I don’t think I ever really got the hang of homework. Up to a certain point, I just didn’t feel like bothering with it and didn’t understand why I should. After that point, it was something to do and get out of the way, a way to show the teacher I was following what was going on in class. I cannot recall ever really looking at it as a way to practice the skills I was being taught. (Which is not to say that I didn’t need it in that sense, just that it didn’t register in my mental lexicon that way.) I also didn’t take any more of it home than I had to. I did math homework during science class, science homework during English, English homework at lunch, and so forth. It was a nuisance.

It took me a couple of therapy sessions for this to click. I do not deny that the terminology is appropriate. The things my therapist asks me to work on between sessions are meant to practice and develop the skills and strategies we talk about, and to help me get practical experience with using them. That is absolutely what homework is meant to do. It totally works. The problem is that homework doesn’t work for me personally very well.

Which does not mean that these assignments can’t be helpful. “Homework” turns it into something I instinctively just want to get out of the way? Then reframe. What does motivate me to practice and apply problem-solving skills? What feels, to me, like a real-world practical exercise of development rather than a boring chore to do and have done with?

Programming.

I’m not “doing homework”. I’m debugging my thought processes.

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Apologies to anyone seeing this more than once. Google Reader seems not to be picking it up, even though it’s in the RSS feed. So I’m trying deleting it and posting anew. –SDJ

It is sometimes hard for me to take myself seriously these days. Not in that good “oh, I can laugh at myself” kind of way, but in the sense that I find it difficult to come to grips with what is going on in my own mind. Which is half the problem, when you get right down to it. There’s no blood test, no brain scan, no lab culture, that will definitively tell me I am really, truly, still in the midst of a depressive episode. It’s literally all in my head. I don’t mean to say that it’s imaginary, but the only measure of it is subjective and internal and self-reported. I’m not sure how far to trust that.

That’s not so much a problem when the symptoms involve really dramatic weepy episodes, or even obviously distorted thought patterns. I can look at that and say, “Yes, I am still having this problem.” Depression is more than sadness or poor self-image, though. It also involves a lack of energy, a lack of motivation, a lack of focus, a leaden weighed-down feeling. Not having enough spoons, as it were. When you decouple that part from the rest of it, it’s more difficult to evaluate internally. And for the past few months, that’s exactly what’s been going on with me. I don’t have near the problem with weepiness that I used to, and I’m quickly learning how to identify and counter what my therapist calls “cognitive errors”. (A lot of that involves sort of an overbearing, involuntary pessimism in my interpretation of what others do and say, excessive pressure on and criticism of myself, stuff like that.) What’s hanging around, mostly, is this intermittent feeling that life is taking more out of me than it should and I just can’t keep up as well as I want to. Or as well as I feel I should be able to.

Why is that more difficult to evaluate? Doesn’t it seem like this stuff would be obvious too? That I am at times exhausted is obvious, yes, but what tends to be less clear is the cause. It’s so easy to fall into thinking that I should have gotten more sleep, should have eaten healthier, should have been more active through the day. That I’m just lazy. That I’m using the depression as an excuse to not do things I don’t feel like doing. I have, after all, no proof that depression is behind this. I just feel tired. I don’t even feel tired all the time; it comes and goes, and as such it can be tempting to think that I must have done something to make myself feel this way.

(I should pause here to mention that yes, I know that if I’m often feeling overtired it’s also possible there’s something physical besides depression going on, or that a different medication might be more helpful, or etc. I have a follow-up with my GP next week, and I’ll be discussing this with her.)

The other part of the problem is figuring out what to do about it. This sort of fatigue is counterintuitive in that the things you’d expect to help often don’t. They might give a temporary boost, but it’s only very temporary and then I’m back where I started. Sometimes they at least break the loop and keep it from getting worse, but then again sometimes they go the opposite direction and I wind up even more drained. A quick restorative nap turns into a 1- or 2-hour sleep that leaves me groggy. Caffeine just makes me feel like my eyelids are propped open with toothpicks. Getting up and moving around to get the blood flowing, taking a leisurely walk, going out and doing something relaxing, taking a hot shower (I prefer showers to baths), even just sitting at home and reading or knitting — all of these things consume spoons, consume energy, in varying amounts. Which only exacerbates the issue. At my lowest points, sometimes it feels like the only alternative open to me is to sit and stare off into space, but of course that’s not really going to help anything either.

