Tag Archives: Art

One Month Later

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It’s only been a month since I started blogging?? I started on 6/26.

It’s been a lifetime. I’ve already learned so much, written so much, read so much. I dare say my poetry has gone up a level or two since I began.

Not long ago, I was thinking to myself, “I need more writer friends.” I have a lot of visual artist friends, and I am head over heels in love with every one of them. But I had very few people with whom I could talk about writing as a craft.

I didn’t realize it, but I was stagnating as a writer.

I’m not sure what happened. I was just following the flow of Tao, “what the hell.” I barely even knew what a blog was. I figured I’d be invisible. Actually I was sort of banking on it, not really wanting to be emotionally exposed. I didn’t know there was a wordpress community. I was vaguely aware of the term “blogosphere” and thought that sounded like a dreadful place full of people bitching about the mundanity of their lives or ranting their crazy.

Well, I guess it is that. But it’s also much more than that. And it’s really unexpectedly lovely.

I never thought of myself as a poet. I was just venting on paper. If someone told me six months ago that I was going to do this, my mind would have boggled. “Poetry” and “blog,” were two of the most boring words put together. 

No. It’s electricity. The level of talent out there, the things people post leave me breathless. And where are the trolls? I’ve spent a month just reading, and the greater part of the dialogue has been enlightening and respectful. Everyone has been kind in their own way.

They say writing is a solitary craft, but I have learned about as much in the past month as I managed to teach myself in my years of solitary efforts.

Warm fuzzies to all.

 

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Eating healthy isn’t so expensive

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“Eating healthy is so expensive!”

Says the person who doesn’t cook? I don’t get it. I did a poll once of my friends and determined that some people think eating healthy means you have to do everything everyone says lately. If you can’t eat fats, starches, sugars, meats… what is there left to eat but members of the squash family, boiled? That’s not living. I think they want to live on a diet of nothing but superfoods, but man cannot afford to live on avocados alone.

I love food, so my healthy eating agenda is fairly open. Of course, I’m lucky because I have no food sensitivities except for a little psoriasis breakout when I drink too much milk. And red dye got me good once when I was a kid, so I generally avoid dyes.

These are my rules:

  • If you make it from scratch, it’s healthier
  • I mean really, make it from scratch. Tortillas, pasta, pizza, etc, are all better from scratch.
  • Try to eat less sugar
  • Try to eat less meat
  • A handful of almonds every day (I’ve noticed this makes my weak nails tear less)
  • Everything varied and in moderation
  • Lots of water, some tea or coffee

Sometimes I’m not so great with the sugar rule. Who am I kidding, I break a lot of these rules all the time. But that’s a part of moderation too, isn’t it?

My best meal for today is home-fermented kimchi (it’s not fishy and horrible at all, it’s spicy-sour and amazing), sour cream, mozzarella cheese, fresh spinach and olive oil on a baked potato. I’d take a picture but it’s ugly. I gotta start being better about taking food pictures before I eat them, but it’s so hard to remember when eating gets to happen.

This meal is pretty cheap. I love potatoes as a cheap carb/vegetable/meal. My sister Jessica decided that I’m obsessed with potatoes and even though this isn’t entirely true, I didn’t argue very hard with her, because I do like potatoes a lot.

Let me add up the price:

Kimchi sauerkraut (recipe adapted from here https://www.makesauerkraut.com/kimchi/)

  • 1 cabbage = $1
  • 1 bunch of green onions = $1
  • 1 bunch of radishes = $1
  • 2 carrots = $0.20
  • 2 inches of ginger = $0.50
  • 2 cloves garlic = $0.05
  • Pickling salt = $0.50
  • Red pepper flakes, spices = nominal
  • A week or two of waiting
  • Total: $4.25
  • One unlisted cost is that of a smelly house. I actually ruined an old nonstick pot of mine fermenting kimchi in it, the kimchi smell has permanently permeated it. I need a real fermenting crock.

