Caramel Apples

A few people on my floor and I went apple picking this weekend. It was pretty fun, despite the fact that it was cold and rainy the whole time. With a bushel of apples, we returned to the farm stand and bought hot apple cider and fresh donuts (delicious!) and listened to a small band playing Irish folk music. With so many apples, we have to think of creative ways to eat them so that we don't get tired of just eating plain old apples. The first thing we decided to try was caramel apples.

I'm not talking about the professional looking caramel apples on a stick you might find at the fair. We are far too lazy for that. Instead, we heated up a cup of caramel in the microwave, sliced up some apples, and dipped them in the caramel. (We had peanut butter too.) It was fantastic. While I sat there eating my apple, I was trying to think of ways that I could relate this to the public sphere or Barlow or something like that, but nothing came to me. I just kept getting side tracked. I started thinking about who people are on the Internet versus who they are in person. And then (don't judge me) I thought of this scene in Shrek.

This got me thinking about layers. I thought of how a majority of people represent themselves fairly accurately on the Internet but then there's always that moment when you see something on your friend's profile that's a complete misrepresentation of who they are. Although their core personality is portrayed by their profile, they've also got that extra 'layer' where they (intentionally or unintentionally) act or talk like someone they're not. Well, then I thought, that's kind of like a caramel apple. There's that outside layer of caramel that kind of masks and enhances the apple, the core of the snack. In this instance, the apple is someone's personality and adding the caramel is like padding a resume or slightly altering one's profile on the Internet. I admit, this is a questionable comparison, but it's all I got...besides this picture of us waiting for our cider to cool down.