To myself, I don’t look “sick”. I don’t even look like someone invisibly ill; after all, to best of my knowledge I don’t have Lupus or RA or Fibromyalgia or any number of other things that are not very visible externally but painful and tiring internally. I just can’t seem to get it together. To myself I look inattentive and idle, I look self-indulgent, I look easily distracted and flighty. How dare I use this serious condition for my own drama? How can I justify the lack of effort I put forth sometimes, the sheer volume of bitching and whining I do about things that are equally bad or much worse for other people, the absentmindedness? How dare I even co-opt terminology like “invisible illness” or “spoon shortage” when depression is the whole problem rather than one symptom among many and I don’t even experience that one symptom as severely as a lot of people do?

Sometimes, that train of thought throws up a red flag and that gives me the foothold I need to calm the fuck down and get back on track. When I look at it all written down like that and I’m feeling relatively levelheaded much of it does rather seem to fall under the “obviously distorted thought patterns” heading. I mean, it’s a whole paragraph of cognitive errors. That other people have it worse does not invalidate my own problems; spoon theory is a really useful limited-energy metaphor even for those who are lucky enough to not usually have to worry about it; depression is real and does have a real effect on how much I can do in a given day. Etc. But those doubts are always there in the back of my mind, and it is not always possible for me to distinguish between reasonable, responsible, honest self-questioning and distortion.

Why am I rambling about this? I don’t know. Part of me wants to sort of defend myself, I guess, because if I perceive myself this way what must others think? I want to try to explain why it’s not entirely some inherent indolence or irresponsibility motivating my conduct. Part of me knows that there are people in my life who legitimately and genuinely do want to understand what’s going on with me and hopes that babbling about it here will help with that. I frankly suck at talking about this in person, because I feel so silly going on about being tired and sad for no apparent reason, but it’s easier to organize my thoughts here. Sometimes. To some extent I’m also just kind of talking it out, in hopes that even if it doesn’t help me find any answers, at least I will have this record to refer back to when the going gets rough and remind myself that I am probably not thinking clearly about what I’m feeling and how I’m perceiving myself.

I didn’t intend for this space to become a depression blog. It may lean in that direction for a while, though, while I work through this.

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Okay, look. You would not expect me to leave my husband because we disagreed on a parenting decision. You would not expect me to junk a car with a flat tire, or move out of my house because the furnace didn’t work anymore. You would not expect me to sever ties with my parents because they didn’t have enough money to indulge my every whim when I was growing up. You would not expect me to put my daughter up for adoption because she’s going through a willful phase. Right?

So why in the name of everything holy would you tell me that if I don’t like the way my country works, I should just leave?

Patriotism is not some all-or-nothing, love-it-or-leave-it proposition. It’s a long-term relationship. Just like any long-term relationship, there are things that can fracture it; I do not mean to claim otherwise. But also just like any long-term relationship, you do have to expect that there will be differences of opinion and policy, and there will be things that maybe don’t always work the right way. When those things come up, it is only to be expected that some people under some circumstances will decide that the situation has reached the breaking point and that they need to go, and that’s fine. (As an aside, though, having reached that conclusion does not necessarily imply the ability to actually leave the bad situation, for a lot of reasons, and that’s worth remembering.) Other people will decide to stick with it and try to fix what’s wrong, and that’s fine too. Still others will decide that retaining the relationship as a whole is worth just living with the problem. That’s their decision, and it doesn’t remove their right to think the problem sucks even as they resign themselves to it.

I know, I know — bitching about it to your friends isn’t exactly trying to make things better. Maybe that’s not the point. I’m sure we’ve all had an analogous issue with some other relationship at some point. Fixing the problem is beyond our means in one way or another, or is just annoying enough to complain about but not enough trouble to put a lot of effort into correction, or isn’t something we even realize can be fixed, or whatever. It happens. It happens with government too, not just with family or houses or cars. Sure, if we feel it’s a serious problem and there is some way in which we can help remedy it we should do so. On the other hand, if we don’t know where to start or have decided that we can live with it, that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about the situation.

