I am Joel's Charmless Coffee Table

I've realized over the past few weeks that I have feelings about my coffee table.

This is new.

I've never really felt anything about my coffee table before. I've noticed it, of course. I see that it's messy, or needs dusting. It sits in the middle of the living room, so I'm aware that it exists, and sometimes I step around it. I store books on the bottom shelf of it, so it even serves a purpose, but again, I've never looked at it and felt something.

Am I supposed to?

This all started back on Small Business Saturday. While out looking at thrift shops and antique shops, I saw a coffee table. It was an antique wooden pinball type game, the thin kind that use to hang on a wall, and someone had taken the frame, added legs, and converted it into a coffee table. It was a little bit cheesy, but also a little bit charming, and I liked it enough to circle back around the store to look at it again four or five times. Priced at an even hundred dollars (which was probably negotiable), it's within my budget, and when I looked at it I just thought, "That coffee table is really me." But then I thought, "I already have a coffee table, though. Oh well."

Since then, I keep looking at my coffee table and thinking, and feeling that it is somehow inadequate.

My coffee table expresses nothing about me as a person, and I feel like that pinball coffee table would.

Back when I was in college, I had a friend who liked to go to Pier One. We would walk around and look at bibelots, and candleholders, and glassware, and sculptures, and I'd always say that someday, when I had my own place that was semi-permanent and didn't have to worry about things getting broken or lost in moves, I would have nice stuff. Interesting stuff. Maybe some antiques. Stuff with some character.

Fast forward to seven years ago, when I moved to my first grownup apartment. The only furniture I owned after years of being a hall director was a random collection of lamps, pressed wood bookcases, odd shelving units, a nice rug, and my childhood wooden toybox, inherited from my father's childhood. And what did I do?

I recreated the scene from "Fight Club" where Jack orders his entire apartment from a catalog:



I went to Rooms to Go, where they specialize in selling you an entire room at a time rather than individual pieces of furniture, and I picked out a living room that matched my nice rug:



Including my coffee table.

And don't get me wrong: It's good furniture. It's seven years old, and still holding up well. The corners of the end tables are showing a little wear, and the chaise lounge, which I refer to as my fainting couch, is stained and starting to sink a little in the middle since I sit on it every day, but overall it's all still in good shape, and was probably a wise investment. It just has no character. There's no sense of individuality, except for the objects that I've placed on it. The table itself doesn't say anything about me, especially when it's sitting in a living room with nine pressed-wood bookcases from Target. Or it is saying something about me, and those things aren't very flattering.

I guess this is a part of adulthood that I've never really thought about: When do you fully establish your own style? And how long does the average grownup keep their furniture for? When should I buy some bookcases made of actual wood? Am I too old for prefab, pressed-wood furniture? What else in my apartment needs replacing? Is this even something I should worry about? Who cares what my coffee table looks like when I am averse to having people come inside and actually seeing it?

I don't know.

All I know is that lately I've had feelings about my coffee table, and they're feelings of dissatisfaction.

In the words of Ralphie: "Oh... fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudge!"

A friend asked me a question this week: "Since you usually spend Christmas alone, do you have any holiday traditions? Like, do you do anything to make it special?"

Getting to be alone isn't special enough?

It was a good question, though, so I gave it some thought, and discovered that I have two definite traditions that I participate in every year:

1) I have a tradition of stacking all of my Christmas packages in the living room, and then spending the days leading up to Christmas shaking them and casually dropping them in the hopes that they will fall open. I can't open them early, because Jesus is watching.

2) Every year, since 2010, I make the Carnation Famous Fudge Kit. Some years there is disappointment, and other years there is a glimmer of hope. This year I decided that even though I will be at my parents' house for Christmas I still needed to follow my tradition, and to spend a morning trying to make fudge that looks like the fudge on the box and then blaming and berating myself for failure to meet the standards set by a food stylist who was probably using blocks of wax covered with shoe polish in place of actual fudge.

This year, though, things turned out a little differently.

The first sign that something might be amiss came yesterday, when I attempted to go out and get the fudge kit. There were none at Kroger. Or at Target. Or at Food City. Or at the other Food City. In fact, the only place I could find one was Wal-Mart. It's almost as if demand for the fudge kit has fallen, as if people don't want to use it any more, as if somewhere there exist better alternatives and people are tired of trying to make glossy, perfect fudge that might not even be possible from this kit.

