Reasonably So

SCENE: Last night, in the kitchen.

STEPMOM (watching me sautée mushrooms, tomatoes and onions with sweet basil chicken sausages): You are your father’s daughter! I never could grasp the concept of cooking for one.

SELF (sautéing): When I know I can cook a delicious meal and have the time for it, why would I do anything else?

Yes, I am confident in my cooking skills. When people ask me if I am a good cook, I affirm wholeheartedly. How do I know? Because when I eat the things I have made, they taste wonderful. I’ll be the first to admit that I am most certainly not an expert chef, but I have learned enough about the subtleties of flavor that I can walk around a grocery store and formulate a meal.

In that passing conversation with my stepmom, I realized that those one-person-meals I’ve always made for myself are exactly how I learned to cook well. The risks aren’t quite as high (i.e. only you will know it is too salty/undercooked/overcooked/bland), so the stress of cooking for yourself is way lower. Sure it can be tough to scale down big recipes (easy fix: learn how to use the freezer and love leftovers–some sauces, soups, and stews taste better with time) or intimidating because you don’t want to ruin expensive ingredients, but you’ll never learn unless you try, RIGHT?

My point is that it is NOT hard to be a good cook. Really, it isn’t.

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I’ve been working hard to take good care of my body, lately: eating as best I can, drinking lots of water, getting good exercise, and sleeping as well as I can.

Water is the one that I’m most pumped about today. I’ve been looking into water bottles for a few months (I try to be an informed consumer), because I’d heard so much about regular plastic and even Nalgenes being unhealthy in the long-run. I’d been a Nalgene fan for years (I had four different bottles by them), but didn’t want to drink toxic water anymore.

The first alternative I learned about was Sigg- made of aluminum, cool designs on the bottles, eco-friendly… good! Not so good: the coating on the inside has been targeted as a potential hazard (I don’t know the specifics, really, but a coating on the inside of a water bottle seems counter-intuitive). Then I learned about Klean Kanteen, made of stainless steel with no coating–simple bottle design, but I dig simple. Priced about the same as the Sigg, I was confident I had found my bottle-to-be.

My stepmom has a Klean Kanteen, so I asked her where in the area I could find one. As she was telling me, my dad jumped in and said “Oh! I have a water bottle you could have!”

“A Klean Kanteen?”

“No, but it’s stainless steel.”

So I checked it out… boy oh BOY did I check it out. I took this thinksport bottle for a spin over the past two days:

,

I am floored about this water bottle. Never have I met a water bottle so successful at being a water bottle.

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Graduating from college is a really de-humanizing experience (hey Mom, did you catch that? Graduating FROM college!). It just sucks the contentment right out of a 22-year-old.

Sure, it has its highlights (a Bachelor’s Degree would be one of them… freedom would be another), But the lowlights are the things that really slapped me in the ass as I walked out the revolving door of my education: the future of LOAN PAYMENTS. That’ll do it! Also, the prospect that I have to figure it out. I have to figure out life and myself and employment and insurance and habitat and relationships and fun: IT.

For weeks now, I have been wrestling with it. The last post I wrote was an indication of that, perhaps, but for the first time since mid-April(ish), I have felt good for a whole week. Part of it is probably that I started exercising again. I started focusing more on eating a little more consciously- lots of fruit and vegetables (today I had fresh cherries, celery with chunky peanut butter, and a salad with tomatoes and craisins and mushrooms and green peppers and chives for lunch). I will soon start to sleep better, once I have a routine up here in Amherst. I am getting a haircut tomorrow that will be more summer-manageable, and I have some new things to wear that I love (thanks, Mom!).

The point is, I am feeling like myself. I captured back some of the humanity that graduation burgled from me. Even though things are no less complicated than they were weeks ago, they are not weighing so heavily on me as to paralyze me with fear.

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Note to readers: Now that I’m back in a happier place, I will move away from personal testimony and back towards fun things I’m making or pictures or food or whatever else I think might interest you. Feel free to leave suggestions!