That doesn’t even begin to cover the other flaws in the “love it or leave” argument. For one, it’s just plain ineffective; all it does is put people on the defensive. It’s not conducive to real discussion and resolution of anything. It’s not helping solve the problem any more than the complaints it’s directed at are. For another… The other way this country works, allegedly, is that everyone gets a voice. By the people, for the people. Not all of the people agree with each other about the way this country should operate all of the time; that emphatically does not mean that those struggling to be heard get kicked out by those louder, more aggressive, and more able to pursue an opposing agenda. The “love it or leave it” argument becomes hypocritical in the face of this aspect of our society, because it can so easily be turned around. This country is not run according to your personal standards. If you don’t like that, by your own logic… Well.

To me, though, those are really secondary flaws. The thing that always strikes me first when I hear this argument made is that it fundamentally flies in the face of the way I think about what it means to be a citizen of this country, what I expect of myself and of others and of my government. I do not understand or agree with it on a very basic level. I try to understand the other side of any given argument when possible, but there are some things that I just cannot wrap my head around no matter how hard I try. This is one of those things.

But of course what’s really beautiful about this place is that I can say this and you can make your love-or-leave arguments until we’re both blue in the face, and both of us can still be here. As frustrating as it can be to hear disagreement that makes no sense to me, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Freedom (of speech and otherwise) and its repercussions are, however, perhaps another blog entry.

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I don’t imagine most people reading this actually need to hear it, but a couple of hints and questions have made me feel like it should be said to those who do. So I beg the indulgence of those who don’t.

You. Yes, you, reading this.

It’s not your fault.

It’s not your fault I’m depressed, and when I have a bad-symptom day, that’s not your fault either.

This is a thing that has gone wrong. It is a thing that it happening. It’s so tempting to try to figure out who started it, who caused it, who’s to blame. I know this. Problem is, there’s no answer to that question. It is a thing that is happening. It is a thing to deal with. That is all.

If at any given time I have obviously been crying, if my energy is low, if I seem withdrawn, if I overreact — that’s not your fault either. Not even if I appear to be responding directly to something you have said or done. The medication I’m on works pretty well, but it’s not a magic pill. I will still have bad days. I will still have triggers. You cannot control this and you cannot reasonably expect to avoid (or protect me from) everything that might push my buttons. And on a particularly vulnerable day, something somewhere is going to set me off — if it hadn’t been what you said, it would have been something else.

Support in various forms is much appreciated, and very important, but ultimately? There is only one person who needs to take responsibility for this, and that’s me. Even then, it’s not the responsibility of having caused it, but rather the responsibility of dealing with it. I’m doing that. I’m taking meds to balance out the chemical end of things, and I’m going into therapy to start work on identifying those triggers and how to deal with them in healthier ways when I inevitably encounter them.

You did not make me depressed, and you did not make me cry. I know that, and you need to too.

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So. It’s been a while, I guess.

I’ve switched meds once and upped my dosage once since the initial depression diagnosis. I’ve had an initial evaluation with a therapist, who confirms that I have been experiencing a major depressive episode. She says it sounds like I’m starting to come out of it, and that our goal will be not just to deal with that but also to give me the tools I need to avoid a future recurrence. (Said recurrence is apparently pretty likely once you’ve had the first episode, and even moreso after the second.)

The meds, and perhaps time, have dealt with the worst of the weepiness and anxiety. All the same, days like today don’t feel much like I’m pulling out of it. I feel so, so tired, so nervous, so braindead. I want to curl up in a corner somewhere until the day is over and the mood has passed. I’m so high-strung; how ridiculous is that?

And I feel so guilty. Because what the hell have I got to be depressed about. Other people, not even other random theoretical faceless people I’ve never met but people very close to me, have problems too. Some of them are equal to or worse than my own, objectively, but these people continue without complaint. Who am I to bitch about stress and being tired and sad? What the hell is wrong with me?

Except I know the answer to that one, don’t I?

In some ways the meds working so well make it worse. Because now I can talk to people more-or-less calmly about it most days, which is a good thing, but on my bad days it makes me worry that I’m whining overmuch because… Well, look at me. I’m calm. I’m happy. Nothing wrong, right? I worry that because I don’t show symptoms when discussing it I’ll come off as all fake and attention-whorey. Especially since my symptoms never did really hit the rock-bottom that some depression does. If I can’t believe anyone else will take me seriously, it’s by extension hard to take myself seriously. (Not in a good way, I mean.)

