Moving - Phone Update #3

I am currently in the process of moving from one apartment to another. This means I no longer have access to internet on bf's computer (my computer needs a new motherboard apparently). Therefore, you get another iPhone blog!

What do you do if you are moving residences and you receive a census form at both addresses? Further, it asks you who lives at the residence as of April 1, 2010 and since we are still technically living at our old apartment AND our new apartment until April 18, 2010, how should we answer that question without duplicating ourselves?

Other thoughts on the census: this is the first time in history that married gay couples can be counted as a such! Progress comes in baby steps, I guess.

How about you? Have you filled out your census information yet, or are you waiting until after April 1 to send it in?

FYI - blogging from a phone is very time consuming! I am off to get cable/internet installed and my computer fixed.

To Tweet or not to Tweet?

Being without a computer for the last few weeks has been a major change in my routine. My usual habit of catching up with my social networking sites and blogs after dinner has been confined to the tiny screen of my iPhone. It also made me realize just how connected I am to both friends and strangers via social networking.

I was talking to my friend about this and she asked me if I had a Twitter account. I didn't (until this morning) have a Twitter account. I explained to her that I really don't feel the need to update the Twitterverse on what I am doing, what I am eating, and what I am thinking every few hours (or minutes!) I also informed her I have enough going on in my own life, I don't need to hear about everyone else's.

Her: "But isn't that exactly what you are doing on your blog, and on Facebook, and when you read and comment on other blogs?"

Me: (In a defensive tone) "Uh, noooo. That is way different!"

Her: "How?"

Me: "Because blogs are an expression of ideas in a robust way. They are not 140 character sentences about what a person is eating! Also, blogging is a community."

Her: "Sometimes blogs are about what a person is eating (Your baking posts, for example, Mara). And Tweeting is really just another way to communicate ideas -- just with more brevity. Twitter is a community too, you know. You need to be able to evolve with social networking, because it is always changing and growing."

Me: "But what kind of meaningful discourse can come out of 140 characters?"

Her: (smiling, she knew she had me) "You'll never know until you try..."

So, this week I am going to experiment with Twitter. If anything, maybe it will be another way I can connect with my blog readers and possibly interest some new readers. Also, my friend informs me that you can get news Tweets, and museum Tweets, and theater Tweets, and band Tweets! That would be pretty neat.

If you have any words of Twitter-wisdom, or any thoughts on Twitter, please leave them in the comments. Or, you can always shoot me a Tweet at @AdulthoodMara!

(picture via ZoomInfoBlogger)

One Bowl Mini Cherry Cheesecakes

This weekend I baked Mini Cherry Cheesecakes for a dinner party with friends. Not only were they delicious, but they were also perhaps the easiest baked goods I have ever made to date. I used Paula Deen's recipe, and while I haven't had success with many Food Network recipes, this one is definitely one for the recipe box. The best news is that you only need one bowl!

Bake this recipe immediately! Your friends and family will think you slaved over the oven for hours, but little will they know that it only took you 8 minutes.

Ingredients
2 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
2 eggs
12 vanilla wafers
1 (21-ounce) can cherry pie filling or other pie filling
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Place a paper cupcake liner in each cup of muffin pan. Beat cream cheese with a handheld electric mixer until fluffy. Add sugar and vanilla, beating well. Add eggs, 1at a time, beating well after each addition. Lay a vanilla wafer, flat side down, in each muffin cup. (Don't worry if the cookie is smaller than the muffin cup, it will spread during baking.) Spoon cream cheese mixture over wafers. Bake for 20 minutes. Allow tarts to cool completely. Serve with cherry filling on top, or pie filling of your choice.


(photo via PreparedPantry. My camera broke, but mine looked just as delicious.)

Geek Squad - Phone Update #2

You never fully realize how reliant on technology you are until you have to go without it.

My computer (as well as BF's computer, cooincidentally)is still broken but I promise to update soon! Help Geek Squad!

Broken Computer

Well, folks, my computer is broken. It is a pretty new computer, so I am confident that if I take it in to be repaired it can be fixed, but until then I am blogging from my iPhone.

But, I had to announce some very exciting news. Nicole and I are attending Bloggy Bootcamp! We will be attending the Phoenix conference, and I can't tell you how excited I am about it. I will learn all sorts of great things to help me improve my blog, including SEO (an acronym I have seen many times but have never understood what it is).

We are also planning on making it a girls' weekend, and hopefully will stay at the resort where the seminar is just so we can mingle with people, lay by the pool, and have a mini-vacation.

Are you a girl blogger? If so, I highly recommend checking out one of these event locations. Or, better yet, join us in Phoenix!

What's In a Name?

***

I can't get used to my friend Nicole's new married name. I have known the girl for over 20 years as Oldewurtel. (Pronounce it however you like, you still probably won't pronounce it right.) Now, suddenly, with a few words from a priest, the Social Security Administration, and the State of Arizona, she is a Carpenter.

As a person who has lived with a very strange last name her whole life also, I feel really more jealous that she doesn't have to struggle anymore with helping people understand. This is how the conversation usually goes for me:


ME: My last name is Stringfield.

