Apricot Coconut Energy Bars and Song(s) of the Week

My co-worker just handed me one of these. Delicious, gluten-free and full of Omega 3s!

Apricot Coconut Energy Bars (From Shutterbean.com)

• 1/2 cup cashews
• 1 cup dried apricots
• 1 cup shredded coconut
• 1/3 cup rolled oats
• 2 tablespoons agave syrup
• 2 tablespoons coconut oil, melted
• 3 tablespoons hemp seeds
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

Line a 8 inch baking pan with parchment paper, set aside. Place cashews in a food processor and process until nuts are evenly chopped, set aside. Put dried apricots in the food processor and process for 3-4 minutes to finely chop. Add coconut, oats, agave syrup, coconut oil, hemp seeds, ginger and salt. Process until mixture comes together. Add the chopped cashews and pulse until well combined.

Put the apricot coconut mixture in the parchment lined baking pan and firmly press into pan. Cover the bars and place in a freezer for one hour. Unmold bars, trim ends and cut into even rectangles. Bars will last up to one month if stored in an air tight container in the fridge.

Song of the Week: Two-way tie between "Why Is It So Hard?" by Charles Bradley and "Love in the Dark" by YACHT. Somehow I missed the latter when it came out last year. The (now) duo from Portland, OR has a super-fun sassy electro sound reminiscent of Le Tigre. Enjoy!

Song of the Week: Cheater's Prayer

This song was everywhere in Belize. It still makes me giggle. Watch out. It'll get stuck in your head for days

Song of the Week: Celebration's "Heartbreak"

An oldie but goodie. Unfortunately, this version doesn't have the wicked horn outro that you'll find on the album but it's rad in its own right.

Celebration - Heartbreak from knox on Vimeo.

Facebook and music as prayer

1. If you haven't yet checked out the Texts from Hillary tumblr, I suggest you check it out now. In the same vein as the now famous Ryan Gosling memes, this one features photos of Madame Secretary texting with celebs from all walks of life. My fave so far is her suggesting that Mark Zuckerburg get a shirt with "a big boy collar."

2. The folks behind one of my favorite sites in Boston, Howfuckedisthet.com created this great graphic illustrating some neat things that could have been done with the $1 billion Facebook just spent on buying the photo-sharing site Instagram. Examples include:

- 12 years of funding for the Harlem Children's Zone
- 6.5 years of funding for the National Endowment for the Arts
- 285 wind turbines

3. I'm coming away from my third relationship-related crash and burn since the holidays and I'm trying to treat it as a blessing instead of being sad. More time for yoga and sleeping. One listen to In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has proven helpful and I think that after two more listens, I'll feel like a new woman again. If it wasn't cost-prohibitive and utterly ridiculous, I might get all the lyrics from that album tattooed on myself. Its not even what Jeff Mangum sings that's so great. Its more about its familiarity and staying power. Like a prayer that you say over and over again, solace can be found in its repetition.

Look Mom, I'm on TV! (On the internet)

I was recently asked by one of my colleagues to pose as a test subject in a video about Harvard Business School professor and social psychologist Amy Cuddy. Here is the resulting TIME video about her research on power posing. According to Cuddy, just standing in a power pose for a couple minutes can give you the confidence you need to nail an interview or give an awesome speech. Check it out! Yours truly appears around 2 minutes, 30 seconds.

A boy a girl and a rendezvous

Man, it's only Wednesday and it's already been a bit of a poopy week. There is a lot of sadness in the air and, while it's totally unrelated to the sadness, I seem to be everyone's problem child this week, which only adds to the poopy feeling. I messed up a printing order, sent a mass e-mail out with date for last November in the subject line, and my mother hates me because I accidentally de-activated the sim card in her US phone, just in time for her trip back to the States. I think I'd hate me too.

On the upside, Veronica and I had a great time writing a birthday song for our friend Emily on Tuesday. It's a little collection of inside jokes from our Belize trip, to the tune of Bob Marley's Sun is Shining. Come over and get me drunk and you may have the pleasure of hearing it. If you haven't already, check out Emily's cacao exporting outfit Moho River Cacao on Facebook.

I've been single for ten weeks now and the novelty of it has slowly started to wear off. I was feeling really free and pumped about all the new time I had to myself. I've directed a lot of the free time into bike work and have tried revisiting several old past-times (over the weekend I spent two hours making birthday cards) but I also feel this burning need to fill the time and share things with someone else. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the someone else I want to share with doesn't exist (yet). But this feeling, this need, has made me super angsty, restless and distracted. If you've noticed a significant uptick in the number of text messages I've been sending you, you now know why. Sorry! I'm sure it is just part of the process and it will pass. Getting over a significant relationship was so much easier in college, when there were tons of other young people everywhere to "get to know."

When writing to a friend about my daydreams of dashing long-bearded pirates, sexy young bankers on the T, and rendezvous with out-of-town lovers, I had to look up the word rendezvous to make sure I was spelling it correctly. This is hard to admit in real life, especially because I used to be fluent in French, but it was so worth it because I learned that one of the definitions of rendezvous is "the process of bringing two spacecraft together." I got excited, imagining that this new information would lead me to find lots of dirty pictures of spacecraft rendezvous, or orbital manuever pornography as I would call it, on the internet. I was sadly disappointed. This is about the best I found:

An artist’s rendering of the approximate positions of the Gemini 6 and 7 spacecrafts during rendezvous.

Still a little dirty seeming if you're in that head space, but definitely not the stuff of viral internet hilarity.

In completely unrelated news, a busload of Harvard Kennedy School students touring the West Bank as part of a spring break trip were detained this week by the Israeli Defense Forces. The Dean of Students called to alert me, because one of our fellows is on the trip. It was so hard not to say "Yep. Sounds about right." The comments on the linked article are worth reading.

New AfroFunk Out of DC

The Funk Ark, a fairly young afrobeat outfit from the District, is about to release their second album High Noon on April 3. You can listen to it here on their website.