I'm gonna get my freedom back.

Even though your last day “in the office” is a week away, we haven’t really been in the office for a year and change now. Which means I haven’t really seen you for a year and change now. Which means we haven’t really talked a ton for the last year and change now.

I’m happy for you and I can imagine how much you need this. So I am sincerely glad for this change for you.

But I also know what happens when someone leaves. It’s not so different from what’s happened over the last year and change, honestly. And it’s not any fault of yours or for any lack of affection. It’s just how I am.

--

4/2/21, 1:51 pm

all I want from you is to keep in touch with me ok? :)

What do I say to that? I so want to tell you that yes, I promise I will keep in touch with you; yes, I will miss you dearly and you’ll be just a few blocks away so let’s get lunch when we’re all back in our respective offices; yes, we have each others’ numbers and addresses so of course we’ll stay in touch; yes, you are more friend than coworker so of course this won’t change our friendship.

But I’m a terrible liar. And I wouldn’t want to lie to you anyway.

Please know that “i’m really, really bad at keeping in touch with people” means exactly that: it is a reflection of me and how I am.

I so want to assure you that I will do my best to stay in touch and reach out sometimes, but I know better. Even on a good day, my best wouldn’t be enough, and god knows I haven’t had a ton of good days lately.

--

In high school, marching band was a third of my classes, an extra hour every Monday, three more hours every Wednesday, a few additional hours every Friday, and a full day every Saturday. Most of my strongest high school friendships were formed with the people I saw most. Any exceptions were formed in the small hours of the night, chatting online with the same few screen names awake at the same time.

And while most kids were probably going to movies or hanging out at friends’ houses, I wasn’t. My friendships didn’t feel any lesser for it, but where others made plans together, I strengthened bonds asynchronously, on my own time, at my own speed. In lieu of quality time outside of school and related activities, I read Xanga entries and left comments. And as silly as that sounds, that’s just more my style of friendship, I guess. Was and still is.

Because in university (and beyond), I found that, as soon as someone dropped off whatever social media I was still using, I didn’t really know what was going on in their lives anymore. I still wasn’t proactively planning visits; I was maybe responding to snail mail or sending care packages. I never even visited my sibling’s college campus to see them; I just waited until the holidays.

And as a pre-pandemic adult, I was impeccably good at responding to texts with genuine enthusiasm, whether we’d last seen or spoken to each other a day or a month or a year ago. But now? without any structure or schedule keeping me social? having withdrawn from pretty much all social media?

I am so grateful to the handful of close friends I have who understand that it now takes me a month or two sometimes to respond to the littlest things. Who still leave me those messages anyway without any pressure to respond, simply because they still want to talk to me, regardless of how I am or am not able. Who know that the time in between doesn’t diminish how much I care about them. And I am grateful that they are able to receive and accept my particular brand of friendship, because it’s all I can readily give.

--

4/2/21, 1:51 pm

all I want from you is to keep in touch with me ok? :)

What do I say to that? I so want to give the kind of friendship that I feel so many others exchange. But even on a good day, I don’t keep in touch. I'll remember that you seek out particular boba shops that use real taro instead of powders. I’ll remember that you’re slightly lactose intolerant and make sure I ask for oat milk instead of dairy. I’ll listen when you’re stressed and remind you that your health is worth more and drop off some boba and houseplants unannounced in the hopes that it gives you any reprieve from your frustrations. And I’ll make sure I order extra drinks so you can have some tomorrow, and I’ll make sure the extras refrigerate well instead of getting a bunch of the same thing because I know you don’t like oversoaked boba, and I’ll pick low-maintenance plants because I know it can just add to your stress to watch something wither under your care, and I’ll make sure that the plants tolerate low light because you mentioned once that only one room in your place gets any decent amount of sunlight.

I’ll remember that J and I exchanged postcards more than letters in college and sometime after as well. I’ll keep the little keychain they brought back from Hong Kong with other tiny trinkets on my nightstand and think of them so many times each week, even if I barely respond to their texts every other month. I’ll wonder if they’re safe now that they live in the South, but I won’t remember where exactly in the South they are because it seems I respond so infrequently that they’re in a different state every time.