Which leads me to the other thing: I second-guess myself a lot. If I have stopped visiting a certain forum I used to frequent, if I have mostly stopped doing certain things I used to really enjoy like reading and writing and photography, if I have broken a lot of physically healthy habits that used to be important to me and if I am having trouble getting back into all of that… Am I using the depression as an excuse? If I’m tired, is it really the depression, or is that a handy scapegoat? If I have trouble focusing some days or am really moody on others, if I can’t seem to eat or can’t seem to stop eating, can I truly blame that on the depression, or am I not getting enough sleep? Not exercising enough self-restraint? Not paying close enough attention to my diet? Or just plain being lazy?

I’ve secretly always suspected that I’m just lazy. On my bad days, I see it reflected back at me in every face I look into, even as I recognize that I’m probably reading too much into what they aren’t saying. I know I’m overreacting, but I can’t seem to stop, and I don’t know why. (Everyone repeat the refrain with me: “Because you’re depressed!”) I feel like I should be able to just pick myself up, dust myself off, and move on with life. I feel like I’m being super-melodramatic, like I have no right to feel this way. But, again, we’re back to: I can’t seem to stop.

Which is why I’m seeking treatment, yes?

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On my drive home, I regularly pass a billboard paid for by the Ad Council. It’s part of their Discover the Forest campaign, aimed at encouraging people to get off the couch, get some fresh air and sunlight, remember the value of natural spaces. The Ad Council has done a lot of good work, and I’m not knocking either them or this campaign in general terms, but… This particular ad really annoys me.

The left half shows a pair of hands holding a smartphone, apparently playing a game involving a frog and some flies. One finger is poised to touch the (rather simplistic) frog graphic. The right half depicts a pair of hands in similar position, but against a background of foliage, and with a live frog instead of a frog game on a smartphone. The finger here is poised to touch the frog’s upraised head. Beneath these images, large text urges the viewer to “Unplug”.

What bothers me about this is the way it makes the whole question into a binary choice. Either use your smartphone or connect with nature. You can’t do both. They’re mutually exclusive. Technology and nature can never coexist, cannot have any kind of relationship with each other that is mutually beneficial. Technology is distancing us from the world around us.

If technology is distancing you from the world around you, frankly, you’re doing it wrong. The answer, by and large, is not to step away from the technology. As with anything, obviously if it’s a huge problem maybe going cold-turkey on TV and smartphones and so forth is just what you’ve got to do. There will be extreme cases, and sometimes they call for extreme action. Often, however, answer is to reassess how you’re using it rather than to chuck it out.

Which is to say: Don’t stop playing the frog game, and don’t make your kids stop playing it. It’s good for developing hand-eye coordination, and maybe things like reflexes or pattern matching or math too depending on how exactly the game is set up, not to mention being accessible in those unavoidable situations where Real Live Nature is not. (Ever try to introduce your preschooler to a frog in the waiting room at the doctor’s office?) That it doesn’t directly involve interaction with live frogs doesn’t make it worthless.

Instead, find ways to use the smartphone to enhance the experience of encountering the live frog. Take pictures or video and share them with friends, thus encouraging more people to come discover nature with you. Use a voice memo or notepad app to record your observations. Look up frogs on the web to try to identify the particular species you’ve found and learn about its habits, diet, biology, etc. Check the weather to see when there will be another nice day on which you can come visit your new amphibian friend, and then add it to your calendar. Set a reminder to write a blog entry later sharing your experience with your readers (see also images, above). There are countless ways in which a smartphone can be utilized in this situation without serving as some sort of pale substitute for reaching out and touching nature.

I do understand the point of the campaign, and as I said, I can’t disagree with the basic principle. Could a lot of us use more interaction with and appreciation of “natural” spaces? Do many of us who are fortunate enough to be able to afford such things as smartphones spend maybe a bit too much time glued to screens big and small? Sure! But technology is a part of our world too. It is not going to go away, and its role in our lives is not going to diminish. If you want to encourage people to get up and get out, I don’t think it’s productive or realistic to tell them to ditch their tech. Instead, I believe the approach should be educating people about how they can better use the tools at their disposal — how to bring the world around them closer when it would be so easy to put up barriers against it.

…Of course, I’ll grant that conveying that effectively via billboard might be a little difficult. But still.

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…Okay, I cheated. Normally, I’d post the recipe here. I’ve decided upon a use for my Tumblr, though; I’m going to use it to focus on recipes, crafty stuff, and generally all things domestic. So foody stuff is going over there now.

