From Jason

Tina Fey on early attempts to style her hair:

That feeling of "I'm pretty sure this next step is wrong, but I'm just gonna do it anyway" is part of the same set of instincts that makes me such a great cook.

It's the essence of the Nervous Chef!

I go to several yoga classes. At one, most of the other women there are middle-aged. There's a fair amount of talk about hot flashes and divorce. The yoga is therapeutic and uses all sorts of props. I leave that class feeling pampered, extraordinarily young, and tremendously fit and flexible.

The other type of yoga class I go to is fast-pasted and uses no props. Most of the other students there are undergraduates. There's lots of of talk about classes, credit cards, and various outrageous things that other people have said or done. I can occasionally do a posture that many of the undergraduates can't, which produces extremely un-yoga-encouraged feelings of comparison and self-congratulation. However, they are pretty much all supernaturally beautiful (and I don't mean that snidely: these are just the facts, ma'am) so I doubt they give a shit that I can do a wheel or crow pose (sort of). I leave that class feeling well-worked out and extraordinarily old (not to mention unfortunate looking).

I occasionally go to a more advanced type of class at the same studio. These classes usually have a range of ages: from folks in their twenties to crazy-flexible sixty-year-olds. The students there are pretty serious yogis, for the most part. We attempt things, and I fall down a lot. We do various partner poses and have to get into very intimate positions with each other. Occasionally, I wonder if I have accidentally joined the marines, like when an instructor asks us to do eight wheel poses in a row. The despairing laughter and heavy breathing in the room at such moments creates a feeling of solidarity, even if most of the other folks usually have an easier time with the postures than I (yes, even the sixty-year-olds). I leave that class feeling humbled, out of shape, and extremely un-flexible.

I think all three sets of feelings are useful and good in their own way. If anything, it's a nice reminder that at any given time -- depending on who we're talking to -- we're all old, young, fit, fat, attractive, unfortunate looking, boring, daring, beginning, advanced.

Of course, you shouldn't compare yourself to other people at all, least of all in yoga. But as long as you're going to (and it's hard to leave that habit entirely behind), it's good to have a range of folks to compare yourself to. Gives you a healthy sense of perspective. If I'm feeling a little too cocky in one class, I can remember another where all the hard, golden bodies left me in their yoga-dust. If I'm feeling a little down on myself for not being able to do x or y arm balance, I can remind myself there's a class in which I feel downright advanced.

Yogurt and the Nervous Chef Bake With Leftovers

1. A Really Old Picture of Food.

A long, long time ago -- way back in January -- I visited Yogurt in New York and attended the Opera. Now it happened, as is it wont to, that Yogurt's household had some leftovers: some bananas going squishy and some cracked eggs that needed using up. Because I have Baking Pretensions, Yogurt asked my thoughts (note: this is usually a mistake, as it produces Nervousness, which makes me fuck up).

Well, the usual method of using up old bananas with banana bread was closed to us, because there was no raising agent in the household and the point of the exercise was to use only ingredients in the household. So what can you make with bananas and eggs that is not banana bread? I thought "Banana custard!" Which is nothing I've ever made--or possible eaten--before, but it seemed possible. So I googled (seriously, why does a GOOGLE site not recognize GOOGLED as a verb? Go away, red squiggly lines!) "Banana Custard" and selected the first recipe I found.

Well, we could do that!

There was no lime, so we used lemon. And for bread crumbs we used chocolate rugelach.

Distressingly, I was once again asked for my opinion (which made me nervous) about what the hell a "moderate oven" meant. I guessed 325 and was happy to see that other custard recipes backed me up.

The result wasn't that pretty: the loaf pan and chocolate bread kind of make it look like a lasagna gone wrong:

However, I thought it tasted pretty good! And I'm not even much of a custard girl! And my nervousness didn't make me entirely fuck up! So, if you've got leftover bananas and eggs and lots of chocolate rugelach and no flour or baking powder, this is a decent option.

2. The Whites of Your Eggs; Also, The Nervous Chef Fucks Up Again

Oh, yes. Yes.