I’ll think about how Y and I once said that we would always be happy to hear from each other, whether it’s been a week or three years. I’ll remember that their birthday is just a bit before mine, but I won’t get the date quite right (it’s somewhere between two and four days before my birthday). There are some dates that I couldn’t forget if I tried, but many more that I can’t remember despite wishing I could. But I do remember when Y cooked dinner for me without saying a word because I crammed a semester's worth of summer school material into one sleepless week of frenzied studying (well, two semesters’ worth, technically, since I did it for two concurrent classes). How could I forget a gesture like that? I still wonder from time to time if their family still sucks, if they’re still too forgiving, if they’re still too generous in both sentiment and resources to people who are owed nothing. I wonder if green is still their favorite color (if so, is it still for the same reasons?) and if they still remember any of the inconsequential discussions about Franz Ferdinand or the Cribs they entertained (and sometimes even initiated).

I’ll recall the only time I ever played Risk, accompanied by freshly baked bread and a glass baking dish of nacho dip split into quadrants because L can’t do spicy and I was vegetarian. I know that I hung out with that group so many times throughout (and sometimes after) college, and while I won’t recall much of what we talked about or did, I will easily recall that, as the only underage person in the group, I was only ever offered alcohol but never pressured to drink. I’ll remember that one time in Econ 123...B? A? when the professor pointed out how I wrote “β” weirdly on the whiteboard, and somewhat embarrassed at my desk, I exaggeratedly mumbled something into my sweater (which was kind of more of a pillow on my desk at this point), but R turned around in their seat to assure me that “yes, I know that you don’t want to change how you write it even if someone else says it’s wrong” and feeling struck as to how they were able to understand anything I said (I barely understood it and I was the one saying it) and just how nice it felt in such a silly moment to feel like they got me. I’ll remember cooking ramen for R and myself one random afternoon between classes at my on-campus apartment and R saying they loooooved sesame oil when I asked. I’ll remember the time they drove me home and asked if I considered going to church and listened to my response so respectfully. And I’ll definitely remember how it never came up again or dampened our friendship. I’ll remember my early impressions of A and their early impressions of what music I probably listened to. I’ll remember that A liked J.Crew and that time I braved the worst mall ever during the holidays to get them a gift card. With L and the rest of that group scattered around the state, I haven’t talked to any of them in...too long. Years. Even when K texted the group a few months ago, I could barely chime in with a half-hearted response. How do I express that I miss them all so much but I can’t (don’t want to?) really talk to them right now? That despite only having half their numbers saved in my contacts, I often wonder how they’re all doing? I know from social media (at least a year stale by now) that R has one? two? kids and their family looks so lovely, but I haven’t talked to them since maybe C’s graduation. And at various points over the last few years, I’ve wanted to say hi, but it feels weird to reach out and say “I randomly thought of that one time in 123 and I don’t know if I ever expressed what your friendship meant to me in college and how I needed it” when I don’t even know anything of their world anymore.

I don’t know how to explain to J that I want to drop off some gifts for their kids, and while we’re out we might as well bring some boba too, but where we “normally” would want to make a thing of it since we drove all this way, I just...don’t. want to. At least not today. And it feels awful and rude and mean, because we’re family and we haven’t really seen each other in over a year and the kids are growing so fast. And it feels silly and confusing, because as we approach their street, I’m suddenly struck with how much I miss spending half a day with them, how long it’s been since we all got boba together, since we were there in person to watch the kids run around until they were too exhausted to insist they were still totally awake and didn’t need to sleep yet.

--

A few years ago, S told me about this framework or theory they had about a person’s “core being” or something like that. They asserted that my core self was encapsulated by one particular moment when I served them fried rice, even as I was crying. And while there are a lot of things that S has said that I don’t agree with, maybe they got this one right.

I’m not ashamed of it (...usually). I’ve come to understand how I care for those around me, and I’ve come to understand that I do it in extremes. I think I’ve even come to accept it.

I’ve also come to accept that I have proactively reached out to maybe three people over the last year and change. And I still have some unreads that are months old.

