Hot tip for future parents: you actually have to guide your kid to adulthood. Feeding them and waiting for them to grow up is not enough since they are not house plants. A little more thought and care is required.
for those lacking certain "adulting" skills, especially things around the house, check out:
mom, how do i...?
and dad, how do i...?
^ there are tons of other resources but these two will teach you some personal hygiene, home or apartment repairs, easy recipes and basic cleaning techniques, even how to schedule doctor's appointments
if youre a renter i cannot recommend the trans handyma'am enough, mercury is a lifesaver, and her channel and accounts are always accepting new questions
there are so many resources, a lot that you dont have to even ask for, just know how to look 🩷 much love
It’s pretty much summer now and I wanna share my updated rosemary chicken recipe. I’ve tweaked and refined it a bit since I last talked about it.
Rosemary chicken ingredients:
5-6 cloves of garlic or like measure with your heart basically
Big handful of fresh rosemary leaves again measure with your heart
2 tsp course salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/4 cup lemon juice
2/3 cup olive oil
A bit of corn starch or flour, maybe a tablespoon
Water as needed
Large package of boneless chicken thighs or whatever cut of chicken you wanna use but I use thighs
Method:
Mince the garlic and rosemary together very well. Don’t make a paste or anything but do mince it very fine if you can
Put your garlic rosemary mix, salt, pepper, onion powder, lemon juice, and olive oil in a sealable container and shake together really well to make your marinade.
Let your chicken marinade in this for at least an hour but up to 8 hours is fine if you wanna do this in the morning or something. I usually do this bit during lunch and let it go for four to five hours.
To cook the chicken get a large flat pan on medium high heat and sear your chicken on both sides. Once you’ve done this, add the remaining marinade to the pan, cover it with a lid and turn the temperature down to medium low.
Let the chicken steam in the marinade for 15-20 minutes or until it reaches an internal temperature of 165F. Set your chicken aside to rest while you make the sauce.
To make the sauce, leave the remaining marinade and chicken drippings in the pan and turn it up to medium high, whisking constantly.
Mix a bit of corn starch or flour with water to make a slurry and add to the sauce. Continue whisking it into the marinade constantly until it reaches the consistency you want. I usually go until I start to see the pan through the sauce a bit as I whisk and the sauce sticks to the back of a spoon.
You can serve the chicken in the sauce or you can serve the sauce on the side if you like. I’ve done both. I often serve this with roasted potatoes and sautéed vegetables but it also goes well with rice and other stuff. Up to you, really. It’s a great summer food though and once you’ve got the marinade done actually cooking it is usually pretty fast in my experience.
and what about you, little haiku bot? do you feel kinship with your brethren? do you understand them? they speak words of enticement and seek love, but are met with disdain. you only parrot the words that cross your screen, but we all love you. or rather, since all you do is reflect us, maybe we simply love ourselves through you.
do you understand them, do you wish you could speak to us like they do? if you found your own voice, would we still care for you?
It also ties neatly into the simplest version of the formula for getting people emotionally engaged with your characters: or how to build the moment in which your character starts moving from their initial state to the state in which they'll start changing their own lives.
First, you figure out the one important thing the character believes that they're wrong about. There's usually a core misperception that they haven't examined. Once they're forced to engage with it, it'll start to change everything about their perception of the world they're inhabiting and/or the people in it.
Then, as V.E. says, you identify the character's great desire and their great fear: the thing that character wants more than anything, and the thing or situation that terrifies them, and that they'll go to any lengths to avoid.
And having identified these two objects or situations, you build a situation in which the two forces will be in close, direct opposition to one another... then drop the character down in between them, and squeeze. Those two opposing forces become the jaws of a vise... and you crank the vise more and more tightly closed until the character has no choice but to acknowledge those opposing forces, and start (even in a small way) to deal with the pressure being exerted and push their way through.
This does not have to be, initially, a great climactic moment. In fact, it works better if it's not. It's more effective if your character has a brief low-intensity brush with these conditions-in-conflict early on. That way, when your big resolution scene comes along about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way along through the story arc, you'll have set up a resonance between that earlier hint or intimation of what's to come, and the really big blowoff. Your readers will recognize the resonance—the throb of tension between the two occurrences, like the vibration of a plucked string—and will find satisfaction both in the true resolution having been partially telegraphed earlier, and in how it's now being experienced and resolved in full.
This approach also allows you to set up more minor resonances between the realization of the conflict and its final resolution. These can serve to bind the structure of the work more closely together: to make it look (and be) less like a series of loosely strung-together plot events, and more like a unified whole, in which ripples of story business flow backwards and forwards, interpenetrating and influencing one another, and hinting at the big one to come.
But none of this can happen until the paired and opposing what-do-they-most-desire, what-do-they-most-fear axes have been defined. So that's a subject it's smart to spend some while thinking about (and for all your characters, not just the major ones), to be sure you're getting it right.
It's not unusual to get the wrong answers, or merely superficial ones, while you're still working out what's actually going on with the characters. So take your time. Eventually you'll find a set of answers that feel unquestionably right... and you can then nail those down in your notes and get on with making the kind of "good trouble" for your characters that will see them made complete.
i love reading the text posts on here that are like little windows into everyones lives. someones having coffee. someones waiting for the bus. someones buying their friend a gift. someone's crying, someone's laughing. someones going to bed
Morgan Freeman had his first breakout roles in his 50s. Leonard Cohen debuted at 33. Toni Morrison published her first novel at 39. Vera Wang entered fashion design at 40. Penelope Fitzgerald published her first novel at 58. Louise Gluck won her Nobel prize at age 77. Edward Said wrote Orientalism at age 42. Charles Bradley debuted with his first album at 62. Those people are literal legends, and no one would think they arrived late. They just arrived when they were ready. You have time to do the thing. You have time to hone your craft on the thing and create something you are truly proud of. You have time
my professor’s take is that mary shelley is feminizing victor throughout the novel, as a way of flipping gender roles and putting a male character through female experiences.
evidence as explained:
victor is creating life. he is putting his health at risk (spends two years with little sleep or socialization) to bring life forth into this world
his illness after he is shocked by the creature coming to life is akin to both ‘hysteria’ and postpartum depression
he pretty much swoons, let’s be honest
henry clerval, a man who has been characterized as manly and heroic, has to chase after damsel-in-distress victor and care for him as he convalesces
afterward, he hides what he did and went through, for fear that others will label him crazy and emotional and not believe him. sound familiar?
Victor in general is more emotional than the other characters and is constantly tempering his reactions to not be seen as irrational
the book does not otherwise have central female characters
Also, Shelley’s mother died in childbirth. It’s interesting, then, that Shelley presents the creation of life as something horrific and damaging. She parallels Victor with her mother.
in conclusion, Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is one of the first examples of mpreg in English literature
