Miss Protestalot

km-funfun-mercantile: 15 Things You Should Give Up To Be Happy

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:52:51 -0400

km-funfun-mercantile: 15 Things You Should Give Up To Be Happy:

Here is a list of 15 things which, if you give up on them, will make your life a lot easier and much, much happier. We hold on to so many things that cause us a great deal of pain, stress and suffering – and instead of letting them all go, instead of allowing ourselves to be stress free and happy…

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Wed, 05 Jun 2013 21:51:38 -0400

Sunday Routine is back. Interviews about what writers, artists,...

Thu, 23 May 2013 08:08:00 -0400

Sunday Routine is back. Interviews about what writers, artists, and entrepreneurs do on the weekend. www.sundayroutine.com

Images by Sharokh Mirzai www.alonelydrive.tumblr.com

Sunday Routine with Molly Young

Thu, 23 May 2013 07:32:08 -0400

Sunday Routine with Molly Young:

It’s Back! With a whole new flavor. Check out my website, Sunday Routine, for the voyeur in you:

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Wed, 08 May 2013 07:50:10 -0400

I hope this is as low as it gets. But I know it's not.

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:40:00 -0400

A few weeks ago, I started looking for in-house copywriter jobs. I had it in my head that even though I was a freelance writer, making money, and liking it, I should at least try to see if I could get a full-time job. (The almost-30 year old woman in me continues to put terrifying scenarios in my head in which health insurance is always the one thing that could have saved me.)

I’m not a huge fan of their store - but I applied for a copywriter position at the Uncommon Goods e-commerce store. I had a few exchanges with a woman who I think is the current copywriter on staff, who sent me a lengthy copy test in which I wrote 250 word product descriptions for four separate products. The whole thing took me about 3 hours. After I submitted it, she said it might take a month for them to get back to me. I waited. A month later, she said they were still making their decisions and I should wait a little longer. I did. Then, it dawned on me to check the website. I was curious if they’d launched the products I had written about in my application.

Just as I suspected. Right there on the website were my product descriptions, two of them word for word, the other two had kept some of the wording. They even used my meta descriptions and subheadings. A week later, I got an email that said “thank you for submitting your application, but your qualifications are not what we’re looking for at this time.”

Every week a new ad for a copywriter at Uncommon Goods pops up on LinkedIn. Is this how stores produce copy now? Scummy.

On Not Knowing What You're Doing

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:32:00 -0400

There’s a general feeling that knowing what you’re doing is important to doing what you want.

Before I come off sounding like a hypocrite, I am one of the guilty ones. I have always thought “knowing what you’re doing” before you do it is equally as important as doing what you want. But that’s probably why doing things I actually want to do has always taken me so long, if I ever get around to them.

Last night, I had dinner with someone I met through Tumblr who has become a good friend and, whether he likes it or not, something of an advisor. I don’t know many people, especially young entrepreneurs, who actually come right out and say “Yeah, I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Pretty much winging it, if you want to know the truth.” But that’s the reality. And that’s something I never realized. We’re all just doing the things we figure will help us create our desired outcomes. Everyone – even the CEO of Fab. Even, I dunno, Anders Holm.

And then there are also people like me, who shoot themselves in the foot every day, because they think they don’t know what they’re doing and therefore they’re not ready; not ready to start, not ready for success.

This friend I had dinner with is just a few years older than me. He knows a lot of things that I don’t, or things I have chosen to ignore in my own neuroses. He knows that the more time you spend trying to know what you’re doing, the less you know. In the process of becoming a much more critical self-editor over the years, for example, I’ve actually become a worse writer. I’ve spent all my time thinking about what other people will think, and letting that be a reason why I don’t write at all.

When it comes to writing, I do have legitimate concerns. Like, I’m always worried I don’t have anything to say, or that someone will read my writing and think I’m naïve. I haven’t lived that long, and I recognize that what I write could very possibly result in cliché without my intending it to. I openly admit to caring about that, worrying about it even. But that’s why, in the past month, I’ve written nothing. Feeling strongly that I don’t know what I’m doing, or don’t have anything to say, has stood directly in the path of my knowing what to say.

