Birthday

Well, I guess technically I'm very late to my own party on this one, but I did have a birthday this month, and what a birthday it was! At my dear Aunt Jane's suggestion, I had a "birthday week", which is basically just an excuse to have as much fun as possible. I even extended it a bit, but more on that later.

My week started with a fabulous weekend out of the city at the lovely home of a friend of Jane's. We ate, we lay about, and the only advice I have for any of you is that finding the right floating pool lounger is entirely worth it. Ours allegedly came from Bed, Bath and Beyond. I couldn't find them online (I was heartbroken), but they were essentially just mesh with a floating border....so comfortable that I stayed out a little too long and got a little too burned. Oh well.

I had work at the museum on my actual birthday, and promised all of my co-workers that I would bring in cupcakes for the occasion. Now, normally when I bake cake, cupcakes, anything, well, cake-y, I go as far into the realm of chocolate as possible. This time though, I figured it had been hot and especially summery lately and decided to go a bit of a lighter route so that we wouldn't all regret indulging for those last two hours of the day post-cupcake break. I chose a "key" lime cupcake (I couldn't find key lime juice in my hoity toity local store...but I can't find a lot of things there) with cream cheese frosting, and boy was it good. I did a quick google search and came up with a recipe that I can't see to find again. Rest easy though, because if you want to do something similar the internet absolutely abounds with recipes for just this dessert. Bon Appetit has one, the food network has one...everyone, so go forth and bake with ease. I decided to color the frosting (which was the easiest thing I've ever made. quite literally.) instead of the cakes, because something about green cake just wasn't floating my boat, and here is the result.

These were a biiiiiig hit at work. One of my friends had three. Top the day off with happy hour at our usual haunt and a delicious dinner at Nice Matin with the aforementioned dear Aunt Jane, and it was a stellar day.

Since it was my first birthday in three years that I'd spent in the good old US of A, I figured I had to do some celebrating with my stateside friends. Turns out I have a lovely group of friends in New York, so I had everyone over for what was supposed to be cake and some bar time, and turned into cake and some inside time because the rain refused to stop pouring. Again, I went with a non-super-chocolatey cake, and I was pretty pleased. I used the Smitten Kitchen birthday cake recipe, which calls for a sour cream chocolate frosting. I loved it. Most people either loved it or said, "it's nice but I wouldn't choose it for myself", and I'm happy with that. It's just not super sweet...the sour cream adds a nice tang, so while it doesn't taste like eating cake smothered in sour cream, it tastes like cake smothered in....something not out of those handy little quasi-cans that we used to keep in the German Haus fridge (Heather. Anya. Yes.)

Here is the recipe: http://smittenkitchen.com/2009/07/best-birthday-cake/

The cake itself is so moist, easy, and delicious that I can't recommend it enough. She offers a great substitute if you want a sweeter, more traditional frosting, so have at it!

Here are the tasty, two-layered results of my labor. Complete with birthday-appropriate sprinkles.

Gilder came for a visit, and the weekend was spent being lazy and trying out the perogie's down the block. Not bad, if I do say so myself. I mentioned a little, er, "birthday week extension," which was a trip home for a fabulous Pinot Noir tasting dinner with my dad. The wine....the food...oh dear. There was a lot of it, and it was incredible. If I said more I'd pass out from hunger.

If you decide to give either of these a try, I highly encourage it, and do let me know!

While Halfheartedly Watching the All-Star Game

Brief but serious question: Do MLB players all secretly have stage names? I swear, some of these are great, but put them all together into one organization and they're just too interesting a combination to not wonder about. Jacoby Ellsbury? Jhonny Peralta? Prince Fielder? Willy Mo Pena? Trot Nixon? Coco Crisp? Okay, so Coco is a nickname I guess, but Cavelli Loyce Crisp isn't much more normal.

Just saying.

Amateur Anthropologist

I have to admit, the only anthropological observations I've ever made in any formal sense have been about long-dead people who left behind their potsherds. I do often muse to myself about the people around me, though, mostly out of frustration, because in crowded places I have only so much patience for people who keep me from doing what I need/want to do. (I've also been told this translates to grumpiness or judgment...I guess I can't dispute that!)

Living in Brooklyn and commuting to the museum, I get a lot of opportunities both for frustration and for observation, and usually wind up with a firm reminder that there are, in fact, other ways to look at the world and oneself than the way I do that (go figure, right?). For example, thanks to my mother I think, I tend to be hyper-conscious of people around me. This drives some people crazy because I hate creating lots of noise, taking up lots of space, or generally creating a scene, and I unload that onto whomever I'm with. I usually write it off as, "It's better to be overly cautious than inconsiderate," but who really knows. The other down side is that I have zero patience for people who don't show any consideration for others around them. I would have thought that in a city full of people, a good portion of them would have figured out how to happily and relatively unobtrusively coexist with each other. Perhaps this was naive on my part, but I figured given humanity's propensity to adapt its behavior to make the best of its environment, I couldn't be too far off with this one. Clearly I was wrong.

Take, for example, the woman in front of me on the escalator today. A crowded subway station...you can probably figure that the people who got off the train with you and followed you in a crowd to those glorious mechanical stairs that carry you out of the station-oven and into the...well, street-level oven...will be, you know, behind you on said stairs. Even though there was a stair between us, when she swung her arm around in a wide arc to heave her purse back up onto her shoulder, she came so close to clocking me in the nose with her elbow that I felt the breeze. I couldn't decided if this represented an extraordinarily well-honed sense of space--because of which she knew exactly how many spare cm she had of clearance between her arm and my face--or an extraordinarily unsuccessful one.

The other thing I notice on a daily basis is people who are completely oblivious to the fact that they share the sidewalk with others. Now, you are entitled to walk as slowly as you want to from Point A to Point B, but if you're going to do with with your friend(s), significant other, companion, or whoever you happen to have by your side, might it not occur to you to, you know, keep to one side instead of walking down the middle?

Maybe I just sound like a whiner--(although we established over lunch today at the lab that it's definitely okay to be too lazy to fix something and just whine about it instead!)--but I guess when you think about it, there are two outcomes for someone who grew up or spent a lot of time in a busy place. 1) You adapt to living as efficiently and easily as possible for you and the people around you, and you're generally conscientious of how you affect them, or 2) You frankly don't give a damn and expect that everyone is entitled to do whatever they want to do, however they want to do it. Maybe it's personal, but maybe it's cultural? We asked Fumi once at a taiko ta session how to respond to someone's sneeze in Japanese. She thought for a second, laughed at us, and said that, in fact, you just don't. Everyone kind of looks around and thinks "oooooooh you just spread germs". Now, I don't feel guilty about a well-covered sneeze walking down the street, but that's some cultural conscientiousness I could get behind.