i feel this person on a spiritual level
Being pride month I wanted to dig a little deeper into what it was like growing up Asexual, too many people gatekeep and suggest that an absence of something doesn’t qualify as queer. I was definitely treated as abnormal or broken by well meaning friends & strangers alike.
A few years ago, when I was living in the housing co-op and looking for a quick cookie recipe, I came across a blog post for something called “Norwegian Christmas butter squares.” I’d never found anything like it before: it created rich, buttery and chewy cookies, like a vastly superior version of the holiday sugar cookies I’d eaten growing up. About a year ago I went looking for the recipe again, and failed to find it. The blog had been taken down, and it sent me into momentary panic.
Luckily, I remembered enough to find it on the Wayback Machine, and quickly copied it into a file that I’ve saved ever since. I probably make these cookies about once a month, and they last about five days around my voracious husband - they’re fantastic with a cup of bitter coffee or tea. I’m skeptical that there is something distinctively Norwegian about these cookies, but they do seem like the perfect thing to eat on a cold day.
Norwegian Christmas Butter Squares
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 egg
1 cup sugar
2 cups flour
1 tsp vanilla
½ tsp salt
Turbinado/ Raw Sugar for dustingPreheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chill a 9x13″ baking pan in the freezer. Do not grease the pan.
Using a mixer, blend the butter, egg, sugar, and salt together until it is creamy. Add the flour and vanilla and mix using your hands until the mixture holds together in large clumps. If it seems overly soft, add a little extra flour.
Using your hands, press the dough out onto the chilled and ungreased baking sheet until it is even and ¼ inch thick. Dust the top of the cookies evenly with raw sugar.
Bake at 400 degrees until the edges turn a golden brown, about 12-15 minutes. Remove from the oven. Let cool for about five minutes before cutting the cooked dough into squares. Remove the squares from the warm pan using a spatula.
So I tried this recipe.
And it is GREAT.
It basically makes the platonic ideal of commercial sugar cookies, only in bar form. When I give them to people (which I do a lot, because this is one of those simple recipes where the results seem very impressive), I just tell them they’re sugar cookie bars.
Edit: Oh, right, and I just use normal white sugar to dust. As much as the dough can hold is best, which is why I always end up shaking the pan around like I’m panning for gold.
I tried these when I saw this post last. They’re REALLY good. :)
La lotería.
Art by @malditoperrito.
Perrito is such a great Mexican artist, please follow him on Twitter.
whew chillay
[Transcript:
So that is a video of a woman like, literally piece-by-piece, word-for-word-ing, what her husband's trip to the grocery store for their household is going to be. And I saw another creator stitch this video talking about - I mean they had a really dope word for it and I can't remember it right now, but it's about performed incompetence, and how actually what this husband is doing is exaggerating their own incompetence and exaggerating their own incapability to force the labor that they don't want to do - this husband - onto their partner, right? That their wife will hopefully be like, "Oh my gosh it's just easier for me to do it myself, so I'm gonna do it myself. You're good."
And now they're absolved of the need to contribute to the household. So actually, that performance of incompetence is an investment that that husband is making for his future self. You feel me? It is like a patriarchal investment. And it's two-pronged, right? So you don't have to - One, you don't have to do the thing that you don't want to do, which is go to the grocery store, but two, you've set the expectations for your own capability so low that whatever you end up doing is incredible.
So, now I'm going to do my favorite thing which is to make it about race, and I'm actually going to say that in a parallel sense, like that is a patriarchal investment that the husband is making into his future self, but I think that actually, in the same way, mediocrity is a gift that whiteness gives to its own future. You know what I'm saying? That whiteness performing mediocrity sets the bar so low that the generations that will eventually inherit the legacies of whiteness can do anything and feel entitled to like, riches and fortune, right? And we also accept that performance of incompetence, and that performance of mediocrity, and then accept the bare minimum from whatever white person, or whatever beneficiary of whiteness comes along and does just more than we would expect from them.
And I think the - because of anti-blackness, it's the opposite for black people, right? Like, to escape the violence of whiteness you have to perform such excellence, and inherently the bar is constantly getting higher and higher, until you have all these superhuman black people who are just getting by.
Anyway, I've gotta brush my teeth. Bye!]
👏 let 👏 people 👏 get 👏 sloppy 👏 on 👏 company 👏 time 👏
interesting how they didn’t share this instead where study show that productivity has actually increased, almost as if people tend to do their jobs more efficiently when they’re not miserable
And both can be true simultaneously…. My BiL was just telling me that he’s so far ahead on his quotas (and his whole unit is) that their manager keeps telling them to slow down a little so he spends like 3 hrs a day on video games and is still ahead.
The ways we could restructure our economy if we were willing to admit that working people to the bone is NOT the most efficient way to do things and isn’t good for people OR companies…
40 hour weeks are antiquated and abusive relics that no longer need to exist.
Meanwhile, Iceland dropped back to a 36-hour work week (people could leave a bit early each day or take a half day on Friday, I believe), and apparently Spain just dropped back to 4-day work weeks. Can we get some of that in the US please? We need to finally be able to live a life, not be held to the same schedules from like 70 years ago.
Imagine how much more chill everyone would be if 3-day weekends were the new standard?
Semi-related note, but this attitude towards time and work, about how we don’t deserve and shouldn’t expect flexibility or choice, gets pushed on us from a young age.
Reading this post reminded me of school. Particularly elementary school, and how the rigid inflexibility, this refusal to allow kids to move at their own pace, actively gets in the way of progress.
I remember being a kid, stuck in class after completing a lesson ahead of time, bored to tears, willing to learn more but not allowed to move ahead. I could be days or weeks ahead in some subjects, but still I was discouraged from reading ahead or completing assignments in advance.
Simultaneously, there were some subjects I struggled with, lessons I needed extra time to complete. When that happened, I was never allowed to use the time I had saved in other subjects to catch up.
And this happens to so many students--being penalized for not being fast or slow enough, for not moving at exactly the “right” arbitrary pace, when actually they are able achieve so much more in the same amount of time if only they were allowed to use that time in a way that suited their needs.
And this institutional attitude never really improves when you move from education to employment.
Capitalism isn’t about maximizing productivity, it’s about establishing control over the individual, and maintaining that control with an iron grip, at the cost of efficiency, at the cost of meaning, at the cost of joy. And it serves no one.
