Growing Up With Banana Cake

After my last bout of being lost combined with anger, frustration and moodiness, I decided to focus on the whirlwind of birthdays in the last week. Being surrounded by Pisces really tells me nothing about their characters other than what I know about each of them as individuals. Morgan would tell you otherwise.

So Vaughn’s birthday is March 1st, Lida’s birthday is March 2nd, Sarene’s birthday is March 3rd and my dad’s birthday is March 4th. Carl and Lida threw a party for Vaughn’s birthday and invited all his classmates and soccer friends. Lida, well, threw her son a birthday party. I’m not quite sure what Sarene did for her birthday other than the surprise Aghavni and I set up for her this past Sunday. My dad just spent an evening with my mom and their friends playing cards. They always play this card game called Belot (we pronounce it “buh-lote”) and it’s sort of an excuse for the friends to get together and man do they always have an amazing time.

I knew my dad would pick up my mom from work last Thursday night and they would go to Tantig Nora’s house and play Belot, since my mom was off work the next day and they could stay up late. Thursday just happened to be my dad’s birthday so I baked Grandma’s Banana Cake so I could take it over to Tantig Nora’s house before my parents got there and do a little surprise for my dad! The recipe conveniently makes two cakes so I took the second one over to Sarene’s house.

Needless to say, it all went well. My dad is very easily made happy – all he really needs is his family (any or all of them would do) and his friends and he’s as content as ever. He just really values the simple things in life and it’s made him a happy man all his life. So, this cake and friends and surprise was pretty much phenomenal for him. Morgan even came along, drank some soorj and endured some tantig-talk for a really long time!

I’m in denial that this might be turning into a food/cooking blog, but it’s just so fun! Especially with pictures to accompany the whole number – totally fun. I’ve made subcategories to organize the Cooking & Food section with even more finesse. For baking, we’re going to call them Spoon Lickers because hey, let’s be honest with what our favorite part about baking really is. So! Here is Grandma’s Banana Cake.

Baking is a beast of cooking all on its own. One wrong extra pinch of this or docking a bit less of that can leave you with nothing but a combination of ingredients and not the magical final product. My mom is very health conscious and once tried to make this with less sugar and oil than what the recipe calls for. Her friends can attest to how terrible it did turn out. Mine came out better than hers for once! You’ve got to really follow what it’s made of and to the right amount.

• 6 eggs
• 2 cups of sugar
• 1 cup of Mazola Corn Oil
• 3 bananas
• 3 1/2 cups of flour
• 1/4 cup of milk
• 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda
• 2 teaspoons of vanilla
• 1 cup chopped walnuts or chocolate chips

An important note: this recipe makes two cakes! Oh and preheat your oven to 350-degrees. (guess that’s two notes)

The order of things mixed together is also pretty vital when it comes to baking. Certain things react in a certain way with other things that help create a huge piece of the delicious puzzle which you can then mix with other delicious things! With Grandma’s Banana Bread, you first (and separately) mix the flour, baking soda and baking powder in a bowl and beat with a mixer. Then you take another bowl and mix the sugar, Mazola Corn Oil, vanilla and add the eggs two at a time and beat this collection with a mixer.

Then, take half of the flour mix and put it in with the whole of the sugar mix and beat with a mixer. Take your milk and pour it in to the mix, then take the rest of your flour mix and beat everything together with a mixer. Once you’ve created the batter, take the bananas and squish them well and add to the mix one at a time. Beat the whole thing with a mixer. This way, you can get the banana squishes into even smaller and squishier pieces!

Once you’ve got your banana-y batter ready, you can get creative. You can either mix in walnuts or chocolate chips or both! I’m not a fan of nuts and a big fan of chocolate – especially my dad – so I opted to go with chocolate to mix in with the batter. Add whatever extra you’d like to add and mix the batter thoroughly with a big spoon.

Because this recipe makes two cakes, you’re going to split the batter between two baking dishes. The one we’ve been using since forever is still out there and I don’t know the official dimensions but I’ve measured the dish I use. The opening is a rough 9.5-inches x 5-inches x 3-inches for a rectangular shaped baking dish. Once you’ve got the mixes in the dishes, you can sprinkle some of the chocolate chip or walnuts on top for decoration. When the thing rises, these will stay on top. I even added some cinnamon to my chocolate chips.