And I know that everyone cares differently, and I know that everyone expresses it differently, and I know that I can only do what I can do, I know --

Oh, things are gonna happen naturally.

I am sorry that I cannot properly explain to you the pang I physically felt in my chest as I wrote out “i’m really, really bad at keeping in touch with people” -- that I felt when I wanted to but couldn’t promise you that yes, of course I would keep in touch.

So I suppose when you ask me to keep in touch:

Please know that I will try. And I hope you can forgive me when I eventually fail.

Hubert: I can't, I'm burying a body.

Ferdinand: But my father isn't home!

Jimmy Eat World - Just Watch The Fireworks

I’m glad you’re healing.

Franz Ferdinand - Get Away

Last year, I tried making a rainbow cake for a toddler’s birthday party. I ended up making three cakes total:

a simpler funfetti cake (recipe from Cook’s Country)

a practice attempt at a rainbow cake, tweaked from the basic funfetti cake recipe

the actual rainbow cake for said birthday party

I kinda took pictures and notes at each step, so I’m just going to document the progression through all three cakes here.

The basic funfetti cake I made was actually a separate project altogether for a friend whose birthday came well before the aforementioned toddler’s. I procrastinated and didn’t gather ingredients or equipment until basically the night I made the cake, so I ended up with not truly rainbow sprinkles. It was very upsetting.

This cake was pretty straightforward, since I followed the recipe exactly, but I think this was actually my first time making a layered cake in a really long time (probably first time ever doing it with cake + frosting made from scratch).

I’m not very good at frosting evenly. :( I should also note that, at this point, I didn’t have a cake turntable, which didn’t help smooth out the frosting at all. Like I said, I really procrastinated. :|

Everyone who tried the cake quite liked it, so I was pleased with how it tasted and the recipe in general. As noted, I did not yet have a cake stand to help with decorations. The recipe also calls for greasing, papering, greasing, and flouring each pan, which I’d also never done before. I swear, that part took me longer than making the cake itself, because I literally traced out three fucking circles and three strips of parchment paper and cut everything out separately like a dumbass. I also had no idea what I was doing when I did the bottom border of sprinkles. (To be honest, I still have no idea how to do that shit, even after watching this video approximately 328973201 times).

Sometime between this cake and the next one, I purchased a cake turntable and also found some tips on how to speed up that parchment nonsense, both of which helped for the following cakes. (For all three cakes, I used homemade cardboard cake circles that I cut from boxes and covered with foil. Not the prettiest, but it got the job done. I’ve since given up, however, and just bought some damn cake circles, but they won’t show up here.)

After my friend’s birthday, I volunteered to try making a rainbow-themed cake for the toddler’s birthday. I figured that, with the right sprinkles, a funfetti cake was already partially rainbow. From there, I did some googling and found a bit more inspiration:

ombre cakes with rainbows on the outside [link, link]

honorable mention: rainbow petal cake, which I didn’t end up using [link]

rainbow frosting inside the cake too [link]

From here, I came up with a plan:

bake funfetti cake rounds with actually rainbow sprinkles according to the recipe

mix one batch of frosting according to the same recipe, but portion it out so I could add food coloring and create different colors

use concentric rainbow circles between the cake layers

use white frosting to do a crumb coat and to frost the top of the cake (toddler’s parents bought some cake toppers and such, so I didn’t want a distracting background there) (that or I just got lazy and didn’t want to figure out how to make the top rainbow too, who knows)

create a striped rainbow pattern around the sides of the cake

frosting would be smooth along top and sides of cake, as with the above cake, but with different colors

On the one hand, I was more efficient with parts of this cake I’d practiced on the previous cake. For example, that parchment paper shit went much more smoothly and I got better at shaking out excess flour. On the other hand, figuring out frosting colors and actually portioning out all that goddamn frosting took a while. And the actual frosting process took longer, obviously.

Here’s what I ended up doing for frosting colors:

The frosting recipe makes ~5 cups plain frosting.

Portion out 2/3 cups frosting for each of the six rainbow colors. Reserve the remaining 1 cup white frosting.

