passion

"Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task." --henry james

if you play the "if a = b and b = c" game with this statement, our doubt is our task.

now you could take that to mean 'our task is to face and overcome our doubt', and you wouldn't be wrong, per se, but i don't think that's what mr. james was getting at here. not quite.
i think he is trying to say that the things we take the time to doubt are the ones that we want most to put our faith into. they are the things we want to throw ourselves at wholeheartedly, to delve into fully, to plumb the depths of, in order to have our doubt proven wrong*. those things we will grope in the dark for, forge paths, possibly trip and fall, the ones we are willing to do whatever we can for because they are the things worth failing at. cuz when something has caught your passion, there isn't a damned thing you can do about it, except to just hunker down and work at it. by virtue of becoming something your whole self can be thrown at, by taking hold of you, your passion becomes the thing you must do with all your might: your task.

further proof:

"what you risk reveals what you value" --jeanette winterson from The Passion
and
"what will you risk? ... i like to smell the urgency on them [the gamblers]... it's somewhere between fear and sex. passion, i suppose." --ibid

now we have the 'equation' of passion revealing your desire to risk something, and risking something revealing the fact that you value it. which actually means that valuing something creates passion. and that sounds a bit like a 'duh' moment, but i don't think it is, quite. it does, however, seem to mesh well with the first 'equation'.
both of these quotations and their associated logical conclusions have key steps, namely, doubt and risk, which are related concepts dealing with the unknown. passion, being the only element these processes share, seems to traffic in the currency of the unknown. or at least, it is in the business of desiring to know (biblically or no) and i can't think of a better way to understand something standing right in between fear and sex**.
which means now we have passion standing right in between, not just fear & sex, but between risk & value, and doubt & task. which sounds about right. i'm not saying these pairs are the same thing necessarily, but that in all three cases one starts with a feeling of uncertainty and ends with a decisive action. passion is what gets us from one to the other.

so how is it that passion has become such a catalyst? i have no fucking clue. except what i said earlier about once it has kicked in there is really nothing to do but follow it thru to its logical conclusion--to do the thing that has you so enthralled. i've finally stopped avoiding the thing i'm most passionate about and am working on the follow thru. cuz the thing about big tasks, the things you really value, they take a lot of work. and they deserve a lot of work. and sometimes halfway thru them you realize the fear and doubt and risk are greater than when you started. cuz now you have something you have put your energy, your passion, into and now there is something to lose if you quit. so the key to keep from despairing before finishing this thing you were passionate about starting is to make this doubt/passion/task cycle a self-perpetuating feedback loop that can keep you motivated all the way to the end of the task. doubt creates passion which motivates starting the task which breeds doubt which triggers passion which pushes to finish the task...and so on, till you are done.

at least that how i'm hoping it works. halfway thru a first draft on the hamlet novel and i fell prey to doubt about my ability to finish the book. december has been a breather, a time for breeding the passion to continue the work that will lead to the completion of my task. my best gal and sounding board for every idea i've ever had just spent a week talking story and character with me--getting me back in the habit--starting with movies we watched, then moving on to a movie we want to write, then this afternoon allowing me to spew about the book, which got me passionate about it again. cross your fingers for me that this bout of passion will last thru the rest of the first draft before the doubt sneaks in again.

JaNoWriMo, let's do this.

Make it happen, vanek!


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* much like the c.s. lewis brand of apologetics: coming at faith from a skeptic's point of view
** fear, like doubt and risk, is also based on the unknown, and sex deals with the knowledge of another. so passion is the step in between not knowing and knowing, ie, the desire to know.

for becky, with love and savor.

strawberries are summer sun solidified. picking one off the plant still warm from the morning rays and biting into it is the best way i know to rejoice in the miracle of food from photosynthesis. if i had to name a taste for summer, that would be it, much more so than watermelon or hot dogs or even tomatoes.
growing up, june meant strawberries. even though i lived on the edge of a major metropolis and knew nothing of country life, every june my family would drive out to the boonies (i.e. wisconsin) and pick at least six gallons of strawberries. it would take us all morning, and then we would stop off at a restaurant (the same one every time--the brat stop) for lunch and head back home to sort and process our bounty.
we would turn the picnic table in our backyard into the sorting station, with bowls for over-ripe, 'now' ripe, not-quite-ripe, and 'wait a bit' ripe berries. the the over-ripe ones we ate right there or threw out if need be--sometimes the most perfect looking berries on the plant don't last the car ride home, what with the back of the van turning into a green house in the brat stop parking lot, and making the whole car smell like summer baked in a pie. the 'now' berries we cut into fourths and stirred a 1/4-1/2cup sugar into, then let them sit in the fridge to macerate. those mom would pour over freshly baked shortcakes (from the recipe on the back of the bisquick box) topped with a dollop of home-made whipped cream. there were usually so many 'now' berries (short for 'you gotta eat them now cuz they will be too ripe tomorrow') that we were eating strawberry shortcake for a week after picking. it was my favorite week of the year. (the only other times that got close were the weeks around dad's birthday when farmer's market peaches meant peach pie was in season and the month in the fall after we went apple picking and apple pie, crumble, and -sauce were on the menu nonstop.) the not-quite-ripe berries were the ones we cut up, sugared, and froze for a bit of summer sun in the wintertime. see, the name is misleading--these were really more like 'by the end of the week these will be close to over-ripe' berries. that said, the 'wait a bit' ones were just that. they could wait till we dealt with all the other more ripe berries before we ate or froze them. there really wasn't an unripe or even under-ripe strawberry to be seen in our harvest.
i just remember that every year, what felt like tons of fresh strawberries needed to be consumed over a very short period of time. cuz it's really hard to keep them for more than a week or so. and i know i felt (and still do) that they were never as good baked as they were fresh. apples and stone fruit are better for baking. so eating and freezing were the only options we felt we had. this was partially because once you have eaten a strawberry as perfect and ripe as you get right off the plant, (and not picked early, sprayed with crazy chemicals and shipped across the country) you will never want to go back. that early experience has ruined me for store-bought strawberries forever. and i can't tell you how grateful i am.
nowadays there are things like strawberry, pecan, bleu cheese, and spinach salad, or strawberry lemonade slushies, or strawberry rhubarb pie (my friend kayt's specialty) or mixed berry coulis spooned over vanilla ice cream, or simply a fresh fruit salad.
i've even known friends to make strawberry jam and/or preserves. one of those doesn't take much (or any) pectin...or is that freezer jam...? i'm not as well versed in preserving as i want to, or will be, once i have a kitchen again. but when i was young there was only one thing god put strawberries on earth for. well, two. one, was to be eaten right of the plant (as described above) and two, was strawberry shortcake. in my mind there was no need for anything else. i guess i still believe that.

two ways to break a coconut

so i've escaped winter by driving 12 hours south from chicago with my friend janet and her friend kenny, and we have arrived at the house of my friends, brad and kathleen, who are living in star, mississippi where he is the pastor of a methodist church and she is a personal trainer at a gym, thinking about grad school. they moved here 8 months ago from the bay area and the lack of culture and progressive peers and queer community is kinda getting them down. so it's an instant party when we show up this evening. the liquor cabinet gets raided and we all are having great and amusing conversation, playing with the dog and passing a bowl, working on the puzzle that is their amusement on other nights.
so, late in the evening, brad picks up a coconut from the fruit bowl on the table and decides its time to crack it open. he takes out a butcher's knife and kathleen gets really stern and says, 'brad, stop! there is no way i will allow you to try to chop a coconut in half with a butcher's knife.' he looks at her and says, 'honey, i'm not stupid,' and explains that, with the back edge of the knife, not the blade, he will whack the center line of the coconut all the way around and then hit it right on that line and it will fall in two. he swears this is how you do it. we all look a bit skeptical, but he is adamant that he knows this is the best way to crack open a coconut. so we watch and comment, and after he has whacked around the whole circumference, he gets a plate to put the coconut on and makes to hit it right in the middle. janet says, 'you are going to break the plate.' brad looks at her and says with conviction, 'no, im going to crack the coconut.' kenny is quietly mumbling skeptical noises until brad looks him in the eye and says with supreme confidence, 'i can do this.' kathleen is still not happy about it, but brad is on a roll now. before we even know whats happening, he has set the coconut on the plate and hammered down on it with the back of the butcher's knife. the instant of contact is unanticipated, abrupt, loud and beautiful and of course, leaves the coconut intact and breaks the plate into about 8 pieces. the instant directly after is completely silent with the comprehension of what happened, brad's utterly shocked face falling in failure and guilt, the rest of us hanging in anticipation of the aftermath. the very next instant, kathleen starts us all laughing uproariously. somehow she gasps out that it was her grandmother's china and then laughs even harder. we look at her and she says, 'its not the good china, don't worry,' and we all just fall over laughing. brad says, 'i was so sure it was gonna work' and janet says, 'i know, but i don't know why.' we can't breathe for almost 10 minutes and our stomach muscles are aching by the time we stop. kenny says, 'brad, i knew it wasn't going to work, but you somehow had me convinced that you could do it.' we all just shake our heads. kathleen is probably the most amused of everybody. im sure she thinks it was worth one of those plates for the perfect hilarity of that moment.

i believe the reason this situation was so funny was that there were two instants of comedy held together by a moment of anticipation. brad was so effing convinced that it was going to work, and his astonishment when he didn't succeed was the stuff slapstick comedy is made of. that would have been funny no matter what, but there was a one-two punch here. it wasn't just the funny situation, it was also the amusement at the funny situation. because they were both present, because kathleen found the whole thing so funny, especially when it was the family china that was sacrificed, this moment had me holding my stomach and wheezing like i haven't done in years.
i mean, she could have been stern with him after the fact, she could have shook her head at him, she could have said, 'i told you so.' and that still would have been funny in some ways. maybe not in the moment, or maybe just after the fact. but she didn't. however, we all knew that possibility was there, so that moment of anticipation between brad's failure and kathleen's reaction, heightened the potential humor to a fevered pitch. when she laughed the explosion was a letting off of steam built up from the absurdity of brad's belief, the extravagance of his failure and the near miss of confrontation from his wife. and the part about it being her grandma's china was just the extra punch in the gut.
(and not to add comic insult to comic injury, (or to try to get one more punch in there) but the coconut, when we finally broke it on the concrete floor of the garage, was rotten.)