THEM: Oh, yes. Springfield.

ME: No, STringfield. With a "T."

THEM: Oh, we don't have a Strongfield on the list.

ME: No. STRING, Like string cheese. FIELD, like a field of grass.

THEM: (sounding even more confused than ever and speaking hesitantly) Is that right? Stringfield?

ME: Yep. String and field, put together. Compound word.

THEM: Is it F-I-E-L-D or F-E-I-L-D?

ME: (silently)How do you think you spell "field"? (aloud) F-I-E-L-D.

THEM: Okay, you are on the list!


Nicole was always the friend who understood the struggles of having a difficult name. I could always count on someone understanding the annoyance. Now, she goes to the bank or a restaurant and says "Carpenter." That's it. Carpenter.

I don't have the heart to change her name yet. My phone still rings Nicole Oldewurtel when she calls. I don't think I have accepted that adulthood comes with many changes -- friends get married, and change their names. I need to reconcile myself with the fact that it is not identity theft.

I asked Nicole today how she felt about her new name. "I love it. I like the name and I like that it represents our family -- and so in that way it does really feel like my name. Oh, and it is easier."

I remember as a younger girl, I would practice my new signature over and over (as many younger girls do). I would write and rewrite the last name of the boy I liked in different styles. I would try to perfect it because, in my fantasy, the boy I liked and I would end up getting married and I would have to sign all my letters with the new last name.

Then, I ask, why do I feel so startled by Nicole's lucky new name?

Nicole's answer today made me realize that changing your name is not identity theft. That both her and I, the quirky girls with the strange names, would be just as unique whether our names be Carpenter or anything else.

And I had to just practice thinking about it this way. So, I literally did practice -- just like the younger-girl-Mara would have. Just to see what it would feel like when signing a new name was less fantasy and more probability. And my boyfriend's last name is Jones, and writing it as my signature suuurreee is easier -- and so much shorter at 5 letters!
I guess it wouldn't be half bad to change my name after all.

Cheers to friends who change their names and help you grow, my little Fickle Nickle.

Until then, this is Mara Stringfield, signing off.

P.S. Dearest BF, though I know you don't read my blog, just in case on this rare occasion you do, please don't be wierded out with the fact that I may or may not have been practicing writing your surname (and may or may not have published my practice on my blog). Trust me, girls do this. I think at all ages, girls do this. It just means I have a crush on you. :)

One Hundred Hours of Solitude

Fellow blogger, Selena, asked me to submit a contribution to her blog http://www.highschoolpoetryslam.blogspot.com/ and aside from being a hugely honored because I love the work she is doing over there, it might also have been just what I needed to help remove the giant writer’s block that has been clogging my head.

The premise of her blog is to deconstruct your high school self and kind of make fun of yourself (which is always good, because in high school most of us probably took ourselves way too seriously and couldn’t really laugh at our angsty dramatics). This got me thinking about high school and the feelings associated with being an angsty teenager, and then I remembered two things which went together in a thought like butter and bread: 1) I had not yet blogged about my recent trip. 2) I felt the high school angst all too recently, and it was acute, and it was unpleasant. And let me tell you, I am happy to be out of high school so I don’t have to feel it very often.

On our cruise, we stopped in various ports. I had this romantic idea about the ports that I would be able to walk around, explore, eat local fresh cuisine, chat with the people who lived there, find hidden non-tourist spots to explore. Unfortunately, when you set expectations you are bound to be disappointed. BF was scuba diving at all the ports, so often times he wouldn’t even come to the land at all, but instead tender off from the big boat to his diving spot. That left me many hours of a day in a foreign country (a developing foreign country, at that) to fend for myself. Being an independent and experienced traveler, I was not worried. Plus, the ship makes it easy to set up various excursions at each port. So, I picked excursions that seemed like something I could do alone -- for example, I wasn’t up for zip lining or cave tubing by myself, but some of the more mellow adventures would be fine for a lone woman traveler.

But “lone” really was the operative word. For 12 hours a day (8 on the excursion and 4 to fend for myself), I was alone. Granted, I was in a tour group (of mostly couples and their friends), but I felt very much alone.

I sat on the long bus rides alone. I ate lunch alone. I hiked alone. I walked alone. Full days of almost no talking, unless I was addressed by someone in my group, “Dear, are you all by yourself?” Yes and no, I would say. My boyfriend was scuba diving and that is a once in a lifetime experience, I would say, half reassuring myself. “Oh, that is very nice of you, dear,” they would respond.

In Belize, after a two hour bus ride, our group arrived at a remote Mayan ruin site. We toured the site a bit, and then were allowed to hike up a ruin. It was a pretty treacherous hike, so most of the people in our tour group decided to skip it (they were also much older and it seemed harder for them to get around). I, of course, hiked to the top. When I made it to the top, sweating and panting, I looked out over the vast jungles of Belize that seemed endless. I was alone.

There was something sublime about being alone on the top of a ruin. Something that made you feel important, like you knew a secret on this earth that no one else knew. And there was also something that scared you about being on the top of a ruin so high that your stomach dipped if you took a deep breath, and you felt like you had to take little breaths or you might lose your balance and fall away.

