Author: Jana

  • tastes like chicken…

    tastes like chicken…

    I’m generally not a huge fan of chicken, or fowl meat.  I think my distaste for it is because it’s typically dry and somewhat flavorless.  But that changed this weekend when some friends and I did some chicken-alchemy.  We used Clothilde’s “Salt-Crusted Chicken” recipe and it was just as amazing as she said it would be–so juicy and rich-tasting that I didn’t even recognize that it was chicken.  I loved, too, that we got to break open the ‘crust’ with a hammer–it’s just not often that you get to use a hammer in the kitchen.   :)

    And here’s Aubrey showing that she knows how to use a hammer:
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    To go with the chicken Aubrey made salad, and I’m now a huge fan of her miso-salad dressing, which was 1TB each of tamari soy sauce, miso, nut butter, and maple syrup, 3/4 cup nut or olive oil, 1/3 cup cider vinegar, and three minced garlic cloves. Amazingly tasty:
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    And for dessert, we tried a new homemade ice cream flavor: Salted Butter Caramel (it reminded me of dulce de leche, but just a bit saltier–yum!).  The only thing I would add to it next time might be one small square of ultra-dark chocolate (90% or higher):
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    I’ll be making that chicken recipe again, for sure.  I might even use it every time I make chicken–it was easy and so worth it because of the flavor.  Perhaps you’d like to join me at chez Remy for Salt-Crusted Chicken sometime soon?

  • yes!

    yes!



    My friend Erin inaugurated The Summer of YES and I’m following suit.  The basic premise is to say YES to whatever opportunities the universe offers (a practice that I endorse wholeheartedly).  So in that spirit, I’m committing to doing two YES-type of things everyday while I’m traveling in Europe.  First of all, I’ll make sure to say YES to trying a new food at least once per day.  And second, I’ll say YES to doing one new thing everyday that I either haven’t done before, or that scares me.  This will not be the same kind of trip-to-Europe-with-the-family with a strict itinerary and a list of ‘must-do’ tourist attractions–although I’ve enjoyed each of those, this is going to be my first venture abroad sans family and sans touristy expectations!  Instead, I’m going to let my travels challenge and provoke me in new ways, and I’ll spend some time touring without a firm plan of where I’ll even end up that night and just see what adventures happen along the way…

    It’s my intention to report daily on Facebook and on Twitter, and I’d love to have you follow along.  I’ll probably not be blogging much (I’m saying NO to bringing a laptop along and NO to being tethered to the Internet), but there’ll be a few posts in the queue so things don’t go totally dark around here while I’m gone…

  • but what I think of now…

    but what I think of now…


    A selection from:

    Eve on Her Deathbed

    Linda Pastan

    In the end we are no more than our own stories:
    mine a few brief passages in the Book,
    no further trace of plot or dialogue.
    But I once had a lover no one noticed
    as he slipped through the pages, through
    the lists of those begotten and begetting.
    Does he remember our faltering younger selves,
    the pleasures we took while Adam,
    a good bureaucrat, busied himself
    with naming things, even after Eden?
    What scraps will our children remember of us
    to whom our story is simple
    and they themselves the heroes of it? …
    But what I think of now,
    in the final bitterness of age,
    is the way the garden groomed itself
    in the succulent air of summer—each flower
    the essence of its own color; the way even
    the serpent knew it had a part it had to play, if
    there were to be a story at all.

  • how to charm me…

    how to charm me…

    Call and ask my opinion about cloud-based file storage services, then ‘share your screen’ with me as we debate the various options via Skype.  Seriously.   :)

    (yes, I am a geek)

  • for ambiguity

    for ambiguity


    Those of you who enjoy traveling (or dreaming about traveling), might like to take a look at this interview with travel writer and globally-minded soul Pico Iyer. He says of travel:

    Iyer: I think the main reason I travel, if I were to sum it up in one word, is for ambiguity. The reason I love travel is not just because it transports you in every sense, but because it confronts you with emotional and moral challenges that you would never have to confront at home. So I like going out in search of moral and emotional adventure which throws me back upon myself and forces me to reconsider my assumptions and the things I took for granted. It sends me back a different person.

    I don’t know that I’ve had the kinds of emotional and moral challenges when I travel that Pico speaks of, but I do find that it makes me re-think who I am in my place in the world. And I feel more alive and present when I travel, because of the novelty of place and things–which I relish.

