Remembering Commencement

I was surfing the internet when some article mentioned Lisa Kudrow´s Commencement Address at Vassar College in May 2010. Being a member of that graduating class, and having been sitting in a white chair sweating through my nice dress and polyester graduation robe in the Poughkeepsie humid air to actually witness the event, it brought me back and made me reflect a little about what she said that day.

To begin with, I vaguely remember people being kind of ambivalent about the selection of Lisa Kudrow as our speaker to begin with (my freshman and sophomore year roommate OM thought Hilary Clinton should do the honors, but then again, in almost Chuck Norris fashion, she thought Hilary Clinton was the answer to pretty much any problem - which was funny because a big group of us thought OM was our own version of Chuck Norris. She is one of the few people I´ve met that I can really label as being Badass. The other is M. M is super badass.). I liked the idea of it. Except for the fact that I didn´t realize that I would be getting my diploma in front of 4000 people and 2 very famous, very incredible actresses. My worries on commencement day were limited to frizz control, the zipper in my dress that wouldn´t zip, and not tripping in front of Meryl Streep and Lisa Kudrow. I failed on the first two accounts but thankfully succeeded in the third.

Anyways, I think the speech was very good and had some great pearls of wisdom for both us (the soon-to-be grads) and our parents. My parents really enjoyed it as well - my dad (a university educator by profession who has seen his fair share of commencement addresses) thought it was one of the best he had ever heard. But the best thing about it is that I fully credit Lisa Kudrow (and her speech) for really turning my parents around on the whole film thing.

Her words were:

¨By November of 1985, I declared that I would pursue acting. My parents and family were thrilled for me and that was the first and most important, wonderful show of support I got. (Look at parents) My parents and family were thrilled, THRILLED. Truly. My Vassar friends were shocked, SHOCKED but supportive and polite. I . . .was terrified, and not because I didn't think it would work out — I was weirdly confident...for no reason at all — but because this didn't exactly feel like it was a choice as much as succumbing to a compulsion, and I didn't analyze what led me to this point, whether it was divine intervention, or a lapse in judgment or sanity, I just listened to that inner voice.¨

My parents actually took her advice. They stopped (for the most part) telling me to go into something practical and provided emotional and financial support to establish my own film production company. They were also they financial backers of several business trips to film markets around the world.

If I ever meet Lisa Kudrow, please remind me that I owe her a huge huge huge hug and a very big thank you.

Here´s the full address for your viewing pleasure:

Categories: graduation, Lisa Kudrow, Vassar, wisdom

Malamados

So I got into a pretty bad discussion with a friend yesterday and decided to take my mind off of it by baking. Cooking and baking and exercising are usually my go-to activities when I feel particularly stressed or upset. Yesterday I decided to make for the second time, these Cherry Mud Cupcakes that I found in a cupcake book I bought way back when I was in college and spotted the book on sale at B&N for $3. I´ve made them before, and they came out really well so I decided to give them a second shot but also decided to experiment a bit with them.

The recipe actually calls for 1/4 cup of Cherry Liquor, but lacking in Cherry liquor and feeling a little bit more alcoholic than usual, I substituted that for 3/4 cup of equal parts Malamado (a Malbec fortified wine from Argentina. Very nice stuff) and Whiskey. I wasn´t sure how they´d come out, but I figured that my brother and his friends could wolf down the batch if anything went wrong. Thankfully, it didn´t. It actually came out really well. And now I am going to call these cakes "Malamados" (which is a mash of the phrase Mal Amados meaning "Ill-loved").

I covered them with dark chocolate ganache which I added a decent splash of Malamado to as well. Delicious!

Here they are:

The Minis I made:

And the full-sized:

The brown stuff around the big ones is the Ganache. The unfortunate side-effect of adding Malamado to the Ganache is that the Ganache doesn´t completely emulsify, so I had to sort of pour the ganache over the cupcakes to sort of decorate them. But consistency set aside, that ganache is pretty damn awesome. It also makes a really delicious Chocolate-Malamado Ice Cream.

