The end of the year, the end of the decade! It’s been a big year for me. Very little in my life is the same as it was this time last year. I’m most proud that I strengthened friendships and began making amends with an important person in my life. I’m learning to accept the limitations of some relationships. Also this year, actually like this month, okay in this very blog post, I resolved to stop shit-talking my exes.
It was a conversation with Jacky that did it. She and I were with D and I offhandedly commented on a woman I dated. The remark was quick, off the cuff, an expedient way to avoid delving into the specifics, namely my own culpability. If I focus only on the fact that the other person transgressed some boundary I don’t have to say that I fucked up too. That I’d hurt someone. That it was messy, confusing, drawn out. Jacky, in her boundless magnanimity, responded to my flippant remark with a moving ten-minute personal story that probably began in the year 1943 and ended in the present day with her saying, and here I paraphrase: After long, often loving relationships, we shouldn’t judge our exes by our very worst moments with them.
I don’t think everyone is owed this kind of generosity, but the people I’ve been with do, and that’s how I want to carry myself and my memories of them. So there’s that big lesson of this year. Thank you Jacky.
Then there are the things I really ought to be saying more often. There are things that it’s taken me a long time to accept, that I’m still a little ashamed of, that I still find creative, roundabout ways to share with people. Things like: For the last ten years I’ve pursued a career that I may be ready to turn away from. I don’t want to be a political reporter anymore. If I write at all I want to write about different things.
Also … I DON’T LIKE BAKING.
As a person who lives alone and who has, at most, like six people I’m interested in seeing (read: feeding) with any regularity here in New York, baking is so rarely worth it. The recipe tracking, the ingredient collecting, the two extra trips to the grocery store for forgotten ingredients, the focusing my eyes on the recipe only to lose my place and have to start the recipe all over again, then the dishwashing, the re-finding of storage spots for the weird dishes, the scraping dried egg white off the countertops. Groan.
It’s liberating to see and accept this about myself. When I’ve got a crowd to feed, and my mother’s expansive kitchen counters to work with, I can be more easily persuaded. But in New York? For me? Nah. Leave the cakes and trifles and meringues to someone else. And that’s okay.
So please know how big a deal it is when I say these are my new favorite cookies to bake. All of seven ingredients, no fancy doing, and clear instructions from Stella Parks who has never let me down. Simple and delicious, light, crunchy cookie times.
This recipe was a double whammy: my nieceypoo can’t eat eggs, and my mother loves thin, crispy cookies. These satisfied both of them! Baby P took a fistful into her chubby little paws after trying them, as hearty a sign of approval as I could hope for. And my mother’s reaction after her first bite was, “Hm, there’s quite a bit of sugar here,” which I promise is high praise in Asian motherspeak. (For the record I do not find them overly sweet at all.)
I loved making them so much I’m, eep, going to haul out my bakeware this week to make them in New York. I even bought my first bag of flour in years.