snowy nights

Zip-zopping in snowpants, knit hat pom pom bouncing, puffy snowbooks tromping thru 4 inches on the ground, eyelashes blinking falling flakes out of the way, mittens sweeping accumulation from tops of fences, cars, and bushes, making snowballs meant for tree trunks. The mouth-covering muffler condences, freezes, melts and remelts with each hot, wet breath till its stiff and drippy. Peripheral vision is nonexistent because the hood is pulled tight, making turns a full torso swivel. Toes can still wiggle, but the tips are unfeeling. Fingers are so cold they are hot and stiff.
But, it has been a good day. The snowball war at johnny's house was epic and ultimately triumphant, the forts constructed for the event were soundly built and well placed, the teams fairly matched. The snow is perfect for packing—just wet enough to hold itself in a tight sphere, but not so wet that once turned into a projectile, it would hurt on impact. The light has just now faded, the blues coming out on the snow-covered houses, trees and yards. Shadows dont get black this time of year, just deep navy blue.
Its almost dinnertime. This thought gets feet moving a bit faster to make the blood flow more to all the parts that have gotten wet and chilled and are headed towards frost bite. Also, to speed up arrival home, where it will be warm. And dry. With hot liquids and warm hugs immanent.
Entrance into the back yard shifts the color scheme from shades of blue and white to splashes of yellow from the kitchen window, and orange shadows of people crisscrossing the pools of light. The desire to decipher the identities of these flitting forms arrests progress to the back steps, the last moment in the frosty night savoured, the anticipation of the inundation of physical and emotional warmth heightened by proximity to its source. Access to sensation has been shut down for hours, both by cold and reaction to it, but in a few moments all 5 senses will be alive to all that is comforting and safe. This weather is killing cold, but there will not be a casualty to it here, tonight. That knowledge, not conscious, but felt deep in the gut—the belief that all bouts of severe weather have their end around the family table, is precious and remembered with gratitude long past childhood.

let it...

it snowed this weekend. Maybe 3 inches. Its the first snow of the season, and my first 'first snow' in years. I was driving to have drinks with a friend when it started, and it smelled like rain. Smelled like wet concrete in summertime, but it was chilly and the snow was gonna start sticking really soon. And it just came down with a purpose for the next couple hours. We were sitting at a table far from the front windows, and yet the conversation was punctuated with exclamations like 'wow, its sure coming down' or 'man, thats pretty.' as much as we complain about the winter weather here in chicago, we are all pretty enamored with snow when its happening. I mean, no one wants to have to dig their car out of a space the snow plows have buried, and the grimy dark grey piles of city snow that accumulate are nowhere near good looking, and everyone worries about slipping and cracking their heads open until they have been able to retrain themselves to utilize their icy-sidewalk-shuffle at the approapriate times. However, we also spend a good amount of time talking about the different kinds of snow—tiny sparkles, large clumps of fluffiness, and all the sizes in between, the kind that will prolly only fall for 20 minutes, the kind that can go all night, the kind that makes you feel you are in a snowglobe—as well as our favorite snowy sights: an inch of snow piled up on every single branch (no matter how small) of all the barren trees along a street, snow angels left by small people in a yard, a spruce tree dropping a branch-load of snow cuz it was too heavy to hold up, watching snowfall from a skyscraper, seeing an outdoor xmas light-studded garland blanketed in snow, a group of kids having a snowball fight on their way home from school, the cityscape shifting from drab shades of grey into the dramatic high contrast of wet stone and brick and concrete against new snow.
Kids in this climate are very aware of the properties of 'good' snow for different activities. the exact perfect snowfall for catching a flake on your tongue, or making snow angels, or sledding, or packing perfect snowballs, are all different. The powdery stuff wanted for skiing and sledding is not wet enough to pack into a snowball or snowman. The tiny shimmery flakes that build up into a blanket so inviting for snow angels are nowhere near as good as the big clumps of snow globe snow for catching on a tongue. This is well known information in the younger set.
And the older kids (those of us who can drive) know the dangers of a freezing rain before a snowfall in creating the perfect skidding conditions. I have seen that kind of storm have its way with all kinds of vehicles on I-80, landing hundreds of them in the ditch on the side of the road. Ive seen it tear limbs off of trees with the weight of the ice and wet snow combined, or bend entire trunks of lithe thin birches over into arches where the top branches brush the ground near the roots. There is nothing quite as awe inspiring as surveying the destruction that one silent nighttime snowfall can do to a sparsely treed landscape (my small midwest college campus being an ideal example). Nor is there anything quite as startling as walking along a snow-hushed, tree-lined avenue on the peaceful afternoon after a storm only to have a tree branch ring out like a shot as it finally gives in and snaps from the weight, dumping a load of snow onto the sidewalk, feet from where you stand.
I remember one winter when I was in grade school, the snow came before the freezing rain, leaving a layer of ice on top of a six inch fall of snow. I was small (and lightweight) enough to, if treading carefully, walk—almost skate—over the ice without falling thru into the snow. Until i found a weak spot. Then i'd crash through and be up to my boot top in snow. It was a fun challenge to stay perched on the ice above. My brother and I took our sweet time getting home that day. We pretended we were trappers up north with snowshoes on, and we were being followed and couldnt leave evidence of where we'd been. We walked from the bus stop at the far end of our block to our house, leaving only about 10 footprints each scattered along the trail, but it took us a good half hour.
Ive missed this weather, living in seattle. Everyone thinks im kinda crazy for prefering bitter, dry cold of the midwest to the damp chill of the PNW. They forget that chicago winters have snow and sun (and efficient central heating) whereas the higher temperatures in seattle are accompanied by lower levels of sun. and whats the point of being cold if you arent going to get the fun of playing in the snow? I have caused myself to get ill before just to spend a whole afternoon building a fort that would ensure snowball war triumph, only to be made to come inside due to darkness and chill before anything more than minor skirmishes could be launched. Ive walked in the house stripping off mittens then gloves, boots and multiple pairs of socks, snowpants then jeans then long underwear, jacket, sweater, turtleneck and undershirt, finding each one of these items to be wet in most places, trying to run a not-very-hot bath that wouldnt make my extremities scream out in pain, and thought that every last bit of on-the-way-to-frostbitten agony was worth it.
Playing in the snow is what makes winter bearable. Take that away, take those days when the sun bouncing off the snowfall enough to make you squint like you are at the beach away, and you have nothing but crappy weather, bad insulation, and depression. Seattle winter is not winter and not fun. The greige gets into your bones and your brain and under yours skin and there is nothing redeeming to it. Having to mow the lawn in march is no consolation, it just makes me angry. (however, check back with me in the springtime, and ill be singing a different tune. Seattle knows that season far better than chicago. I only ever had a passing acquaintance with it until I moved west. Now its my pet.)
but I digress. So I will leave you with this:

mister bluebird on my shoulder

ive been running around like a chicken with my head cut off for a week now, especially this weekend trying to not sleep at the theatre and taking on props duties, lugging myself and tons of stuff back and forth from OP, and you have prolly noticed that i havent had time to write much at all during this time. i have, however, found moments to notice things i want to write about, and one of those moments was yesterday as i gathered my plethora of bags off the window seat in my parents dining room and looked up at the window for a second. and there on the windowpane was the bluebird. i quick took a picture of it so i wouldnt forget to tell you about it(so many things jumbled in my head these days i forget at least 5 of them at a time).
its not much, just a blue glass bird to sit in a windowsill and have the sun glint off of. but it used to live on the windowsill in my grandma's nursing home room, and tho mom doesnt remember its existence before that, i am almost positive grandma had it in the kitchen in the house on pine street in seymour, indiana. this is the house my grandma and grandpa fox had built when they got married and then raised my mother in. its the house that we went to visit grandma in where there were always cookies in the cookie jar and little bottles of coke in the fridge and all the other joys of being at grandma's. i could draw a floorplan of this house, i could reconstruct every room, the feeling of each one, why i loved being there. the skeleton key that locked the basement door, the chinese checkers board in the front hall closet, the marble hearth in front of the fireplace where we used to burn pine cones dipped in chemicals that would flare green and red and blue, the lamps, the tables, the pictures on the wall (one was my mom's first communion glam shot), the tall antique bed i slept in, the cut glass bowls in the dining room cabinet, the turquoise ceramic fixtures in the upstairs bathroom. i remember the games we played with the central heating ducts in our bedrooms, being taught how to sew in the living room, listening to bing crosby's christmas album on the record player in the attic bedroom, playing croquet on the big grassy lot next to the house, rollerskating in the concrete basement, thanksgiving dinner around her table which always had homemade noodles in broth and white gravy for the turkey and a birthday cake for her when nov 23rd fell on a thursday.
the oddest thing about grandmas house was the fact that she had a blue and green kitchen with blue and green carpet. yep. carpet in the kitchen. i never understood. they must have redone it in the 60's or something. the colors were loud and the patterns on the floor and walls were big and busy. there were owls on the walls as big as my head in royal blue and sea green. but then there was this beautiful little bluebird. i think he lived on the window above the sink, the one you look out of while doing the dishes. right near the little ceramic dish grandma put her rings in so she wouldnt lose them in the dishwater. i always loved this little bird who looked so sweet set against the green of summer, the gold of fall or the white of winter out the window. i have no idea where she got him originally, but he was always there watching over all of us as grandma made dinner or dessert or poured iced tea (just a little sweet) or opened cokes (coke was a big thing at grandmas house). and seeing him on a windowsill reminds me of all those wonderful times.