Categories: baking, chocolate cake, cupcakes, foodie

Understanding the Complexities of Modern China

Ecuador is currently undergoing a bit of a tumultuous transitional period. Transition into what, I am not entirely sure about, but it is nonetheless a transition. It started last September with the 30-S riots. It is the fourth major political upheaval the country has seen in the past 16 years. And the fourth Coup d´Etat as well. Yes. It was a Coup d´Etat. I will firmly maintain that it was a Coup d´Etat - it did not start as one, but the President turned it into one. I´m not a fan of the President. His methods are questionable, and he surrounds himself with a bunch of sniveling weasels that really are the problem with the government. I think that he has good intentions, but also remember that the road to hell is paved with good intentions - and with that in mind, the whole country is being led down into mouth of Erebus itself. Also, the man has an attitude problem that often gets him into trouble. I don´t particularly agree with his political ideologies (I don´t particularly agree with most political ideologies in fact) but I´m not that militant about disproving their validity as a lot of people I know are.

That being said, I am most certainly am not in favor of all the stuff going on right now. A journalist and the newspaper he wrote for were just sued for $45 million and 3 years in prison, and found guilty, by the president for defamation of character and disrespect for the office of the presidency because the journalist wrote a piece criticizing the government. The event echoes the feeling of experiencing 30-S from my house - information filtered through the national channels that were suddenly all overridden by the one government-controlled channel, who cried against the rebels curtailing their "freedom of speech" when they cut the wires that allowed them to override all the other channels. Part of me is kind of scared. Rumors are flying around about the government monitoring Facebook posts and blogs and even emails for stuff that could be potentially volatile. But then, part of me reminds me that, well, this isn´t exactly a first-world country, and judging by other rumors, I doubt they can really take in such a huge scope. That being said, it still feels like it is the death of free speech here. And that in itself is tragic.

However, I get mad when people start comparing what is going on here with China´s (and by China, I mean the part of China known as The People´s Republic of China) recent (the last 100 years, which in the scope of Chinese history is very recent) history. Today I read a comment on Facebook about how what is happening here is even worse than what happened in China. There was also someone else back in October that made a careless remark about Mao Zedong and how he seems tame in comparison to the President. This makes me mad because that comment was made out of ignorance of the complexities of the rise of the modern PRC. Yes, freedom of speech is dying here, but it is nothing, and I do mean NOTHING in comparison to what happened in the 50´s, 60´s and 70´s in China. I love China, don´t get me wrong, there are many many good things about it, but that being said, it has gone through one hell of a transformation to get where it is, and is still continuing on that path. We cannot even begin to really understand what it was like for the people of the time to go through ages such as The Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. We cannot even begin to understand what it was like to recover from that, to be reborn from that, to carry those traumas in our modern personal and cultural identities. We cannot even begin to understand the mindframe of Chinese culture. So radically different than our own Western standard, but just as immensely rich and complex. All it takes is to stand in Confucius´s tomb, or the Longmen Grottoes or any other of the many cultural landmarks traumatized by these periods and stare at the 2000-year-old decapitated Buddhas and 1000-year-old graffitied grave markers and feel the weight of that destruction, feel the weight of the decisions behind that destruction, and the people behind those decisions. All it takes is to talk to the ordinary Chinese middle-aged guy who cannot stomach Xiao Baicai (Little Chinese Cabbage) because that is all he ate for 2 years during his childhood. All it takes is to stare at the way parents cherish their one child as they play among the spring peonies.

I am not saying that the PRC´s tumultuous modern history didn´t have its good aspects too. It did. In a bizarre way, it opened up a lot of opportunities for a lot of the Chinese population that would have not had access to them otherwise. But the opening of these opportunities came at a huge cost, one we cannot even begin to fathom. It is a complex issue - the rise of modern China. Full of ups and downs. And it is weighty and huge.