    What about you, do you agree with Pico? And/or, what do you get out of traveling?

  • cliche

    Let’s see, since I’m middle-aged and divorced and trying to make a new path for my life, I think that means it’s time to go to Italy, right?  I’ll be just like Diane Lane and Elizabeth Gilbert…and before you know it, I’ll not only have a villa, a foreign lover, and a new outlook on the world, but I’ll finally be the real me.  Don’t you think?

  • sacrament

    sacrament

    In my recent post about visiting the LDS church last weekend, I mentioned that I found the LDS sacrament rite to be quite difficult, even long before I left the church. On that entry, a friend left the following comment:
    So I thought I would briefly address her question…

    In the LDS church, the sacrament is administered every week by members of the lower LDS priesthood.  Typically the bread and water are blessed by 16 year old boys and the trays of bread and water are passed to congregants by 12 and 13 year-old boys.  I’m not particularly fond of the gendered pattern that this follows.  I can’s see any logical reason why a girl could not bless and pass the sacrament, too.  So that kind of rubs me the wrong way.

    But that’s not my primary discomfort with the ordinance.  That comes from it symbolizing the blood and body of Jesus Christ, and for the promises contained in the sacramental prayer:

    O God, the Eternal Father, we ask thee in the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ, to bless and sanctify this bread to the souls of all those who partake of it; that they may eat in remembrance of the body of thy Son, and witness unto thee, O God, the Eternal Father, that they are willing to take upon them the name of thy Son, and always remember him, and keep his commandments which he hath given them, that they may always have his Spirit to be with them. Amen

    This ordinance is all about atonement of Jesus Christ–a concept that I find repulsive. I don’t like that the violent killing of a human being was supposedly conducted on my behalf. Even if I could accept the idea that Jesus was a willing victim in this arrangement, I reject the logic of a worldview where a murder is the foundation for personal sanctification. Everything in my heart and in my soul tells me that this is wrong. I could easily use stronger language to describe my repulsion to this concept, but I don’t want to completely alienate those of my readers and friends who hold this view.

    So the first part of my LDS faith that I lost, was when I realized that I couldn’t accept the literal or figurative sacrifice of Jesus.  That happened several years before the rest of it unraveled.  And as a result, I avoided taking the sacrament whenever I could because it was discomfiting for me to participate in a ritual that reified such a violent act.

  • dependence

    the living room
    I was chatting with CatGirl the other day when the subject of dependence came up.  I took the opportunity to explain to her what the consequences were of the choices I made to marry young and start a family at age 21.  That it meant that over a decade ago, when it became obvious that my spouse was not as trustworthy as he had seemed, that I was stuck.  At that time I spent all day caring for my two young children.  He took our only car to work everyday and our neighborhood wasn’t well-served by local bus routes.  Which meant not only was I confined within the walls of our home nearly every hour of the day, but I was also ‘stuck’ in a larger sense.  I’d never held a full-time job and my bachelor’s degree wasn’t in a marketable field.  Even in college when I’d applied for crappy part-time jobs I’d usually been turned down because of my disability (this was back in the day when they could tell you to your face that “We think you just aren’t physically capable of this job”–which meant that somehow my artificial leg would prevent me from answering phones for an office?).  And as a cancer survivor, I was also insurance-dependent, knowing that the only means I had for acquiring my expensive prosthetic limbs was via my spouse’s policy.  The fear of losing my mobility loomed large.

    What I didn’t explain to her then, but will someday, is what followed.  After celebrating my 30th birthday I started wearing black all of the time because I felt frumpy and old.  Soon, I stopped eating, and then I spent most of the day staring listlessly into space while sitting on the back porch, or curled in a ball leaning against the washing machine and feeling its comforting hum.  I thought too often about matches and knives and wanting my life to be over.  My chronic bronchitis developed into chronic laryngitis.  I whispered and wheezed.  And over time I grew smaller and smaller and smaller…

    So I told my daughter that I would always support and respect her choices for the future, but I hoped that she would never-ever-ever put herself in a position where she was as dependent as I was.  Because everyone deserves mobility and opportunity for employment–even spouses who choose to stay at home and care for their children.

    She was listening carefully as I spoke, and she agreed.