Here are 3 take-aways from our dinner conversation that helped me snap out of it:

Lesson 1: “Strategy?” If you have an idea, do what you think you should do. If it doesn’t work, delete it and try something else.

Lesson 2: Be careful how you’re gauging success. Look at something through your own eyes before anyone else’s. Are you proud of what you did? Was it well-done? If you think so, other people will think so too.

Lesson 3: When you say things like “Do X to get Y results,” even if you say “I did X and got Y, so you can too,” it doesn’t make it proof. You have to try a bunch of stuff and work to the place where YOU recognize what you did as success. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow other people’s models. It just means, get to success on your own. There is no recipe that works for every person.

Just a side note on Lesson 2. I feel that the ubiquity of “likes” has influenced what I create. I have definitely come to gauge my own work on its “like reception.” That’s probably not an unfair assessment generally speaking, but then again, is it? It’s such a vague indicator of anything (what did you “like” about what I did? One never knows).

The important thing to remember when sifting through what you’re trying to do is that nobody else knows what they’re doing, either. Nobody. Nobody has the answers. And while there’s something to be said for patience, there’s nothing beneficial to “waiting around” until you feel like you know what you’re doing. That day will never come.

I promised my friend that when I wrote this post, I’d publish it and wouldn’t take it down.

It’s a start.

Stop Working (So Hard)

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 20:03:00 -0400

I flipping love this blog post by Kyle Bragger who so excellently articulated something I’ve been trying to talk about for months but not at all ironically haven’t had the time to explain!

It’s this: Stop working (so hard)

“There’s a pervasive and toxic way of thinking ‘round these parts that you’ve gotta out-hustle your competitors; that you have to pull all-nighters and throw away weekends to ship that new feature; that, by working double- or triple-time, you’ll execute better and pull ahead of the pack.

Nope.

What did The Hustle™ accomplish? I gained weight. I wasn’t spending enough time with my (now) wife. I felt like shit. I began to resent my work, and the work I was producing clearly wasn’t my best. I started cutting corners. I went from a mindset of shipping with quality and integrity to “when is this going to be over?”

Nowadays, I’m working 4-day weeks, and doing no more than an hour or two of intense work at a time. I take a lot of walks. I’ve lost weight. I’m happier. My wife is happier. I’m more present. And most importantly:

I’m doing the best work of my life.

The idea that, without “hustle,” without throwing away nights and weekends, without putting your life on hold for your work, you’ll somehow be more successful, more productive, is ridiculous to me, yet continues to be pushed by participants in our industry left and right. This is, quite simply, insane.

So, dear reader, I implore you: If this post at all rings true, sounds a little too familiar, do yourself a favor — take a vacation. Get away from your work for a bit. Reset. And when you come back, pick some number under 35 and try working that many hours per week, and no more.

I’ll be surprised if you don’t start doing the best work of your life too.

Postscript: If your colleagues, clients, or bosses don’t get why working less is a better idea, leave. There are far better places to be than at a company that values quantity over quality. (You too, freelancers: Set office hours, take breaks.)

novelstolike: Another one from stream of consciousness master...

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:51:27 -0400

novelstolike:

Another one from stream of consciousness master flex. A lot of drugs are ingested, a lot of comfort food is eaten, a lot of antics are performed in North Brooklyn.

"You might not get a lot of respect as a writer, but the crippling self-doubt and soul-crushing poverty make it all worth it. "

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 21:03:09 -0400

"You might not get a lot of respect as a writer, but the crippling self-doubt and soul-crushing poverty make it all worth it. ":

futurejournalismproject:

Via Mark Straub at the Pessimist:

Writers, as a rule, aren’t usually held up as examples of anything good. We’re more… cautionary tales. You can live for a thousand years, and I guarantee you will never hear a disappointed mother tell her surgeon son, “Why can’t you be more like your brother, the writer?”…

…You might not get a lot of respect as a writer, but the crippling self-doubt and soul-crushing poverty make it all worth it. And though it might be too late for you to change careers, you can still learn some valuable lessons from those of us in the industry.