i still have a hard time with the fact that our family doesnt own that house anymore. grandma sold it when she moved into the nursing home in '91, but she took bluebird with her. i remember when we went to visit her in her new room, and i saw him on the window there too, so glad that at least one thing still felt like grandmas house in this sterile place she had moved. it ended up being a great thing for her, she had never learned to drive so she was so much closer to the action at the nursing home, having people to eat with all the time, just having to walk down the hall for the nightly cut-throat euchre game. but bluebird was a reminder of the old house, the happy times we shared there, and the love that my grandma steeped each brick and board and inch of space in during the 50+ years she lived there. now that my grandma has passed away bluebird lives on the dining room window at my parents house, next to the wall with the picture of grandma's house as it was back in the day. seeing him sitting there still brings back the feeling of well-being that always engulfed me in that house and being around grandma generally, the feeling of being loved so very much and that love being manifested in the food i was fed, made by her hands.
creating this feeling is something my mother is incredibly good at as well. admittedly, she had the best teacher ever. seeing that little window-sitting bluebird yesterday, knowing the little cub, alex fox vanek, was coming over for dinner with the family, and witnessing mom make tomato sauce and chocolate pie in preparation, i was made aware of how beautifully the tradition is being passed down. and even though i was too busy with the show to be there at the table with them, maybe alex saw mr. bluebird and had that same feeling of well-being which meant that both grandma fox and ray van fox were there in spirit.

crossworld

ever seen the movie wordplay? not surprised if you haven't, (but its really good). its about my mom's favorite person, will shortz, the editor of the new york times crossword puzzle. she has been doing the nyt crossword puzzle since since he was made the editor of it (1993) and it has been a standard part of my family life for years. she used to only do the sunday crossword and work on it all week on her commute to work, but now that she is retired, and my parents get the times daily, she has been doing each day's puzzle every week. actually, thats not even true anymore. since she has been in continual practice, she doesnt even deign to do the monday or tuesday--they are a waste of her time. cuz, unlike anyone who does these puzzles competitively, she likes to sit with the challenging ones that take her most of the day to accomplish. and then she goes on the crossword blog that she reads and checks her answers and learns about other crossword solvers opinions and hangups and such.
which means i get to do the easy ones. and having been taught by a true aficionado, i feel pretty good when i can get the monday done in a half hour. (of course, rex parker, king of the crossworld, gets it done in 2-3 minutes. for reals.)
but i would much rather work on the puzzle with my mom. since we have been in high school at least, she has given up on it for a time (always to come back to later) and thrown it across the table to one or the other of her children and said, 'see if you can get any of it.' and not in a challenging way, but in a i-give-up-and-maybe-a-pair-of-new-eyes-will-see-something-im-missing sort of way. also, sometimes there are pop culture references she doesnt know. (just like how i never know the more erudite old school film greats or 1960's hall-of-famers). i feel like will shortz edits the puzzle to include clues for trivia buffs as well as word play artists, scholars as well as sports fans, people of the younger generation as well as the older. put all those types together and you have my family. so between the 5 of us, we can usually get it done.
we kids learned at an early age that the first rule to being a part of this combined effort was that our usual sloppy handwriting was verboten in 'mom's crossword' (she is still the primary solver, the curator of the event of solving it, bringing in the experts on this or that at her whim), and the second was writing over the number in any of the boxes. man, all of us have caught hell for that at some point in our lives, and we didnt soon forget it. but, once following the rules, each of us has taken a bit of pride in knowing something mom hadnt gotten, or having a corner 'fall' (which means you get enough things filled in that the rest of the crosses are self evident, all of a sudden) when we were the one with pen in hand. (oh yes, it always has to be in pen. using pencil is not done in my family.) ive looked at finished crosswords lying around the house (usually the sunday) and can tell by the handwriting whose aid was enlisted when. except my dad's. he only works on a consulting basis. never have i seen him lift up a pen to enter a word, but he is the go-to guy for most sports and old movies clues. at least half of my knowledge of sports history has happened around the table with a crossword puzzle laid out in front of us. many a dad-answer is accompanied by a story of how he happened to know it.
the fun thing about staying at my parents house when i come thru chicago is that now, as an adult, i get to be a crossword puzzle 'artist in residence'. when mom leaves the puzzle lying around for a few hours before going back to it with fresh eyes, she not only allows me to have looked at it and fill in what i can, she expects and even encourages it. she will say, 'did you look at the puzzle today?' if she is stuck, and sometimes even when shes not. because on wednesdays she takes the puzzle with her to work, she has given me her login info for nytimes.com so i can do it myself online. then, when she gets home, we compare notes, tho she has always gotten more done than me. sometimes she will have already gotten a thursday puzzle done by the time i have a chance to look. then she will apologize for not waiting, but not as if she was really sorry. and i dont expect her to either wait for me to look at it or be sorry that she didnt. i know my place. its still 'mom's crossword' after all.
because i have a 'completionist' penchant in me i have a hard time honoring the last rule of 'mom's crossword', which is that she never looks anything up. unless, of course, she has admitted defeat and just wants to figure out the rest of the empty boxes for fun. however, there is a tacit agreement that if we are both really stuck and i cave and look something up, she wont ask where the answer came from. i dont get to this point until ive been in despair for quite some time, and usually i ask permission. its still 'mom's crossword after all. and i dont wanna be banned from working on it.
i guess i could always do the one in the trib, but, being my mothers child i have a bit of disdain for anything not nyt. puzzle snobbery runs deep in our family. none of us wants to admit to mom that we might do the odd redeye or reader puzzle, tho i know at least a couple of us do (me included). its just to keep our hand in, not for any kind of challenge, you see. ;) its like playing solitaire on the computer with the deck only flipping one card, just so you can have the feeling of accomplishment that comes from winning (im guilty of that too).

intermission

(missed posting this last night due to... well, honestly, due to the consumption of about a bottle of roditis wine)
i just realized ive made it halfway thru the month. and some of the stuff ive written (not just posted from previous writing sessions) im kinda proud of. i know this blog is a bit all over the place, and since ive been working on a show, is often about theatre, but i hope those who read it frequently are enjoying it. please, feel free to comment on any of the posts, dialogue/feedback helps motivate me to write more and better.
today is tuesday, and almost every tuesday im in chi-town these days, i try to get together for at least a drink with my best friend from high school, kayt (kate, now that shes not a teenager she spells it normally--i still think of her as with the 'y' tho, i see it in my minds eye in her handwriting). anyway, she also was in theatre in high school, also went to college in iowa, also came back to OP/chicago after graduation and she also attempted teaching for a time before deciding it wasnt for her. we have been friends for 17 years this winter and have become family to the extent that every year i spend part of christmas night at her house, playing games around the dining room table with her family, all of whom i know and love.
now tonight, since we havent gotten to see each other in a while, we will go out to dinner to catch up. this is a standard thing as well. there was a time that started when we moved back from college and spanned (on and off) until i moved to seattle, that we prolly went out to dinner on average once a week. and always to the same place. our visits to this same restaurant have become such a habit that when we set up the dinner date for tonight we only had to decide on a time. there was no need to mention that the place will be, of course, papaspiros.
this restaurant has been our place for close to ten years at this point. the owner *loves* us and has proposed to each of us multiple times, his brother, the head waiter, is our buddy and confidant (and also comes on to us often), the busboy that was there for years and years was our best friend, and every single waiter that has worked there is 1) astonishingly attractive 2) a huge flirt and 3) incredibly good at tavli (a greek version of backgammon).
we would go to have dinner and share a bottle of wine and dish about our lives, as well as flirt shamelessly with the waiters. (you must be aware of the fact that this was the most girlie time of my life. ive had a friend describe me as 'boy crazy' during that period. tho it was a fallacy, i understood where they got the impression. i actually wore skirts back then) we were there so often that spiro, the owner, couldnt help but get to know us. (he had to cater to the regulars, especially when the regulars are two cute young women.) from that point on we would get at least one free round of drinks with our meal, and we would stay all evening. at some point we were close enough friends with everyone that we no longer counted as customers. we would stick around till closing and then go down into the bar with whoever was working that night and play tavli and drink till late. they taught us how to be good at backgammon, sort of all of them at once, crowding the board and giving advice, counting the dice and their moves in greek, keeping each other honest when they tried to cheat us...we got good enough for it not to be a teaching moment every time one of us played, they would actually have to concentrate so that we didnt end up beating one of them.
the time that we were really heavily involved there was when i was living a 'stumble home' from the restaurant and used it like my living room. this was also the time that kayt and i each made out with at least one of the waiters if not more (i think tasso might be the only boy we have ever both been involved with). and yes, they were pretty, but it was just a really fun group of guys to hang out with, and they were all really good at their jobs. the first time i noticed tasso it was because he opened a bottle of wine so beautifully. not in a showy way, in a very capable and adept way that was full of nonchalant, everyday brilliance. his were the kind of hands you enjoy watching, and they were good at a plethora of things. (not to mention they happened to be attached to a person with the most gorgeous face i have prolly ever seen in my life who actually made me shiver with desire and even just recently inspired kayt to use the phrase 'raw sex' in describing him). but aside from that, he was a fantastic waiter and just the opening and pouring of our wine that night made me wax eloquently on the simple pleasure of watching someone do something well. doesnt matter what it is, if yer good at it, i would love to watch you do it and if you enjoy doing it, that just makes it all the more fun to watch. this is more than partially why i loved going to spiro's place, because everyone there was remarkably good at what they did and most of the time very much enjoyed doing it.
it helped augment the enjoyment for them, and for us, that the waitstaff was such a close family. aside from the fact that half of them were related to at least one other person that worked there (i mentioned that spiro and yanni are brothers but also spiro's son sammy helped out, and their cousin's son georgie was there on and off. and tasso's brother pambo also worked there--he was our favorite), they really loved hanging out together. and we got to be a part of the crew for a while, getting to see all of them the way they were as people after they were done working for the night. yes, they were still our waiters (tho it came to feel like going over to a friends house for dinner), and yes they were very good at their jobs (which was fun to see and was like we were hanging out with our friends while they were at work), but no, that did not define them (to themselves or to us), because we got to see them for who they were as people. especially cuz almost all of them were from greece or nearby--albania, cyprus, turkey--and they would tell us about their lives there and how they felt about the differences they experienced here. it was really a great community to get a glimpse into, to have the honor of being a part of even, for the time that it existed.
cuz its a lot different now, only spiro and yanni are still there from the time we were regulars. i mean, we still walk in and get kisses and hugs and 'how are you, where have you been baby, i love you so much'-es and it feels like home to sit down at whatever table we want, order a bottle of the greek blush wine--roditis--that we always drink, spend a while ignoring the menus before ordering what we always get, and hanging around until just before closing when spiro will sit and gossip with us, buy us at least one more round of wine (if not three) and treat us like we arent customers. but its not quite the same, and not because there arent any beautiful boys left, but because the family that was the heart of the restaurant has scattered to the four winds, many of them going back to their homes on the mediterranean, some just moving on. its still a good restaurant with a good waitstaff and really good food, its just that for me it has lost a bit of that same joy of watching someone do something so well that its become the most natural thing in the word. that thing that makes it great.

