I don't usually post quizzes, but this one is pretty good...

Some of the characteristics listed here are spookily accurate at describing me.

Your result for Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz...

You Are an Ingrid!

You are an Ingrid -- "I am unique"

Ingrids have sensitive feelings and are warm and perceptive.

How to Get Along with Me

• * Give me plenty of compliments. They mean a lot to me.
• * Be a supportive friend or partner. Help me to learn to love and value myself.
• * Respect me for my special gifts of intuition and vision.
• * Though I don't always want to be cheered up when I'm feeling melancholy, I sometimes like to have someone lighten me up a little.
• * Don't tell me I'm too sensitive or that I'm overreacting!

What I Like About Being an Ingrid

• * my ability to find meaning in life and to experience feeling at a deep level
• * my ability to establish warm connections with people
• * admiring what is noble, truthful, and beautiful in life
• * my creativity, intuition, and sense of humor
• * being unique and being seen as unique by others
• * having aesthetic sensibilities
• * being able to easily pick up the feelings of people around me

What's Hard About Being an Ingrid

• * experiencing dark moods of emptiness and despair
• * feelings of self-hatred and shame; believing I don't deserve to be loved
• * feeling guilty when I disappoint people
• * feeling hurt or attacked when someone misundertands me
• * expecting too much from myself and life
• * fearing being abandoned
• * obsessing over resentments
• * longing for what I don't have

Ingrids as Children Often

• * have active imaginations: play creatively alone or organize playmates in original games
• * are very sensitive
• * feel that they don't fit in
• * believe they are missing something that other people have
• * attach themselves to idealized teachers, heroes, artists, etc.
• * become antiauthoritarian or rebellious when criticized or not understood
• * feel lonely or abandoned (perhaps as a result of a death or their parents' divorce)

Ingrids as Parents

• * help their children become who they really are
• * support their children's creativity and originality
• * are good at helping their children get in touch with their feelings
• * are sometimes overly critical or overly protective
• * are usually very good with children if not too self-absorbed

Are You a Jackie or a Marilyn? Or Someone Else? Mad Men-era Female Icon Quiz

Hey girl, wanna make some pizza?

Ever since I read the Orangette post where Molly spoke of her husband's obsession with pizza, I've been itching to make pizza myself. I found a recipe on Epicurious for pizza margherita, with a dough recipe from Pizzeria Bianco, which was mentioned in the Orangette post. I always pay attention to COINCIDENCES, so I knew this would be a good recipe to try for my first pizza-making venture.

I made a pizza date with Tyler so we could incorporate some time playing with his dog-sitting charge, Otto Skinner.


Stir together yeast, 1 tablespoon flour, and 1/4 cup warm water in a large bowl and let stand until surface appears creamy, about 5 minutes.

Add 1 1/4 cups flour, remaining 1/2 cup water, salt, and oil and stir until smooth.

Stir in enough flour (1/4 to 1/3 cup) for dough to begin to pull away from side of bowl. (Dough will be slightly wet.)

Pulse tomatoes with juice in a blender briefly to make a chunky purée.

Cook garlic in oil in a small heavy saucepan over medium-low heat until fragrant and pale golden, about 2 minutes. Add tomato purée, basil, sugar, and 1/8 teaspoon salt and simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, until thickened and reduced to about 3/4 cup, about 40 minutes. Season with salt and cool.

Knead on a floured surface, lightly reflouring when dough becomes too sticky, until smooth, soft, and elastic, about 8 minutes. Note: This is really fun! I couldn't take any photos of me kneading because the dough was so sticky I didn't dare touch the camera.

Form into a ball, put in a bowl, and dust with flour. Cover with plastic wrap or a kitchen towel (not terry cloth) and let rise in a draft-free place at warm room temperature until doubled, about 1 1/4 hours. Dough pre-rise.

Meanwhile, snack on Cheetos and a kalimotxo, then move the whole circus over to Otto Skinner's house.

Marvel at cuteness of Otto. Aww.

It has risen!

Do not punch down. Dust dough with flour, then transfer to a parchment-lined pizza peel or large baking sheet. Pat out dough evenly with your fingers and stretch into a 14-inch round, reflouring fingers if necessary. Thanks Tyler!

Spread sauce over dough, leaving a 1-inch border. Arrange cheese on top, leaving a 2- to 3-inch border. Again, thanks Tyler!

Play with Otto while pizza is baking. Notice that he smells kinda like tortillas. (This guy freaking loves me. He kept climbing into my lap, then wouldn't let me put him down for anything--he fought and fought and broke my necklace when I tried to put him down! I love him, though. He's adorable and sweeter than any other schnauzer I've ever met).

Slide pizza on parchment onto pizza stone. Bake until dough is crisp and browned and cheese is golden and bubbling in spots, 13 to 16 minutes. Using peel or baking sheet, transfer pizza to a cutting board. Cool 5 minutes. Sprinkle with some basil leaves before slicing.

