Serenity & Spice

Last week, I may have come off as a bit negative. Recently, I’ve realized that most of the writing I have done in the past year, if not for this blog or the time I participated in NaNoWriMo , has been for therapeutic purposes. Although it has helped me emotionally, it has not helped creatively. For this post, I will focus on something more positive. You can’t be sad with ice cream. My initial plan was to build a sundae that would completely represent everything I loved about myself when I was a kid. I was creative, silly, energetic, brave, and I tried to be kind. Who we were as children is probably the purest version of ourselves. That was before the stress and trauma of everyday life alters our personality. Seven-year-old me would not have been afraid to go after what she wanted. She was awesome! Do you think it's possible for a person to re-raise themself? I don’t own an ice cream maker, and given the limited space I have available in my kitchen, I don’t see the point in getting ...

 “A woman happy in love, she burns the soufflé. A woman unhappy in love, she forgets to turn on the oven.” - Sabrina (1954) Sabrina is probably one of my favorite movies. It stars Audrey Hepburn at the beginning of her career after winning the Oscar for Roman Holiday . It was also the first film she worked with Hubert de Givenchy for her costumes. It was a partnership that lasted decades.  This film is the other reference I think of when I think of soufflés. As a lovesick teenager, I loved this movie. I always dreamed of going off to Paris and coming back as a better, more cultured version of myself. However, I didn’t go to Paris; I went to Iraq. It proved to be a far dirtier personal transformation.   Hepburn plays the titular character as the daughter of the chauffeur to a wealthy family on Long Island. Her whole life, she had been in unrequited love with the younger son of the family, David, played by William Holden. To help her move on, she gets sent off to cul...