kitchen time

Every friday my parents babysit my nephew during my sister-in-law's school day. The other days of the week she has a childcare situation set up, but on fridays, its off to the grandparents house he goes. Which he loves. And which, staying at my parents house right now, I also love. I reap the benefits of seeing my bitty fox cub without the responsibility of having to feed and change him, make sure he takes naps when he gets fussy and keep him happy for 8 hrs straight. I just get to stop in the kitchen and make faces at him and pick him up and squeeze him for a bit and then head to work. Yesterday, I was free until noon and got to have most of the morning with 'lil toots' (pronounced with the short u of 'put') who loves to spend time on the floor of the kitchen playing with tupperware while gramma barb baked multiple cakes and other baked goods for different events this weekend. My mom is taking the role of gramma very seriously. I think alex wasnt more than a day old when she was already in the kitchen baking cookies. I reminded her it would be more than a year before he could eat them and she said, 'yes, but the parents of our little one will need to fortify themselves, wont they? They deserve gramma's cookies too...'
she comes by it honest, tho. My grandma fox was an amazing baker and I dont think there was a moment we spent in her house that the cookie jar was empty. It was always on a low shelf in the kitchen and we checked it the moment we arrived. I mean, after we hugged and kissed grandma, of course. Cookies, 6oz coke bottles and sugary cereal. That was how we were spoiled at grandma fox's house.
The cookies and coke will continue on to the next generation from my mom to our sweet pea (sugary cereal has always been off limits in my parents house and I will throw a fit if they loosen that prohibition for the grandchildren).
The thing about seeing alex play around on the floor of the kitchen (the same one I played on) while mom baked, was how strongly it brought back memories of cooking with my mom when I was little. Bigger than the peanut, but not by too much. I was 'mom's little helpers' in the kitchen early. She had a tiny apron I wore and the way the kitchen was set up at the time there was a little corner of counter with the fridge right up next to it so she could stand facing on side of the corner and work while I sat on the other side with cabinets to my right, the fridge to my left and mom's right hip directly in front of me. It was the perfect position from which to learn how to cook. And just to sit and babble at mom while she worked or ask a thousand questions and have her explain every single thing she was doing and why. It was from this position I learned by osmosis how to make cookies and pies and muffins and bread and watched her make dinner countless times. It was my alone time with mom. Being a middle child made it hard to feel like i was ever not one of a crowd, so the times I got to spend alone with either parent were really precious. And part of me knew that a lot of why I got to have this was that I was the only girl child. Not that the boys didnt take their turns in the little cooking alcove with mom, watching her every move, enjoying the time with her and tasting whatever she was making, but I think my tenure of having mom's cooking moments with me was akin to an apprenticeship more than my brothers'. It was somewhat apparent to me that because I was the female progeny, the family recipes needed to be passed down to me, and I was the one who would make the most use of the knowledge of how to make the perfect pie crust. Which im not denying, I use that recipe and technique often and am very grateful for it. But I feel bad the boys didnt get as much learning around the culinary things in life and in our family as I did. Im the one who knows how to make manicotti shells (and thats only because my mom sat her mother-in-law down and got the recipe out of her years ago so someone would know). There has been a time in my life where I resented this socialization, and then a time when I felt bad that the boys didnt get as much of this instilled in them, and now, I think, I am just really glad someone in the family knows these things. And if the boys wanna know later on when we are the oldest generation hanging around in the living world, they can ask. Or if their spouses or children wanna know, and didnt get the opportunity to learn it directly from gramma barb, (tho I hope to god they do, cuz there is nothing like it, I gotta tell you) at least one of us will know.
Maybe this is stupid, to think this way. To put a lot of emphasis on how the older generation did something. Cuz I dont cook like my mom at all. She says 'if you can read, you can cook,' which I think is mostly true, but I have never followed a recipe exactly in my life and feel the need for substitution and improvisation a lot in what I do. And I dont bake like her either cuz I am always (at least attempting to be) making vegan baked goods which turns a lot the rules she taught me on their heads. So why is it im so hung up on things like pie crust and kentucky colonels (the best candy out there, made at christmas time with a bourbon-soaked pecan a the center of a fondant coated in chocolate) needing to be done just like grandma and gramma? I dunno. Because it brings me back to a time I was so sure of grandmas love that I got so I didnt even have to look in the cookie jar to know it was full as well as a time I was so safe in the corner of the counter being trusted with the family secrets and surrounded by the smells that meant home and food and love, all of which has become the definition of mother to me. And if I can help transfer those feelings of love and trust and safety to my family's next generation, im all for it.

book lust

"i spend lots of winter days with books. i cant resist them. writers are writers because they love to read. if i read two or three books every week i couldnt live long enough to read thru all the books i own. but that doesnt keep me from buying more." --poet Ted Kooser from Local Wonders

the only schooling i have had since high school was four years of undergrad at a small liberal arts college in the middle of iowa where i became and english major with unofficial (or unfinished) concentrations in theatre and environmental studies. which means the highest degree i hold is a BA in english literature.
now, english majors become english majors because they love to read. it was a toss up for me my first year at grinnell when i looked thru the course catalog between english and biology, but when i noticed that all the bio classes were on the micro level (instead of a macro, environmental scale) and every english class had stuff i couldnt wait to dig into, i knew. ('i knew it like you know about a good melon...') so i spent my four years of college reading books. books that i would have picked up during vacations even if they hadnt been assigned. books that were all chock full of stories, not theories; fiction, not fact; books that would take me imaginative places, not wherever you go when you use critical thinking skills, like we were supposed to be taught at this school where they teach you to think (the new buzzword is 'inquiry-based' learning).
but yeah, i just read books. stories. i mean, some of them were hundreds of years old, and therefore i guess i got a little culture, and my hard-on for 'willy the shake' grew to epic proportions, so now i can be called a true snob. but really, i just read books. which is what i did my entire childhood and formative years too. bury your nose in a good dickens or bronte or faulkner even, and you can stop thinking about anything relevant to your life or your future. which is definitely what i was looking for in college. people would ask me what i was going to do with the degree and without fail they ended the question with 'so are you gonna teach?' which was never my plan. ever. i was gonna read and that was it. and maybe i could figure out how to get paid to write someday. that was as far as id thought. you see, i had a stick-fingers-in-your-ears-and-sing-loudly sort of approach to my life after graduation. i was happy to just sit and read until they wouldnt let me anymore. but then they made me graduate.
and what, pray tell, (you ask) are you now qualified for in the work force? well, let me tell you. without any training in education, let alone a teaching certificate, about all a BA in english is good for is becoming a bookseller. which is what i did. the summer after graduation i started as a sales assistant at a local bookshop and from there (with the small hiccup of moving to china for a school year and trying my hand at teaching, which i now have proof im not any good at) i moved from bookseller to book buyer (which is just the guy that stocks the store). so when i moved to seattle, the first place i walked into with my resume was a bookstore. and i was a pretty good employee cuz i was more than happy to learn everything i could about the stock.
cuz guess what is so awesome about being a bookseller? you have almost unlimited access to books! its amazing! its easier than the library. and your boss encourages you to take that new novel by your favorite author home for the weekend to read so that you can write a little shelf-talker review card and recommend it to your customers. cuz the other awesome thing about being a bookseller is practically every one of your customers is a person who loves to read too! its so great! i kind of hate capitalism and retail on principle and i had qualms about being the kind of person (in my job) that tried to get people to spend money, but if there is anything on this planet i could endorse spending money on, its books (the only other thing is travel, but thats not really a thing, its an experience). really, i would be better off as a librarian but you have to go to school for a while to be one of those. really, you have to be incredibly educated to work in a library. (which is awesome, if the government of your state can pay you what you deserve to work there, but that doesnt seem to be the case anymore. thanks, W, you non-book-reading buffoon. who on earth believed you could write one? sheesh). libraries were my bread and butter back when i was young. i have never owned as many books as ted kooser, even after years and years of working at bookstores. i only own the ones i know i need to re-read often enough that having them saves me a bit of hassle. cuz libraries are great. the smell and the quiet and the durable bindings and the shelves upon shelves...the fact that once you find an author you like you can usually just have at their entire oeuvre. i did that as a child with so many authors, memorizing the spot on the shelf where dr. seuss, john bellairs, hugh lofting, louisa may alcott and many others resided. and going back time after time, till i had exhausted the supply. i can still see those shelves in my local library where i grew up. i spent hours upon hours there in the summers as a kid, partially because our house didnt have air conditioning and the library did. on the really hot days in july and august my mom and brothers and i would ride our bikes to the library and spend the heat of the day immersed in faraway places and the incredibly hard task of choosing which ones we could bring home with us. my mom was a smart cookie. she knew we would develop a pavlovian response to the library as a comfortable place which i still to this day respond to. every new town i go to i first want to find the library and spend a day in there to get the feel of it on my skin. and my comfort level around books has obviously helped decide my half-hearted attempt at a career in my post college years.
cuz bookstores are just like really new libraries, with a fee to take out the book instead of for returning it late. i still to this day think there is something really luxurious and decadent about being around all the brand new books in a bookstore. the lush colors, the new bindings, the soft, unbent covers, its a sensual pleasure i never became immune to. maybe its because i had gotten so used to stiff library bindings and the cellophane jacket covers and forgot for a time how gorgeous books can be. there is a trend in the book making industry right now to make a paperback book so smooth and silky and pliable in the hands that it kinda makes me hot. im not quite joking. and the shelves upon shelves of stories at ones fingertips is such an amazing promise of one adventure after another (whether its from plot, thought, relationship or description, its all an adventure to me). someday, when i have a house, i will have a library. or at least a study/office lined with bookshelves so i can have that feeling of a thousand other worlds surrounding me, just waiting for me to dive into them. any time im in a room with bookshelves (which is only ever in other peoples houses these days) i my eye is drawn to them to see what kind of characters have populated my hosts brain. and what possibilities there might be to occupy my mind while im staying there, of course. cuz as a reader and a writer, i find getting inside a new characters head to be really one of the most pleasurable things i can think of. yum. maybe thats why i have a hard time actually finishing the stories i write, cuz i dont want my characters to leave me. there is always more to explore there, i just know it.