For the first time since maybe September, I just went for a run. I’m visiting my mom right now, so I brought the dog with me. We’re now both reclining on my bed after cooling down and stretching–she’s panting like a maniac and my body is shaking because it forgot what exercise was. It felt so good to get out in the sun and get some exercise.

The past month and a half has been turbulent and challenging, and I should’ve been doing more things (like running) that made me feel good. I have graduated from college. That means thousands of different things, but the most clear is that I am now solely responsible for myself. Yes, I do have a support network of people that care about me, but things are different now. I am operating solo and it is an alarming experience.

All of my plans have changed. Boston and Cambridge, I’m not returning to you in the near future. You’ve been a wonderful place for me, but I need some open land and tall trees whose roots aren’t surrounded by cement. Amherst is offering me some physical space to think, think, think. I am going to take it. I am going to fix up the bike I just got, find your running trails, and take care of your children for a few months.

After those months… who knows? Maybe I’ll be ready for Boston again. Or maybe it’ll be Tahiti, London, or Bolivia. More likely, I’ll stay in Amherst for a little bit longer. Maybe I’ll just pace myself–that’s the most important thing I learned about distance running back when I was on the team in high school. You must be able to pace yourself well enough that you can do your entire workout at the same speed. Even if you’re going a little slower than you’d like, you should be able to maintain that same speed for the best possible gain of endurance.

I’ll pace myself, stretch diligently, and have nice, long cool downs. Maybe I’ll work a few sprint workouts in, here and there, but I’m going to run for the enjoyment of it.

I understand that it has been almost an entire month since I posted last. I need you to understand that I need a little more time.

I could throw you some metaphors or other bullshit, but I’d rather not. Simply, I am overwhelmed.

Take care of yourselves til I get back.

PUBLIC APOLOGY: I am sorry I forced you to look at Quasimodo constantly for the last week and a half.

My eye is better (my cough is not). I turned in my final thesis on Tuesday, so you can only imagine the kind of things I’ve been doing for the past thirteen days. It’s not the past days I’m concerned about so much as those to come. I don’t even know what to do with three free hours right now, let alone the rest of my life.

In order to fill up some of those new hours, I picked up a book at the library yesterday. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. I picked it up because of the following quotation from an essay by David Hare “…on factual theatre.”

In a famous letter to the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway expressed reservations about his friend’s great masterpiece Tender is the Night. Scott, Hemingway said, had taken elements of his own relationship with his wife Zelda, he had added in events which had befallen their mutual friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and then he had laid on top of this factual mélange a third layer, this time of pure invention. This was, Hemingway said, no way to write, because the reader was distracted by the question of what was real and what was not. In his reply, Fitzgerald pointed out that this was, actually, one of the means by which writers of fiction had always operated. Elizabethan dramatists, including Shakespeare, had regarded it as normal artfully to mix facts about people who had really existed with what these same people inspired in the author’s imagination. Hemingway had the perfect right to doubt Scott’s success with what he called ‘composite characters.’ What he had no right to do was question the method itself.

Hare goes on to discuss documentary theatre as a form, based on his own experiences:

Never for a moment has it occurred to me that such works, using verbatim dialogue, organized, arranged and orchestrated with proper thematic care should involve less labour, skill, or creative imagination than those dreamt up in the privacy of a study.

I bet you assumed I only thought about chicken wings, ice cream, and arts and crafts! Au contraire, mon frère! I wrote that whole damn thesis about documentary theatre, and although I have never wanted to think less about it, I am choosing to read Tender is the Night because of it. I didn’t actually include any part of David Hare’s essay in my thesis, but I found it fascinating. Even in my post-thesis mayhem, I am extending my study. CREEPY, right? Definitely didn’t think I’d be into that, but then I think about how much I like to think and learn, so why should I stop?