  • Twitter Weekly Digest for @janaremy, 2011-06-24

  • guilty pleasures…

    ranunculus
    One of my favorite guilty pleasures is perusing the poetry and interviews in The Paris Review.  I don’t remember how or why I began reading it, but once I did I was hooked.  Recently I was going through some poetry in the online archives and came across this interview with writer Shirley Hazzard.  I especially enjoy what she says about poetry:

    Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life. It literally and figuratively saved my life, and enabled me to live inwardly. I do not know how people manage without it…

    Vladimir Nabokov told his American students that they must saturate themselves in the poetry of their language, poetry in English, in order to develop the ear. This seems to me the most valuable advice one could give to readers or writers. Of course, he did not mean that this should be done with a “purpose” in mind, as if to exploit the power and beauty of great art. Accessibility to expressive language will not come that way. It is an act of love, with implicit humility, and must develop itself. So much of this is intuitive, and intuition itself must be developed from an early age if it is not to languish. Our era of interpretations and explanations and the piling up of convoluted lingo in the academic world–the self-gratification of many a “close reading,” the psycho-sociological overlaying and, often, undermining that commentators apply to works of genius–has been inimical to the nurturing of intuitive affinity and understanding. Much of that arises, I think, from a modern fear of immediacy and of the loss of the illusion of control. Housman’s reference to the hairs rising at the back of one’s neck as one reads a poem remains a test of quality. Such response is individual and cannot merely be generalized, dismantled, controlled.

    I love that feeling of “the hairs rising at the back of one’s neck” from poetry.  I know that sensation all too well.  And it’s what keeps me coming back for more.

  • This is the Place (or, my return to the LDS church)

    IMG_4128

    This weekend I attended the LDS church while on a visit to Utah. It was my first time attending a Sacrament Meeting in well over five years. It was my first time taking the sacrament (communion) in much longer than that (because even long before I stopped attending the Mormon church, I couldn’t stomach the symbols of that ordinance). It wasn’t an earth-shaking experience in any way. In fact, it was just the opposite. The hymns were familiar and I sang them with some gusto (much to the chagrin of my seatmates, I’m sure–I do not have a pretty voice). Shaking the Bishop’s hand and meeting the local saints was endearing. I felt no friction in any of those experiences.

    That said, I have no intention of returning to activity in the LDS church. But it was nice to know that I could attend and it could be a benign, rather than a frustrating experience. Perhaps that means that I am finally healing from the wounds incurred by my natal faith, and am comfortable with where I’m at now in my life.

  • she’s got legs…

    she’s got legs…

    A few months ago I was reconsidering my legs.  For a few years I’d gone ‘robotic’–letting my prosthetic leg show rather than wearing a cosmetic covering over it to make it have the same contours as an organic leg.  It was an empowering experience, but also hard sometimes.   I don’t mind being stared at–I’m used to it now, after having had that happen for nearly 30 years.  I don’t mind discussing my disability–I’m used to that, too.  But I do mind when that tends to eclipse everything else that is important and interesting about me.  So I started feeling like it was time for a change (that, and I started wearing knee-high boots, which looked REALLY WEIRD with one skinny leg and one normal-sized one).

    As a temporary measure, I put some old cosmesis on my leg to see how it felt and looked.  I showed my kids and their jaws sort of dropped.  They were so used to a Mom with asymmetry–they didn’t seem to like it much.  I mentioned it to some friends, who were supportive, but not really opinionated one way or another about which looked better.  And after a few weeks of using that old cosmesis (which wasn’t actually fitted to this prosthetic leg so it didn’t look quite right around the ankle or knee), I submitted the insurance paperwork to get some nice cosmesis made for this leg.  And, months later, it was approved and I got my new skin about a week ago.

    At this point, I’m still not sure which look I prefer.  I see positives and negatives to both.  But I like that I now feel comfortable wearing my leg either way–I experience no shame in showing my robotic innards, and I also enjoy ‘passing’ as a biped and having my tights and boots and slacks hang symmetrically on my lower body.  Perhaps what’s most important is knowing that either works fine for me, and I can change my mind about my ‘look’ at any time without feeling the need to justify or explain it to anyone.

    (Pic to the left is me last Halloween with stripey tights and a tutu.  Pic to the right is me today at work (with my skirt hiked up a bit to show the vintage-lace edge of the slip that I’m wearing underneath my sundress)