I've been living in a very rural community for two years and I'm considering relocating to the city. People think I am insane. When I first moved up here, people thought the same thing. I had absolutely no experience with livestock, farming, or anything country besides my background in archaeological field work. Oh, and I owned an ironic pair of cowboy boots. It was, however, an irresistible challenge, a new experiment.
Sometimes, I get these great bees in the bonnet and simply MUST try out some new experimental thing. Recently, it's been bok choy. How do you even cook bok choy besides your standard Asian saute/stir-fry type of dish? I made a delicious soup with it the other day, with a very light broth and lots of other yummy veggies. The bok choy was added late in the cooking so it wouldn't turn into bok mush. It was ok but not particularly stand out. Last night I became obsessed with the thought of finely minced vegetables. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do with these veggies but it was guaranteed to be pretty in the making. There is just something deeply satisfying to me about mincing things into teeny tiny cubes and putting them into nice piles. Taste was completely secondary to the almost tangible mental sensation that was forming in my mind. I could feel the knife chop-chopping away in my imagination and I could almost see the little stacks of cubes. Maybe one of those Legos I am always stepping on traveled through my skin, floated into my blood stream, and became lodged in my brain. This, of course, would make one think in terms of the intense tactile satisfaction of breaking bigger things into tiny cubes, making nifty piles, and then rearranging them into something else. You tracking?
Once I started chopping, it occurred to me that I am blogging these days and blogs normally have lovely photographs of people's painstaking efforts to make and do beautiful things. So I tried, honestly, to photo-document my progress. Here's the rub: I get so deep into a project that I often can't stop for little details like taking pictures, following directions, eating, or drinking. Ha, that shit's for plebes. I'm a patrician of the maker's process. I can't be bothered with details. So I took some sort of random, poorly lit pictures of piles of onions, fish fillets floating on top of sauce, and a rather horrible final shot of a bed of rice with toxic-looking yellow goo covered in julienned bok choy leaves. My final dish turned out to be fish curry with caramelized bok choy stems, sweet potatoes, and mirepoix dressed with raw bok choy and celery leaves. It was all very schmancy sounding but it looked like a confused street taco threw itself up on my plate. I didn't mind, it tasted bomb and the six year old loved it. In fact, he requested it for lunch. Granted, today he will be the only kid with sweet potato/bok choy fish curry at his rural kindergarten. Good thing he's not afraid to wear a different hat.
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Finding your way back home
I am finding my way back home. Home is a strange place for me. It involves an immense amount of reading and the development or refinement of skills. Ah, skills. What is life without an insane repertoire of unusual abilities? Right now, I'm all on fire about fermentation. I'm awaiting the shipment of rennet, koji, and a tofu press. I have a vat of ruby sauerkraut and cauliflower bubbling away merrily on my kitchen counter. A while ago I made an enormous batch of sauerkraut but it sprouted some terrifying looking mold on the surface and I got freaked out and stuck it on my porch. The porch is my liminal space where questionable experiments wait in purgatory to be revived, or more frequently, pitched in the compost or trash.
The compost itself is just another way station. When something goes awry, it gets composted and awaits its transformation. Right now, the compost is gleefully transforming a pig head into a beautiful clean skull that will probably end up mounted on my wall or chilling in my office as part of my growing comparative vertebrate anatomy collection. Yes, this is science speak for hoarding animal parts. It's all part of this amazing cycle for which I find myself deeply grateful. It's mystifying. Every time I think that I'm insane, I get these little reminders that there is a macro-scale method to my madness. I moved to the country so that I would have the space and freedom to establish a giant compost heap and have a place where my ill conceived projects could go to die, or, um, transform. Sometimes I am so deep in the forest, I can't even see the trees. And then I find my own feet walking the path toward home. Like a horse let off its tether. Or a couple of escaped pygmy goats heading back to the barn at sundown.