Link: Here!

If you’d rather read via RSS, that link is here.

Oh, and speaking of crafty domestic stuff, after getting lots of knitting-related goodies for my birthday and beginning to realize that I really do like this knitting thing quite a bit (even if I’m not very good at it), I finally decided to join up at Ravelry.com. Profile here.

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This was written for the following Not So Novel prompt:
The Object

It was Natalie’s third Christmas — that is, she was two years old — when she was given her first Barbie doll.

Barbie was a gift from a member of the extended family with whom we would not meet until well after Christmas was over; the package had been passed along to us, and we let Natalie open it at home on Christmas morning. When she tore a corner of the paper open and revealed the bright bubblegum-pink box, I knew what it must be even before I could see the logo. Immediately I felt my heart sink.

The thing is, Barbie is a complicated issue for parents of little girls. She is a prominent symbol of the ongoing struggle over cultural indoctrination as relates to body image issues and a woman’s place in society. Barbie, with her completely unrealistic figure and her propensity for dressing up as a princess or a shopaholic or a supermodel, with her feet incapable of wearing anything but high heels, allegedly sends a very strong and specific message to children at a very early age about gender roles and the ideal of femininity. We had not yet discussed what we thought of this and whether we wanted Natalie exposed to that or not. The very appearance of a Barbie doll in our house threw me into a whirlwind of confusion and second-guessing about how I should parent my daughter. I wasn’t ready for this decision! I was supposed to be worrying about what to feed her and when she should be potty trained, not what message her toys were sending her!

But we wound up letting her play with it, and gradually I began to realize a couple of things.

One is that efforts to shield Natalie from Barbie — or any other such things — are utterly futile. Guess what? She doesn’t exist in a vacuum! She goes to daycare, and amazingly enough, daycare has a sizable collection of… yeah, Barbies. Even if she didn’t have that available, she interacts with other kids. She comes shopping with us, and while that doesn’t entail a lot of Barbie exposure specifically, it does mean she sees things like the Victoria’s Secret window displays at the mall. She sees and hears lots of things, and soaks them all up in the way that only a preschooler can. Here’s the cold, hard truth: We cannot wrap her in bubble wrap and insulate her from every potentially negative influence in the world around her. And even if we could, I’m not convinced that would be a good idea. How do you build up an immunity to something? How do you learn to deal with a situation? Not by avoiding it.

The other is that however pervasive Barbie or any other controversial influence is in my daughter’s life, there is another side to this story. And that’s… well, us. She plays with Barbie for a while, puts her away, and comes back days or weeks later. I’m here all the time, telling her that she’s my beautiful girl, encouraging her to develop healthy habits without emphasizing weight or shape, praising her progress in learning and her intelligence. She has no shortage of good role models in her life, both male and female. She soaks these things up, too; she may appear inattentive at times, but will pop up with an unexpected correction or bit of information at the strangest times. Am I to believe that a doll, however entrenched in popular culture, is going to undermine everything she has been taught by the real, living people who are closest to her and to whom she is most attached?

Maybe. It’s worth keeping an eye on. But the solution would seem to be counterinformation rather than total isolation. And that’s why I didn’t flinch, or wince, or hesitate much when the question of her recieving another Barbie was floated this past Christmas season. It will be fine. She will be fine. We will undoubtedly completely screw her up in some way (I think it’s in the job description), but this won’t be it.

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This was written for the following Not So Novel prompt:
Borrowed Words.
The nearest thing with words on is a notepad covered in ultimately useless notes from a few months back on a work side project. The word, chosen by randomly setting my finger down on the page, is…
…”filtering”. This connection may be a little tenuous; bear with me, please.

So we’ve been doing this Not So Novel thing for a little more than two months now. How’s it going?

There is a part of me that looks back and cringes. I have posted things that were perhaps ill-advised, experiments that did not turn out to my satisfaction, like the Twitter-fiction and the haiku catch-up. I have, by contrast, not posted things because I get to the end of writing them and realize that they’re horrible or that they’re just retreads of what I’ve already done. There’s a whole draft I could have posted in response to The Object, but I wrote it about the same time as the Wet and realized as I was typing up the latter that I was using a lot of the same language and themes and had managed to get repetitive despite somewhat different subject matter. “Wet” turned out the better of the two, so it won. I have also wished several times that I could go back and un-suggest some of the prompts that originated with me. Things like Painting really seemed like a good idea at the time, but when I actually had to write about them… Not so much.