Okay! Now you’re ready to stick these babies in the oven. Remember, your oven should be set to bake at 350-degrees. I never really know exactly how much time they should stay in the oven, but definitely give a looksy after a half an hour. This time, I had them in there for 40-45 minutes before they were ready. After a half an hour, see how much of it has risen. Take a toothpick or even a long wooden shish, and poke the cake. If batter comes with the toothpick or shish as you pull it out, it’s not done completely baking. Add on increments of 5 to 7 minutes afterward and keep on poking it to check.

Hooray! Your cake should emerge from the oven with a beautiful brown hue and bursting at the crest! One piece of advice from experience, however, is that you wait for the cake to cool down before you try and get the thing out of the baking dish. I usually take a butter knife, a spatula or even a rubber spatula and scrape down the edges. The rubber spatula helps because you can get under the cake and help pop it out of the dish. Also, don’t put the cake in the refrigerator while it’s still in the baking dish and newly out of the oven. It’ll stick to the baking dish and part of your cake’s bottom will be left bare. (oopsies!)

My grandma used to make these things, wrap them in foil and an old plastic bag that the pita bread usually came in (they were – and still are – the perfect size!) and stick them in the freezer, stacking 5 or 8 at a time. Then, when it was Christmas time or the last day of school, we’d take them out and pass them out to the mailman, the gardener and my elementary school teachers. It’s a simple recipe and it makes a pretty universally delicious and versatile dessert that while some might wager is actually a banana bread, turns out to be a very delicious cake indeed.

Thank you, Grandma Nazeli. We’re going to do both kinds of bakhlava one of these days, I swear.

Getting A Leg Up and Cramping

It’s been tough being me since I graduated from college. I’m sure these days I’m not the only one thinking of themselves in that way, though.

When I finished school in December 2008, I had a BA in Literary Journalism and another in Film & Media Studies. I had been in school for a little over five years and had emerged with two Bachelor in Arts degrees with a Minor in English. I was ready to hit the communications and media job market with everything I had. After all, I had a lot under my belt to feel as confident as I did. I graduated school with a good five years of bonafide publication experience (in terms of editing and especially in terms of writing) under my belt. Not only that, but I had also worked in radio for about four and a half years where I had my own radio show (which included weekly playlists with live bands and on-air interviews) and manned the on-campus marketing squad for the station. It was all tons of fun, too.

I was ready to write anything from press releases to articles of all shapes, flavors and orientations. I was ready to show off my communication skills, which I attributed to having been a radio personality for all those years and not to mention all the interviews I planned and did with people (read: bands, mostly) who I had never met before. I was researching what to charge for freelance work I would undoubtedly get (oh and would obviously get paid for – duh), putting together Clips & Phrases to work as a portable clip portfolio of my work and had at least ten different drafts of my resume and cover letter to match.

Instead, I rarely wrote (and for free at best) and on top of that held seven unpaid internships in one year. Then, to top off my first year out of college, I land the shittiest job from hell with a boss who disgraces not only the full gamut of the publishing industry (from basement ‘zines to New York glossies), but the entire Armenian culture as a whole. Even as I stand here today, in this very moment in time, he exudes all that. Gross, what a wasted individual.

So that happened and that sucked. The whole time I was guilted at home for not choosing a more lucrative profession for which I should have attended school. All those years and dollars later I have no income and scrap together a couple 20s from babysitting twice a month. Then the phrase “recession proof” not only became a stable for everyday conversation, but the bane of my existence. Publications were doling out lists of “recession proof” careers which my parents readily ate up and presented to me any chance they got. It was boiled down to teaching or nursing and I sure as hell wasn’t going to do nursing. At the time, I sure as hell wasn’t going to do either because I had just spent a little over five years in school and didn’t want to admit that I had wasted all that time and needed to start over.

Obviously, things are playing out differently in my head now. I’m going back to school to get my Teaching Credential (and hopefully my Masters in either Education or English Education) and am looking forward to a truly lucrative career path. I see all those years I spent in school not as wasted years, but as years where I developed the professionalism and education one should harvest from their years in college. With Journalism, you learn a mode of writing that’s perhaps more realistic than what you practice with analyzing Literature, one that’s more applicable to the get-the-point-across-clearly-and-briefly goals of an essay. Even with that said, my love for Comparative Literature is tantamount to my love for Journalism and I’m truly excited to bring that happy marriage into the classroom.

