Grandma's* Cheesey Potatos

Ingredients

1 (2 pound) package frozen hash brown potatoes (the square ones)
1/2 cup melted butter
1 (10.75 ounce) can condensed cream of chicken soup
1 (8 ounce) container sour cream
1/2 cup chopped onions
2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
(for topping)
2 cups crushed cornflakes cereal
1/4 cup melted butter


1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F
2. In a large bowl, combine hash browns, 1/2 cup melted butter, cream of chicken soup, sour cream, chopped onion, Cheddar cheese, salt and pepper. Place mixture in a 3 quart casserole dish.
3. In a medium saucepan over medium heat, saute cornflakes in 1/4 cup melted butter, and sprinkle the mixture over the top of the casserole.
4. Bake covered in preheated oven for 40 minutes.


*These were a staple at every Christmas, Thanksgiving, and sometimes just for the artery-clogging hell of it. As was the case with many of grandmas Jeannette's recipes, I always assumed it was some long passed down family treasure, only to discover in my 20's that it came off the back of a box. Still, I stand by my attribution.

We miss you already.

I am starting a meme.

Good work, everyone. Just really, really good work.

Some sad news this weekend.

I hope Billy Collins does not take too much offense at me posting this, my favorite of his poems, in its entirety.

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

A few months ago, I became an ardent fan of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was something I'd been only peripherally aware of until the release of M. Night Shyamalan's reviled live-action adaptation. I never saw the film, but review after scathing review took time to point out how well executed the original series had been, which piqued my interest. Finding myself in need of something to obsess over after the completion of a six-season Lost binge, I spent the next several weeks streaming the entirety of the Airbender series on Netflix. For those who have not seen it, the world of Airbender is every bit as charming and funny and touching and dark and thoroughly imagined as anything J.K. Rowling has come up with. (It also, unfortunately, shares the Potter series' reliance on deus ex machina and heaps of clunky expository dialogue, but in both cases the material is intended for still-developing minds, so these may be necessary evils.)

I bring this up because, in a fit completionism, I must have added the Shyamalan adaptation to my Netflix queue, and today it arrived on my doorstep. I am used to inferior adaptations of things I love, but I have been told that the film version of The Last Airbender is so bad it might even tarnish my fond memories of the cartoon.

To view, or not to view....

I used to be friends with a personal trainer. I always thought that would be a great job; you do something you love, something physical, and you make someone’s life noticeably better. He would always say, though, that his chief frustration was his clients’ inability to match his contribution to their own wellbeing.

Any two people will inevitably find the point where their motivations diverge, especially if money is involved. The music executive will push a band for a more commercial single, the student will beg for a passing grade in the class she has never bothered to attend, the physical trainer will shout for one more push-up from the client who doesn’t see why he has to do all this work to fit back into his skinny jeans.

There’s something to be said for the force of laziness as well, although I think what we see as laziness is often the unwillingness to accept that someone else has a profoundly different set of priorities.

I’m not sure why I’m chewing all this over, other than I’m sitting in a computer lab with my class right now, watching a student at the back of the room as she shuffles through the songs on her iPod. She is failing the class. I want her to finish her paper. She wants class to be over so she can go back to her life, which is absolutely cluttered with sick babies and housing problems and other concerns that, to any impartial observer, far outweigh a properly formatted Works Cited page.

A pilfered Facebook status update, that maybe should have been a blog post to begin with:

The truth is I am only playing at being an adult. The necktie, the responsible shoes, sometimes they freak me out as I catch glimpses of them, attached to my reflection in the mirror by the door. But down in a place where mirrors can't see is a boy in Superman underoos, a red beach towel safety-pinned about his neck like a cape. Perhaps the cape is my necktie's dream-self. It, too, would prefer to be on an adventure.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the way other people think. Specifically, the idea of false consensus and what it means for a society, with a two-party political system, headed toward the end of an election season. We’ve made it quite clear to each other that we can’t all be “real Americans.” We’re either Communists or bigots. Lee Ross’s experiments in the 70’s suggested that not only do we grossly overestimate the extent to which “others” agree with us, but we tend to pathologize those who disagree with us. Add in a chalkboard and a gentle dusting of prideful xenophobia, and you’ve got Glenn Beck’s entire career.

…or at least that’s how it seems to me, as someone who disagrees with Beck and thinks there must be some explanation for his legion of followers. It’s hard to point out a real-world example of this particular cognitive bias without becoming guilty of it oneself.

And yet there are clear instances where a person’s stated beliefs are obviously (or if not obviously, at least very likely) the result of some psychological abnormality. Take Ted Haggard: a closeted homosexual (a term I use because I think “gay” suggests self-acceptance and membership in a particular subculture) who has dedicated much of his adult life to opposing gay rights. Those are not hard dots to connect. But where does that leave someone like the abominable Maggie Gallagher, who has also dedicated her life to fighting gay rights, and is straight?

Well, for the record, I think she’s a fucking sack of nuts as well. But…see paragraph 2.

I had two very different interactions with two very different students tonight. The first was with a young woman whom I had to tell several times to stop talking while a test was in progress. On the third or fourth time, I made her move to a seat in the front row.

She told me, “If you talk to me again like that, I will go off.” It wasn’t said angrily, but in a matter-of-fact tone, as if we were friends and she was advising me not to see a particularly bad movie.

The second was with a new student: young, gay, attractive, and flirty. He wanted to introduce himself, make a good impression, bat an eyelash or two.

In both cases, I was suddenly and uncomfortably aware of my position of authority. It’s a tenuous little dynamic, one that relies on the acknowledgment of both parties involved. Either situation would have been a non-event in any other context, and yet in the classroom each seemed to require some form remediation on my part, and to present an opportunity to indulge in something inappropriately satisfying. I backed off from both students, probably a mistake in the one instance but not in the other. It just seems like a road you can’t un-walk.

It’s been over a year since I last blogged. To be honest, I didn’t miss it. To borrow a phrase from Anna Wintour: It’s not art. It’s not even culture. It’s advertising. And, as instruments of compulsive solipsism go, blogs aren't even that great; Facebook status updates and Twitter have long since supplanted the blog as the electronic megaphone de rigueur.

But this doesn’t change the fact that an online presence is something of a necessity these days. It’s the business card of our increasingly branded age. It’s exhausting though, all that outrage. Someday, someone will write a script that autoblogs. A do loop statement that returns roughly 300 words of random, petty indignation and increments until x = infinity. Are you listening, Mark Zuckerberg?

And yet, for all my whinging about the tedium of self-expression, I remain profoundly grateful for the ability to communicate in the medium of written language. It’s something that hits me every time a student misses a word like “adept” on a vocabulary test. “Dissipate” is another one that seems to give them all trouble. I have no idea when I learned those particular words, but I know it was sometime before my freshman year of college, when my students come to me. It’s not too late for them to learn these things, but it’s probably too late for them to learn these things. Who failed these kids, I often wonder. Their teachers? Their parents? 50 Cent? I guess it doesn’t really matter. They’ll make it through the rest of their lives probably never using “dissipate” correctly in a sentence, and it will only occur to people on the other side of the conversation, those of us somehow lucky enough to be able to do things like read a book without effort or compose a self-absorbed blog entry, that the deficit is even there.

-JT