On the other hand, I’ve also produced some stuff I rather like. Some of it I was pretty happy with right off, and proud to post — Fly, for example, or Sounds Like Rain. Some of it I had to take some time to warm up to, most notably The Trailer of the Movie of the Book I’m Not Writing Just Now. (I also feel like that one actually advanced my Nia project a step or two, if nothing else because it forced me to name and describe Caitlyn, which helps bring her into focus in my mind.)

So there’s been good and there’s been bad. Does the bad mean that I need to develop better filters? Well… Yes and no.

The “yes” portion of the answer relates to the prompts, mostly. I think in the beginning I had a tendency to try to come up with prompts that became exercises, ways to stretch our writing skills and refine our techniques. That’s not a bad thing, but what I lost sight of was the point of all this: To write more. Exercises and stretching and refinement are wonderful things, yes, but when you’re just trying to write at all, I think they can actually get in the way. You start to feel like you have to improve, and you maybe forget that writing something is an improvement over writing nothing. The act of writing, in and of itself, is an exercise. How do you get better at walking, or speaking, or drawing, or cooking? Do you have to have an organized approach to methodically building up specific subsets of skills? No. You just do it. And then you do it some more. As you do it, you learn what works and what doesn’t. You find your balance, you refine your technique, you develop your palate. Which is not to say that an organized agenda isn’t useful, either, but it’s not necessary. And it isn’t the point of the prompts; the point of the prompts is just to get our brains working on writing at all.

Which leads nicely into the “no” portion of the answer. Although I don’t care for some of the work I’ve posted, I am also not sorry that I posted it. If anything, I need to stop filtering so much out just because I think it sucks. After all, the point of this is practice. Practice is going to involve some unsightly results. They are still results, and still valuable for that. And if they suck that badly, hey, feedback will help me figure out how to improve my writing, won’t it? And I can’t get feedback on things I don’t post.

I think my filters are just fine. The point is not to produce perfect writing; the point is to write at all. And even if I am several prompts behind, and even if not all of the results have been satisfactory, and even if some of my efforts in helping other people to write as well have been perhaps a little misdirected… I am writing. And that is a good thing.

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This was written for the following Not So Novel prompt:
Of Interest

It all started with a brownie pan. I saw it as I was putting the dishes away and it started one of those crazy chains of ideas that you wind up sitting down and tracing backward because you can’t quite remember how you got from Point A to Point F. In this case, it went like so:

1. I have Monday off; I could bake brownies.
2. Last time there were brownies, they had mint chips on top. I wonder if there are any mint chips left.
3. Oh, but I’ve really been more about chocolate and cherry lately. I wonder if I could get cherry chips?
4. OOOOH! Double Chocolate Chip cookies! But with cherry chips!
5. Er. Wait a sec. Can I even get cherry chips around here?
6. Probably not. Dammit. So much for the baking thing.
7. Wait! I have cherry extract! I could just do regular chocolate chip cookies, but replace the vanilla with cherry! And maybe some sort of cherries in the dough too?…

Discussion on Facebook and the actual shopping trip for supplies refined the idea, and it became a reality. My ingredients of choice were Ghirardelli Twilight Delight 72% Cacao squares, chopped up into little chunks, and Sun Maid dried tart cherries. I used the standard Nestlé Tollhouse recipe, but substituted cherry extract for vanilla, the Ghirardelli for chocolate chips, and the dried cherries for the optional nuts the recipe calls for. I also cut the recipe in half since I knew I would likely be the only one eating them and I don’t really need four or five dozen cookies, no matter how yummy they are.

Results?

Unexpected. The chopped chocolate was much more melty than chips generally are, which was cool in that the cookies came out with a marbleized look, but also made them really messy and difficult to remove from the pan. I think next time I’d either go back to chips or cut the amount of chocolate in half. I suspect the problem is that when you measure 1 cup of chopped up chocolate, there’s less space between pieces than there would be in 1 cup of chips; I should maybe have gone by weight. I’d also try to make them more obviously “cherry” — either add some red food coloring or perhaps use something like candied cherries or maraschino cherries that would add a pop of red.

But how do they taste?

Oh, dude. Delicious. You should totally try these.

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