And in my little breaths I looked around for anyone who could witness this too: just one more person to share a real moment with, just so I could remind myself that it was all happening. Someone to give me a little wink or a nod to signify that though sublime and scared, I had been here and I had felt it -- and someone else had felt it too.

But I was just alone.

So, I climbed silently down the ruin. My head felt light from altitude but my heart felt heavy with loneliness. About halfway down the descent I saw a young couple climbing up, they were breathless too but they were laughing and talking to each other in thick Irish accents. My spirits brightened a bit and I asked, “May I climb back up with you and ask you to take my picture?” The said yes, and I climbed back up with them, they snapped my photo and I climbed down again. I heard the girl cheering about being on the top of the world as I climbed down, and I heard the boy laugh, and I imagined them twirling together, arms out, heads up, with their eyes focusing on the nearly touchable sky. I held back burning tears.

Later that day our tour group set up camp (we were in the jungles after all, we needed rest and repast) and we had a few hours to spend at camp before we jumped on a jungle boat through the rainforests. At the camp I walked around for a bit, collecting various sized walking sticks before drawing in the dirt with the shortest ones, and then I sat some more. Others in our group napped with their spouse/partner in large hammocks, or hiked around two by two.


I ate my lunch at that camp, sitting alone in the sun at the end of a makeshift gangway, my legs dangling so close to the water that when the wind blew I could feel the finest spray. And I felt the loneliness again. This time, it was something even more tangible than the loneliness I felt on the top of the ruin. It was as familiar and painful as a chronic ache.

My legs were still dangling, but this time I was sitting on a toilet seat, fully clothed, with no intention of using the facilities. A sandwich in a zip-lock baggie was on my lap: mayo, turkey, cheese, wilted iceberg, a tomato, and soggy wheat bread. Next to me was a brown bag with warm string cheese and a warm yogurt. I was wearing a shirt-style sheath dress made of shiny silver fabric with flowers on it, and white, platform tennis shoes. I felt so confident when I put on the outfit that morning, but in the bathroom stall of my new high school I felt only small and alone.

I chose to start eating in the stall after spending a few lunch and break periods sitting at a cafeteria table alone. No one talked to me, no one included me, and aside from the occasional pitying stare from a classmate, everyone avoided me. So when the lunch bell rang and everyone filed to the cafeteria, I would divert from the crowd to the girls’ bathroom that was located closest to the cafeteria. I liked the close-by bathroom because from my stall I could still hear laughing kids, so I felt both connected to possible kinship and wholly reminded of my loneliness. When the bell would ding to signal the end of lunch, I would wipe my tears, take a few bites of string cheese, flush the toilet for good measure, hold my head high, and exit the bathroom stall like I was a queen.

On the cruise, each excursion at port felt like a ringing lunch bell -- a stinging reminder that I must brace myself for a day of loneliness. But it was almost worse on my trip because I wasn’t confining myself to a bathroom stall, and it wasn’t just teenage gossip that I was missing out on. Instead, I was exploring ruins, hiking, boating, picking wild mini-plums from a rainforest and then eating them, and seeing amazing things like iguanas the size of dogs walking freely down the city streets. But I didn’t have anyone to be able to share these experiences with. The same feeling as the 15 year-old high school bathroom stall queen, but a little more complex and a little less insecure.



Though I don’t keep in great touch with my friends who studied abroad with me in Madrid, I know how to reach them, and I send them well-wishes via Facebook whenever I can. And they are so important to me because their existence reminds me that when I was in Spain, I really lived. I lived life to the fullest, I climbed to the top of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, I saw my favorite band at the tiniest venue in Madrid with about 20 people present, I spoke Spanish moderately well, I lived in a beautiful apartment, I stayed up all night in Italy and drank sangria every night in Spain, and I took in everything and never took any of the experiences for granted. I was there. And I have a handful of friends whose very existence, regardless if I talk to them at all or not, reminds me that it was not a dream.

In Central America it wouldn’t have been safe to walk around as a woman alone, with not a soul knowing my whereabouts. So, I couldn’t explore much, I couldn’t venture into non-tourist places. Instead I took long bus rides, tuning out chatter and staring or sleeping. I took long walks in contained ports while singing to myself, drew in the dirt with sticks, foraged for berries, visited wild monkey sanctuaries, and made sand-angels on perfect white beach sand. I toasted to myself and drank a stout Belikin Belizean beer at a bar alone, making a mental note that it was hoppier than most stouts, but was still delicious. Though the memories I had were wonderful, they were always tinged with an underlying sadness that was laced with memories of warm string cheese and tears.

But, the show must go on, and the queen always leaves her throne with her head held high. If anything, from my trip I remembered an ache I am not used to, mostly because I have the most wonderful BF. I am grateful that because of him I usually always have someone who would save me a seat at the proverbial cafeteria lunch table. Maybe I took the comfort of partnership for granted, and the fates wanted me to feel that tangible solitude again. Not the most pleasant lesson, but one I can grow from.

Oh yeah, and next time I go on a cruise, I am inviting all of you. Then BF can scuba dive and someone can twirl around on the top of a ruin with me.