The classroom…

One of my high school English teachers has a blog, The Teacher’s View, and it’s interesting to read it from where I stand now – that is, not as his student and not yet his peer, in a way? Regardless, he’s brought to light some rather troubling points that I have been trying to ignore as of late, just so I can go about this new plan, this newly paved path with some glimmer of hope that I’m actually headed somewhere this time.

In his latest post, he talks about a story from Monday’s Los Angeles Daily News that talks about how LAUSD is currently reared and ready to lay off a good 4,700 teachers, administrators, counselors and nurses to help close the gap in their $640 million budget deficit. He then goes on to discuss the politics behind this clusterfuck of budget cuts and deficits and everything else and how every last individual involved in the education system – from the students who need the guidance to the instructors who are either being stripped of imperative teaching resources or are stripped of their classrooms all together – are reeling from the hurt. Mr. Martin says, “The poor condition of American education is nothing short of cultural suicide. We have blown the collective foot off of the body of our country, and now we are bleeding to death.” Convenient timing.

This adds to when I called LAUSD today to ask how I can “insert myself in the system” to substitute teach around LAUSD while I wait for school to start. They’re experiencing a serious hiring freeze and are currently not hiring any more substitute teachers. She spent several minutes repeating this fact with a colorful plethora of dismal, bottom-of-the-barrel variations to strip me of all hope that we’ll ever come out of this ditch alive. I decided to disregard her and went on to ask how I could apply anyway. She again proposed the dismal situation to which I practically cut her off and said, “Thanks for your help I’ll find it on my own – you’ve given me enough negative support as it is,” to which she then put down her sappy-sad-sapperson attitude and pointed me in the right direction.

On top of this, tutoring centers have children they need to allocate to tutors but the tutoring companies have also instilled a hiring freeze and have laid off employees because of budget cuts. There are kids out there who need help and just aren’t able to get it because the government is unable to provide the monetary necessities to keep these kind of vital organizations alive. It’s such a cliche but a viable one at that – education truly is our future and if we set our foundation with cheap, shoddy materials, what kind of product would you expect from that anyway? And this particular establishment runs off of No Child Left Behind financing so it’s interesting to see even them treated like that.

Ugh. It’s just a whirlwind of messiness right now and I can’t help but sit here and wallow, thinking, “This can only happen to me, right?” I mean, coming out of school at the height of a recession, bearing through ridiculous internships and humiliating jobs just to get a leg up in an already competitive atmosphere and coming out with less than nothing left me feeling pretty hopeless. Now, switching gears towards this new path and having this reality be as dismal as the one I just came out of is leaving me with a lot less than hopelessness.

All this on the eve (or rather, early morning) of the March 4th Day of Action. There are going to be protests and rallies in Sacramento and LAist has got a map of the rest happening throughout Southern California.

I can’t really say I’ve braved these kind of hiccups before because, well, I just switched gears with the last hiccup. I’m not going to let this get me down though. My main goal is to not only gain a source of monetary funding for my future but to help insure my quality of life doesn’t take a nosedive to poor with the wrong job or career. I truly believe that a career in Teaching is a sincerely excellent place for me as a venue where I can ensure a positive quality of life and pass that vibe along to every student that comes through my classroom doors.

In Guac Shock

I’ve been having a lot of fun in the kitchen lately. While I’ve been living at home for over a year now, it feels as though I’ve only recently been able to freely move about the kitchen and not only use all the awesome cooking gadgets and gizmos, but enjoy an amazingly awesome cooking space. Our kitchen isn’t huge and there’s no elaborate island in the middle but its granite counter tops, non-pergo flooring and steel/working appliances make it an appealing place to explore cooking.

Of course, these are all fairly recent developments. This house is a good 30+ years old with us as the only residents as my dad did help design and build the thing in the 1970s. The kitchen had remained all original until about three or four years ago. The kitchen went from an awkward ’70s chic to something with a more palatable modern look and tasteful coloring practically overnight – my mom had wanted a new kitchen for a very long time. The varying shades of brown – from diarrhea mahogany down to charred (not burnt) sienna – were replaced with beiges, chocolates and auburn-trimmed hues. I’m not a fan of the speckled granite counter tops, though, but it was what Mom always wanted so it’s what we’ve got.

