spaghetti code and meatballs

"You've failed me."

(and hERE'S some requests from Twitter↓

Have you guys seen that clip

The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and ’90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the “culture of fatherhood” has changed more than fathers’ actual behavior.

Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothers’ expectations and reality to “a largely successful male resistance.” This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women — who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting — by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?

The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel they’re getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance.

Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to women’s labor. Men resist because it is in their “interest to do so,” write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, “Gender and Families.” By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing “a separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.”

While interviewing working parents for a book on parenthood, I spoke with one dad in Vermont who said: “The expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. My dad has never cooked a meal. I’ve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when you’re not being asked …” he trailed off, and then said: “I have justifications. It’s a cop-out.”

Take love out of the equation and focus on the workplace, and it’s clear how this plays out. Studies show that male employees sit back while their female co-workers perform the tasks that don’t lead to promotion. In a series of lab studies, the economists Lise Vesterlund, Linda Babcock and Maria Recalde and the organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart found that in coed groups, women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. But in all-male groups, the men volunteer just as readily.

In an interview with NPR, Dr. Vesterlund explained that the women do the work “because they’re expected to.” The men “come into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games.”

We play the same games at home. I interviewed couples separately and found that the women were often angry, while many men didn’t seem to realize there was a problem.

The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance. The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. But this isn’t “maternal gatekeeping,” the theory that men want to help but women disparage their capabilities and push them out. Instead these seem to be situations that necessitate the intervention of a reasonable adult.

A mother in California said: “It’s important to me that my sons are not falling asleep in class and that they’re not late for school. My husband does not share those priorities, so I do bedtime and school drop-off.”

The dad in Vermont explained: “I do laundry when I need it. When it comes to the kids’ laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and I’m happy to do it, but if you’re going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.”

The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness. A mother in Illinois said: “My husband is a participatory and willing partner. He’s not traditional in terms of ‘I don’t change diapers.’ But his attention is limited.” She added, “I can’t trust him to do anything, to actually remember.”

A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting weren’t important enough to remember: “I just don’t think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.”

Finally, some men blamed their wives’ personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. “She wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I don’t keep lists. I think there’s a belief that if she’s not going to do it, then it won’t get done.” (His wife agreed that this was true, but emphasized that her belief was based on experience: “We fell into this easy pattern where he learned to be oblivious and I learned to resent him.”)

A father in Portland, Ore., confirmed that his wife takes on more but said: “It has to do with her personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has a need to be engaged, to be doing something.”

Many mothers told me they had tried to change this and had aired their grievances with their partners, only to watch as nothing changed. A mother in Queens said she spent three years trying to get her husband to do more before coming to terms with the fact that maybe it was never going to happen. “He notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about,” she said. “How much convincing of the other person can you do?”

All this comes at a cost to women’s well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities “as unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,” one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings — and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.

Division of labor in the home is one of the most important gender-equity issues of our time. Yet at the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.

The largest dam removal in U.S. history. So successful that the salmon that haven’t run freely in the river for literally over a century came back the next year. Not steady progress over a decade as expected, the very next salmon run they came home. No one alive saw salmon in that river outside the hatcheries kept by native’s tribes and the Department of Fish And Wildlife scientists desperately trying to save them. One of the activists who helped bring the suit spoke of their dying grandmother making them promise to bring the fish home, and they didn’t know how that was possible, but they spent decades doing it.

The legal basis for successfully suing the power company who owned the dams was Indigenous treaty rights to eat the fish. Eating the fish was the one thing in a century that succeeded in being a clear and legally binding right that superseded the desires of white capital and industry. I have been going to the public interest environmental law conference off and on for 20 years where a lot of organizing for Undam The Klamath happened. I’ve heard updates about every legal tact they tried as they happened, and they tried everything.

There are healthy, thriving salmon, trout, and lamprey in a rewilding and recovering Klamath River right now as a direct result of Indigenous people eating them. Of their legally binding right to eat them. They sure as fuck care more about those fish than any white vegan ever could. They are salmon people that the Creator sent Salmon to feed, while charging the People with protecting and stewarding them. It’s not possible to learn about salmon and trout in the Pacific Northwest without learning this, and it’s unambiguously racist to dismiss this symbiotic relationship.

