Food and Sensibility

I have an interesting relationship with food.

I have always been slim, except for two months right before college, which I'll get to in a moment. A combination of an old-fashioned childhood, common-sense parenting and obedience made me try everything, like most things, and never have to worry about gaining weight. Rather, I was the shortest and skinniest kid in class all the way up to tenth grade, when I shot up to be tall and skinny.

My mom, bless her femme au foyer heart, made decent food every night, packed our lunchbags in the morning, and surrendered the weekend kitchen to Dad. A true homemaker, she shows her affection by providing and nurturing. She never liked cooking, but did it and did it well. As she always said, "Veg, meat and starch at every meal, the dinners are ideal."* Predictable, yes, but my family never pretended to be anything else.

We ate dinner together every night, most of the way through high school. The dinnertime conversation ebbed or flowed, according to our loquacity of the evening, but was always familial and cordial. So food was a comforter, a sustenance, a conversation, and a source of love.

*Well, she never actually said it, but I bet she will now.

Then I went to France, gained weight, obsessed about it surprisingly little, went to college and danced it off in a few months. Then I went back to France, probably gained less weight than I thought I had, came back, broke up with a boyfriend, took an overload of courses one term, stressed myself out, and briefly flirted with anorexia.

I wanted to lose my French weight, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I liked food too much, liked the taste of it, the warmth and comfort, the sociability of it, the feeling of satiety, and the adventure of trying new things. So I shook myself out of it by discovering ways to de-greasify dining hall fare: steam salad bar veggies in a microwave, crack the free peppermints over vanilla ice cream, and assemble your own 'grilled" cheese sandwiches in the toaster. Talk about cooking on a budget. I also took fewer credits the following semester.

Even though I had lived in France, the place where they invented meals as an excuse for conversation, I never really *got* the connection between the two until I had gained enough confidence to be able to hold my own in such a conversation. I've written before about the "Wednesday Girls' Night," and I can't think of a more enjoyable way to spend an evening than with friends around a table of good food. I don't want to go to a bar, just give me a casserole. I loathe the idea of a bachelorette bash at a club; give me a potluck with my friends and a sleepover and we're good.

But it was another meal that made me turn the corner and look the label of Foodie in the eye. A friend and I had started spending a weekly meal together, sharing our photos and memories of abroad over a glass of wine and a plate of delicious. At one point he served me a cold three-bean salad that was sublime, yet simple. I have never been able to recreate it, although I've tried. In return, I introduced him to eggs Florentine, one of my favorite go-to fixes. Anyhow, I was hooked on good food, well made.

Since then, whether I'm cooking for one, two or twenty-seven (cf: last Thanksgiving!) I try to cook the best I possibly can. Lately this has meant eschewing processed foods in favor of original sources. Just as I felt utterly granola for joining a yoga spa, I feel organic and earthy for dropping half a grand on a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. Every two weeks starting in June, we'll get a full basket of fruit, vegetables and eggs, all straight from a Long Island farm. (No kidding, the contract makes sure these durn city-dwellers understand the food may have DIRT ON IT!! Gasp!) I can't wait for it to start. I'm already planning on canning my own tomato sauce from the reddest, ripest tomatoes I'll ever eat that I didn't grow myself and filling the house with the fragrance of applesauce cooking down.

I can't think of anything else that I spend so much energy and time on, try to be creative with, or take more pride in doing well. Cooking is a challenge for me, and the moment that I get to sit down at the table with my Frenchy is the moment I wait for all day. We quietly talk over the day's happenings, the news, share ideas for handling work problems, and just be. And food continues to be the reason for intimate moments, for nurturing and for enjoying life. There's nothing better than a good meal.

Open Letter to My Landlord

Dear Landlord,

First of all, I don't really know who you are. The superintendent seems to do all the actual work around here. (Incidentally, I know he is the superintendent because he is missing several teeth. This seems to be one of the common characteristics of New York supers.) Identify yourself, please.

Second, while I appreciate that you didn't raise our rent (much) for our second year of life in your fine establishment, I do think it's kind of skeezy that you allow us to pay said inflated rent by fax. Who uses a fax anymore? (Incidentally, the way this works is that he just copies my bank account number from the bottom of the check and deposits that much money in his coffers. My BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER which is so prominently displayed on the bottom of each check I write. Watch me never pay for anything by check again, ever.)