As I dive into this book (slowly… I dozed off after 5 pages yesterday), I look forward to being transported into another world. I look forward to immersing myself in that world and swimming around in it, but then getting out of it and thinking about the structure Fitzgerald created, and the amount to which it bothers or intrigues me that the characters are composites or the events are dreamed up. In short, I’m reading for the excitement of reading, but I’m also going to have a little book club with myself about my reading.

Maybe that’s just a way to fill up the time, but I feel pretty good about it.

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Work Cited:

Hare, David. “…on factual theatre,” Resource Material. Talking to Terrorists.

By Robin Soans. London: Oberon Books Ltd., 2005. 111-113.

I feel you, brother. My nagging cough, sore throat, and clogged sinuses seem to have given my right eye their blessing to join the goddamn club. I, too, am wonky-eyed.

It’s that curse that I have (you might have it, too) that the minute I accomplish much hard work, my body says “OK, I QUIT” and gets sick. This time it started with feeling a little crappy, I was thinking “this feels like I might get sick.” So I upped my fluid intake, but still woke up the next day with a sore throat and feeling a little stuffy. Long story short, I am sick, and yesterday I’m puttering about my business when I notice oozing from my eyeball. OOZING FROM MY EYEBALL. (more…)

I am a Red Sox fan. I have a hat, and a keychain bottle opener. I am also, however, an inconsistent fan. If you were a bully, you might call me a fair-weather-friend of the Sox because I only watch the post-season, but you would be wrong (sort of).

I only watch during the post-season because for the past two years, I have lived in two houses with no televisions and one apartment with a television but no cable. No cable means no NESN. No NESN means no regular season games (at least very few). The post-season is on network television, so it’s all I get. Even tomorrow’s game is on NESN. The opener? Really? Thanks, guys. However, I wouldn’t watch it anyway. NOT because I don’t want to, but because I just can’t think about baseball until after April 22nd (MY SHIT IS DUE IN TWO WEEKS??!?!!!!). And even then, I still won’t have a TV and cable until July at the earliest (even that is still up for debate…).

All that said, I’m going to be a real grown-up soon, and being a real grown-up means that if I don’t pick up some consistent hobbies, I will be subject to a swift kick in the head by Boredom. Grown-ups like baseball, right? Or do they only like to listen to smooth jazz and discuss nature documentaries while sipping on a glass of rosé. It will be more likely that I will watch the Sox with wing sauce all over my face and a cold mug of beer in my paw. Maybe being a grown-up isn’t so scary after all.

Another future craft! Depending on how well (if at all) you know me, you may have heard that, come July, my man and I will be moving into a new apartment. For the first time in years, I will be able to settle someplace for more than a mere 8 or 9 months–for my life as a student has been that of constant motion.

(SIDENOTE. I just ate a black jelly bean by accident and took it out of my mouth half chewed and put it on the coffee table… if you didn’t know me before, now you do, huh?).

Back to the apartment. The kitchen is cute, and would be considered an “eat-in” but it has neither counter-space nor drawers. None whatsoever. Nor is there a pantry. There is an open cabinet space above the stove and sink, and the two doors under the sink that will probably house cleaning supplies, and perhaps a trashcan. Those who know me know that I love to cook a lot. So with this kitchen in mind - take my love of crafty projects and couple it with my internal desire to be anywhere besides the academic world at this present moment, and what do you get? Kitchen solutions, naturally!

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I am in high-stress mode. I have three weeks until my senior thesis work is due. THREE WEEKS. And only TWO DAYS until the performance I’ve been producing/directing happens. My back is in knots, I am weary no matter how much sleep I get, and my capability to speak in full sentences is incredibly diminished. BUT, for your sake and mine, I am trying to relax. I’ll tell you how.

1) Wednesday night, I will be getting a 1-hour massage. Hopefully that will reduce my physically manifested stress by a LOT.

2) I’m also trying to think of comforting things in general. I’m going to take you to one of my happy places…

We are sitting on the couch in our favorite comfortable clothes. We are drinking cold beers. Maybe a Red Hook ESB or Brooklyn Pennant Ale ‘55. (If you’d rather hold a cup of tea or water, that’s fine, too).

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