care to be an armchair anthropologist with me for the day?

Yesterday, my 12-year old son Ethan explained to me his theory about why so many teenage boys are obsessed with the combat video game Halo. Ethan isn’t allowed to play Halo (or, if I have any say in the matter, even be in the same room while someone else is playing Halo; I think the popularity of the game is a sign of all that is wrong with our society and I’m sickened by the fact that in the first ten weeks after the release of Halo 2, players spent 91 million combined hours playing the game online, but don’t get me started on that rant…).

Anyway, Ethan, the properly brainwashed child that he is, tells me he doesn’t really want to play Halo because it is too violent. The problem is that many of his friends in Junior High think or talk of little else and Ethan sometimes feels a bit “out of it.” Frankly I wish I could shake some sense into those kids and get them to pick up some less dangerous hobbies (playing with matches anyone?) but I’m afraid it’s a lost cause.

So, here’s Ethan’s theory (much paraphrased and simplified; his analysis was far more complex than mine, I promise):

The reason why young boys are attracted to violent combat games is because we have evolved as a species for the hunt. If we still lived out in the wild, boys Ethan’s age would be learning to throw spears or shoot guns. They still have this natural instinct even though our meat now comes wrapped in plastic at the grocery store or rolled in a tortilla at Taco Bell. Halo and similar games give boys a chance to act out in a virtual world their historical roles as young hunters.

I admit he makes an intriguing argument but I still don’t want to believe that there’s anything “natural” about these games or the impact they are having on our culture. If this is a vestige of a human behavior once necessary for survival, I’d like to hope we’ve gotten past it by now. What do you think?

Velazquez, Prince Baltasar Carlos as a hunter vs. Halo Fighter

What if. . . none were enough?

A woman sets her ladder against an enormous block of hay and begins to climb. Her ladder comes no where near the top of the pile but the thought of what she will do when she gets to the highest rung has not yet occurred to her. The climb itself is everything. To her right and left, men and women raise their arms above their heads and caress the hay, stretching to embrace their body-width portions of the mountainous pile. Some pluck what they can with long hooks and forks. Others fight over fistfuls of the hay, willing to beat each other senseless or slit a throat or two if necessary.

And all the while, the pile of hay is on the move. Pulled by a team of monstrous creatures, the hay wagon is rolling along, taking with it an entourage of peasants and princes. The front wheel will soon crush the man who clutches at a tuft of hay instead of saving himself. The back wheel is about to snap the boney leg of an old man who has found himself entangled in the spokes. There is a disastrous kind of momentum, a willingness to follow the hay wherever it is headed—a compulsion to see its value, accept without question its desirability. Those who parade behind it see nothing but a wall of yellow. Those lucky few who sit on top of it feel nothing but the comfortable ride it provides. Those who brawl and grasp to the side of it want nothing but to have more and more of it.

And who stops to ask if it is worth all this? If it is worth anything at all? What exactly is the stuff they fight over, the stuff they collect, worship and climb? It is nothing more than a bunch of hay.

I was thinking of The Haywain by Bosch today while I walked a circuit through the mall. It has been snowing too much lately to take my usual walk around the neighborhood, so my friend Staci and I go to the mall in the morning, just about the time all the stores are opening. We are not shopping. We are exercising, dressed in sweats, pushing Nora in the stroller and walking at a furious pace past windows filled with jewelry and prom dresses and the soft porn of Victoria Secret lingerie modeled by sultry manikins. And every time we turn the corner in front of the Nordstrom’s Department Store, we come face to face with this:


Setting aside the grammatical issue (What if…the subjunctive tense were not optional?) the window drives me crazy (and crazier and crazier as we pass it repeatedly). Staci says, “This is why our country is in a recession” and I totally agree with her. The greed, the sense of entitlement, the imperative to buy something (more than once if possible), and the artificial need created by advertising campaigns and by trends and by followers of the hay wagon: these attitudes have driven people to spend beyond their means and lose track of what really matters.

