our alley walks (3 total), we have never seen a car parked here.

 A rare bit of color.

There is really not much of interest in our alleys. They are prim and sterile. The nice thing about the dearth of interesting is we get real excited about practically anything, including these two toolboxes. We approached timidly, as if they contained bombs.

 But—nothing.

 Lets play: what is this?

 Nice arrangement, but no thanks.

This got us a little excited because we thought it was an impaled animal.

 Aw, that thingymabob is smiling at us.

Now we're talking—a fenced-in vacant lot. She wants IN.

 But there is not much to get in for. Is it so ugly it's beautiful—or just ugly?

 It looks like a beach, Jessie says. I find this strangely beautiful. Unlike the Northern California coast, which is just beautiful beautiful.

 Whoa, a huge pencil and a rock.

OK, she's in. The mere fact of being fenced out made crawling under the fence irresistible.

I feel like I'm visiting her in jail. I hope this isn't a portent.

Super great find—a padlock. Her brother was so taken by this treasure, he insisted on going on an alley walk also.

The Hard Boiled Eggs In The Oven Phenomenon

Whew—want to meet some excited people? Google "hard boiled egg oven," or Bing it if you're on a PC. You too can get swept up in the greatest improvement to cooking since red quinoa: oven-baked hard-boiled eggs!!! For some reason, this topic is an over-punctuated one, and fraught with indiscriminate capitalization:

People are really excited about oven-baked eggs. As they should be. Oven baked eggs, purportedly:

1.) taste as good or better than boiled
2.) can be baked in the oven!!
3.) instead of boiling!!

Not one to fight a sound argument, seven eggs are baking in my oven as I type. I have high hopes for this oven-baked thingie because hard-boiled is the only way to eat eggs. Scrambled eggs look like scrambled placenta (cuz they are). Ditto for omelettes, quiche, poached, over easy . . . I'm feeling queasy even typing these dishes . . . but hard-boiled, now there's a yummy way to chow down on some embryonic fluid.

And ladies—yes, most of these oven-baked egg aficionados are ladies—if I may dial up the egg goodness even further: please consider free-range, organic, brown, oven-baked eggs. I was shocked how many photos demonstrated the egg-baking process with white eggs. Say no-no-no-no way to white eggs! White eggs from the grocery store will taste like Tupperware after your first time with an organic brown egg.

I interrupt this post to report that eggs baking in the oven give off that gross cooking egg smell (fellow egg-avoidants will know what I'm talking about), whereas we all know that hard-boiling eggs produces no smell. Mark that as a pro or con, depending on your predilection. Oh, hello! How could I have forgotten to tell you the recipe: cook the eggs for 30 minutes at 325 degrees.

Behold the glory of the oven-baked egg:

I'm told not to worry about the spots, not that I would've, but in case you are—don't. And yes, the muffin tin is the suggested container. I suspect the reasons are mostly aesthetic in the way that Pinterest users love order and things that fit nicely into slots.

It's very late, so I will conclude this post in the morning with a taste test.

MORNING UPDATE: The eggs did not peel any easier than hard-boiled, contrary to many enthusiasts' claims. Here is a photo of the peeled egg, whole and cut. I am not a fan of the two brown spots or the big air dimple at the bottom of the eggs. Aesthetes sigh.

They are drier than hard-boiled eggs and maybe even a little tougher. In a blind taste test, I probably could not tell the difference, but I don't plan to switch to oven baking my eggs any time soon unless I need 50 or so for an egg-dying party. And if I tell you I'm hosting an egg-dying party, please send me to a psychiatrist at once.