blog fatigue

just over a week and ive hit a wall. trying to write a blog on a day im working is kind of ridiculous for my brain. also, i think i wrote and received enough emails to kill a horse, all with people speaking into my ear. makes me go a bit loopy. its nothing a couple of tv mysteries cant solve, tho. the new love of my tv life is the show sherlock. it really is a perfect adaptation/bringing up to date of my favorite mystery stories ever. if youve never gotten into sherlock holmes, now is the time. go here to watch the first (and only until next fall) three episodes. a study in pink is the first. you only have a month from sunday so hop to it, the game is on.
so here it is, almost midnight. but i dont want to pawn off another random something i wrote a while back on you all again today. (by the time i finish it will be tomorrow and ill have to start all over again...argh) enough.
since i cant get him out of my brain, ill just bring you folks into the conversation. less about holmes and more about his home: london. i love that town with a passion. i lived there for four months the fall of 1999. it was my 'study abroad' semester and while my friends were going to india and africa and latin america, i went to the city i had spent so much time in already, but only in my head. remember, i was an english major with a penchant for shakespeare and theatre. it took until i was out of college to really delve deeply into american literature because i had spent all my high school and college years reading brit lit. i had read so many books and plays set in england generally and london specifically in my life by the time i visited the city, a very many of them written before the turn of the last century, (including every sherlock holmes story ever published) that i felt i knew my way around before id even settled into my flat. which ended up being a fantastic delusion because a kid who grew up in chicago, (where there are arrow straight streets that run for miles and miles and its a perfect grid--thanks chicago fire--of north/south and east/west streets and has a numbering system radiating out in each cardinal direction from state and madison, every block a new hundred, every 8 blocks a mile) was going to by definition get horribly lost in the nest, the warren, the tangle, the maze of streets that makes up the city of london. it is disordered and chaotic, utterly random in its numbering, and completely baffling in its classification of streets, avenues, lanes, roads, places, squares, circles, circuses, terraces, gardens, vales, and mewses. i promise, each and every one of those names is attached to a roadway of a different size and shape than its fellow, on the map of london. there is no end to the dead ending, twist and turning, roundabouting, jogging, zig and zagging, and every shift of direction, no matter how slight, changes the name of the street. i could walk from my flat to school via two routes. one, was down edgware road to the main street, which was oxford street, head east, and then up tottenham court road. took about 35 minutes. or, i could go as directly east as i could from my flat (instead of the down/up part) and, if i didnt get lost, cut 5-10 minutes off my walk and traverse a roadway that changed names 6 times between edgware and tottenham court. this is not an exaggeration, look it up yourself. and this is why no resident of london is without a copy of the 'a to z' (pronounced a to zed) which is basically a map of london in book form with an index of streets in the back. (it figures prominently in the second of the new sherlock episodes, updated from the almanac used for a similar purpose in the original story.)
for those of you who have never run across a mews (pronounced, at least by the american tongue, like 'muse'), or havent read sir arthur conan doyle as deeply as i, i will attempt to explain what that particular kind of roadway, or passage, is. if a square is a small (1 block in length per side) fenced in, private park (see the movie notting hill for an illustration) with a road that goes around all four sides (all the sides of this square-shaped road have the same name, like grosvenor square) with houses facing this road all around it (with their numbers starting in one corner and working their way up around the square back to the start so the lowest and the highest are a the same corner), then a mews is the miniature, back alley version of that. it was originally the place behind the grand houses on the square where you pulled in the carriage and found the stables to leave the horses. so, like an alley with garages, except when carriages went out with the automobile, the stables got turned into apartments, and people moved in. so its like having an apartment that looks out onto a courtyard. its rare (as far as i know) for a mews to be a through street. i always saw them as dead ends. and, if you care about this sort of thing, its not a very prestigious address to have. there is a great scene in a sherlock holmes story called, i think, 'a scandal in bohemia' where he hangs around a mews disguised as a coachman and gets all the information he needs about a certain suspect from the grooms in the stables of her house. its the kind of 'street' you can see and immediately cast your mind back to a time when it made sense to have an alleyway only 6ft wide and with no real turnaround and no exit. one of the thousand things that remind you how very long london has been a center of civilization and culture. im so very glad i took a history of london class while i was there. did you know there are still places in the city where you can see the original roman wall? the one they built to enclose entire the city back in the 3rd century? (which is now just the small neighborhood called 'the city' east of the west end which is like the loop in chicago, the financial center of london.)
but i digress. london, for someone with plenty of time and a compass, is an exceedingly pleasurable city to walk in. especially if you are willing to get lost. i realized early on in my semester there, if i took the tube anywhere in the first two zones (the smallest of the concentric circles radiating out from the city center used for the pricing of fares) i was doing myself a great disservice of 1) disorienting myself and 2) not allowing myself to see how all the different areas fit together. if i walked from one place to the other i understood the shift from neighborhood to neighborhood and realized things like the fact that those two tube stops were actually just a long block from each other and not worth the trip underground. the street im thinking of, between the embankment stop and the charing cross stop, quickly became my favorite one to walk down in london (or the part of london i knew, chiefly the west end). its called villiers street and one end opens on to the strand right near charing cross station and st. martin in the fields church (the one whose steps were famously recorded by edward r. murrow during an air raid in the blitz, he held the mic down to the steps to get the sound of londoners walking (walking!) to the air raid shelter in the crypt below), the other end not quite entering onto embankment road. there is a bridge over the thames right there, only for the train into charing cross and foot traffic, which gives you a fantastic view of southwark and westminster and the millennium ferris wheel (now called the london eye and which at the time was still being built). the thing about getting on that bridge is you have to do it from the second floor. sounds funny to think of a street as having a second floor, and it really was built into the building of charing cross station, but it felt as much like a public thoroughfare as the street was, and looked out over this street in the best people-watching fashion. i used to take this route from school, which was right next to the british museum, to the national theatre just over the river (which i did every other week that semester, i lost track of how many theatre productions i saw around town in that time but would estimate around 20). id spend a couple hours walking down charing cross road and stopping in every bookshop i saw, then climb up to my perch on villiers street and watch the commuters coming home from work, passing by the inevitable statue-type street performer at the bottom of the street, until it was time to go to the theatre. thinking back, i dont know if i ever walked on the street-level part of that street. i only ever wanted to be there for the birds eye view of the masses and the quaint little shops. it felt like standing on the bridge over the expressway near my home growing up. like watching a river flow past you. meditative and yet interesting, cuz noticing how very similar yet slightly different the people were was a fun game, the subtle variations in london working professional garb, almost invariably black and complete with the standard issue satchels or briefcases and the long umbrellas, some with their commuting shoes on--vastly different from their office shoes, cuz they never match the outfit. then every once in a while a splash of color, catching one's eye just like an autumn leaf getting borne down a stream would.
hm. seems to be a pattern of thought for me to write about, the places i can be alone with my thoughts, watching movement. wonder if thats to do with the fact that writing is such a solitary art, its another place in which im good at being alone.