That's just crazy talk, I thought, putting the fudge kit in my cart. Wal-Mart no longer has hand baskets, so you have to use a cart even if you're only buying two things. There's nothing wrong with the fudge kit. If it doesn't come out right, it must be the cook.

This morning, I got my kit out:



"New look", you say? Because the fudge on the box looks as unattainable as ever. The front of the box wasn't the only change, though. When I opened it, I discovered that something was missing:



They no longer five you the little pan to make the fudge in. The instructions on the back mention lightly spraying an 8 inch pan, but don't mention that you have to provide the pan yourself. Oddly, the kit wasn't any cheaper even though it comes with less stuff, and I felt the first stirrings of resentment against Carnation bubbling within me. I don't even have an 8 by 8 pan. Who am I, Martha Stewart? A Keebler elf? Whoever Freihofer's is named after? (Charles Freihofer, it turns out.) You think I can just pull the right sized pan out of the air?

I can't, but I realized that my my vintage turquoise Pyrex 503 (which I need a lid for, if anyone wants to send me something really special for Christmas) dish is roughly that size:



Measurements confirmed that it is 8.5 by 7 inches, which seemed close enough to 8 by 8. Dish problem solved, I started on the kit, which hasn't changed. You dump the condensed milk, butter, and sugar mix in a pot:



Then you stir while it heats:



and then it boils and you stir constantly for exactly four minutes:



After that you remove from heat, add the marshmallows and chocolate chips, stir, and pour it into the pan.

I was so hopeful for a minute. I was stirring, and it was glossy! The fudge had shine, damn it! I was all, "In the pan! Get it into the pan! Oh, God, I've done it! I'VE MADE THE FUDGE!" and then, in the twenty seconds it took me to spoon it into the pan, something happened:



That Goddamned fudge looks exactly like last year. It looks the same every year! Seriously.

2012:



2011:



2010:



Every year the fudge looks like this. Low heat, high heat, butter, margarine, disposable pan, Pyrex dish... none of it matters. That's what I have realized this year.

The Carnation Famous Fudge Kit makes grainy, visually disappointing fudge.

It's not the cook. If you make the same thing four times, and it comes out the same way four times, that's the way it's supposed to come out. The flaw is in the recipe.

Next year, I will continue the tradition of making holiday fudge.

I have a whole year to settle on a new recipe.

"What's a warp core?"

During the four day Thanksgiving weekend, I had an unplanned television binge: BBC America did a "Star Trek: The Next Generation" marathon, and like a moth drifting lazily toward a bug zapper on the corner of the porch roof I was slowly drawn in and unable to turn the channel for hours. Since then, I've continued watching whenever I'm flipping channels and it happens to be on, and for some unknown reason it happens to be on a lot.

In viewing so many episodes in a row, and in discussion the show on Facebook, a thought has recently occurred to me:

For all the years that I have been a fan, I may have misjudged Counselor Troi.



No. You heard me. Like Baby's dad in "Dirty Dancing", when I'm wrong I say I'm wrong, so don't push it, lady.

I've written before about how Counselor Troi is kind of the most worthless crew member on the ship, but I've realized something in binge-watching: the showrunners did the character a horrible disservice by putting her in those all of those unprofessional, casual cleavage suits for six seasons instead of a uniform. I'm sure that guys watching liked it, but...

Here's what was wrong with all the bunny suits:

1) In a practical sense, they left Counselor Troi disadvantaged compared to the rest of the crew in potentially hostile situations. If an away team beamed down, everyone else had a belt, or loops on their pants, for holding things like phasers, tricorders, datapads, or whatever else they might need. If Counselor Troi beamed down with an away team, she had cleavage. No pockets, no loops, not even a purse.

2) In a visual sense, they left Counselor Troi professionally disadvantaged. Sure, casual clothes might make her more approachable as a counselor, but for bridge duty she should have had a uniform. Imagine, for a moment, that you are skyping with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. Everyone you see in the room is wearing a standard issue, regulation uniform, except for one sitting off to the side in a dress. Would you assume that person was a valued, key member of the leadership team, or would you assume they were a civilian? There's a reason why Ensign Ro looks so surprised that Counselor Troi is a lieutenant commander in "Disaster": It took the writers five seasons to get around to mentioning that she carried any military rank at all, much less one that designated her to be mid-level management.