So no, our problems are not in any way comparable to China´s, just as China´s problems are not in any way comparable to ours. It feels like a 10-year-old child comparing their problems to and claiming to understand the problems faced by a 60-year-old adult. So, at the risk of sounding a little crass, to all of you making careless remarks about this issue: get your ignorant asses to a Chinese History course and get some perspective.

Categories: China, pet peeves, politics

God Bless You JK Rowling

I was perusing around JK Rowling´s official site (don´t ask me how I got there, let´s just chalk it up to a similar situation in which I ended up spending 4 hours on Wookiepedia) and came across this post:

"Being thin. Probably not a subject that you ever expected to read about on this website, but my recent trip to London got me thinking...

It started in the car on the way to Leavesden film studios. I whiled away part of the journey reading a magazine that featured several glossy photographs of a very young woman who is either seriously ill or suffering from an eating disorder (which is, of course, the same thing); anyway, there is no other explanation for the shape of her body. She can talk about eating absolutely loads, being terribly busy and having the world's fastest metabolism until her tongue drops off (hooray! Another couple of ounces gone!), but her concave stomach, protruding ribs and stick-like arms tell a different story. This girl needs help, but, the world being what it is, they're sticking her on magazine covers instead. All this passed through my mind as I read the interview, then I threw the horrible thing aside.

But blow me down if the subject of girls and thinness didn't crop up shortly after I got out of the car. I was talking to one of the actors and, somehow or other, we got onto the subject of a girl he knows (not any of the Potter actresses – somebody from his life beyond the films) who had been dubbed 'fat' by certain charming classmates. (Could they possibly be jealous that she knows the boy in question? Surely not!)

'But,' said the actor, in honest perplexity, 'she is really not fat.'

'"Fat" is usually the first insult a girl throws at another girl when she wants to hurt her,' I said; I could remember it happening when I was at school, and witnessing it among the teenagers I used to teach. Nevertheless, I could see that to him, a well-adjusted male, it was utterly bizarre behaviour, like yelling 'thicko!' at Stephen Hawking.

His bemusement at this everyday feature of female existence reminded me how strange and sick the 'fat' insult is. I mean, is 'fat' really the worst thing a human being can be? Is 'fat' worse than 'vindictive', 'jealous', 'shallow', 'vain', 'boring' or 'cruel'? Not to me; but then, you might retort, what do I know about the pressure to be skinny? I'm not in the business of being judged on my looks, what with being a writer and earning my living by using my brain...

I went to the British Book Awards that evening. After the award ceremony I bumped into a woman I hadn't seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? 'You've lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!'

'Well,' I said, slightly nonplussed, 'the last time you saw me I'd just had a baby.'

What I felt like saying was, 'I've produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren't either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?' But no – my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!

So the issue of size and women was (ha, ha) weighing on my mind as I flew home to Edinburgh the next day. Once up in the air, I opened a newspaper and my eyes fell, immediately, on an article about the pop star Pink.

Her latest single, 'Stupid Girls', is the antidote-anthem for everything I had been thinking about women and thinness. 'Stupid Girls' satirises the talking toothpicks held up to girls as role models: those celebrities whose greatest achievement is un-chipped nail polish, whose only aspiration seems to be getting photographed in a different outfit nine times a day, whose only function in the world appears to be supporting the trade in overpriced handbags and rat-sized dogs.

Maybe all this seems funny, or trivial, but it's really not. It's about what girls want to be, what they're told they should be, and how they feel about who they are. I've got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don't want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I'd rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before 'thin'. And frankly, I'd rather they didn't give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons. Let them never be Stupid Girls. Rant over."

All I can say is, AMEN Mrs. Rowling. Couldn´t have put it better myself.

Categories: harry potter, stupid girls, weight loss

College Dorm Nostalgia

My old dorm is on the Vassar homepage today! I miss it! I miss living in an Architectural landmark.

Noyes house pride! :D (because REAL dorms have curves)

You can see it much bigger and in better resolution at www.vassar.edu.

Disclaimer: Pic isn´t mine. Don´t sue me!