home-free to home-base in a gajillion 'easy' steps

this evening, my younger brother seth and I are going to have a business dinner where we get together and talk seriously, man to semi-man, about buying a house together in chicago. Most likely in the Logan Square neighborhood of which he is already a resident. For some reason, in the past 6 months, the number of houses that have been foreclosed on in that area has gone from no more than 50 to over 300, at least according to the real estate website im wont to frequent these days. Now im not so sure that trying to purchase a house in foreclosure is the best idea out there, but im optimistic that if those properties become bank owned, they will be sold at a price closer to the amount left on the mortgage than to the amount they would have sold for even last year. The plan is to start researching and get a real estate agent who's willing to help look, and find a house near the blue line that is a 2-flat (or a duplex for non-chicagoans) for $100,000 (or less) so the mortgage, when locked into a 4% interest rate for 30 years, is manageable. The thing that will make this a two person job is the property taxes. on a house with so much square footage in the city we are looking at $5000 a year, most likely. However, if we have a house with 2 units (one for each of us) and each unit has 2 bedrooms, and either of us ever wants to have a roommate, then 'rent' for each of us living there would be obscenely cheap. The thing is, tho, finding a house at this price usually means finding one in pretty bad shape. I am more than happy to put in the sweat equity this sort of place requires, tho. im looking for a project to keep me busy and settled in one place for a while. Again, the eternal optimist in me says that working on a place, somewhat slowly as I can figure out how to fix it up and amass the money to do it, would be really fun. Seth of course referenced the movie 'the money pit' with tom hanks which is hilarious if you dont own a house and spirit breaking if you are thinking about buying a fixer-upper.
My motives for buying a house are mostly based on the two parts of my personality that have the hardest time coexisting and allowing me to stay sane: my host and my traveler. My host, who has been laying dormant for a year and a half now while ive been a non-stop guest, is so very ready to have a place of their own to nest in and be a homebody and have people over all of the time, visitors who need a place to stay, friends coming over for dinner, community events like house shows and game nights and potlucks and crafternoons and book clubs and any other events I can think up. My traveler, who is close to having their fill of my current lifestyle, will soon pop up again, tempting me away from the life my host has created, no matter how wonderful, and convincing me there are more places to see and things to explore and ways of living to experience, which I know I wont be able to resist. But i can at least lessen the difficulty when said situation arises by living in a place that isnt too expensive to be able to pay 'rent' and still have money to travel. Or a place that I could rent out my unit of, know that seth is still there to take care of his share, and go away for a time. Like, spend summers in seattle or berkeley or detroit or nyc or wwoofing somewhere across the globe, or spend a year writing in a garret in paris, or london, or edinburgh, or cinqueterra, italy. (none of these are out of my ken, as I have seriously thought about each of them and only wwoofing have I not had first-hand knowledge of) or simply give myself the amount of time and space I need to sit still in a room by myself, listening to the voices in my head and getting them down on paper in a way that will actually lend itself toward publication, which is a kind of going away in itself.
point being, I could have a place that was always my home that was set up specifically so that I wouldnt have to leave it outright in order to go away for a time. Which would mean I would have a place to come back to (aside from my parents house which at 32 is getting a little silly) that is near the fam (especially the little fox cub mentioned in my previous post who has more to do with my choice of location than im ready to deal with) not to mention all the amazing and lovely people ive known for so long who, by virtue of being midwesterners, are a remarkably loyal bunch, and (so I have been told multiple times already) absolutely love the idea of chicago being my chosen and legitimate home-base. Cuz thats who I am: not a person with a home, necessarily (as proved in my home-free nature these days), but one with a home-base. In fact, I might proffer that as a name for our house. Home base, where the mastermind behind homeroom lives, where recording projects of various kinds are happening in the basement and attic, where sometimes the two hermits in the two units never go outside or see the other one unless one of them remembers to make dinner and thinks to share it, and where sometimes the house is full to the brim with people staying over to catch up, eat up, fix up, store up for winter, share stories, and sing songs, all the while creating something beautiful and just maybe getting it down on paper, film, tape, digital file, canvas, or wall, either for just themselves or to share with others. If you want to be part of my home base, for any length of time, lemme know. Im taking applications now. ;) everyone is welcome to visit, stay, and collaborate; help fix, cook, garden, create; bring along their ideas, energies, plans, projects, productions, and progeny. If I will have visited you in my 2 years of travel, you are required to come stay with me so i can repay you in kind, you have an open invitation. if i havent made it out to see you i apologize and desperately want you to come to me so i can make it up to you. in other words: everyone, anywhere, come. If im there, you are welcome. If im not, you are still welcome. get the keys from seth and make yourself at home.
[of course, this is all contingent on our plans tonight coming to fruition in the next 8 months, and there is a lot that can go awry between a planning dinner and closing, but...] *I want this.* And have for a long time. Just didnt know where or how or when. The best solution I could find is here, in the recession with seth, now. I will let you know how its coming and send out invitations when my host has finally gotten his way.

avuncular ecstasy

warning: this blog is going to be somewhat lofty and dramatic in its praise and awe for a certain very small child. to be transparent about my bias i will let you know now that the little one in question happens to be related to me. this might or might not have anything to do with the choice of language used below, and i beg your patience and critical reading skills to separate fact from fiction, exaggeration from accurate assessment, wild claim from hard truth. (in other words, take everything forthcoming with a grain of salt, but i beg you to withhold judgment till you meet the subject in person.)

my nephew alex is the cutest thing on the planet. now i know you want to say something like 'thats what everyone says about their own family member,' but as my older brother nate (alex's father) has said 'its a fact that he is empirically good looking,' and tho we all laugh at his false modesty, not one of us disagrees. i feel like i have a bit of proof, however. i have traveled all around the country and shown every last one of my hosts a picture of said 'lil toots' (as his grandmother calls him) and each time i have watched my host's face melt into a puddle of admiration and the strong desire to pinch cheeks. its inevitable. allison (alex's mother) talks about walking down the street and having passersby stop to admire the peanut.
it helps that he is also the most good-natured human being under 1 year old known to humankind. he *always* has a smile on his face, he makes up excuses to laugh, he practically forces himself into giggle fits, and he just, by his presence, makes your day brighter. its almost obscene. he is really delighted by everything which makes him a delight to be around. my entire nuclear family believes wholeheartedly that he is 1) a miracle, 2) the most beautiful, 3) the most intelligent, and 4) the most talented child to ever arrive on this planet. and we are happy to bore others with proofs of these claims. we feel this way because 1)he is ours, and 2) he is the first of the next generation to grace our tight little club and we are ever slightly more than giddy at the prospect of being a part of his life. the thing that makes all of us a little crazy is that my brothers and i grew up at least 4 hours away from any aunts, uncles or grandparents and never really knew how it works when the extended family is close enough to be a regular part of your life. my dads brothers and their families were way out in LA, if we got out there once every other year we were doing good. my closest grandparent was my moms mom down in southern indiana and she would come stay with us for a couple weeks a couple times a year so we knew and loved her, but not in a 'this is a constant in my life' sort of way. not like the fact that my parents take care of alex during the allison's workday every friday (shes a teacher and is done before nate) and he knows life in their house and falling asleep and waking up to them like its totally normal. which it is to him. its just so far from any of our understandings of growing up i think we are all still a little shocked at how lucky we are to find ourselves in this position. (i include myself theoretically at this point...see below.)

[at right: tofu all over his face]
all that said because i got to hang out with him yesterday. it was the first time in a month id seen him (which tends to be the standard amount of time between visits these days) and he has grown a lot in that time. not in size or shape, but in dexterity and mobility and perception. he is figuring things out at a rate of at least 5 a day, whether its that reaching for something will get it passed to you, or that when you make a growly roaring sound when you want another bite of banana you get fed and tons of smiles, or that you can get from one place to the other by getting from a sitting position to all fours and then back again, but getting up over one leg and sitting down over the other which accomplishes both a different location and orientation in the process (try it, it works). he is brilliant and amazing and so much fun, but my heart almost broke when i walked into my mom and dads kitchen yesterday morning and he looked up at me with a face that was halfway between indifferent and curious, and all over unrecognizing. cuz this means hes paying attention to the people in his life outside of his mom and dad and he knows them. so the logical conclusion of that is: i am not one of the people in his life. weep for me. this is a tragedy i am having a hard time recovering from. cuz what i dont like to tell people is i was 2,120 miles away when he was born, and i didnt meet him till he was 11 days old. my name does not appear in the home-made 'on the day you were born' book that lists the rest of my family as being excited to meet him that day. i am an awful aunt. uncle. ray ray. (thats the compromise right now between myself and allison, alex's name for me will be ray ray. everyone else is gramma barb, grampa wayne, and uncle seth. itll do for now...) whatever my title, im failing in my role.
and ive realized, even if i settle in chicago to be closer to him (which decision i will be more forthcoming with in a later post) i know myself well enough by now that i know i will not always be able to stay here. the travel bug bit hard more than ten years ago and wont let go. and its the opposite for my brothers, they will never leave chicago. ever. even to travel. i had to beg and plead seth just to come visit me in seattle. so i will always be the one thats away, the one that travels for holidays, the one that is coming home to visit. which on some levels might be to my advantage when alex gets older and threatens to run away to live with ray ray in london for the summer before college to escape the tyranny of his parents, but for now is painful only to me, the little one oblivious to his unfamiliarity with this person that looks vaguely like those people most important to him. which feels unfair, cuz there was a time when he was half as old as now, when he used me as a napping substrate and he knew my smell as one that meant safety.
so this has spurred in me the desire to make my presence in his life known. granted, right now it helps that i will be around for his first thanksgiving, his first christmas, his first birthday (in feb), cuz he is old enough to be paying attention and i wanna be there for all of that. but then ill be traveling for 4 months and might only spend 2 days in chicago that whole time, and well, he might start talking during that period. i will most certainly miss his first steps, and his first words (unless those come soon). im coming to terms with the idea that most of my presence in his young life might be thru sending postcards and pictures and videos. on the train home this concept formed itself into a childrens book entitled 'kisses from ray ray' which was about all the varying ways that a little fox cub named kit gets 'kisses' from a bigger fox, named ray van fox, who travels all over the world and sends these kisses thru the mail or the interwebs or thru other family members or what have you.
sometimes its just a postcard with the symbol of an x and an o on top of each other, like this:
which, coincidentally, ray ray has tattooed on a forearm (does this both look and sound familiar? it should). sometimes ray ray draws one on kits arm, too.
im kinda super excited both about the real-life version of this story, and the possibility of making it into an actual book. problem is, i cant draw worth shit. anyone have ideas for how to illustrate this or want to collaborate with me on it? anyone...? bueller...bueller...?

this is it: life imitates art

this is it: the first day of the rest of my month. my first entry of 30.
wrote this on the 48hr (spanning 3 days and two nights) train from seattle to chicago where i didnt have a book to read, internet access, nor anything but spotty cell phone service. it was a mini writing retreat in and of itself. and now im in chicago and gearing up for a hectic month of stage managing and working and writing. bring it, november!