The pig started out as an attempt at taxidermy. Ok, I know, this probably sounds bonkers but bear with me. This pig was not my first rodeo. I've been dabbling in the wild world of self taught experimental taxidermy for a few years and I've successfully mounted a few animals. Visitors to my home are greeted by these cheerful friends looming down from atop a self consciously hip mid-century china hutch or peeking out from behind an ornate bird cage. Those who know me don't bat an eye, those that bat an eye never return. You have to get used to a certain level of unusual to roll with this bad b. But back to the pig. I had this glorious vision of beautiful oak-tanned pig hide or maybe a full furred cape made of bristling wild boar fur. Neither of these dreams came to pass. Instead, I found myself on the kitchen floor at about 11:00 PM on a weeknight with a scalpel in one hand and a filthy, bloody, greasy pig head with cape still attached staring back at me. I was valiantly attempting to deflesh the hide to prepare it for salting but it was damn hard. Every time I moved the head around, the pig would oink at me in this low, threatening grumble. You can imagine how startled I was the first time it happened. See, my friend gave me this pig hide with all the neck viscera still intact and the head attached. Therefore, the throat and vocal folds were functional, and every time air would be forced through the larynx, the pig would grunt. So, I'm squatting there with my greasy scalpel, having cleaned maybe an eighth of the surface area in an hour when my former boyfriend comes into the kitchen and just looks at me.
"What. Are. You. Doing?"
Of all the things to ask, could you imagine a more absurd question? I mean, isn't it self evident that I am defleshing a pig head? Seriously. Again, with the knowing me business. If you have to ask then why are you even here at 11:00 on a Tuesday? Obviously, I am balls deep in a bizarre experiment that involves dead pigs, taxidermy, scalpels, and a healthy sense of optimism about how much sleep I need in order to give a lecture on human skeletal morphology in the morning. So whyyyyyyy are you staring at me? And why are you asking me what I can only assume is a rhetorical question? Clearly, minutes count here! I am on the clock!
Of course, my only response is to say "Well, I'm trying to deflesh a pig. How was your day?"
In the end, the pig could not, in fact, be taxidermied in the short window of "me time" that exists between 10:00 PM and 7:00 AM. He ended up being bagged up and stored on the porch (thank the sweet heavens for cold winters) until I had time to haul him out to the compost pile and give him a proper good bye for now. Retrospectively, it's an amazing allegory for what happened with the boyfriend. METAPHORICALLY speaking, people. The boyfriend is not literally in the compost pile. Lucky for him.
So I guess this is my process. It is messy. It is questionable. It might not even be legal. There are grand experiments and even grander failures but I am always daring greatly. The path is winding and often obscure but it leads me always, inexorably home.
Saturday, February 15, 2014
Post V-Day Analysis
I was talking to a male friend of mine today and I started wondering why our conversations are always so enjoyable. True to form, I needed to do a little research to answer this question and the following epic text was born:
"I figured out why you're so damn enjoyable to talk to. Being a nerd, I started puzzling over personality types and it turns out that we are each other's natural match on the Myers Briggs scale. I am an INFP (introverted intuitive feeling perceiving) and you are an ENFJ (extroverted intuitive feeling judging). We both represent some of the rarest personality types IN THE WORLD. You're around 2% and I'm around 3%. I think I've only gotten to know one other ENFJ in my life. Jesus, run the numbers. Let's say I meet roughly 1,000 new people a year. Of those, approximately half are male, leaving about 500. Of the 500, 2% are my natural personality match, meaning 10 individuals. Of those ten individuals, how many are likely to be physically attractive? To me, a man needs to be over 6 feet tall, which is approximately 14% of the population. So out of the ten dudes a year, only 1 of them is likely to be tall enough not to be considered a midget in my book. Factor in that only 30% of the male population is between 25 and 44, and that comes out to meeting 0.3 ENFJ dudes approximately my age and in my acceptable height range per year which translates to maybe once every three years. Plus, I actually have to engage this person in conversation long enough to figure out if I can stand him. Do you see the statistical odds there?? Every day I have less than one tenth of a percent chance of meeting my "perfect match". And I didn't even consider ugliness (but that was because I can't find any solid statistics on fugly). The good news for you is that you might meet 15 INFP women in a year but the bad news is that only 10% of the population is in your target demographic of 18-24. You are, in fact, more likely to get lucky with an older woman. I find that FUCKING HILARIOUS."