The white vegans are trying to get all hunting and fishing banned in Oregon, and that’s quite possibly the single most catastrophic thing that could be done to the animals here because we killed off all the major predators of creatures like deer and without anything hunting them their numbers will explode, eat all the vegetation, destroy the ecosystem, and then die along with everything else in that failing ecosystem. Controlled hunting of deer is vitally necessary for the deer to survive. This is something Native people know, but patronizing racist savior-complex white people refuse to listen to.

I have a whole collection of Oregon’s Public Broadcasting’s documentaries about Klamath River or the larger story of fish and people in the region. If you watch nothing else, watch Klamath Dams Are Coming Out, First Salmon Ceremony, After The Dams, and First Decent (Native made). It could not be clearer that the salmon are being protected and nourished by the people who eat them, and that stewardship is a massive part of their creation myths. But it contradicts political vegan dogma so they don’t listen.

Sure, here's my disorganized recipe from hell, cobbled together from various websites and experiments. I just realized that I pasted the caramel and pastry cream in the wrong order... It's easier if you make the pastry cream first and clean that pot for the caramel. I'm on mobile. Will fix.

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1 box white cake mix, using egg whites. Bake. Flip onto a wire rack.

2/3 box spice cake mix (save the rest to turn into batter later, or portion the batter and bake it on the side.) I add extra allspice. Bake in previous pan.

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Caramel Ganache (kinda):

1 cup granulated sugar

⅓ cup butter, salted or unsalted

White chocolate and hot milk ganache (pre-prepare or don't; pour hot milk over the chocolate and stir until thick but fluid consistency. Use the same method over dark chocolate to make a separate, thicker ganache for later).

Heat until fully melted and amber, without burning. People say don't stir the sugar; I don't think it matters much for a cake like this and I stir it to help it melt faster after it has started.

Add the butter pieces and stir until smooth. It's gonna look scary. Just keep going.

Add the white chocolate ganache until reaching desired consistency. This is done now. Transfer to a holding container and immediately wash your pot. Filling the pot with water and letting the leftover scuz simmer on low helps.

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Pastry Cream (it's just custard with butter, apparently) (ALSO NOTE: I never have a ton unless I make a thin tall cake, but this amount offers an appropriate texture. Maybe double this exclusively if you can make it look pretty. IMO, I'd turn this into a mousse to stabilize it, but I haven't. Spicetrekkers Walnut Espresso Blondie has a good custard->mousse setup.)

▢ 2 cups whole milk

▢ ¼ cup granulated sugar

▢ 1 large egg

▢ 2 large egg yolks

▢ ¼ cup cornstarch

▢ ⅓ cup granulated sugar

▢ 2 tablespoons unsalted butter

▢ 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (or vanilla bean, split open, to add to the milk during heating)

In a medium saucepan, combine milk and granulated sugar. Gentle simmer/steam. Do not boil.

Whisk together 1 large egg, 2 large egg yolks, ¼ cup cornstarch, and ⅓ cup granulated sugar in a mixing bowl until smooth and pale.

Slowly pour about half of the hot milk into the egg mixture in a steady stream, whisking constantly to temper the eggs and prevent curdling.

Immediately pour the tempered egg mixture back into the saucepan. Return to medium heat and whisk constantly until the mixture thickens and begins to bubble, about 2 to 3 minutes.

Remove from heat. Stir in 2 tablespoons unsalted butter and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract until fully melted and incorporated.

Transfer the pastry cream to a clean bowl. Press plastic wrap directly onto the surface to prevent a skin from forming. Refrigerate until completely chilled (can use freezer initially, if you want).

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Layer as per image. Layer as follows:

Spice cake → Caramel ganache → White cake → Plain pastry cream → Pastry cream with add-ins → Dark chocolate ganache with oreos if you want it that way → Crushed biscoff cookies

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It is very reminiscent of a typical Southern dump-cake, but if you organized it. It's fun. With work, it could be kind of classy?