Using liquid food coloring (red, yellow, green, blue):

red: 10 drops red

orange: 6 drops yellow + 2 drops red

yellow: 10 drops yellow

green: 10 drops green

blue: 10 drops blue

purple: 6 drops red + 4 drops blue

Each colored frosting went into its own small Ziploc bag to use as a makeshift frosting bag. Note that, since I was planning to smooth all the frosting out, I didn’t need to worry about frosting tips or anything fancy like that.

In researching ideas for this cake, I think I read up on liquid versus gel food coloring, but it sounded like I’d need to check specialty stores to find gel food coloring (I couldn’t find any at my local supermarkets, anyway). So I decided to be lazy and just used liquid food coloring.

This yielded very pastel colors, even after adding 8-10 drops food coloring to just a 2/3 cup portion of frosting. People argue that too much liquid food coloring can change the consistency as well as flavor of your frosting, so I stopped there and decided a pastel cake wouldn’t be so bad. Also, I was probably pretty tired at this point.

I really, really enjoy my process pictures for this cake because I 100% underestimated how fucking pale my frosting would be with liquid food coloring. No process pictures for the baking part, since that was all the same stuff, but you won’t miss them anyway.

Cake rounds baked and frosting mixed:

As you can see, that frosting is really fucking pale. Oh well, I’m sure it’ll be fine. First round goes down and first layer of rainbow circles go on.

Expectation:

Reality:

Nailed it.

I switched the color order for the next between-cake frosting layer -- partially to mix it up, but mostly because I didn’t think about changing each color’s portions to accommodate larger versus smaller circles:

So that’s two rainbow layers between three cake rounds. Since I was just stacking the cake layers, I didn’t really need to worry about smoothing the frosting between them, as the weight of each layer kinda handled that for me. Additionally, assuming we would cut typical slices ending close enough to the center of the cake, I also didn’t need to worry too much about making the concentric circles that even. Basically, if there was a thicker band of red on the left side of the cake than the right side, it probably wouldn’t matter much, unless I fed the cake to a bunch of assholes who compared their slices to see how much I fucked up.

Crumb coat plus first color layer:

I know it doesn’t look like much...

...but it’s amazing what a turntable and bench scraper can do.

FUCKING BEAUTIFUL.

Once I finished frosting the cake, I cut a slice out so I could take a bunch of pictures from different angles.

Some thoughts on the frosting:

In addition to leaving the top white, I also left a layer of white on the sides. This made it easier to “blend” it into the rainbow layers, i.e. I didn’t have to worry about the “corner” between the top and the sides.

You can see the plain white crumb coat under the rainbow frosting after you cut slices, but it’s kinda whatevs. I was still pleased with the overall effect.

In general, that outer layer of frosting is a bit lumpy when you cut into the cake, but again, not too worried about that, as the whole cake’s general look turned out better than expected.

I was pretty bummed about how light the colors looked when I mixed the frosting, but went with it anyway. After putting everything together, I think it looks pretty nice, as long as you know what you’re getting and aren’t expecting a truly bright, intensely colored rainbow cake.

I was pleased enough with how this turned out to try and duplicate it as is for the final product.

I felt pretty good going into the final cake, especially with all my practice at this point. This time, I cut each Ziploc bag a bit wider (second cake’s frosting felt a bit wispy, especially with between-round frosting layers) and tried to be generally more assertive with the frosting (I was pretty conservative with the practice cake because I wasn’t too confident in how much frosting would be needed at each step).

Unfortunately, the weekend of the birthday party ended up being extremely warm, so the frosting on the sides drooped quite a bit. As a result, the bottom got a bit muddled:

I don’t have a clear picture of it, but the cake layers also kinda shifted around during the hour-ish car ride from our place to the birthday party (presumably due to the warm weather again). So I was actually less satisfied with how the “real” cake turned out compared against my practice cake.

Nonetheless, the birthday child was delighted and all the guests thought it looked fine and tasted great. I also feel much better now about assembling cakes and basic buttercream frosting decoration. It’s still pretty, uh, “rustic” looking, but especially after this third cake, I think perfection is the enemy here -- the more I fussed with it, the more frustrating and seemingly fucked it got.

Say Anything - Peace Out