It's especially hilarious because the only reason I don't snap this particular dude friend up like a hot buttered croissant is that he is way too young for me. Oh the irony.
"I figured out why you're so damn enjoyable to talk to. Being a nerd, I started puzzling over personality types and it turns out that we are each other's natural match on the Myers Briggs scale. I am an INFP (introverted intuitive feeling perceiving) and you are an ENFJ (extroverted intuitive feeling judging). We both represent some of the rarest personality types IN THE WORLD. You're around 2% and I'm around 3%. I think I've only gotten to know one other ENFJ in my life. Jesus, run the numbers. Let's say I meet roughly 1,000 new people a year. Of those, approximately half are male, leaving about 500. Of the 500, 2% are my natural personality match, meaning 10 individuals. Of those ten individuals, how many are likely to be physically attractive? To me, a man needs to be over 6 feet tall, which is approximately 14% of the population. So out of the ten dudes a year, only 1 of them is likely to be tall enough not to be considered a midget in my book. Factor in that only 30% of the male population is between 25 and 44, and that comes out to meeting 0.3 ENFJ dudes approximately my age and in my acceptable height range per year which translates to maybe once every three years. Plus, I actually have to engage this person in conversation long enough to figure out if I can stand him. Do you see the statistical odds there?? Every day I have less than one tenth of a percent chance of meeting my "perfect match". And I didn't even consider ugliness (but that was because I can't find any solid statistics on fugly). The good news for you is that you might meet 15 INFP women in a year but the bad news is that only 10% of the population is in your target demographic of 18-24. You are, in fact, more likely to get lucky with an older woman. I find that FUCKING HILARIOUS."
It's especially hilarious because the only reason I don't snap this particular dude friend up like a hot buttered croissant is that he is way too young for me. Oh the irony.
Friday, February 14, 2014
Frosting
There is frosting on everything. I mean everything. Ocean turned 6 and we held our first real birthday party. Can we talk about fiascos? I made pool noodle light sabers. We had a piñata. A piñata for the love of god. In my living room. I consumed adult beverages. I shopped and slaved. I cleaned and decorated. I decluttered. I fretted. And afterwards I collapsed. Somehow, through the days of preparation, party frenzy, and severe post-festive malaise, two dozen cupcakes grew legs and dropped their greasy, sugary calottes all over my house. I picked up my glasses today, and wiped them on the hem of my shirt, an habitual gesture that signifies getting down to business. I put them on my face only to discover that I was peering through a vanilla cream haze. Whether this nefarious smear originated on the glasses or the shirt is anyone's guess. I just know that the frosting is everywhere.
Also, for your viewing pleasure, here is a Lego dude stuffed down the hole of a pool noodle light saber (edited to add that no such picture exists since the light saber mysteriously disappeared...to the goat pen? the dog's digestive tract? behind the dryer aka no man's land???). The raw materials for said light sabers were harder to find than an ear bone in a sand box, given that it's mid-February. Do Chinese slave factories go on toxic foam noodle production hiatus for the winter? Or are the assholes who own Target just sitting on a stockpiled hoard of pool noodles to torment overly-ambitious moms who bite the bullet and drag their asses from big box store to big box store in the fruitless pursuit or joyful childhood memories?
To make up for how stressful the whole situation was, I give you a photograph of a five year old putting a grown man in an arm bar. Gleefully, I might add. It always makes me giggle, anyway.