It’s been fun working in the kitchen and while I was on board with helping during Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, and slipping in a few experimental (yet successful) desserts in there as well, I’ve only been on my own fairly recently. I think it all started with making the sweet potato fries a couple weeks ago which not-so-coincidentally coincided with my parents being out of town. My mom has all the best intentions but when she does want to help and get involved, things go a little overboard and the next thing I know, I’m being lectured on the best way to place a spatula in a drawer without getting it caught on things when the drawer’s opened. Captain Obvious isn’t even worried about pointing that out. Her words are wisdom but things like that turn passing-down-family-recipes-fun into unnecessary meddling.

So with the last three weeks of freedom I was able to experiment and try the sweet ‘tatoes and surprised my parents with some decent grub on their return home. This past weekend I tried my hand at guacamole for the second time and was so pleased with the recipe I had found online (and tweaked to my liking) that I made it again tonight and ate the whole bowl with my parents. It was delicious! Here are some rephrased tips on what I had originally found at SimplyRecipes.com.

Colorful necessaries.

Guacamole is really all about the ingredients. There’s no baking involved, which means you don’t have to deal with the properties of your ingredients changing under extreme heat or cold to get the desired product. Your only concerns are the ingredients and their quality but most importantly, the quantity of each ingredient. Too much or too little of one thing can make or break your guac.

• 2 ripe avocados
• 1/2 red onion, minced (about 1/2 cup)
• 1-2 serrano chiles, stems and seeds removed, minced
• 2 tablespoons cilantro leaves, finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon of fresh lime or lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon coarse salt
• A dash of freshly grated black pepper
• 1/2 ripe tomato, seeds and pulp removed, chopped

Preparing the goods.

Preparations are interesting. I honestly cannot chop onions for the life of me. My eyes must be super, super sensitive because all I need to do is cut the thing in half and I feel the burning coming on. After the fact, my mom told me that chopping an onion in front of an open window works as well as keeping a lit flame nearby. To make do without her old country magic, I used a mini food processor I had bought in college to practice making hummus. The thing chopped up the onions nice and small, enough so you weren’t getting a huge piece in each bite of guac. On another note, chopping cilantro basically sucks because they’re such delicate leaves that lining them up to chop them doesn’t quite cut it. You end up bruising the leaves instead. You’ve got to bunch up the leaves and get the knife as close as you can to the bunch and be careful not to cut yourself. This way works the best for me. Oh and be careful after chopping the serrano chilies – don’t touch your eyes or any sensitive area, really. These little devils are muy caliente!

You basically mix everything together at this point. I pitted, scooped and peeled the avocados and mashed them up with a fork in a mixing bowl. Then I added the chipped onion, cilantro, lemon juice, salt and dashed some pepper. Mix it up and have yourself a little taste! The directions call for 1-2 serrano chilies and I used one and a half chilies for a nice, spicy bite at the end of each scoop. I also add the chopped tomatoes at the end since they’re already kind of squishy and you don’t want them too disheveled in the guacamole, even if the whole thing is just a mashed up mass of goodness.

Glob the thing into a festive bowl and serve! I’ve got the tortilla chips that are shaped like strips instead of the triangles. The strips seem like the perfect size for dipping and gathering the good stuff, to me. That’s starting to sound like the needless specifics my mom gets into so we’ll just leave the chip choices up to the consumer haha

I’m excited to find an excuse to make this again. You can just add on to the amount of each ingredient needed proportionally based on how much you want to make. These bowls are sort of your average, cereal bowl size (maybe a tiny bit smaller?) and all those listed ingredients makes exactly this much. Guacamole is a pretty versatile addition to any party table, so it’s good to have this notch on my (apron) belt!

French Dip in Morro Bay

Our trip happened to fall on Valentine’s Day but that was purely coincidental (and actually worked to advantage, too). Since Ryan got his new car, he had wanted to take a mini-road trip up to Morro Bay. I think it was the excitement of having the new car and wanting to be in the new car as much as possible that stood as the initial enticement. Well, he’s had the thing for several months now and with this kind of LA/Valley drive to work in gridlock everyday, twice a day, things put a really quick damper on their honeymoon phase. Luckily, there was more than just a small, quaint, beach side community luring the drive – there were french dip sandwiches.

That pickle's in the way of deliciousness - french dip sandwich at Morro Bay's Hofbrau. That's a mini, too!

