hodge-podge

Today on the hill I climb to get to my Friday morning class, there was a small group of people with a microphone, standing and reading the names of all of the service people who have died in our most recent war(s). Everyone walking up and down the hill was on their cellphone, wearing headphones, or zoning out.

One of the largest bus-stop areas in the square is in front of a fancy restaurant and many high-rise banks. The contrast between the warm, smiling white people inside the incredibly clean glass windows, lounging and eating $9 salads, and the freezing cold, bundled-up, multi-racial, worn-down looking group of public transit users, waiting for a bus to wherever we're going. The difference between the faces is plain to see, as if there are some people who walk around everyday with overgrown elephants on their shoulders, and others who don't have to.

Three small children with braided hair and white-out nail polish, sitting on each other's laps on ugly blue bus seats, laughing and pointing at a squat wiener dog being taken for a walk.

The feeling of waiting to find out what my last semester of college will look and feel like, of waiting to sign up for the last classes I'll take as an undergraduate. Incomplete completion!

On nonsense.

I wish I could write a graphic novel, something poignant and funny and dark like Lynda Barry or Alison Bechdel or Mariko & Jillian Tamaki. I like writing and reading and art, and I want to participate and make things, but I never know how. I feel like there's a perfect medium out there that just keeps eluding me and when I find it I will be home. Can you get to the point where you've read so many books that they start spilling out of you in original novels? Maybe I just haven't read enough books. Natalie Goldberg says that there is no more perfect time to write than right now this very second, and that writing is a discipline. I agree, but I am very undisciplined. I am also reading about how to like myself more, and how to think less about how I wish I were something else. I read self-help books a lot -- with Buddhist flavorings! -- and cry on the bus sometimes. It's embarrassing, like everything in life.

All I know is that I want to get away from having to see the angry and disappoitned masses every day, to walk on unforgiving concrete and the grimy artifice that comes with living in a city. I want to live in an old farmhouse, with a big wooden desk of my own, full of pens and colored pencils and watercolors, and notebooks of all shapes and sizes and textures. And I will sit in the liltingly beautiful hours of the early morning and write nonsense, and draw nonsense, and out of it will come a small worthwhile thing that will make the passing day worth finishing. Or out of it will come nothing, and I will try again the next day. And it will be my desk, and it won't be covered in clothes and homework like my current desk is now, because our apartment is too small for me to really work at my desk. And I will have chickens and vegetables, and no neighbors, a few cats and my loving partner, hodgepodge family/friend dinners, and lots of dirt but no smog. And I will feel truly alone-without-lonely for the first time and I will feel safe and full and free to do what I need to do for growth. But all these things require money and how do you find time to work for adequate amounts of money when you have to keep your soul alive, too?

I need to find a way to check out of the rat race, or I will be trampled. The pulpy remnants of violently squeezed childhood joy and wonder are something that I have to spend the rest of my life protecting inside myself. I've gotta get out of all this, for the sake of my soul, and fully inhabit my body as a world apart from this ugly dog fight of grades, the greed, minimum wage, competitive resume-writing, applications, interviews, proving yourself, proving yourself, proving yourself...I feel like a cat that has been dropped into the ocean: confused, miserable, slowly drowning, but desperately aware that there is a better place, one of comfort and acceptance and clinging to the hope that someday that place will be accessible and that place will be home.

 

 

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

On Eating and Being.

It seems really pretentious and self-centered to write about why I started this blog ("let me blog about why, me, I started this me I me me I me blog..."), but I'm doing it anyway (being afraid to do things because they are too "___," but doing them anyway, is a new theme in my life). My decision to start a food blog was not pre-meditated in any way. It was a whim. I never thought I'd be comfortable enough to write about food, and it's still really hard for me. I don't know exactly why I started it, but blogging has cracked the little nut that is my heart in ways I didn't anticipate.

Writing a food blog feels like it would be the least challenging of blog options. We all eat, we all cook in some capacity (microwaving leftover pizza is a form of cooking, if you keep an open mind), so writing on and taking pictures of food seems really simple. I've always wanted a blog, so of course I decided early on that I could never have a food blog, because it'd be a cop-out, and because I have always had -- and probably always will have -- serious issues with food, weight, and body image. So, instead, I just didn't write at all. This was a poor decision. Read Natalie Goldberg's work to find out why.

Surprisingly, the double-whammy of having "food issues" and being all defeatist about a food blog not being "challenging enough" was what lead me here. I've come to learn that I am not very smart about taking care of myself; I tend to do what I feel I am supposed to do, not what I really want to do. I have even less perspective on what truly makes me happy. In short, creating this blog was a small fuck-you to myself: to constantly telling myself that what I want to do is not what I'm supposed to do, to thinking that I have any idea of what will make me happy or unhappy, to being constrained by what arbitrary limits and restrictions I put on, well, everything.

I'm not trying to make this blog sound huge and important, because it isn't. It's really quite plain, and forgettable, and nothing compared to the plethora of elegantly designed and cohesively themed food blogs dotting the rest of this internet landscape. The fact that it is so unimpressive and small is revolutionary on a personal level, though, because usually if projects don't fit up to my asinine standards of what is relevant and worthy of my time and effort (honestly, nothing makes the cut, so I live quite an anxiety-ridden life of semi-productivity), I drop them, or never begin them at all.

But, a little happy voice in my head (it really is alone up there, amidst all the nasty, viciously hurtful ones) told me to just make the boring, worthless food blog despite its blandness, its poor design, its lack of focus. Just do it, because I can, and because I want to a little bit, and because maybe (god forbid) it will bring to my life some arrhythmic drips of joy. That really is enough of a reason, I now know.