Categories: college, dorm, nostalgia

Restaurant Review #2: Alma

Restaurant Name: Alma

Location: El Monitor 188 y Quiteño Libre, Quito, Ecuador (+593) 22252248

Kind of Food: Contemporary / Latin-American Haute Cuisine

Price Range: I honestly have no idea since we were invited to dine there as guests. But TripAdvisor says $18-$35.

What I ordered: We had a especially created 10-course gourmet meal designed to be paired with 7 different wines. Among the dishes served were Duck Carpaccio with Passion Fruit Sauce and a side of goat cheese, Grilled Octopus, Crayfish-Avocado Salad, Grilled Tuna with Sichuan Peppers and Passion Fruit Sauce, Duck Confit, Taxo Sorbet, Swordfish with Pineapple served over White Carrot Chips, Chilean Sole and Oysters with a light lemon-garlic sauce, Shrimp Ravioli, Chocolate Mousse with Raspberries and Dark Chocolate sauce, Passion Fruit Creme Brulee, Apple-Caramel Spring Roll.

Comments: I think I died and went to heaven after last night´s meal. We joined some American friends that were leaving today for a last meal in Quito at Alma Restaurant. They brought the wine, Alma provided the food. I will begin by saying that our hosts´superb wine selection set aside, the experience at Alma was marked because of its perfect (and I do mean perfect) wine and food pairings - a feat remarkable in itself when the Chef had not opened any of the bottles for inspiration and did the pairings on sheer culinary knowledge. Unbelievable. As for the dishes, they were all fantastic. My personal favorites were the Duck Carpaccio with Passion Fruit Sauce and a side of Goat Cheese as well as the Passion Fruit Creme Brulee. The Duck Carpaccio simply made my day because I haven´t had the chance to have Carpaccio in over 6 years because of a pork allergy, and so being able to savor it again (albeit made from Duck) sent me over the moon. The Passion Fruit Creme Brulee was a delightful surprise - I´m not a huge fan of Creme Brulee as it tends to be far too sweet for my taste, but the Passion Fruit infused it with a shot of acidity that gave it a much more complex (and less sweet!) flavor. I also had a ball with the Tuna with Sichuan Peppers and Passion Fruit Sauce. The roasted Sichuan Pepper gave it a smoky, hot, and slightly oriental flavor that reminded me of cooking dumplings in Beijing and that flavor was complicated by the sweet undertones of the Passion Fruit. That paired with a peppery Syrah was just absolute heaven. Admittedly, dinner was a blur (7 wines do take their toll) but I would say it is one of the best meals I´ve had ever. So if you are ever in Quito and in the mood for some fine Latin American Haute Cuisine, Alma is a definite must.

Categories: foodie, Quito, Restaurant Review

The End of Childhood

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 was released in cinemas worldwide a week ago on Friday July 15, 2011. A 11-year story finally came to an end, and with it, the absolute end of childhood. I feel that it was the last threshold, the last marker that I needed to pass before full-fledged adulthood. It ended. Therefore I am, much like Harry, Ron, and Hermione, finally an adult. I´ve seen the film 3 times so far. Once on the Midnight Premiere, one a day later, and one last sunday. Last Sunday I saw it in Spanish. Which wasn´t bad. Haha. In any case, the film is good, and solid, although I feel Part 1 is the stronger of the two overall, there are moments in Part 2 that simply take the cake. The Prince´s Tale sequence is my favorite. All three times, it has had me in tears by the end of the 5-minute interlude, with Alan Rickman simply stealing the movie with it. Another of my favorites is this little action sequence where the trio runs across a courtyard. In the span of two minutes, the film pays tribute to all the 7 other films in a very elegant and emotional way. My whole adolescence, and Harry´s journey, passed before my eyes in a flurry of magical moments.

What will we do without Harry Potter?

Many people of my generation are asking themselves the same question.

For me, the answer is simple. I have experienced, thus now it is my turn to create.

Categories: harry potter, job