Also, for your viewing pleasure, here is a Lego dude stuffed down the hole of a pool noodle light saber (edited to add that no such picture exists since the light saber mysteriously disappeared...to the goat pen? the dog's digestive tract? behind the dryer aka no man's land???). The raw materials for said light sabers were harder to find than an ear bone in a sand box, given that it's mid-February. Do Chinese slave factories go on toxic foam noodle production hiatus for the winter? Or are the assholes who own Target just sitting on a stockpiled hoard of pool noodles to torment overly-ambitious moms who bite the bullet and drag their asses from big box store to big box store in the fruitless pursuit or joyful childhood memories?
To make up for how stressful the whole situation was, I give you a photograph of a five year old putting a grown man in an arm bar. Gleefully, I might add. It always makes me giggle, anyway.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
In My Head
It's where I live. I can't seem, most of the time, to break out of this eggshell. I'm all caught up in here, living my life in a distracted half-gesture. You know what I mean? Like a mom waving her hand distractedly at her son when she's having some dull adult conversation on the phone. That simile just confused me. Am I the mom? The son? The phone? The caller? See what I mean?
What, then, am I?
1. Mother
2. Maker
3. Scientist
4. Lost
5. Distracted
This list could go on forever but it's sort of the worst to listen to people describe themselves, and infinitely more entertaining to watch people be themselves. That's an area in which I excel. I will, to my very dying day, be unerringly myself.
It wasn't always that way. I'm thinking back to many times when I've tried really damn hard to be someone else. I get this visceral sense-memory of a junior high birthday party for a girl named Liberty. Her neighborhood was not-so-great in my child eyes and the fig tree in her front yard was decorated with tissue paper ghosts. She was older so it was a boon to be invited to the party. I remember going to the party and feeling so horrendously out of place that I wanted to climb out of my skin. The people were nice, the kids were friendly. We got some serious MC Hammer dance-offs going, but I just felt completely not myself. I sat on a lava rock planter and tried really really hard not to judge. I thought it was stupid. I didn't want to go inside where the girls were gossiping and trying on womanhood like an over-sized bra. I was more inclined to play legos with the little brother but I knew it wouldn't do at such an esteemed social event.
There was an overweight boy sitting on another planter dressed inexplicably in some kind of Hitler uniform. I guess it must have been a costume party but I don't think I was dressed up. However, given my peculiarities, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to discover that I was dressed as a coal miner (yup, wore it to school), one of the lost boys from Lord of The Flies (favorite novel in 6th grade. wow. healthy), Indiana Jones (always a good way to establish gender identity at this awkward age), or some variation of a cat (simply because there was a pair of cat ears on a headband that resurfaced occasionally throughout my childhood). I decided to strike up conversation with the awkward boy since I always got along well with boys better than girls and he was guaranteed not to have a conversation about periods with me. Going into that talk, I just knew it was going to be terrible.
Now, at this moment maybe you are expecting that this is going to be a lovely story of self-discovery and the prudence of withholding judgement of awkward, pudgy teens because they turn out to be lovely and grow up sensitive and work for Green Peace. Spoiler alert. It's not. I was right. This kid absolutely sucked. He was weird and socially lame, not terribly clever, less than politically astute (hello, Hitler costume), and generally a terrific bore. But this is where it gets weird. I consciously decided, in the middle of our stilted and terrible conversation, to simply not be myself. I decided that I was going to make this awkward, boring kid feel incredibly comfortable by being just like him. When I think back on this idea (I was, what, 12?) it makes me think that maybe I'm a sociopath. It wasn't like I didn't know what I was doing or that I felt uncomfortable and was seeking a friend. I felt bored and looked for an experiment. "Can I convince this kid that I am a boring kindred spirit?" I asked myself. You already have my answer.
I spent the whole evening completely engrossed in this game, to the exclusion of everything else at the party. i didn't try to make friends, I didn't engage with the birthday girl, I didn't use the time to jockey for social advancement. Instead, I decided to wholeheartedly pursue my role as socially awkward self-conscious girl at the party and convince this boy of my identity. The weird thing is that it worked. Completely. It was one of the first experiences I had with the concept of re-creating identity. I realized that I could be whoever I wanted to be, that identity is a choice. Given the right circumstances, you can chameleon yourself into the good graces of any social situation and IT WORKS BOTH WAYS. You can go up or down the social ladder at whim and people will accept whatever you present to them.