so im sitting at a table outside joe bar last friday, my last full day in seattle, writing in my journal about the version of hamlet id taken a bunch of people to on wednesday, and how i would direct it were i to ever have that chance, and this person walks up to my table, flashes a bright, blue-eyed smile at me and says 'hi, nice to see you again. im charlie, and you are...?' i respond appropriately, we shake hands. he continues as he sits down in the chair at the table next to mine, 'sorry i was in a weird mood when you first introduced yourself...' i interrupt with 'well i was in a really big hurry, so...' and he proceeds to very naturally get to know me in an easy, charming, open and bright way that feels quite familiar. his eye contact is steady and clear in its desire to connect, his face hovers on the verge of a smile most of the time.
We talk about anything from our art, where we are from, where we live, what gets us up in the morning, to how we both like to write with our left hands backwards, how we share the penchant for writing notes to ourselves with pen on our forearms. He uses his hands to map out the visual nature of possible moves in a chess game, as if he is showing me some fine-tuned choreography, and my whole understanding of how to play opens up. He tries to illustrate the shape of the sculpture series he is working on and I grasp it conceptually, but not visually.
I speak of the end result of a theatre production in the same terms one uses to describe that moment of pure sound when a choir singing exactly in tune can create an overtone, that aural evidence of the whole being more than the sum of the four part harmonies. That Something greater that can always come of collaboration. The phantom note that shows you are right in the sweet spot of your art, your life, (same thing) that can resonate beyond yourselves and your collective efforts and touch others even when it doesnt exist anywhere but within the joining of your separate voices. I say out loud and later write furiously about the fact that this resonating tone, applied to all sorts of moments (Stone soup, loaves and fishes, fermentation, photosynthesis, human evolution, synapse firing memory, a cake, a shared meal, a song, a family, a community, love) is my definition of god.
Our conversation goes far beyond ourselves, and finding the places we resonate as artists is much more fulfilling than learning the specifics of our lives and histories. I basically already knew he grew up in the midwest, just graduated from cornish, does print making, and lives in a large collective house in the cd. None of that matters. Neither does his passing resemblance to someone ive made up. What I found to be revelatory was knowing that he too prefers working collaboratively, and loves being a part of a team, but tho he has dabbled with music, it is visual art, whether drawing, painting, print making or sculpture--each a practice as solitary as writing--that resonates with his soul, blossoms from his perception, feeds his desire to create and anchors him in his life. What I needed most right before ending my month-long writing retreat was to meet another artist that is figuring out how to balance the time they need alone to create and the time they need to connect with friends and community. This is not a rare difficulty for people. Most of us struggle with it. i find if I spend all my time alone I have nothing to write about anymore. I need human interaction to help fill up my storehouse of stories to tell. This is how artist communities get founded. This is why there are writing groups, shared studio spaces, multi-use venues, art schools, coffee shops. This is why I go to joe bar to sit among people and read and write and watch and make up stories and tell stories and meet people or get to know them without meeting them. This is why the month that I will be at rehearsal for paul's show every day I will also be posting a blog to balance things out inside me. And to keep myself in practice.
My new friend charlie gives me his card and a hug upon leaving. We promise to find each other on facebook. I realize how glad I am to know this person. this very separate person from my self (or any of the people occupying my head), but one that is working on some of the same things I am. He truly is someone I should have known. And tho he is almost a decade younger than I, we might be at similar places in our paths, or at least on the same curve of the spiral. close enough to wave, compare notes, and give encouragement.
And in case you were wondering, his stuff is amazing.

conversations are easier when you control both sides

this is a true story and im only slightly ashamed to tell it. here is a little insight into one neurotic writer's mind:
so a couple weeks ago i noticed this cute boy hanging out at my favorite coffee shop, joe bar, and i couldnt stop looking. but this sort of thing happens to people: they see someone who hangs out where they like to hang out and they take notice of him cuz they find him attractive. now, a normal person (if those exist) would most likely say, 'wow, hes cute. maybe i should talk to him.' or 'gosh, hes good looking but im here to do some writing and hes with a friend so ill leave it at that.'
i, on the other hand, find myself totally fascinated with him and let my concentration on my work go slack because im (only somewhat surreptitiously) watching him, without any thought of caring if im noticed or of introducing myself. three times on three different days, always in the evening, this happens. it takes me a while to realize why i cant stop looking over at him, like worrying a loose tooth. its because he looks like a grown-up peter pan. i mean, its also because of the fact that he decides to sit directly in my line of vision every time. hes an artist of some kind (im almost positive he goes to cornish), in all likelihood an actor or musician, (which i 'know' cuz i can see the performative aspect of his interactions with people and his reaction to my gaze), and i think he kinda likes it. of course, because he notices me noticing him, he looks over more frequently than he otherwise would, checking to see if im still checking him out, as if compelled to scratch an itch. im amused by this, but not necessarily encouraged to make his acquaintance. i feel like i already know him at this point. i have made a study of his clothes, his movements, and his manner with people. i feel like i can tell if he likes someone he runs into by his body language. note: im never close enough to hear his voice, but i feel id almost recognize it.
and then this week i see him at the wildrose (it was taco tuesday and i was meeting a bunch of friends who live on the hill) and it changes everything. okay not everything. but it ups the ante. cuz now i wonder if hes queer. before he just looked like someone i should know somehow. now he looks like someone i could potentially date. and thats when i start mentioning him to the friends im drinking with and blowing this thing way out of proportion. before he was just an interesting study, pulling at my imagination like a child pulls on your pant leg for attention. now its a full blown crush. and it gets out of hand enough that he prolly hears me talking about him (hes at the next table for christs sake) and i keep joking about going up to talk to him. he even gives me a perfect opportunity to do so, he takes his time getting his bag from under the table and putting it on right in front of me at the moment that all of our friends have left the vicinity. but he has his back to me and i cant muster the desire to break the fourth wall. cuz right now he is a character in my head. once i speak with him he gets a life of his own. and im not actually ready for that. and thats when i realize its not just that he looks like peter pan, he looks remarkably similar to the vision i have in my head of one of the main characters in a story im writing. this boy could be my robin. ive created a folder on my hard drive of downloaded photos of celebrities that approximate my image of this character, but i havent found an exact likeness that fits right. this boy is extremely close. not quite genderqueer enough in outward presentation, but seeing him here in this queer context, i realize he is one of the closest things ive found. put him in a fishermans sweater instead of a lumberjack shirt, and he would be spitting distance from my robin. its a bit hard to take.
so the next afternoon i happen to be in the neighborhood of joe bar and decide to go sit for a while and write before taking myself out to a movie (nowhere boy, see previous post) and i start mulling over this boy being my main character and how to handle it. and how i really need to introduce myself when i see him next, cuz otherwise im bordering on creepy. but how would i introduce myself to my own creation? so i do that thing where i start thinking up what i would say to him and then i wonder how he would react, so i start to write a scene between the two of us as if i did walk up and say something like, 'you look like this character in my story'. and of course it feels perfectly normal to be putting words into this real live persons mouth because its so like putting words into my characters mouth, and also, a lot easier than actually interacting with him. note: im high on caffeine at this point. im also feeling a little dirty cuz this is basically fantasizing about this person, and amused at myself because the interaction on paper doesnt go particularly well, just as it wouldnt in real life. and at some point i have to stop writing to go to the movie, annoyed that ive completely ruined any chance of ever being able to step up to this real live person and naturally introduce myself. not that knowing him was ever really the goal, its just once you give yourself lines for real life you either deliver them like they were rehearsed, or veer from the script so widely you sound like a moron. (and by 'you' i of course mean me.)
i watch the movie and am inspired by john lennon as a teenager and need to write some stuff down, so i walk back over to joe bar, buy a beer and sit in a corner. and i cant find my fountain pen. its the only thing i write with anymore and i used it in the movie theatre and im afraid i lost it there. so i rush back over, borrow an ushers flashlight, despair, leave my email address with the attendant in case it turns up, and go back to search my bag again, hoping i overlooked it. i had. im so relieved my hands are shaking slightly. ive had this pen since i graduated high school and have logged hours upon hours of writing with it in the last fourteen years. i just got it back into working order two months ago, at the same time my writers block dissolved, and i would prolly have a breakdown if i lost it.
however, crisis averted and boy sighted. had to walk past him on my wild goose chase and now the adrenaline over the pen is spiked with seeing this person i was intentionally writing myself into contact with a couple hours ago. but i go to calm down, drink my beer and write about john lennon reminding me of my thirteen year old self and how neglectful of that young person ive been. i decide on paper to start being more willing to express myself, (ready or not) to be more impulsive and just do things, not merely think about them. and now im high on purpose and passion and living life (not just watching it) and being a writer (not just talking about it) and now i have to leave to walk home and eat something before having drinks with friends in the cd.
at this point i have caffeine, adrenaline, and alcohol, john lennon and my 13 yr old self, robin and my made-up version of this boy all creating a bit of chaos in my head. so before i walk out of joe bar, knowing this is a bad idea and the exact worst moment to do it, with my pulse hard and flushing my cheeks, i stop just behind the boy and tap him on the forearm. he interrupts his conversation, turns around and i look him in the eye and say, 'hi, my name is ray.' i extend my right hand to shake his, which he gives in a somewhat limp-wristed manner just like robin would do and says 'im murmhumurner' in a voice i very decidedly do *not* recognize. and i say, 'trevor?' and he says, only the slightest bit louder and more distinctly, 'charlie.'
and whatever i was holding together, falls apart. 'charlie,' i say, 'its nice to meet you.' and i nod to his friend, adjust my satchel on my shoulder and walk away. not 'you look like someone i should have known once,' not even 'i feel like ive made enough eye contact with you now that you should at least know my name,' not what i actually wrote in my notebook, just 'nice to meet you.' i prolly had a scowl on my face, even. the scene had ended before it began. i am simultaneously proud and disgusted with myself for this. i went right over to the smoke shop nearby, bought myself a zippo and a pack of cigarettes and walked home while smoking a nat sherman. note: im not a smoker. and then i drank enough whiskey at the twilight to feel the need to check my jeans pocket upon waking the next morning for the credit card id used to start a tab. and now im blogging like a maniac.
and this, my friends, i call a success. and none of it has anything to do with that person named charlie. never did.