Here are the seven quick tips Mark gives the aspiring writer.

Ignore deadlines.

Take criticism badly.

Burn bridges.

Hate yourself.

Trust no one (especially not yourself).

Sabotage all of your personal relationships.

Drink heavily.

Read through for Mark’s explanations of each.

H/T: Roger Johnson.

"My dreams are simply bringing forth what I think but don’t admit to myself, perhaps;..."

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 17:08:00 -0400

“My dreams are simply bringing forth what I think but don’t admit to myself, perhaps; they’re not revealing any truth so much as reflecting my projections back at me. Yet the way they upend what I think I think speaks for some intuitive truth: the least important moments may transform our lives more radically than crises do. I stopped off for an overnight stay at Narita Airport in 1983, and those few hours moved me to relocate to Japan. Meanwhile, the times when I have watched people go mad, try to take their lives in front of me, or die, seem barely to have left a trace.”

- Pico Iyer from “My Nighttime Rearrangements” in The NYRB

The Letters of William Gaddis

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 20:28:00 -0400

I’m no William Gaddis scholar. The only thing I knew about him before I was asked to review his book of Letters was that he’d written J.R. and it was his most famous novel, and that I found J.R. impossible to read. So that seemed to bode well.

In fact it did, because Letters was much different than any of his other books. A real person came out of the mist and I grew really fond of him quickly.

I’m not going to talk about the actual letters here (though there are several really interesting ones of note, esp. this). I do want to mention what I liked best about William Gaddis after getting through those 523 pages.

He was a white, Harvard educated man growing up in the 40s - yet not at all an asshole. He spent his 20s outside of the US touring some of the poorest nations in the world. He refused to return to New York and get a job at the places where he knew people and it would be easy, even though he always had trouble finding work abroad, and was always, seriously, out of money.

He made his youth out of rejecting the things privilege could get him. He did not believe in it. He could not stand the idea of working for the New Yorker! He didn’t want to hang out in Greenwich Village! He couldn’t think of anything more of a waste.

It’s nice to read someone who lived at a time when a person who wanted to write, or a person who just didn’t know what to do, had the courage to leave the cities (which Gaddis claims are all the same-you can learn nothing new from another city, he says - and yet look at everyone else of that time, and now! Fitzgerald, Hemingway, they all flocked to the cities, so do we) and go do something really hard, and strange, and inconsistent, and scary. Kind of lose yourself in the world where it’s cheap to live because that’s what you can afford. And find the adventure you need to write your story out there. Where you’re kind of alone and always wondering what the hell you’re gonna do next.

I like that idea of literally going out (searching far and wide) to find the story no one else has written yet. There’s something to that. I admire Gaddis’s persistance. His gall. I’ll be giving J.R. another go.

Pretty typical shot of Opie, my favorite rescue dog.

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 13:30:48 -0400

Pretty typical shot of Opie, my favorite rescue dog.

Human Size Candlesticks. That’s what I think.

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 14:12:24 -0400

Human Size Candlesticks. That’s what I think.

Apica Notebook CD-15

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:17:00 -0400

I have so many notebooks - seriously. So I just don’t buy them anymore. Not since I was in college. I’ve never found one that actually “worked.” All the ones I have ever owned, I basically still have, and they are all half written in.

Last summer, when I quit teaching and went to visit my parents, I found a bunch of the abandoned ones and brought them back to Brooklyn. I felt sorry for them….I guess? I tried to use them for some other purpose, like writing lists or keeping track of my spending. But it was too strange to have pages of diary-like stories, or tid-bits from my high school French class taking up the first 50 pages, so those books just got relegated to the bookshelf in my apartment. It makes me pretty sad every day when I look at them. I can’t fit a new novel on the shelf because of those damn things.