Enjoy pizza with yummy Asian salad provided by Tyler. Continue snacking on pizza as you fart around on the internet looking at things like this, until pizza is completely gone!

Song

Check out this link to my current favorite song, Electric Feel by MGMT. For copyright reasons or whatever, embedding has been disabled on it. Silly bastards.

A Christmas greeting

I just wanted to share the hilarious card my friend Tiffani made me. I love it more than anything. I love the morose look on the owl's face; I love the way the spilled drink looks like a glass of blood; I love the fact that the owl is holding his wings down as if to say, "I didn't do that!" This is definitely going in my fuzzy red frame for year-round appreciation!

Also: Please check out Brandy's post here to see the brilliant and hilarious exchange between her son and "Santa."

:(

Jenny is having a crummy week so far and is studying to take the GRE (2nd time, for a better score) on Saturday. Watch this.

Random Bits

If someone told you that your office Christmas party would take place at the Nampa, Idaho Olive Garden, would you think it was just a bad joke? Like from one of those really lame wanna-be mockumentary sitcoms on TBS? Or a comedy sketch written by high school sophomores? Well, it's no joke; my office Christmas party is literally going to be held at the Olive Garden in Nampa, Idaho. This is so amazingly lame that I'll not comment further, except to say that I may have to get a part-time job elsewhere just so I may attend a cool Christmas party. (Though I am grateful to have a job and therefore an office Christmas party to attend.) I did an image search for "Nampa Olive Garden" and here is one photo that I found, by Shawn Records, titled Lena's House, Nampa (I can't post it here because that would be stealing). I don't know what it has to do with the Olive Garden, but it accurately sums up my attitude toward the Nampa Olive Garden. Check out the rad photography website where I found it, called Hey, Hot Shot!.

Have you ever worked with someone who was well-meaning but annoying? Today in the break room, I had a sandwich to heat up. As I went to place it in the toaster oven, a coworker who was heating something in the microwave grabbed a plate out of the cupboard and insisted, "Maybe you should put this under it!" "I don't mind if the bread gets burned," I told her, but she insisted, "I'm just worried the cheese will melt all over and make a big mess!" It's true that the sandwich contained Havarti cheese, which is the meltiest cheese on the planet (mmm, melty cheese), and it's also true that when anything falls into the toaster oven and burns it smells up our entire building. So maybe I was being a bit cavalier about my sandwich-heating, but I am an adult, goshdarnit. My coworker expressed her intention to place a sign in the break room reading "Your mother does not work here." I found this a bit ironic.

I found a cool website called The Daily Aphorism, which publishes a bold-font aphorism each day. You can print them off or subscribe to have an aphorism emailed to you daily. Today's aphorism is "the mundane is to be cherished," a quote by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer. This is a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with, which is why I printed it off and used it as the decoration for my decorate-your-own coffee mug. I purchased this mug about 6 months ago but couldn't find anything I really wanted to display on it until now.

Speaking of coffee, I've gone without coffee for the past several days and I find I am much less cranky and irritable. I usually drink coffee from the time I wake up until my lunch break at 12:30, but I've discovered that coffee really amps up my anxious, aggressive, and grumpy tendencies. It also seems to rev up my appetite, and some days by midmorning my stomach growls and churns like it's trying to digest my internal organs. I've backed off from coffee, at least for now, but I still drink caffeinated tea and soda, (tea is what I'm drinking out of that mug) . Cutting out coffee definitely takes the edge off, since, as some of you know, I can be a bit irascible at times. ;)

My new favorite blog

Is this Finnish girl's fashion blog, cleverly titled Only Shallow. She's the cutest girl ever, with a close resemblance to Maggie Gyllenhaal, and she writes in English. She has links to oodles and oodles of other blogs about street style and vintage fashion. This supports my belief that Scandinavians are the most stylish people on earth; they're experts at rocking cool tights.

It makes for a great distraction from the depressing economic news found everywhere else on the internet.

"Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About"

I have just discovered the most hilarious website of all time. A British journalist has a website called Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About. It is brilliant, witty, and long. I have been reading it for about 3 hours--it's been an ongoing project for this guy for many years, and he is representative of how British writers are just born funnier than Americans. Americans, (and apparently Germans like this guy's girlfriend), just so often can't seem to handle irony or satire or sarcasm or sardonic wit. They just get offended by it, per my usual experience. Look at the sentence I just read 45 times because it is simply RAD: "I'm surely not going to be able to pick out anything - my searching fingers are now too callused, from running them along Margret's reasoning in an attempt to identify the scar where it's been imperfectly welded to reality."
Oh my God! If I had the knack for metaphor/hyperbole/whatever that this guy does, I'd, I'd....I don't know what I'd do, but every time a thought passed through my brain I'd laugh and clap my hands with glee, no matter where I was or how insane people thought I was. I'd eventually end up in an asylum, drugged and muttering to myself, but, hey, isn't that where old age leads most people anyway?