Emchap's Shit from the Internet 05/20/20 🍠
Last week was the season finale of Survivor (yes, it's still on; yes it's amazing that they just had their 40th season), which I watched with my Survivor Group over a zoom. Normally we all meet in one person's home to eat burritos and debate the merits of various contestants, but the world is at it is, so, Zoom.
The entire endeavor was made weirder by the fact that a solid 3/4 of the regular attendees at the event live in the same apartment complex (myself among them) so our individual zooms were for the most part happening around a shared driveway. When my friends laughed on zoom I could hear their actual laughing coming through their windows, since everyone has them open due to the heat and we are all basically living in the same house composed entirely of our front-facing living rooms, noise-wise.
It was fun, in that seeing my friends is fun and I enjoyed watching strangers competitively walk across bridges for sport. A Jersey cop who played a very good game and is also a doofus won and revealed himself to live in a home decorated like a Rooms To Go, which was a fun fact that I clutch to my heart. I was reminded once again that "is basically in my broad age category" as an adult is completely different than "is basically my age" as a kid, because I was 9 when this show started airing and several of the participants were straight-up adults. I ordered a pizza to eat by myself, and it was good.
But as much as there's no other, better way to have any of these sorts of activities, there's something profoundly depressing about little pods of people all eating pizza 20 feet apart while unable to sit on couches and hug and do normal fucking friend stuff. At least when I schedule zooms with my friends in New York or Austin or Atlanta, it's the same as it would be anyway. But when the person is literally across my driveway, fuck, it's depressing.
I don't think I've hugged another person since March 12th; the most human contact I've had in the last two-and-a-bit months was in the hospital, where it was primarily people intrusively measuring my urine output/fucking up my blood draws. I have the cat and I'm glad I do, but the longer my entire life stretches out in the same house on the same video conferencing software I spend all of my time in, waiting for the summer to come in and make everything more miserable, the sadder I get.
And I know I am doing absolutely better than so, so, so many people who have it harder, but it feels like my limbs are lead and my blood is cortisol and every time I've been asked to pick a gif to describe how I'm feeling at work in the last month it's been some animated illustration of fatigue. (My current personal favorite.) I've been the most disconnected version of myself as a friend and partner and colleague because all I want to do is sleep for the next six months, which is of course some pretty classic #depression. And I wanted to eat some fucking gross pizza pile with my friends while we watched the cop climb into a tree or whatever the fuck.
But of course that isn't an option. So I'm in the house with the cat and the windows open, watching TV, trying to stay awake until I can go to bed at 9pm like a slightly more reasonable person.
Shit to read
The dirtbag left can suck a bag of dicks, and jesus, this poor woman.
Just a fun set of IT horrors.
As a fellow "I don't have any overarching goals" person, I loved this.
We live in the stupidest timeline but I enjoyed this.
Just some fun and funky fucked-up facts about the Celestial Seasonings folks.
Christian porn addiction frameworks are bananas but I enjoyed this dive into them.
Did you know the Magnetic Fields have a new album out?
Shit to eat
Take an emergency day off because you are so worn out and tired and twitchy that you're going to yell at someone in an email and your entire job is, on some level, to not do that.
Sleep in. Late. Like 10?
Eat a cold half of a gondola pizza you ordered the night before. The eggs will be a little weird cold, but it's fine.
When you are done and you have had your coffee and you have confirmed that the weather will not get too hot today, start.
Make a cinnamon bun dough. Pick your favorite. I used the dough from a few newsletters ago, except no bread flour because I was out and I had to start over at the beginning because the all purpose flour I was using had some fun pantry moths (I hope) in it. Make an 8x8 pan's worth, of halve a 9x13 recipe. Something in that ballpark.
Let it rise, punch it down, and flop it onto a floured baking surface.
Roll it out. I went to 10x10, but that's a mistake. Do 10 x longer.
Cover it in butter or crisco and cinnamon sugar stuff, you know how this goes, do what you'd like.
Roll it up into a 10" long cigar. I said to roll it longer earlier because that will give it more layers of rolling, which is important.
Freeze the dough cigar for 20 minutes.
When you're done, take it out, cut off a half inch from each end, and then cut it in half down the long part.
Pinch the edges together at the top and sort of twist it around itself a few times, pinching back together at the bottom. Face the cut edges out. Make it look like the weird S everyone used to draw.
Pop it into an oiled loaf pan. Cover, wait another hour.
Bigger than before.
Cook it at 375 for 30 minutes, rotating halfway through.
Once it's out, cover it in some sort of cinnamon bun glaze. I did a quarter cup each of powdered sugar and yogurt plus some vanilla, but you do you. Dump it on there to absorb while it's hot.
Once it's halfway cooled, cut a hunk off and enjoy a nutriently lax lunch. It's good.
(Assembly technique from Smitten Kitchen's babka.)
Shit to listen to
I listened to this mellow jazz playlist while burning incense and cleaning my house over the weekend, and you know what? It was nice as hell.
The Great, on Hulu, is an absolutely dumb, horny delight. Like costume drama Riverdale.
Shit to buy
I just got some wheat gluten to make my normal flour into dope-ass bread flour. I am become Ozymandias etc.
I am totally on board with the concept of these watercolor kits that my coworker suggested to me as a fun social distance activity. Look at the wee cute cactuses!