I’ve only been to Morro Bay along the way to the Pielow & Co. summer camping trips and other than a welcome stretch of the limbs from being in a car since way before Ventura County, there’s the Hofbrau the get excited about. To get this out of the way, I’m not a particular fan of french dip sandwiches. I have other staples I try out as “safe” foods in new places but Ryan loves french dip sandwiches and roast beef especially. He’s always looking to try out the french dip on the menu. I think it was one of the first things he ever made for me. He was very excited to use his San Diego apartment crock pot, I remember that.

Anyway, to be honest, during my first visit to Hofbrau, I wasn’t all that excited about their famous french dip sandwiches but I got one anyway (because everyone else did and man, I didn’t want to be like the guy asking for a fork at the sushi place and stick out). So I got one and it was the best thing I could have ever done. They were delicious. Absolutely delicious. There’s no extra decadence to the thing either. It was just pure flavor that melded so well that I thought this is the perfect balance of all the ingredients that should go into making/preparing french dip.

It was the draw of the french dip sandwiches and the fact that Morro Bay was close enough yet far enough to label our trek a “road trip” and still get the thing done in a day that made us think of this in the first place. Between busy weekends and plans just not falling into place, we were left with today. It worked out really well, too. We’re not ones to get all epic and intense over Valentine’s Day. Exchanging cards and sour gummy straws will do (he likes gummy candy!) with spending time together as a given but still a plus. This mini trip just the thing to do with each other and for each other that we would have done anyway, regardless of the Hallmark holiday.

View off the pier lining Morro Bay at sunset. The birds had just started to get all crazy and flighty for some reason.

It was fun to drive up, grab some good eats, walk around the tiny town and try out some photog moves on a new subject – water and sunsets. I’ve just posted the day’s spoils on Flickr. They have adorable little inns along the main drag, too. I’m thinking a mini-weekender next time? Maybe? Maybe. Whatever the duration of time, good company always makes any moment worthwhile and today was a testament to that time-honored truth.

Sweet ‘Tato Fries?

Alright, so I know I have a long ways to go in the cooking-at-home department. Living away for five years gave me at least some concept knowledge. I’ve got the basics down and can prepare a mean grilled chicken breast with some maybe pasta or pilav. I got a quick way of preparing salmon, too. I’ve even got a trick for vegetables on the side. I can follow directions really well and have made my grandma’s banana bread several times on my own. I’ve got some ethnic basics down too – your tabouleh, hummus and well, pilav. I’ve only made bakhlava twice – both the square, flat kind and the round kind – but only with the intensive supervision of my grandma. I made Paula Deen’s apple butter pumpkin pie last Thanksgiving and it actually turned out really delicious. I experimented with a neat sounding guacamole recipe and that turned out tasty with just the right amount of spicy.

It’s the directions that help me get by, though. Without them I’m not one to just, gauge out of nowhere. Lida can, though. My sister-in-law is an amazing cook. Their kitchen is like her personal chemistry lab. She knows almost exactly how much of what will taste like what and what sorts of spices compliment what kinds of entrees. It’s fantastic and her dishes are great. Ryan’s sister takes the cake on deserts, though (yeah, I went there). She’s honed her skills in cupcake making to the umpteenth degree. She’s even put coconut in/on a cupcake and I’ve wanted another one. Go, Katie! Her deserts are amazing.

I pale in comparison, but only for now. I’ve been toying with a decent way to make sweet potato fries. I absolutely love them and if I have a chance to order them when we’re out, I’m on it. I even once had mashed yam with brown sugar and man did I fail in trying to recreate that! I’m on that too, though.

I tried different things and couldn’t quite come up with a edible outcome. I tried simple olive oil and pepper and it just didn’t turn out right. I heard of getting the slices covered in an egg wash and wanted to try that out. I used olive oil instead of a non-stick cooking spray and smeared way too much egg white wash on the strips and ended up with soggy sweet potato slices and scrambled egg. That was gross.

So here we go, trying this one more time with feeling. I got my Pam, one egg (instead of two) and a nice looking yam. I only used half of this yam because I didn’t want to crowd the cooking sheet like I did last time. Everyone’s got to get a chance to get some heat! I took the half and peeled it, then sliced it into pretty medium slices. They weren’t too thin or too thick. The ones on the thicker side actually ended up better so I’d suggest a bit thicker than what you might be used to. They’re going to deflate anyway so don’t consider what they look like raw to be the size they’ll keep.