3) All that cleavage made it even easier for the writers over the years to mold her into the helpless female/damsel in distress role. What kind of episodes and plotlines did Deanna get over the years? Mind raped repeatedly, kidnapped, imprisoned, forced into an arranged marriage, harassed about not being married and not having grandkids, unwanted alien pregnancy, henpecked by an overbearing mother, and let's not forget "Eye of the Beholder", where she spends an entire episode in a girl-on-girl catfight over Worf with some poor woman. Compare any Counselor Troi plotline with the ones that the other major female castmembers had and the difference is jarring. While Guinan was always written as kind of sexless, Dr. Pulaski, Dr. Crusher, Tasha Yar, Ensign Ro, Nurse Ogawa, and even Keiko O'Brien were always written as professionals first and females second. That's the reason why episodes like "Sub Rosa" and "Code of Honor" seem so out of character: they are. In most episodes you could change the gender of Dr. Crusher or Ensign Ro and only have to make minor adjustments to the plot. Counselor Troi is continuously infantalized and helpless, dependent on the men around her to protect her, which may explain why she was dead in almost every alternate future shown.

Realizing that the show creators contributed heavily to my negative impressions of Counselor Troi doesn't fully redeem the character. I still have three main problems with Counselor Troi.

1) I caught her in a lie. In the first season episode "The Battle" she tells the captain that she senses deception from the Ferengi, but in the third season episode "Menage a Trois" she tells Riker that Betazoids cannot sense any Ferengi emotions. I guess in the first season she was eager to prove her worth or something. (By the way, "Menage a Trois" is yet another example of #3 above. Not only are Deanna and her mom kidnapped, but they spend most of the episode naked after the Ferengi forbid them from wearing clothes. These kinds of things didn't happen to the other female characters, but they happened to Counselor Troi more than once.)

2) In seven seasons and multiple movies, Counselor Troi was shown at the helm, driving the ship, only one time. That time, in "Generations", she crashed the ship into a planet and destroyed it.

3) She doesn't know how the warp core works. For years I have referred to her as Counselor Deanna "What's a warp core?" Troi, on the grounds that she asked that question in "Disaster". Having finally rewatched "Disaster" tonight, I've discovered that, well...

Counselor Troi never actually said that.

But she said something equally stupid, related to the warp core. When Ro and O'Brien are explaining that the antimatter containment fields are collapsing, Counselor Troi foolishly asks what will happen then. Ensign Ro gives her the WTF? look that I remembered, and blurts out that the ship will blow up. She finds it incredible that Counselor Troi doesn't know this, and she's right to be annoyed about that. Counselor Troi, as a lieutenant commander, is a Starfleet graduate and as such is expected to have a basic working knowledge of how the engines (which are powered by a matter/antimatter reaction) work. We know, because it was a question that Wesley Crusher had to answer on the Starfleet Academy entrance exam in "Coming of Age". You can't even get into Starfleet without knowing how the engines work, but Counselor Troi has somehow managed to get in, graduate, and spend five seasons on the Enterprise without knowing it. In the entire run of the series, that may be the dumbest thing she ever said.

So, in closing, Counselor Troi may not be as awful as I've always said she was.

But she's still no Dr. Crusher.

"So, did you take November off from blogging or something?"

I went out both days this weekend, Saturday and Sunday. Both days I made a plan, got up, and mostly stuck to it. This is important because it really didn't happen at all for the rest of the month. Most weekends in November, except for going to work at football games, I have come home on Friday afternoon, closed my door, and ventured no further than the dumpster or the laundry room until Monday morning. I'm going to be honest, because it explains why I haven't had anything to blog about:

I've been having some trouble with myself.