And the hay wagon is always on the move. Today it is a Maxx New York bag (yes, I called Nordstrom’s to ask. “They’re really inexpensive,” the handbag associate told me, “Only $48.” I’m not sure which disturbs me more, the cost of the ugly handbags or the fact that there’s a dedicated associate who sells nothing but the ugly handbags). Tomorrow it will be something new. Maybe not a skittle-colored, patent leather, appealingly-impractical-at-any-price accessory, but something equally worth chasing after.

It’s for this very reason that I normally steer far clear of the mall. Just a few days of walking past the shops and already I find myself thinking about fashion far more than I normally do, wondering if I should be dressing Nora like the lucky kids whose mothers shop exclusively at The Children’s Place. It’s an insidious toxin, this materialism. It fills the air in drifts and breezes, influencing all who pass the imagery and product displays in the same way that the scents of body lotions and baking pretzels and colognes reach their tendrils out into the mall corridor like cartoon smells rising from freshly baked pies on a windowsill.

“Avert your eyes,” I tell Nora in the stroller as we pass the insipid handbags. “Pay no attention to the stuff behind the glass.” We don’t need one of those. We don’t need any of this. It’s all just hay.

Cream Horn recipe

As promised, here's the recipe for the cream horns I made last week. These are easier than they look, just a bit time-consuming. My friend Staci is even going to make them this week with her kids. And no, I promise I'm not turning into a cooking blog.

Cream Horns
(The instructions for the horns are from Cuisine at Home magazine; the filling recipe is from my friend Chef Tara)

1 box sugar ice cream cones
1 box frozen puff pastry (thawed)
1 egg
1 tsp water
1/2 cup turbinado sugar*
1 box (4-serving) instant pudding (vanilla or chocolate)
1 cup whipping cream
almond flavoring
powdered sugar

A few preliminary notes
*Turbinado sugar is a coarse, tan-colored sugar. I found it easily at the grocery store (sold as a brand called “Sugar in the Raw” in little packets). You’ll use it in this recipe to sprinkle on the outside of the horns. Do not substitute regular granulated sugar which will burn.

When I made these, I doubled the batch (used 2 boxes of puff pastry) and I finished with 23 horns. I made two batches of filling so I could fill half the horns with chocolate, half with vanilla.

The trick with the puff pastry is to keep it as cold as possible. Follow directions on the box to thaw it (takes about 40 minutes on the counter). Cover it with a damp paper towel when you’re not directly working with it and put it back in the fridge if it starts to get too mushy.

Making the horns
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Spray the parchment paper with nonstick spray.

Prepare the sugar cones by wrapping each in foil, then coating with nonstick spray. Slice the puff pastry into three sections (along the fold lines) then into 1/2 inch-wide strips (the long way) with a pizza wheel. Form horns by wrapping 3 strips of pastry around each mold, starting at the tip and overlapping the strips to prevent gaps. (The horns are very “forgiving” and look great once they’re cooked even if the strips aren’t the same thickness. Just be sure to overlap the edges and squeeze the tip closed so the filling won’t leak out). Rest the horns on the cookie sheet with the end of the last strip underneath. I fit 8 cones to a sheet.

You can re-use the cone-molds over and over. Just wipe them off a bit and spray them lightly again with nonstick spray between batches.

Whisk the egg and water together. Lightly brush each horn with the egg wash. Sprinkle them with the turbinado sugar. Bake for 20 minutes or until golden. Cool on a rack for 2 minutes, then remove molds. Cool pastry completely before filling with cream.

Cream Filling
Whisk 1 pkg pudding with 1 cup cold milk (half of what it normally calls for). In separate bowl, whip cream, 2 Tsp. powdered sugar and 1/2 tsp vanilla to soft peaks. For the vanilla flavored cones, I also added 1/4 tsp almond flavoring. Fold the pudding and the whipped cream together until you get one color.

Another possible filling idea: Whip cream with 2 Tsp. powdered sugar and a squeeze or two (to taste) of strawberry jam. It makes a light, tasty strawberry whipped cream.

The horns look best if you use a pastry tip and bag to fill them. Or in a pinch you can use a Ziploc bag with one corner cut off. Fill the horns no more than a couple of hours before serving so they don’t get soggy.