Preheat your oven to 400-degrees. Spray a cooking sheet with the Pam and lay the slices on the sheet. Make sure everyone gets their own spot! Beat the egg wash into a light, frothy foam and add some salt if you like. I dabbed the egg wash on the slices only because if you paint it on, things will move around. Try to dab gently, too – no globs of egg wash. I learned my lesson last time from the accidental omelet. Also, for the egg wash, I used only egg whites and it worked pretty well. Then sprinkle your spices. We happened to have Lawry’s Seasoned Pepper and some basil so I used those.

I put the sheet in the middle of the oven and set the timer for 15-minutes. After that time passed, I moved and flipped some slices around and set it in for 20-minutes. In retrospect, however, I should have just done another 15-minutes instead of 20-minutes. The non-stick cooking spray was magic, too. I watched them cook in the oven and saw the oil bubbling underneath each slice which probably helped to disperse the oven heat throughout the whole of each slice and not just the surface exposed in the oven.

Pile and serve! Okay so maybe some of them are a little burned. That’s where the 15- instead of 20-minutes retrospect came in. But the texture and taste was great! It was crunchy on the outside and still soft on the inside which preserved the sweet flavor of the sweet potato! I’m actually decently proud of these guys. They were pretty good. I’ll tweak things around a bit next time, but this is the closest to delicious I’ve gotten all week. There’s still that other half, too!

“Dear Diary” for the Ages

I figured it was about time I got to general blogging.

In all honesty, I lied to myself about wanting a personal blog for a long while. I masked this desire with “necessary” blogs. There’s Clips & Phrases which I made last year as a clip portfolio for all my writing. I needed a way to showcase all my writing without wanting to include a 100+ page binder with my resume. How could I possibly pick just five writing samples?! Instead, I put everything on the boundless and endless internetz and included the link with my resume and emails to different publications asking if I could please, please write for them and maybe, just maybe get paid. I went all the way back to freshman year and chronicled every article for the school newspaper, every paper for journalism class and every assignment for film class along with the blogs and internet ‘zines I had written for. I must say, the thing turned out to be a pretty nifty writing showcase. While the dates on the most recent entries are separated by huge gaps, I still see the potential for additional posts. I’m going to work on that, too.

Then I put together The Photo Folio as a way to showcase my photography. I had just gotten my very own (and very first) DSLR and planned on posting a photo of mine each day as an incentive to create, more than anything. It worked for a while but it got to the point where sifting through mounds of photos looked more tedious than exciting. I was nervous about my product, too. With the advent of digitization, everyone can be a self-proclaimed photographer and I was afraid to fall into the ranks of another hipster with a huge lens lurking in the sale racks at Urban Outfitters (no offense, really – I was actually just there today). I’ve only recently realized that the reality of the situation is that it’s actually great that everyone can be a self-proclaimed photographer. Sure, much more content is created and much more of it is put out at the same time and yes, it’s then difficult to see what’s outstanding and what’s just, there. But nothing needs to be outstanding any more than it needs to be just a simple outcome of one’s creativity. I don’t have to be the sharpest tool in the shed, just useful enough to be called a wrench. Just capable and creative enough to make photography I can call my own and photography I’m proud of. It’s kind of liberating, actually.

That brings us to An Honest Puck. God, I love Shakespeare. I really do. I’m not going to pretend to understand everything about the guy either. Regardless, it seems I understand enough to develop a strong affinity for what he’s done for literature. Puck was one of my favorite characters from one of my favorite plays. I don’t care that he’s maybe evil or makes mistakes or is probably neither male nor female. I’ve always been intrigued by his character. The line comes from Act V, Scene i of A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Puck apologizes to the audience about maybe offending them by the contents of the play. He encourages them to pretend it was all a dream and by his honest recommendation, it will fix things.

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends. (Act V, Scene i)

So let’s see what inane thoughts spew from this corner of the internet. I’m looking forward to bringing the LiveJournal days back from the ashes at this sleeker, less spammy-feeling venue (read: WordPress). It’ll be fun to have some friends along for the ride. After all, we’re just a pool of mortal fools trudging through space and time together. Let’s make the most of it with a drink in our hands, laughter across our faces, friends to share everything with and lest we forget, positive hearts and open minds.