Consider the considered lobster

living in new hampshire with ro and eli this august really made me think about my food politics and why I am vegan, which was awesome. It meant that I partook in more non-vegan things than normal, because they were still within the parameters that I feel myself keeping now. Namely: can I see with my own eyes that the food is produced locally, sustainably, humanely and hopefully with some love and understanding around the value of life? If so, i'll eat it. Which meant I did things like drink goat's milk from the farm nearby after having met the goats and heard the 13 year old son tell us about them. He was pretty proud even if he professed to hate living on a farm.
In talking with ro about carbon footprints and processes that are bad for the environment I was made more aware than previously of the fact that vegan eating isn't necessarily that much better for the environment if you are eating processed stuff, and not just Quorn fake chicken nuggets, but soy milk and tofu even, which tend to be made from soy beans grown on huge monoculture farms and require a ton of processing—water and energy consumption and such...
all of which I know and have had to let go of on the grounds that 1) I dont really eat that much processed stuff (i've never been that into 'fake meat') and 2) at least i'm not participating in the inhumane treatment, killing, and wasting of animals. I want to never partake in that huge corporate factory farming economy in any way, if I can help it. Which means that, no, I wont eat the 'cage free' eggs from whole foods if they cant tell me what farm they come from, and no it doesn't matter if you bought an organic 'free range' turkey from costco for thanksgiving i'm still not gonna partake. One, 'organic' and 'free range' have somewhat uninspiring meanings these days and two, costco? Really? Can we get any more removed from the sources of our food?
Until I know the owner of the chickens (or they are mine) and can buy a turkey i've seen alive and enjoying life before becoming our dinner, I will refrain, but thank you for the offer.
So, with these thoughts in mind as well as conversations with ro about fishing, its sustainability, and the history of the seafood 'industry' in new england with local guys and their boats out being careful to maintain populations, I decide, if im less than 100 miles from the coast of new hampshire and we can find a local lobster guy, I should prolly test this whole working-within-my-vegan-politics-but-eating-non-vegan thing. Push the envelope a bit past goats milk.
So, we find a roadside store that is owned by the guy who actually fishes the coast and runs the lobsters over fresh and they live in a large, well maintained tank at the store, and we buy 3 chick lobsters (for $5 each!) and take them home to eat. We have done a bit of research and decide to steam them in a big pot, which is supposed to be tastier than boiling, but I want to kill them quickly first instead of making them die slowly of heat. Cuz I hate the idea of boiling them alive anyway, but boiling is one thing, and steaming them to death seems like quite another.
And I know everyone says lobsters dont feel pain like we do, and I believe that. They dont feel pain like humans because we have evolved to a point of self-consciousness which means we tend to also have mental anguish attached to our pain. But crustaceans, tho they dont have the same kind of nervous system we do, still have some kind of basic way of feeling stuff so that they can get along in the world, and all living things react to a sensation that will be detrimental to themselves in order to survive. Even plants, when hooked up to diodes, show electricity spikes when you break off a leaf. Is this pain in the sense that we use it for ourselves? I dunno. But it stands to reason that lobsters, as animals, know when they are being hurt and are going to die. If you pulled the legs off a spider you'd see it squirm, this can't be any different. Because I feel this way, I wanted to basically chop thru their main nerve center (i.e. brain) and kill them as quickly as possible. The idea of being witness to their death felt so much better than just putting a lid over them as they expired.
So, when we were ready with the pot on the stove, I took the first one out of the fridge, rinsed it off, handed it to ro who held him on the chopping board with a towel, took a chef's knife and held it pointing downward with the tip poised above the back of his head. then I poked the knife all the way thru till it hit wood, and then pulled the handle downward, thru the front of the head, right between the eyeballs, with a motion like I was pulling a slot machine lever. Then I watched the poor thing struggle and twitch and take a good 30 seconds to actually stop living. It was horrifying and made me sick to my stomach. Everything i'd read about this method of killing lobsters said it completely severed their nerve center and they died really quickly, like close to instantly, tho sometimes their was a twitch or two left in them right after. This guy, however, was still moving and breathing and would prolly have been saying some profound last words to us if we had any lobster communication skills, and it was incredibly painful to watch. And I tried my damnedest not to take my eyes off him the entire time. There in front of me was what looked like an immense amount of suffering at my hands, it would go against everything in me to ignore it. But my god, it was hard to watch. I witnessed his death with an aching heart, an overturned stomach, a catch in my throat and the itch of tears behind my eyes. And there were still 2 more to go.
The second one went quicker, but still seemed to linger longer than I would have ever wished on any living creature, so by the third one I must have looked a bit despondent, cuz ro offered to kill it. She picked a spot on the back of the head for the tip of her knife that was further back than I had gone, and no sooner had the thunkchunk of the knife finished its path thru the head than this lobster flinched once and was dead. I was so grateful to not have to hold it still as it slowly kicked its last that I almost cried in relief. Or despair. I had been cutting in the wrong place. Well, not wrong, but not optimal. Which means I could have spared the suffering of the first two had I done it correctly. Forgive me, lobsters, for I know not what I do. My god. A humbling experience in every way. If I ever kill again, which I will have to decide if my heart and soul can handle taking another life before trying, I vow to know exactly how to do it in the quickest, most humane way possible, preferably after having watched it done right by an expert. Given that I am the child of a father who says a prayer for every dandelion he uproots, i'm not so sure at this point if killing, let alone slaughtering, are within my realm of ability. Not physically, mind you, but emotionally and spiritually. I guess, as long as I did it with a spiritual mindset in a way that honored the creature, I probably could. I'm sure the entire time those 2 lobsters were leaking their lifeforces out onto the table, every second found me praying for their suffering to be over. I was also extremely aware of the fact that their death was to further my life, to nourish and sustain me and my friends and in that way at least they didn't die in vain. That amounts to prayers of gratitude in my book.
By the time dinner was served my body and emotions had calmed down enough to be prepared to enjoy the experience of eating this animal, of feeding myself with an (until recently) living creature, to partake in the process of turning its flesh into my own.
I systematically took apart my lobster and found every bit of meat in it, remembering that I had to chew a lot more than I do when eating plant matter, which made the meal a meditative process for me. The searching for and working to exhume the morsels, the tasting and chewing and contemplating and swallowing all succeeded in humbling me further, even as the massive protein high cam into effect.
We hadn't really bothered with anything in the way of side dishes for the meal, and I was glad of that. There was nothing to divert my focus from my meal that had once been its own entity enjoying a life in the atlantic, catching, killing and eating its own meals.
As traumatic as the lead-up to this sounds, it was a delicious and satisfying meal. The biologist in me really loved looking at all the different parts of the creature and I appreciated getting to interact with the carcass as a whole. not that I really needed a reminder that I was eating an animal, but just to be aware of it as an entire being. So often people eat something like chicken nuggets or even just buy ground beef, or boneless, skinless chicken breasts—pieces of meat that look nothing like the animal they came from. We are good at distancing ourselves from the sources of our food here in america and I remember appreciating the opposite of that in china, even if it made me feel a little queasy to see a turtle on a plate that looked like it could get up and walk away. Getting to break into the lobster shell with my hands and fish out the flesh was a very intimate way of dealing with this animal while treating it as food. It was a bit of a scavenger hunt and a way of really deeply knowing 'he who is now your dinner.' no shying away from this process of eating an animal, not at any point from start to finish.
And it wasnt even finished. After we had gleaned every bit of meat out of the lobsters' shells, we boiled them overnight in the crock pot to make lobster broth, the smell of which was very strong and permeated my dreams. And then, of course, there were the dishes. And the lobster pot took some scrubbing. I waited a while to do the dishes, and at that point I was ready to forget the fact that my dinner had been alive, but the reminder was there in the smell of the leftover cooking water and the hardened scum on the pot that was much more pungent and stubborn than any plant matter could be. My stomach thought hard about turning again, but the only thing that could make the evening's meal harder to cope with would be to throw it up, so I resisted the urge, plugged my nose to the smell of crustacean death, and dug in with soap and water.
The house ended up smelling like seafood for a couple days, tho I doubt ro and eli noticed. Animal food is so much stronger in flavor and smell than plant food and I forget sometimes how finely calibrated my senses are now that I deal only with more delicate ones. When others wouldn't notice the bacon fat or even butter in something, I find that it has a really strong showing in my mouth. Which is not to say its gross. On the contrary. If I smell something with meat in it cooking I will invariably say, 'wow, that smells good.' cuz it does. Animals and animal products taste good. Show me a vegan who says they don't miss cheese and i'll show you someone who is either a liar or delusional.
Cuz yeah, in case you missed this part, im just gonna put it out there again: lobster is delicious! Really tasty, almost sweet, and really succulent if you cook it in salt water cuz it retains more of the flavor and tastes a bit like the sea. It was very obvious to all of my senses that I was consuming something oceanic. And I loved it. I came to the table with an almost religious reverence, not just for the life taken in order to eat, but for the simple scrumptious decadent delight that is fresh steamed new england chick lobster. I sat deconstructing the carcass with meditative thoroughness, not just to interact fully with this dead animal, but to delve deeply into the full sensual experience of my food. I consciously chewed each bit, not just for digestive purposes, but for gastronomic ones as well.
If I went into this endeavor with the desire to enjoy the experience of eating a lobster, I believe I succeeded. If I went into it to be fully present with an animal as I killed and consumed it, made it my food, I succeeded. If I did all of this in order to test my ability to take a life and incorporated it into my own, i'm not sure whether I passed. if I went in hoping to god I enjoyed the experience more than I abhored it, the jury is still out. If I wanted something to test my vegan parameters, I found it. If I wanted an experience I will remember for a long time, I got it. If I hoped to know if I could do it again in good conscience, i'm nowhere near sure.