Cookie Butter Hot Chocolate

Happy V Day, sweet people!

In the spirit of V Day, I want you to do something for me.  Do something today to show yourself that you love you.  Maybe it's watching your favorite movie.  Maybe it's spending the day with your favorite person.  Maybe it's making a donation to an organization that means a lot to you.  Maybe it's wearing your favorite outfit or getting that ear piercing you've really been wanting.  Maybe it's doing yoga and drinking more water.  Maybe it's making a cup of cookie butter hot cocoa for you and your Galentine.

Yesterday I made this hot cocoa for my Galentine Jill.  This recipe came from an intense need for cookie butter and a severe lack of pretzels.  While gingerbready cookie butter goes great with spoons, that seemed like a lazy Galentine's treat.  The gingerbread flavor is subtle but adds creaminess and a bit of spice. Try it; it's nice.

Cookie Butter Hot Cocoa
makes two

2 1/2 cups milk (any kind)
4 tablespoons cocoa powder
3 tablespoons Speculoos cookie butter
2 tablespoons agave nectar or white sugar
whipped cream or marshmallows

Put the first four ingredients in a saucepan and heat on low, whisk til the cookie butter and cocoa powder are incorporated.  Pour into two cute matchy mugs and swirl in ice cream-like Cool Whip or float tiny marshmallow dots.

Remember how wonderful and lovely you are, wear cozy socks, and sip chocolate when you aren't eating it.  Happy Valentine's Day!

Review: Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

Narrated by an unnamed young man who moves into Holiday Golightly's humble New York apartment building, the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's is an account of Miss Golightly's last months in New York City as told from her quiet upstairs neighbor's perspective.  "Fred", as Holly calls him, chronicles their friendship from the aspiring writer's move-in to the first time Holly climbs in through his window in escape of a drunken, boring lover.  He ends his story with the last time he ever sees this woman, mysterious as she is stylish, as she flees the city in a lonely taxi.

I was excited to find that Breakfast at Tiffany's reminded me of The Great Gatsby in a lot of ways.  Capote's nameless first person narrator is a peripheral one very similar to Nick Carraway.  Both are the young, introverted, and slightly aimless new neighbors of two seriously chic characters.

Holly Golightly's personality could be considered a combination of those of Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby.  She is flighty and sweetly dismissive while being smooth and grandiose.  One important difference out of many between Holly and Daisy is that Holly is a "liberated woman" of the 1940s who doesn't care what people think of her, and in fact, she enjoys shocking them.

Both Mr. Gatsby and Miss Golightly fuel their exciting lifestyles with money earned in less than honest ways.  They both move to New York City and alter their names to hide the lowly pasts that embarrass them, but they trust their stories' narrators enough to admit their secret histories.  Nick Carraway and "Fred" are fascinated by their melancholy neighbors, and though they disapprove of many of their decisions, their concern for them, whether motivated by pity or friendship, is apparent.

I didn't read this book.  I listened to someone read it to me.  Breakfast at Tiffany's was one of the first audio books I have ever listened to, but they feel familiar because they remind me of my mom reading aloud to my sisters and me.  They remind me of sitting around the living room, or more often squished in one chair, listening to the tales of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott.  My mom made sure to read us stories about brave, hard-working, and compassionate girls, and Jill and I would daydream about living in a log cabin and wearing bonnets and lace-up boots and having a fourth sister who died of scarlet fever.  You know, all that fun 1800s stuff.

With audio books, the work of reading is gone and you are a kid again with few responsibilities.  (Just kidding, you still have to do the dishes, but at least you can listen to the audio book while you wash!)  While audio books manage to feel both nostalgic and time-efficient, I have noticed that I don't hold on to the details of the story as well when I don't have the visual memory component of words on a page.  Still, audio books are great for "reading" books I probably wouldn't have read to myself.

Breakfast at Tiffany's was one such book.  I once saw the opening of the film adaptation, but I wasn't very interested in Holly Golightly beyond Audrey Hepburn's iconic black dress and dark shades.  Nevertheless, when Breakfast at Tiffany's popped up as my first Audible suggestion, I decided to give it a listen, and with the great dialogue that dominates this short novel, it turned out to be a great choice.

Defining Feminism

Feminism is making a comeback.  It's especially talked about on social media, so much so that #womenagainstfeminsim has cropped up as well.  I know feminism is truly awakening from its 1990s-2000s slumber if there is a sizable reaction against that movement.  So in fact, I'm pretty thankful for these anti-feminist tweets and opinions because it means people are noticing a rise in support for feminism and want to discuss it.

At first I was really upset by the tweets and YouTube videos I found after searching #womenagainstfeminism on Twitter and Google a few months ago.  In fact, this post was going to be a bit angry and argumentative.  After talking to my very wise friend Megan, though, I realized that that is exactly what I don't need to contribute to the conversation.  I think most of these women already know that without feminism they couldn't be doing what they are doing today (vote, own property, divorce, show some ankle, etc.).  While I disagree with most of the women against feminism, I am most upset by the fact that this tweet debate shows that nobody really knows what feminism is.  Feminists don't even really know.  They argue about the definition and what it means to live your life as a feminist pretty much constantly.  Does a woman have to throw away her razor and skirts to be considered a feminist?  If a woman is a stay-at-home mom, is she a feminist? If a woman is a stripper, can she be included as a feminist?  What are feminists fighting for, exactly?  Whose rights? American women?  [Insert race here] women?  Lower-class women? Fat women? Transwomen?