Don't freak out. I'm not depressed, or suicidal, or in need of intervention. I DON'T NEED A PHONECALL TO CHECK ON MY MENTAL WELL BEING. I've actually talked to a therapist about this before a few years ago, when I was seeing one more often, so I know what's wrong. I've just had a little trouble shaking it off. I've written before about my introvert streak, and how that usually just translates into me doing stuff by myself a lot, but I've never mentioned that in the fall it tends to get a little worse for a while. After a few weeks of adjustment I come back around to normal equilibrium and everything's fine. This is my yearly cycle, and I'm aware of it, but this year has been worse than usual because I changed my fall schedule without stopping to think about what impact that might have and how I should plan for and address it.

Every year I travel in October, which I did this year, going to New Orleans and Providence, and then in November I go back to New York to see my family for Thanksgiving. This year I decided that I haven't done Christmas at home in forever, and it might be nice to have a change, but that meant that right at the time when I don't want to be around anyone but am forced to be because I am with my parents and have no car, so someone is in proximity twenty four hours a day for a week or so at a time, I was by myself for the first time in years. Unfortunately, most weekends it meant that I couldn't convince myself to leave my apartment. I'd get up, take a shower, shave, and then find the idea of going out and being around people too overwhelming to contemplate. All that traffic, all those cars, all those people I might have to talk to or be bumped by or just look at, it was all just too much to think about, and it was easier to just close the door and stay inside in my safe place.

I've known for a couple weeks that I really needed to shake it off, but was still having trouble. I still haven't seen the "Thor" sequel because both weekends that I wanted to the idea of going to the mall and having to sit near people made me anxious, but fortunately last weekend my friend Melissa invited me to see "Catching Fire" on Sunday, so I had to actually get up and leave the house or else I would disappoint someone else. This weekend, I drew up a plan for Saturday, and actually followed it, all by myself. After a month of not doing so, this feels like a tremendous achievement to me. I didn't draw up a plan for today, but a plan came together anyway.

See, yesterday was Small Business Saturday, and I decided that I needed to go out and support small businesses by going to the comic store and by looking for ties, thrift shop clothes, and vintage Pyrex. I've not shared my Pyrex collection here, really, mostly because I don't have a nice display space to show the entire thing, but since I started collecting a little more deliberately and less haphazardly I've done a lot of searching and reading on the internet. Friday night I even spent 45 minutes or so reviewing patterns and ebay listings so that I'd be able to recognize rarities and know if prices were fair. I was having an ok day, having spent more on ties than on Pyrex, when I saw this:



That wasn't anywhere in any pattern reference that I reviewed. I stared at it for a moment, wondering if maybe someone had taken a bowl that the color faded off of (this happens when you put vintage Pyrex in the dishwasher; a bowl and lid that I picked up at an estate sale for a couple dollars are so far gone that I just keep putting them in the dishwasher myself) and painted it themselves. People make weird art projects out of other things, so it could be possible, but I looked closer and saw that the design was fired on.

"Maybe it's Glassbake. Or Fire King. It can't be Pyrex or I would recognize it."

Intrigued, I picked it up and turned it over, and sure enough, it's Pyrex, but I had no idea what it was.

For the first time ever in my life, I wanted a smart phone that connected to the internet.

Instead of just buying it anyway, I put it back, rationalizing that it might be a newer, non-vintage piece, not putting together in my head until I got home that the Pyrex logo on the bottom had a crown on it, and none of the other dishes in my collection do. It has a crown because it's British. That piece is from the "Tally Ho" pattern, which was given out in the United Kingdom in the 1960's as a promotion for a tea company, and was manufactured there as well. I have no idea what it's doing in East Tennessee, but I kept thinking about it and thinking about it, and people on Facebook encouraged me to go get it, so today I got up, got ready, and went back to the store.

According to the Pyrex Facebook group that I'm in, I beat another shopper who was on the way to get it by twenty minutes.

I'm counting it as destiny. If I had stalled, or delayed, or not gone directly to the store according to my plan, then the bowl would have been gone when I got there. Instead, now it's mine.

I left the apartment two days in a row, and I had a good weekend.

I will be ok.

Providence, Rhode Island

Before I describe my trip to Providence this week, I'd like to share a brief lesson I learned about air travel on Thursday, when I was returning home:

You should not read books about pandemics on airplanes, because you will have an extremely uncomfortable trip if the person directly across the aisle from your aisle seat vomits loudly into their air-sickness bag.

Just FYI.