I'm Not Dead, Just Resting My Eyes

Hey lookie! It's me. Among the many things that cause me on occasion to lie sleepless and twitching in my bed, trying to sleep but unable to as the many things I have left undone dance tauntingly before my eyes, there's the fact that I did an awesome residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and told them I'd do a write up of my experience on my blog, to give the Center its due kudos. And then I never did. SO I AM NOW. AFTER I SAY A FEW OTHER THINGS.

Warning: this is going to be a links-a-palooza. But which I mean: lots of links! Because it is my terrible misfortune to know lots of talented and successful people, to whom I wish to give due kudos. Also, you should know that I am not only famous but also a great listener.

MORE LINKS! The fabulous Ms. S (or, as I like to call her, "Pants, Bossy" -- not to be confused with Tina Fey's Bossypants; first name Pants, last name, Bossy) has a blog, Yogurt is Cultured! It's on my blog list, but right here I linked you to the entry where she talks about seeing an opera with me when I visited her in New York, cause we shouldn't get confused about this not being all about me.

Speaking of ME, I recently finished the second draft of my novel, so I'm now emerging from the cocoon of writing, blinking a little at the harsh sunlight of the world outside, forced to deal with all the undone tasks, neglected friends, etc. Amelia recently blogged about the empty nest syndrome of sending off her manuscript, but then her novel manuscript has been sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux because she's a motherfuckin' rockstar, while mine is still at, em, an earlier stage of the publication process. So it feels a little bit presumptious to be like, "Yeah, I totally know the feeling, right??" But I am feeling oddly empty-nesty. I miss my novel. It must be Stockholm syndrome, considering how much I moaned about it. I've come to identify with my captors! They just wanted the best for me! They loved me in their way!

I just read Zadie Smith's collection of essays, Changing My Mind, in which she has an essay called "That Crafty Feeling." (Originally published in The Believer -- I believe (pun totally not intended, but nevertheless awesome) that you can find it online.) Anyway, she says that in novel writing there are "Macro Planners" and "Micro Managers" (bold mine):

You will recognize a Macro Planner from his Post-its, from those Moleskines he insists on buying. A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure—all before he writes the title page. This structural security gives him a great deal of freedom of movement...I know Macro Planners who obsessively exchange possible endings for one another, who take characters out and put them back in...
I can’t stand to hear them speak about all this, not because I disapprove, but because other people’s methods are always so incomprehensible and horrifying. I am a Micro Manager. I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose among three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea of the ending until I get to it...Macro Planners have their houses largely built from day one, and so their obsession is internal—they’re forever moving the furniture. They’ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers build a house floor by floor, discretely and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.
Because Micro Managers have no grand plan, their novels exist only in their present moment, in a sensibility, in the novel’s tonal frequency line by line...the whole nature of the thing changes by the choice of a few words. This induces a special breed of pathology for which I have another ugly name: OPD or obsessive perspective disorder. It occurs mainly in the first 20 pages. It’s a kind of existential drama, a long answer to the short question What kind of a novel am I writing? It manifests itself in a compulsive fixation on perspective and voice...months are spent switching back and forth. Opening other people’s novels, you recognize fellow Micro Managers: that opening pile-up of too-careful, obsessively worried-over sentences, a block of stilted verbiage that only loosens and relaxes after the 20-page mark is passed. In the case of On Beauty, my OPD spun completely out of control: I reworked those first 20 pages for almost two years. To look back at all past work induces nausea, but the first 20 pages in particular bring on heart palpitations. It’s like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.

I'm a Micro Manager, and so I wrote the whole first draft from the first sentence to the last, in order. I reworked the first few chapters a ridiculous number of times (over the course of...four years?). Then I started over and rewrote it. I stalled, once again, about the third/four chapter mark, got some feedback, pseudo-started over again, and then kept writing till the last sentence.

MY POINT, and I swear that I am getting to it, is that I couldn't have done it without the residency at KHN, in a very real and very literal sense. Like I said, that first draft took about four years (and then I did a little tinkering with it before starting over). The second draft, which was longer and more structurally complex, took about nine months. Of course there are lots of reasons for that, but the residency at KHN helped in several crucial ways:

I Got a Cupcake Stand and Made Cupcakes to Put On It

That is all! Ain't it purty?

I made big cupcakes and put frosting inside them

That is all: