rue-madame's Diaryland
Diary
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Having your cake and eating it too
If I were in Paris this week, I�d go see The Mountain Goats on Friday. Instead I�m still here, and this is what�s been happening: I spent Monday morning baking two layers of white cake. Don�t know if any of you out there have baked white cake before, but the deal is that it�s white because of egg whites. The whites must be beaten to stiff peaks then folded into the batter. I�ve made yellow and chocolate and mocha cakes before and I admit that I was not feeling so confident when the white layers cooled to 2/3 their original height. About an hour later, I had a Type A psychotic break where I realized that even with frosting, the cake would not be birthday high enough, and since it was supposed to be a birthday cake for my bestest friend Harriet, I decided to bake two more layers. I ended up making a 3-layer white cake with chocolate frosting. The fourth layer is in my kitchen, covered in some makeshift chocolate ganache because I ran out of all the main frosting ingredients. The cake is pretty good, I admit. It looked lovely on the table at her house, all homemade and statuesque behind the other dishes and candles and flowers. The birthday party was very fun. I think Harriet may be one of the only people on the planet who can throw a party on a Monday night that goes until midnight, and have everyone rsvp with wine, salads, bruschetta (or is it bruschette?), mac n cheese of every variety, creamed spinach and biscuits. So that was Monday. Tuesday was a little more eventful. I spent the morning putting together some pdf samples. I saw an ad someplace for freelance/contract book designers and editors, and I decided to get cracking. I had all sorts of image degradation from Quark to Acrobat, so I had to go from Quark to Illustrator to Acrobat and that extra step took forever. Part of it is that my file management leaves a lot to be desired and I kept losing track of the adjusted documents. Boring technical stuff. Anyway, I somehow managed to assemble some samples, and send them off. This was somewhere in the neighborhood of 11:30 am. I spent the rest of the afternoon helping Terence with his application packets and emails. He sent off 5 things yesterday. At 4 pm, the phone rang and it was for me. It was the person to whom I�d sent my samples. They want to see me tomorrow and check out my portfolio. Terence pretended to be annoyed. �You send off one thing, and you get a call! I sent off ten in the last week and haven�t heard a peep!� The truth is that Los Angeles is not a publishing center; New York and San Francisco are. So in this town, with my experience, I�m sort of a big fish in a little pond. And since I can�t stand rejection, I�m selective about where I send samples. No use barking up the wrong tree and wasting a bunch of precious time, time that could be better spent reading, doing yoga or being a mouse potato, right? Last night, we went over to Harriet�s to eat her leftovers and watch tv (Buffy and 24 to be exact.)I read a little bit before falling asleep (The Secret History.) �Livin� la vida loca! My job today is to open up my portfolio and see what needs changing. I will also volunteer my services to Terence, who always needs help with writing and navigating online forms. We�ve both decided to try one last time to push hard for jobs (or job prospects) in Los Angeles. If nothing materializes in the next few weeks, then we will pack up our stuff and move to San Francisco.
9:23 a.m. - 2003-02-05
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