I was flying home on Thursday after flying out on Sunday for a really good conference with a few coworkers. The conference days were pretty busy, and I co-hosted a newcomer's reception and co-presented a session about NCAA regulations and housing for student athletes. Both went well, and I have a bunch of notes about topics like gender-inclusive housing and new laws about therapy animals that I will probably use, or at least share, at work someday, so I'm going to go ahead and call it a successfull conference.

In between conferencing, we went and explored the city with coworkers and colleagues from other schools. On Sunday, after we flew in, we were starving, so we met up with people and went immediately to dinner at the Trinity Brewhouse:







It was a short walk from our hotel, and I was so hungry after travelling all day that I ate a whole ten inch pizza. (Not because I'm fat. Because I'm hungry. That's the story we're sticking with, ok?)

The next morning I got more than enough exercise to make up for it, as four of us decided to walk down the riverwalk:





to eat at breakfast at Brickway on Wickenden, a place that had been recommended by the tourist map our friend Carling had and by the hotel staff. When we got there, it was a cute little diner:





that was almost like eating in someone's house. I had banana pancakes:



and they were delicious.

Tuesday we stayed at the convention center all day, which was sort of interesting because we were sharing it with a much larger hair stylist convention (so much multicolored hair and leopard print in one place!) and another, smaller conference where this was a topic:



I listened at the door for a minute, but heard only silence.

Tuesday night, Meg, Josh, and I decided that we were tired and just wanted something close, so we ate at the Melting Pot in the mall across the street from our hotel:



Since there was a skybridge connecting the hotel and the mall, we didn't even go outside.

The conference wrapped up Wednesday afternoon, so Meg, John, and I decided to walk to Federal Hill, which was ten minutes from our hotel and is the "Little Italy" of Providence:



The sculpture, La Pigna, is not an odd pineapple. It is a pinecone, which is a symbol of welcome in Italy. Federal Hill is a mass of small shops:



and Italian restaurants:





We picked one at random, and I ate four cheese ravioli as big as my fist. I've never felt so full of Italian food in my life, and the walk did nothing to make me feel like I'd worked any of it off. It was fantastic.

On Thursday we weren't flying out until lunchtime (and, thanks to incompetence and outright lies from United Airlines, we ended up spending twelve hours on planes or in airports; I'm not even going to talk about it because I'm still so mad), so Meg and I decided that we were going to walk the historic Green Line:



We were told that the Green Line, which passes many historic and architecturally significant buildings in Providence, was a loop, so we thought we would just join it by our hotel where we saw it and start walking. It turns out that, rather than listen to others, we should have looked it up, because the Green Line isn't a loop. It's exactly what it says: a line, and it ran out at the state capital after a half hour of fighting our way through six downtown crosswalks:







(My camera couldn't decide if it was too bright out or overcast, one of the dangers of point and click photography. The two pictures of the capital building above were taken within a minute or two of each other, with no change in clouds or sunshine.)

Once we discovered that we'd picked the wrong end of the Green Line, we realized that we didn't have time to walk it to the other end before we had to be back at the hotel for checkout, so we went to Burnside Park, which was just up the street, to walk around and look at the statues.

There's a fountain dedicated to General Burnside's wife:



(Is it me, or is that guy on the right kind of giving you a "hey, baby" eye?)

a weird half boat:





emerging from the ground or sinking into it, depending on whether you are a "glass is half empty" or "glass is half full" type of person, a statue of General Burnside himself:









which was heavily chalked and marked up by the Occupy Providence movement (Side note: many of the Occupy Providence participants in the park were reportedly Brown University students, who pay about $55,000 a year to attend their school; they may want to rethink protesting big business, and protest a little closer to campus instead), and this fence art:



I'm not sure how it was done, but if you looked at it straight on it didn't really look like anything:



and only turned back to art when you started walking along the fence and caught it at the right angle:



Leaving the park, we saw a sad drunk babydoll:



and the war memorial:



After that, we came to another, smaller park (or possibly a part of Burnside Park that was split by a plaza) with another statue:



and some kinetic sculptures that had words on one side and art on the other. One told the story of Roger Williams' early dealings with the Native Americans:



One talked about the founding of the city and present-day events:





and one talked about famous Providence native H.P. Lovecraft:





There were others, too, but we realized that we didn't have time to read them if we wanted to make our plane.