by : Sharon Albert In-class writings

Me as a Writer

[Please note, I am posting here the last third of some free writing we did in class, relatively unrevised but somewhat abridged!]

I do love writing, and in fact I love language. I love words. I love the grammatical structures that hold words and ideas together and make them communicable. I love grammatical puns and missteps. I love beautiful prose. I’m less excited by what is more mundane. … And I want to be a beautiful writer. And a meaningful writer.

I think about the conversation today in class, and about art and perspective and the limits of language. I a realize why so often I feel utterly stymied by all of this. Because at the end of the day my writing, beautiful or mundane, never quite says exactly what I want it to say? Because there is less of me? more of me? than what is on the page? Because as soon as I say it it is somehow not quite right? Not quite what I wanted to say? Or maybe it was when I wrote it, but language and ideas and what I want to say are all too fluid.

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by : Sharon Albert Reflections and other informal writings

Healthy Eating at the Fair

I’ve gone to the Great Allentown Fair with my family every year since we moved to Allentown in 2002. We generally try to go on opening day–in part, to see if we’ve won any prizes for our entries–and then at least once more.

2nd Place!

The Fair is an amazing entryway into the diversity, glory, and weirdness of humanity; and it is also smelly and dirty, and way to crowded for the introvert in me. I love the Fair and hate it, and nothing better represents this ambivalence than the Fair food.

I am not ambivalent about the smells and the grease. Although it is an inherent part of the Fair, I hate it. I’m not even tempted by deep-fried oreos or Krispy Kreme donut burgers. (Full disclosure: I’m vegetarian.) My two indulgences every year are a bright red, rock hard candy apple and a greasy, powdery funnel cake.

This year, though, I was delighted–amazed?, amused?–immediately upon entering the Fair to see, of all things, a stand giving away cottage cheese!

Hood’s cottage cheese. A world of flavors, some savory like cucumber-dill, some sweet like peach or pineapple, and the one I ultimately chose: just plain cottage cheese!

I wasn’t particularly hungry when I arrived at the Fair, but I do like cottage cheese, and it seemed like it might be a good foundation for the grease and sugar that lay ahead, and anyway I like cottage cheese.

It was pretty good: small, even curds; just moist enough without being messy; a little salty, a little yeasty. Most of all, amidst a long midway full of food that was deep-fried and/or sugar-coated and/or so synthetic that I wouldn’t even want to begin to think about what actually went into it, eating cottage cheese at the Fair seemed delightfully, hysterically, appropriately inappropriate!

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