All of that business just changed recently, thanks to my trusted friends over at Spoonbill and Sugartown. The notebook for my life, which I discovered just a few months away from 27 years old, is the Apica CD 15 – a Japanese notebook with hand-drawn lines (CD - it even has my initials). It is MY NOTEBOOK. But you can steal it.

I think part of the reason I got into a notebook conundrum early in life was because of buying those marble jobs, with way too many pages for what I ever needed them for. This one, with 60 pages, is just enough. I actually have more than one, and can color code them. This for that. That for this (red for work, yellow for a personal project). And because someone took the time to weave it together, whenever I bend the book all the way back, there’s no damage done (no staples popping, no pages sliding out). And the paper takes super well to my favorite felt-tip pen.

"You can’t sit there thinking, ‘I’m gonna be discovered someday.’ You have to show initiative and..."

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:02:44 -0400

“You can’t sit there thinking, ‘I’m gonna be discovered someday.’ You have to show initiative and really make yourself useful which is something that I always say to younger writers. That’s a lot of it. Just make yourself useful. And for a writer the number one way to be useful is to come up with really good ideas. I mean, your ability to write a beautiful sentence will ultimately be important. But I don’t think you wow an editor into giving you an assignment by a beautiful sentence. I think you wow them by saying, ‘I’ve got a great story idea.’”

- Susan Orlean, writer for The New Yorker, on getting your start in journalism (via gracebello)

lylaandblu: KODAK BROWNIE LAMP by L&BYou know how much we...

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 10:23:44 -0500

lylaandblu:

KODAK BROWNIE LAMP by L&B

You know how much we like to tease our products for this Summer, but every now and again we make good on the things we show and let you have a real taste. This is a handcrafted Brownie Lamp, built using a 1916 Kodak Boxer ‘120’ film camera. It features a high-copper-finish socket, threaded wire (courtesy of Craig) and a reproduction Edison bulb. He is available currently! All items purchased before our official launch come with a small gift from us here at Lyla & Blu!

Click here if you are interested! Thank you!

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Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:57:59 -0500

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Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:22:17 -0500

Like any regular American kid I grew up eating my grandmother’s...

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 10:13:00 -0500

Like any regular American kid I grew up eating my grandmother’s apple pie. Mixed from a box of Jiffy with apples and sugar thrown in, the crust was flaky, the apples equal parts sweet and tart, and every bite accompanied by a mix of familiar spices. We’d always eat it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream at Thanksgiving, next to a sliver of my mother’s pumpkin pie. This was the American tradition of my suburban childhood, and all the perspective on pie I’d ever had. Then I moved to Brooklyn.

A few blocks away from my first apartment in South Williamsburg was a fried chicken joint, popular on the weekends for brunch and bloody marys. They also made pie, from scratch, from a Southern recipe. An obvious amateur in a city of committed foodies, I’d never had better pie in my life. There was so much I’d been missing.

Brooklyn has long appreciated a good pie. Two years ago, the New York Times declared pie the new cupcake. And the trend has been building in Brooklyn. Every August, Prospect Park hosts a Pie in the Park festival , one of many pie-related competitions throughout the borough. And the shops have proliferated around the city. Today, the pie shop that rocked my world is one of the three major shops in Brooklyn that specialize in pie, and is, in my opinion, the best of the bunch.

A TRIP TO THE PIE EXPERT

On an early, rainy morning, we set out for The Blue Stove. Though a few blocks away from the major subways, tucked on the corner of a more residential spot, at 9 o’clock, espresso machines whir, customers populate long wooden tables with their laptops, and in the back, the smell of slightly burnt sugar from pies, cookies and scones already coming out of the oven.

Rachel, who owns the Blue Stove, wipes her hands on her apron and offers us coffee. She’s going to show us the secret recipe to her great grandmother’s apple pie, just in time for Thanksgiving. “All the ingredients are in season, and I haven’t changed a thing about the recipe since it was written down.”