Miss Austen regrets

I watched the “Complete Jane Austen” series on PBS last night (as I have for the last few weeks). Last night, I think because of the Superbowl, they did not show a new novel but a special film called Miss Austen Regrets. It was a somewhat fictionalized pseudo-biography, but we all seem to enjoy imagining what Jane was really like and I thought this film was well-made and compelling. I especially loved the moment where Reverend Bridges—the man who seems to have loved Jane the most, but now they’re both older and he’s married—asks her why she would not marry him. He tells her that he would have let her keep writing. She says she would have been too busy mothering children and would not have had the time. I completely agree with her. Some people say, “Oh, how sad that a woman with such a keen sense of the romantic never married,” but the truth is that had she married (and naturally had a household to run and children to bear and raise) there’s absolutely no way she would have written any of her books. They were written in the leisure time granted to her by her spinsterhood, her poverty and her freedom.

Maybe this is why I write about motherhood so much. It’s my way of having it both ways and only both ways. If I were not a mother and wife, I could not write what I do. Yes, I get frustrated by the fact that I have no time, no space, no “room of my own” in which to carve out a writer’s life, but what would I be writing about if I had those things and no family to inspire me? I’d like to think I would have nothing to say.

It snowed again on and off yesterday. It was beautiful, of course, but I’m tired of the snow. I feel trapped in my house. Trapped by the endless winter. Buried under it. There was much shoveling to do yesterday (and more shoveling later and still there was a new skiff on the ground this morning). I went to church without Ken because he stayed home with Nora (still sick, always sick) and when I got home, as I turned around to pull the car into the driveway, I got stuck in the gutter. My wheels were spinning and the thought hit me that now I was good and truly “stuck in a rut.” We are all stuck in a rut. I wonder if we’re just living through the same blizzard over and over and over again. “There’s no way that this winter is ever going to end,” says Phil Conners just before he kidnaps the groundhog and drives it off a cliff.

McKay spent at least two hours playing in the snow yesterday afternoon. He has taken over the pile to the side of the house (the one created by the repeated shoveling-off of the driveway) and has dug tunnels and caves into it. He is a child who also needs to carve out his own personal spaces. He is a cave-dweller. A fort-builder. He once asked for padlocks for his birthday. He wants treasure boxes, room, a bedroom of his own. One day when I could not find him anywhere in the house, I finally discovered him wedged into a tiny 2’ by 2’ space in his closet, alone, reading.

And yet, McKay would be miserable as an only child. He and Ethan are more than roommates; they are best friends. McKay is most happy when they are together, pacing circles into the carpet of their room, role-playing some elaborate space-battle scenario. I know that he would not trade the closeness of our crowded home for a room of his own and the silence that would go with it, just as I would not trade my domestic busyness for all the privacy and free time in the world.

The truth is that we don’t get to consciously make these choices. Even Jane could never have seen her options in front of her simultaneously since the consequences of her resistance to marriage only developed over time. But I can still take a good look from my present vantage point and say that, knowing what I know now, I would still live my life as I have lived it. Don’t get me wrong, there are a few things I wish I could take back—my kitchen tile, my laser eye surgery, my entire 7th grade year—but when it comes to my family and the choices I have made to marry and be a mother to each of my children, even if it means I will never ever be the subject of a PBS special, I have no regrets.

and then there was one

It started with Nora. One minute she was fine and the next she was vomiting all over the floor of the boys’ room—a floor which unfortunately happened to be covered at the time with 8 million Lego pieces. I’ll spare you the details of that cleanup.

Nora spent the next 24 hours proving the old adage that ‘what goes down must come up or at least out the other end.’ Much laundry was involved.

By Wednesday, I had caught the bug. I tried to call in sick to my job but my bosses (ages 1-12) said my benefits package did not include sick leave. Go figure.

Wednesday night and early into the wee hours of Thursday morning, Ethan and Gabie took turns racing for the bathroom…and not quite making it. Nora continued her pattern of filling her diaper (and pajamas and socks) with radioactive liquid waste every two hours.

And Thursday afternoon, McKay called home from school to say he was feeling lousy and needed to come home early.

Only my husband Ken is still standing, untouched by the plague that has spread all around him. Wish him luck.