Upon reflection, I recognized a few things:
1. Incipient sociopathic inclinations
2. Incipient scientific inclinations
3. 1 and 2 are definitely not mutually exclusive and may, in fact, covary
4. This might be why I'm so adamantly "me"
All that being said, welcome to the blog.
What, then, am I?
1. Mother
2. Maker
3. Scientist
4. Lost
5. Distracted
This list could go on forever but it's sort of the worst to listen to people describe themselves, and infinitely more entertaining to watch people be themselves. That's an area in which I excel. I will, to my very dying day, be unerringly myself.
It wasn't always that way. I'm thinking back to many times when I've tried really damn hard to be someone else. I get this visceral sense-memory of a junior high birthday party for a girl named Liberty. Her neighborhood was not-so-great in my child eyes and the fig tree in her front yard was decorated with tissue paper ghosts. She was older so it was a boon to be invited to the party. I remember going to the party and feeling so horrendously out of place that I wanted to climb out of my skin. The people were nice, the kids were friendly. We got some serious MC Hammer dance-offs going, but I just felt completely not myself. I sat on a lava rock planter and tried really really hard not to judge. I thought it was stupid. I didn't want to go inside where the girls were gossiping and trying on womanhood like an over-sized bra. I was more inclined to play legos with the little brother but I knew it wouldn't do at such an esteemed social event.
There was an overweight boy sitting on another planter dressed inexplicably in some kind of Hitler uniform. I guess it must have been a costume party but I don't think I was dressed up. However, given my peculiarities, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to discover that I was dressed as a coal miner (yup, wore it to school), one of the lost boys from Lord of The Flies (favorite novel in 6th grade. wow. healthy), Indiana Jones (always a good way to establish gender identity at this awkward age), or some variation of a cat (simply because there was a pair of cat ears on a headband that resurfaced occasionally throughout my childhood). I decided to strike up conversation with the awkward boy since I always got along well with boys better than girls and he was guaranteed not to have a conversation about periods with me. Going into that talk, I just knew it was going to be terrible.
Now, at this moment maybe you are expecting that this is going to be a lovely story of self-discovery and the prudence of withholding judgement of awkward, pudgy teens because they turn out to be lovely and grow up sensitive and work for Green Peace. Spoiler alert. It's not. I was right. This kid absolutely sucked. He was weird and socially lame, not terribly clever, less than politically astute (hello, Hitler costume), and generally a terrific bore. But this is where it gets weird. I consciously decided, in the middle of our stilted and terrible conversation, to simply not be myself. I decided that I was going to make this awkward, boring kid feel incredibly comfortable by being just like him. When I think back on this idea (I was, what, 12?) it makes me think that maybe I'm a sociopath. It wasn't like I didn't know what I was doing or that I felt uncomfortable and was seeking a friend. I felt bored and looked for an experiment. "Can I convince this kid that I am a boring kindred spirit?" I asked myself. You already have my answer.
I spent the whole evening completely engrossed in this game, to the exclusion of everything else at the party. i didn't try to make friends, I didn't engage with the birthday girl, I didn't use the time to jockey for social advancement. Instead, I decided to wholeheartedly pursue my role as socially awkward self-conscious girl at the party and convince this boy of my identity. The weird thing is that it worked. Completely. It was one of the first experiences I had with the concept of re-creating identity. I realized that I could be whoever I wanted to be, that identity is a choice. Given the right circumstances, you can chameleon yourself into the good graces of any social situation and IT WORKS BOTH WAYS. You can go up or down the social ladder at whim and people will accept whatever you present to them.
Upon reflection, I recognized a few things:
1. Incipient sociopathic inclinations
2. Incipient scientific inclinations
3. 1 and 2 are definitely not mutually exclusive and may, in fact, covary
4. This might be why I'm so adamantly "me"
All that being said, welcome to the blog.
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