les biscuits et les verres

Thanks to Pinterest, your average Joe can dream up all sorts of creations. Or mimick all sorts of others' creations. Here is my Peanut Butter Hug "cookie". 

I was going for a sweet pink so the hug looked more like zebra stripes but I got a humble rose color. I'm not disappointed. They taste pretty good. I used an idea that I found at dailynibbles.com. However, I did not read it well enough to find that I should have used gel food coloring. I used some target off-brand liquid drops. Probably the cause of the humbled mumble-bumble rosy pink instead of the hot look-at-me pink.

(That was just what I had at the house.) And when she refers to the Peasandthankyou.com recipe I again used just what was around the house. So dairy-margarine instead of not and plain creamy Skippy peanut butter instead of natural. Things like that...

I also tried breaking beer bottles down into glasses. I read about this technique in a magazine my cousin had last year or a couple years ago. Seeing it on pinterest reminded me that I wanted to try that. So I finally did. Once again, I used what was around the house instead of what was recommended. For this, I looked at about.com's several pages on "How to cut class with string"/similarly named topics to get the gist of it. I ended up soaking some pink kitchen cotton crochet yarn that has been sitting in my sewing room for a while now. After a few different trials -oh there were errors, obviously- I wound the yarn around the bottle a couple/few times, cut and tied it and took it off to soak in, in the end, lamp oil. I tried nail polish remover but it just didn't burn long enough. Maybe not enough acetone. 

I don't know why but there was an unopened gallon of lamp oil in the basement. It has to have been sitting there for at least five years. Probably. I used some machine-washable gloves that I bought for my printing and dyeing class to push the soaked yarn back into place. Sitting at the side of the bath tub with a metal tub full of cold water under my arms, I took off one glove to strike a match and light the yarn. While sliding my hand back into the glove, I watched and turned the bottle as the yarn self-extinguished. (Note to self: Oven mittens are not necessarily flame retardant. But I learned that a different way, don't worry.)

As soon as it was done, I dunked it in the cold water. After some attempts, I heard the "pop" that I read about and the glass was broken. But not neatly like I thought it would be. And repeat. ish. I'm planning out working on the kinks. I think the big chunkers of edgy glass are from the yarn-knots. I plan to trim/tuck them better next time. Also, I am thinking that it would create a more consistent/leveled break to put the glass in the water vertically instead of randomly rolling it into the cold. Trying to make sure that the hot ring goes cold all at once should work. Hopefully. We'll see. I gave up for the day after two failed-ish attempts. And then made the afformentioned cookies. That failed-ish.

 This was my first attempt (above). It went through a few different burning yarns and cold-dunkings. There were a lot of rugged edges left and as a result a lot of little pieces were still breaking off in the sanding process. For once in my life, I actually kept my gloves on for the project (except of course to light the match).

The one with the label was my second attempt. You can see that it is smoother but still not necessarily something someone will want to drink out of. Oh right, did I mention that instead of a diamond emery, I used a 400grit sandpaper? I'm looking into getting the emery. I sanded out the sharp parts, it is perfectly safe for rubbing your finger all over. Trust me, I did so again and again and again. It just needs a good sanding down for obvious aesthetic purposes, you know?

lire

Reading Palahniuk doesn't make you feel good about yourself. You don't become a better person having read his works. Your life becomes no more significant than it was before, necessarily.
It's like looking at Picasso's works. You don't admire them for their beauty. They don't show that you have a true appreciation of art. Or abstract even.
These men, their works, inspire. And not in the, "I'm going somewhere," "I can achieve greatness," "the world is my canvas," sort of way. But in a way more subtle. They challenge you to think. To look back at all that is crooked and easily undefined or more commonly over-defined.
Palahniuk, like Picasso, is giving you another approach to observing, to viewing. To thinking. To appreciating. To approaching life. He takes your world and, with words, tears it apart from the seams. He realizes all vantage points and selectively adheres new perspective to parts/people/places you already know.
And he is not doing it for you. He just does it because he can. If he knew that not a single person would read it, he would probably still write it anyway. Because he is a writer. Because that is what he does. Because he thought it. Or knew it. Or figured it out. And even if he weren't guaranteed readers, in written form, it would at least have the potential to be read. Even if just by himself again, years down the road.
How selfish would we be to keep our thoughts to ourselves? To keep our epiphanies, our revelations, our discoveries limited to those who epiphanized, revolutionized, discovered.
Still- How selfish would we be to expect that someone actually cared about every thought that we've had? Or any? Any epiphanies, any revelations, any discoveries. They may have seemed significant to us but why do we care if or hope that someones else learns of/from them?
Even the diary of Anne Frank, presumably written for her own eyes, is shared and studied and applied to modern day morals, philosophies, history lessons, etc.

Kurt et Chuck

Up until recently, I hardly read anything if it wasn't written by Kurt Vonnegut. Right now, I'm into Chuck Palahniuk. This man is amazing. He has a cynic voice, like I admire so much in Kurt, in his writing but it can be encouraging in a way. I've never hated the human race so much but at the same time, loved it so much either. To think that he can create such mind-bending thrills within a couple hundred pages. To see that he can make me think and re-think, regret, reform. I'm just beyond half-way through Diary and I can't help but feel connected to the fictional character "writing" it. It's like taking my earlier blog post, "inspiration" and turning that into a character and then having someone else write to him while he's in a coma. So far at least.
Some of the things he writes, I feel like they were taken from my mind, my mouth and/or my writings. This is going to be short because I just have to finish reading. I was told that I won't see the end coming and now I'm even more excited to finish it.

inspiration

I don't know if this has already been "discovered" by someone yet, but I find that those who are truly great at what they do are those who have suffered a great deal. For some reason, a crooked childhood, a near death experience, a loved one's death... they are all perfectly great inspirations. Maybe it's because it forces the person to think longer, harder, and deeper about life and their supposed purpose.

What are any of us here for, really? What are you here for?

Before this gets too deep for anyone, let me remind you that yes, I do ask a lot of questions. I know, I am the writer. I should be the one informing not the one inquiring. But these are, more or less, hypothetical questions. I plan to share my opinion and thoughts, where they apply, but I want to make you think. Good classes, the ones you really learn things in, don't just give you information. Good classes, good people, the ones you really learn things from, ask questions. They make you think. Good classes and people engage you not just during, but for at least a while, if not forever, after. There will be no quiz. Not about RL. But these are key points that I'm brushing on. Maybe you can make time to think of them when you're in the shower.

Have you suffered something that should/could make you great? If yes, have you really? Or are you just being dramatic? If you really have, did you use that driving force or did you try to bury it? Sometimes people bury it because they don't want others to know what happened to them. Sometimes people exploit their problems to make them seem more meaningful and moving. Rarely, but most importantly, people keep these problems honest and relevant for as long as they can and help others to cope with similar situations. Or help others learn. Or help others heal. And in this process, they create something beautiful.

Can one be inspired and/or inspiring without such an epiphenomenon? I would like to believe that no one wishes upon themselves a great tragedy in order to be inspired. So, how would the rest of us, un-bothered nothings find inspiration? Can a person truly be inspired by the beauty of life as it is? If you stop to smell the roses, do you think to appreciate that you can: 1.stop 2.smell 3.find roses??? And if so, is that even enough? I feel as though this is what gets you called naive.When you can finally take the world and view it as something beautiful, you are all of a sudden missing out on reality. Why do we have to strive so hard to be happy but at the same time focus on everything that is wrong with the world? Is it enough to appreciate the good times, or do we never rest until everyone is happy? Newsflash: ce n'est pas possible