Cake & Karma

 Penny Cooper, Baker's Assistant:
"This is for humans who like a lot of too-much frosting."

The cake looks pretty, doesn't it?
I'm pleased, but I'd halve the frosting if I made it again. I probably won't though-- this Yellow Cake recipe is too rich:
5 eggs and, including the frosting, one POUND of butter.
(I didn't look closely, just chose the best-rated recipe.)

Not that I'm not eating it. If I were tempted, this helps:
NUTRITION
1slice (1/12th of the cake)
Calories: 674 cal | Sugar: 61g [= double the daily allowance for a grown man] | Carbohydrates: 84g | Fat: 36g | Saturated Fat: 23g | Cholesterol: 147mg | Sodium: 239mg | Potassium: 215mg

I hadn't taken into account how tempting the SMELLs would be while making it: vanilla and batter, chocolate melted into butter... 
I won't subject myself to that too often, but it was okay.
I'd set out red grapes to grab--little sugar bombs.
Good going, me, that was a good strategy!

I'm taking grapes to work too, so I'm not sugar-starved when I serve the cake for Big Boss's birthday today. (I'm getting a ride from Jester this morning---not only is the 3-layer cake awkward to transport, but it snowed a little last night.)

BELOW: me and BB in 2018--my first year at the store. (He's not a Star Wars fan, just put on a donated Darth Vader mask.)

Ours is definitely a relationship with some karma involvement.
That is to say, there's some things  to be learned there, some attraction/repulsion dynamic, mutual respect and affection mixed with wariness, fear, anger.
'Bafflement' might be the best description of the result. LOL
WHY ARE YOU IN MY LIFE anyway?!

An American yogi I've been watching online, Asha Nayaswami, says she likes to make up stories of what people might have been in her past lives. (Especially people she's finding difficult?)
These stories probably aren't true, she says, but they're helpful to me.
I love that.

Not sure who we were to each other in past lives, but I've encountered BB's type before in this life. I usually avoid them, but sometimes they are unavoidable, and I know there are lessons to be learned.

Specifically, BB is a lot like my father (dead). Both men with prickly pride ("honor", they call it) and a strong need for authority, though with benevolent intent. 

(Huh.
Kind of like Darth Vader trying to love his son, Luke? Not that DV was benevolent.)

I never do well with this type, nor they with me (nor Darth Vader with Luke)--even with the best will in the world.
I think they like me well enough--but are baffled by my "resistance" to their authority.
And I like them overall, but am wary of how their pride can warp their benevolent philosophies.

We're afraid of each other, from different angles. That's a big block, and I truly don't have a great strategy for relating to this type of human--for meeting at the heart.

My sister is expert at placating men like this. She uses very female-coded manipulation (flattery and misdirection), which works great on them. Everyone involved seems happy. They make an easy match, though I don't know that it's 'enlightened' so much as familiar to them.

At any rate, I can't even do that thing she does.
And I don't want to! It's not honest.
I wouldn't say it's a lesson I need to learn to advance toward enlightenment--rather, the opposite.

I don't know. I'm genuinely impressed that BB did hire me back, despite being wary of me, and I genuinely wanted to make him a cake, as I have in the past.
So maybe I've inched forward in making peace, at least. As I did with my father. I moved us maybe an inch closer together, which is more than my father managed with his own father.

This configuration is going to take a few more lifetimes to become love, I'd say.
(This is on me to learn, as much as on them--but we're both blocked.
It's like a chess game that just got locked in wrong.
In stories, sometimes it works itself out in later generations. Again, see Star Wars.

Anyway... I've come a lot further with people like my mother, people with the sparkling intelligence of crystal, and the hurt of a shattered mirror. So wonderful! And scary? I suppose. But I have learned better strategies of love with them---LONG time coming.
If this were a musical, here I would break into song
"Boundaries, boundaries,
Boundaries are your friend!"

Good fences make good, loving relationships with people like my mother. Me getting (a little) better at that with them has worked well for everyone.
Yay!
But with the people like my father, it's kinda the opposite:
I think boundaries need to soften a little... and like I said, I do not have a good strategy for that.

We'll just leave that for now.

NEITHER of these configurations are partnerships, I note.
I think that's why I've been single since I broke up with bink when I was thirty-seven, twenty-five years ago. bink is like Auntie Vi in my life--consistent loving energy. Easy.

In the affair with Oliver after that, I was still single. He was definitely a person like my mother, and we were playing chess on an impossible fun-house mirrored board. That was never going to work. And it didn't.

Partnership doesn't seem to be on my plate of karma in this lifetime.
That doesn't feel like a lack, to me, but just not work that fits or comes into my life or that I seek out. (Or, do I actively avoid it? Maybe.)
So, it's not come into my life. Or, . . . not yet.
Who knows?

Some Images
surfing the waves
playing chess
maintaining beautiful fences
spinning stories

Okay, Jester will be here soon--I gotta pack up cake for the ride now.
Spin on!