Rachel’s pies are well known in the neighborhood. Aside from the staples such as pumpkin, apple and pecan, she often bakes something like the cheddar bacon apple pie that makes people who never really considered themselves pie people convert on the spot. But she wasn’t always a baker. Like most makers we discover in these parts, she had another job out of school, and found her way into her craft by a series of circumstances. For her, it was while working in a restaurant that she started actually baking. “The pastry chef left at one point, and I said, “could I maybe try the job?”

Eventually she started selling her pies at a Vermont farmer’s market to see if there was something to it. “I wanted to make sure my friends weren’t just being nice.” This led to venturing around the city to take orders at her friend’s offices, baking pies out of her apartment. Meanwhile, she started looking for a space.

MAKING GOOD PIE IS NOT ABOUT BAKING

The really interesting thing about pie is that no two ever taste alike, and even after you find the recipe you love, it takes intuition. “Making pie is a lot more like cooking than baking,” Rachel says. “You have to react.”

Though Rachel’s apple pie recipe has been passed down for generations, she’s made hundreds, thousands of pies, and has a few tricks up her sleeve. Here’s what she told us about making the best apple pie you’ve ever tasted:

She makes a simple crust, sifting flour and salt in a bowl, and adding 1 c. Crisco in two batches, the first one to make a sand-like texture, the second so the dough becomes more pea-sized. Using a pastry cutter, she mixes the dough, adding a ½ cup of cold water as she goes. Then she wraps the dough in wax paper until she’s ready to roll.

The next step is all about the apples. My grandmother used to use the most tart, sour apples around, adding enough sugar to make you think they had macerated for a week. Rachel uses a variety of whatever’s in season. She says the mix of sweeter and tart apples keeps flavors interesting. For each pie, she peels, cores and dices 6-8 apples into ½ inch slices, then sprinkles them with fresh lemon juice to keep them from browning and to aid the maceration process.

Rolling the dough is next. I told Rachel I always spend three days cleaning up after I make a pie. She doesn’t clean up at all. She cuts off two sheets of waxed paper and presses the quarter of dough into a flat pancake between the two sheets. Then she uses a large wooden rolling pin with the handles removed to roll the dough out while it’s still between the wax paper. After rolling flat, she fits it into the pie pan and stabs the bottoms with a fork, replacing the pre-baking process with a quick flick of the wrist. And it serves the same purpose, giving the bottom layer of crust room to breathe and an excuse not to puff up. Sayonara pie weights.

Instead of pouring the apples in, she first sprinkles the bottom layer of the pie with about a half cup of sugar. This, she says, to caramelize the bottom layer as it cooks. Then she follows that up with about ¼ a cup of flour.

In a bowl, she stirs up the diced apples and dumps them right into the pan on top of the crust. Pulling jars of whole spices from the shelf, she grates fresh whole nutmeg over the tops of the apples, making sure to get some on the crust too. “This gives the crust some of the spice and flavor of the rest of the pie, so it’s something people can enjoy too.” She follows that up with cloves, then cinnamon, which she puts all over the top of the apples. “I don’t like it to be too spiced, because you don’t want to take away from the apples.”

For the top, she reverses the process of the bottom layer, sprinkling the ¼ cup of flour first, followed by about ¼ cup of sugar. Strategically, she places four pads of butter evenly around the top of the apple dome, the idea being for it to melt, mix with and intensify all the other flavors. “The pie becomes its own crock pot,” she says. Cinching the top layer and slicing four even slits in the center, she brushes the top crust with milk and sprinkles it with a very thin layer of sugar. The pie bakes for one hour exactly, and comes out with a glazed, crispy crust.

YOUR SLICE IS PART OF A BIGGER PYE

In 1713, English poet William King wrote a poem titled “Apple Pye” which explains how the dessert became so iconic: OF all the delicates which Britons try To please the palate of delight the eye, Of all the sev’ral kinds of sumptuous far, there is none that can with applepie compare.

Pies replaced cupcakes in just a matter of years, but American pie is not a trend.

Pie Image by Sharokh Mirzai