Now that I figured out what the kimchi cost, let’s see what my lunch cost:

  • 1/16 of the kimchi (about ½ cup) = 0.13
  • 1/2 massive potato = $0.25
  • 3 T sour cream = $0.20
  • Handful of spinach = $0.10
  • ½ oz cheese = 0.13
  • 1 T Olive oil = $0.18
  • Total: $0.99

Okay, so it’s not Mr. Money Mustache levels of frugality but it’s about a million times yummier and more nutritious than a box dinner, which would cost three times as much, not fill you up, and make your day WORSE with its flaccid flavors. Or if you went to a restaurant, it would taste good, but you don’t really know what happened to the food back there in the kitchen while it was at the mercy of all those underpaid cooks, and you would be paying eight times as much for a damn potato.

Here’s something else to think about when moaning about the time it takes to prepare food. Thoreau explored this concept in Walden. He said in the end, everything costs close to the same. For example (and this is clearly not the example Thoreau used), you can spend $4 and 60 active minutes making a big jar of amazing kimchi tailored to your own unique tastes. Or you can work for 60 minutes at your job, gain an extra $8, and use that to purchase a really nice $12 tub of artisan kimchi of equal quality at the farmer’s market.

Humans are supposed to spend a great majority of their time collecting, preparing, storing, and eating food anyway. It’s the natural order of things.

Maybe kimchi isn’t the best example. If you really hate kimchi or cooking, you can spend $1 on a meal at Taco Bell, then you can use the other $3 to buy a gallon of gasoline and a lighter, and set yourself on fire. But you’ll have used up all your time doing a different stupid thing. One of the joys of modern civilization is that we have the luxury of wasting our time doing whatever stupid things we wish.

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Just drivel

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Last night I drove to my sister’s to give her ham. (The ham was amazing by the way. Rich, savory, smoky, salty meat magic. So much better than your average pale water-logged drowned-corpse store-bought ham.)

Unfortunately no one was there. We’d missed each other! She was in town, where I’d just come from. Curses.  They were in the middle of getting their house fumigated for brown recluses. So I did the normal thing: got in through their garage, held my breath, and made a ham deposit in their fridge. The fumigator guys were long gone, but nobody was supposed to be in the house for another three hours. I’m fine, I’m sure I’ll be fine. I’m no brown recluse.

Then I drove back to town and met the same sister for ice cream. The drive was so ridiculously pointless, but we hadn’t been able to get ahold of each other until it was too late.

Still, the ice cream was nice, and her kids are lovely little people, if you don’t mind people who hang their whole weight from your neck and giggle insanely at their own poop jokes. We all made faces at each other while we ate our ice cream. Now we all know exactly who can do the Elvis lip and with how many sides of their face, who can raise which eyebrows, etc. I let them benefit from my greater age and wisdom and taught them a few things. As a child, I practiced these things in the bathroom mirror with the vague premonition that they would come in useful one day, and lo, they have.

Then I went for a run. My app refused to work so I just ran without it, and it was one of the nicest runs I’ve had all year. Why was I timing myself again? What horrible things we do to ourselves without even being aware. It’s easier to enjoy a run when you don’t have to meet some kind of arbitrary deadline. And it’s easier to get yourself out the door when you know you will enjoy the run. You will be a happier runner if you don’t worry about all the little scientific aspects of running, and being a happier runner who follows the dictates of the body will make you a healthier runner. This is Tao. By not working hard at running, I’ll be a better runner. No more running app for me.

Then I went to the grocery, picked up some bread and blackberries, went home, made the most delicious grilled ham and cheese sandwiches with the ham I’d smoked. I also threw together a blackberry cobbler and accidentally gave it way too much biscuit crust which took forever to cook. Everything was delicious. The beauty of life is directly proportional to the beauty of the food, and today my friends, life was beautiful.

Then I went to bed early in an attempt to get up early. Got a wild hair up my ass and composed a villanelle which took hours and then it was late. My lifelong struggle has been to get up early. I’m wondering if I can use what I learned from my run today to help me get up early in the mornings. I want to get up early in the mornings. So… I’m just going to stop trying. See where that gets me. There’s no easier experiment.

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