This blog also exists as a form of rebellion from my body hate and food issues. I can write about food, and eat the food I write about, and not feel guilty about enjoying both! Okay, still working on that, but I love writing, and I'm allowing myself to use that love to write about something that brings me great pleasure and even greater pain. I'm not using this blog to work through my hang-ups, but the simple act of deciding that what I eat isn't embarrassing or shameful -- that the fact that I eat at all isn't embarrassing or shameful -- has been revolutionary to me on a personal level. To be a woman who eats and enjoys it seems to be a shameful thing in society, unless you are extremely thin and can brag about your god-like metabolism. To not be this sort of thin, god-like woman and to be writing about food makes me feel brave.

I think that everyone should do whatever it takes to make themselves feel a little more powerful, less oppressed, more positive, and less downtrodden, even if what they choose to do is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things (their personal lives, their families, their country, the world, etc...), and even if what they do has no "ultimate goal." It makes me feel brave to write this tiny blog that no one reads. Sometimes, it even makes me cry a little.

Contributing to your own well-being is like plugging in a small, but fiery, space-heater of hope that thaws your icy, cynical body more and more every time a contribution is made. I have no hopes of fame or improvement or self-actualization. I just want to feel happier and braver. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. Who knows anything about being happy, really?

Forest of Beech Trees by Gustav Klimt, 1903

Fall is finally here. Yesterday, it was in the high 70's (boo!) but for the rest of the week, it's going to be in the high 50's/low 60's (yay!). To me, this means cooking more comfort food because my semester is filled to the brim with stressful responsibilities. It means less fresh fruit and vegetables, and more canned ones, which is depressing, but it also means more melty casserole type things and pumpkin and cinnamon and warm beverages!

I'm keeping this post short because I have a big post coming (more cooking adventures: pizza and tacos -- with lots of delicious secret ingredients that I will reveal upon posting), and because I have homework to do.

Today, I recommend taking time to read and drink some hot tea, or hot chocolate. It will do your soul some good, especially if you're a student of any kind dealing with the torrential downpouring of new stress that comes with starting a new semester! I recently finished "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet A. Jacobs for my Black Women's Autobiography class, and I highly recommend it. It's not a light or fun read, but it's an important one: can you remember ever reading a slave narrative written about a woman, much less by the woman herself? Probably not, because this is one of the only ones. It was published in 1861, by the way, and initially under a pseudonym, because Harriet didn't want those who helped her escape to get in trouble upon its publication. What a woman! If you're looking for something light, steer clear, but I truly believe that the most rewarding part of being a reader is the discomfort one feels when having to grapple with a challenging text full of difficult ideas and thought-provoking insights. Make yourself uncomfortable, and feel your brain grow.

Also, feel your stomach grow as we transition into fall, the season of comfort food! Next post soon!

On public transit and the masses.

Up until this academic year, public transportation has been nary a blip in my day-to-day life. Unwilling to walk up hills? Take the free student bus! Need to take a trip somewhere once a year? Check, check, & re-check the bus route to make sure you make it, do it once, and vow you'll never take the bus again. Now, taking the bus is part of my everyday life. I have a daily commute: 25 minutes to get on campus, 45 minutes to get home (usually, because of traffic; sometimes it's only 30 or so). This isn't really inconvenient for me, because I, ideally, get some time to wrap myself up in headphones and ignore the world for a while, or make a dent in my mountains of homework. It's a sort of interlude between work and home, during which I can calm down, forget the day, all while sardined between at least two people, if not more. 

The whole "forgetting the day" thing the ideal, though, and it rarely happens. There's always people on the bus who are chatty, or loud, or under the age of 5, or distracting in one way or the other, and inevitably I spend my time people-watching, baby-oogling, or (deliberately) people-ignoring. On my route, there's a guy who will (and does) talk to every single person on the bus and, if they have a young child, he will congratulate them on being parents. Intrusive? Yes; Harmless? Completely. Yesterday on the bus, I saw someone who looked like my twin. We started talking, and it turns out she knows people I know, is in my department, and has the same professional aspirations that I do (birth doula!). Pretty remarkable. A few days ago, I gleefully watched a female toddler enjoy the hell out of a piece of caramel. Today, a toothless, but smiling, old woman who works at Salvation Army (she told me) started talking to me about the Famous Daves' ribs she was holding in her lap and, subsequently, about the fat blunt she was going to roll when she got home. The list goes on.

Sometimes the bus totally blows, and sometimes it's a revelatory experience, providing me with a place to sit and be transported physically to my destination, and mentally -- sometimes by force, sometimes by choice -- into the worlds of people I'd never otherwise interact with. Sometimes the bus is just the bus. Mostly, though, it's an experience in humanity: being stuck in a smelly, hot, and strange soup of people, of which I misguidedly feel as though I don't belong, only to be struck with the realization that I am a key ingredient in this amalgamation which is mostly comprised of the tedious, flavorless drone of living but, threaded throughout, is the occasional, smile-inducing, day-improving spot of laughter, complicated characters, and unpredictable happenings. 

I'm afraid that I'm making it sound too cinematic. It's not like we all look at each other and smile knowingly that we are going through different but similarly challenging life paths and at the end we all hug and cry. It's just that sometimes the bus isn't all that bad, and sometimes it is really bad, and in both instances, it affirms my faith in humanity and swathes me in my discomfort with the gross, unsavory side of human existence, forcing me to get the fuck over myself for at least one minute in my otherwise mind-blowingly self-centered day.

Take the bus. It'll do you good to make your day a little less comfortable.

"Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." -- Dorothy Day