While mulling this over, the terrible and wonderful my-professor-was-right-all-along hit me.  In a feminist criticism course I took, the professor spent a lengthy amount of time discussing the relativity of feminism to modern women and if it can even be defined anymore.  After all, there isn't one single and obvious reform to rally around like suffrage or even the Equal Rights Amendment.  We discussed whether something needs a hard and fast definition to even exist.  We talked about the severe negativity many people associate with "the other F word."  We speculated that perhaps adopting a word like "equalist" would be a safer, more comfortable label.  I disagreed with her at the time, thinking "equalist" was wimping out and making "feminist" even more of a "bad word".  I  thought the prof was suggesting that feminism as an active movement had come to a close and now all we could do was exchange high-fives and critique old literary pieces using historic, archaic feminist ideas.

Now my own internal feminist debate that has been storming most ardently in the past few weeks has come full circle and I find myself again looking at the ideas in Dr. C's feminist criticism class.  Although now I feel I can see a bit more clearly into the murky, muddy puddle that is feminist theory.  We need a definition of feminism.  But who is authorized to give it?

A while ago I watched a TED talk given by Tavi Gevinson that grappled with the same issues.  The precocious high school girl, who runs a fashion blog and considers herself a feminist, explains how she came to terms with all the contradictions that come with being a feminist, not to mention one obsessed with fashion.  Feminism is incredibly complex and means something different to virtually every person who has encountered the word.  So basically, you must define it for yourself.  I know.  That clears up very little.  But I'll try to explain by giving my personal definition and some guidelines about finding your own feminism.

My definition of feminism is "total equality regardless of gender identification or sexual orientation".  The way I measure this "equality" is based on the abolition of the assumption that we as humans possess any ownership over another human's body.  Societal expression of this ownership assumption includes rape and sexual assault, body judgement and shame, oversexualization of the female (or male) body in media, and in other parts of the world women are still trying to declare freedom from body ownership in serious and basic ways, like genital mutilation and prearranged marriages that equate to goods exchanges.  The second part of my definition is compassion.  I know that a lot of women give back the hate they feel directed at them and call it feminism, but I don't subscribe to that.  Compassion is the motivation for my feminism.  The third part of my definition is that all women should be free to choose their own life.  If they want to be mothers, they should be.  If they want to chase a career, they should.  If they want to do both, they should be able to without judgments made on their parenting.  If they want to stay home and homeschool their kids and bake pies and sew clothes, they should be able to without judgment.

My guidelines for defining feminism are simple.  Equality should be in your definition somewhere.  Hatred should be left out of equal rights fights always.  And feminism is not exclusive.  It can't fully exist without also fighting racism and classism.  It also intersects with gender spectrum issues and fat studies these days.

Sounds really idealistic, romantic, and other words for the opposite of realistic.  But that's the thing.  I want it to become a reality.

Review: The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

Sally Jay Gorce, having just graduated college, is off on a Parisian adventure and her rich uncle is footing the bill.  When we first meet her, she is spending her time doing nothing in particular.  She stays out late with groups of American artists in French cafes some nights and others she spends in the arms of a married Italian man.  Then she meets an old friend Larry, falls in love with him over an afternoon glass of wine, and does everything to get him to notice her, including audition for his play, in which she successfully performs.  The book follows her around the artistic cafes and seedy gay night clubs of 1950s Paris and documents in Sally's own charming and hilarious words her trials and victories, her many lovers and various rivals.

Miss Gorce is a wonderful narrator because she is flawed and completely honest about it.  She says,  "I always expect people to behave much better than I do.  When they actually behave worse, I am frankly incredulous."  She has no delusions about herself and doesn't take herself (or anything) too seriously.  She's not usually harsh with herself; she has brief pride when she accidentally does something well or kind and she fully admits mistakes and errors in judgement when she accidentally fails.  She never gives herself too much credit, and she doesn't beat herself up about anything either.  Sally Jay knows exactly who she is and what she's like, although she pretends not to.  For a twenty-two-year-old woman, she cares surprisingly little what others think of her.  She's in Paris to party.  Sally Jay does what she wants.

This spirited gal could win a lot of hearts, but I can see people of the theatre especially loving Sally Jay to death.  She is a new and talented actress after all, so I feel like she could be a theatre major's best friend.  She's dramatic yet along for the ride.

The Dud Avocado is considered a coming-of-age story and what better example of finding oneself than a student abroad.  But this novel is light-years more lighthearted than The Bell Jar or The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It is also very different from every other coming-of-age story I've read because the conclusion leaves you wondering if Sally Jay did actually come of age.  The unsatisfying and semi-blunt ending suggests that she did not really learn her lesson.  In fact the story ends with Sally Jay heading to Japan, possibly to relive her crazy traveler's adventures.  The last sentence is Sally's declaration "It's zymotic," of the Japan trip. "Zymotic" could have be 50s slang or just Sally Jay slang, but literally it is a 1800s adjective for a very infectious disease.  Elaine Dundy could be referring to the return of Sally Jay's fever for travel, but she also might mean that she has been infected with the same quick trustfulness that got her into trouble in France.

What probably got this carefree and unassuming literary work a reprinting after half a century is its honest voice and Dalmatian spots of wisdom.  For example, this line in particular pops into my head at almost every social event I've been to since reading this book: "I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it."

(Hooray for marking The Dud Avocado off my list!  What's next? Frankenstein and A Beautiful Mess book club November selection, Lena Dunham's new essays.)