Thirdly, the stairway and hall in my apartment building is being repainted. While this is an overall improvement, I would like to register the following complaints:

1. The pervading fumes have given me a constant headache for the past few days, as well as made me a leetle crazy. I cannot be held responsible for my actions. I also have enough candles burning in an attempt to mask the odor that you could probably see my apartment from space. This is most certainly a fire hazard.


2. Some dumb crumbbum keeps taping the "Wet Paint" sign right onto the wet paint! WTF! I have peeled it off and moved it elsewhere several times, but it seems that I am the only one in the whole ship to have common sense, or care.


3. I understand that the work is not yet finished, but the painters previously had to scrape a whole buncha crap off the walls prior to painting. Now the stairs are full of (likely lead-based) paint chips and dust, which get tracked into my apartment each time someone comes in. Swiffer pads are expensive, dude. Shouldn't the paint guys vacuum?

And finally, I have a confession. I like to peek through the open doors of other tenants if I pass by at the right moment. A few weeks ago I noticed that New Girl downstairs had bright pink walls! Why does she get non-institutional wallage and we don't?

Respectfully submitted,
Liesl

Cultural Reintegration

Over there on the right, down a little, a leetle more, there you go, is a new element that I cleverly called "Cultural Reintegration," continuing the whole culture shock metaphor. It's a list of movies I've seen in 2008 (although since I can't remember exactly when I saw three of the four listed there, it may be more aptly described as movies I've seen in 2008 and maybe a little back into December 2007, but definitely not so far as November.

I realized I have poor short-term memory a long time ago, probably around the time when I was trying desperately to memorize dance routines and just couldn't keep one step in my head before moving on to the next step. The same phenomenon showed up in college, when I swear I read a book but couldn't tell you a thing about it. Ditto for movies. And for pretty much anything that required me to retain information. This might be why I didn't do so hot in grad school.

So as a memory jog, I'm going to keep a tally of the movies I saw in 2008. Movies in cinemas only, please, no rentals/illegal downloads that we watch at home. Those may feature on another list somewhere. Perhaps this will help me remember the general plot arc more than a week later, or make me a little less pathetic in the Kevin Bacon Game. (Truly pathetic. I think I can possibly name one film that Mr. Bacon himself was in.)*

If I get even more ambitious, I might write a review. Although I really hate when bloggers do that. I really don't care about your opinions. So maybe I won't. Unless I decide to.

Yes, that will be all for today.

*He was in Apollo 13, right? Ooh, and Footloose! Two!

Six Words

For the moment, this post is just a placeholder of a link I saw: the Guardian's Six Word Stories challenge. I'm going to try to come up with a few, just not while I'm at work. (Hi, boss!)

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Okay, back now. In the meantime, I've found a lot more examples. Check out Caterina, Wired, or Flickr for stories (and accompanying photos). Here are some I've come up with.

Apartment squeaky clean. Page still blank.

You’re 26. Comic books for birthday?

Guitar in corner, strings all broken.

Finger un-ringed, she’s curled up crying.

As she sobs…he sleeps on couch.

She welcomes pain of cramps, thankfully.

Fan finally arrives, broken, in October.

In-laws come, go, we survived. Barely.

Too hungry to cook. Take-out again?

“Good morning, love.” “Who are you?”

Asleep; it costs too much to eat.

“I only lie when it’s important.”

I want to be anywhere but here.

Most people who have tried this exercise say it's easier to write the sad ones; I agree. The trick is getting the six words to tell an entire story, beginning, middle and end. It's too easy to write a simple description, or to write what could be the first sentence of a book.

And before you ask, some of them are true, some are true but embellished, and some are entirely imagined. Which? I leave that up to you.

The Return

The holiday festivemaking has been made, and no one could think of any good reason not to go back to work, and so back to work we went today. I don't think you could find a more dejected-looking group of privilieged Westerners than myself and my subway mates as we clanked our way across the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan today. I even forewent coffee in order to wallow in my more perfect misery. That, and the line was too long.

Anyhow, I was greeted with the Kenyan electoral crisis. We think we have a problem with the Democratic candidates who can't keep straight what side of the fence they're on and the Republicans who, if you added all their ages together, would be able to remember when Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible was banned and mail service began in Denmark, to name a few events of that year.

No, Kenya's electoral crisis is verily a crisis. The incumbent just somehow managed to squeak out 230 000 more votes than the opposition, who was running significantly ahead in all the pre-election polls. And just somehow, the body overseeing the election can't get their hands on the original stack of ballots, before someone just managed to alter 300 000 of them in the incumbent's favor. Now, understandably, people are mad. What do Kenyans do when they're mad? The same thing that Southerners do: go out and shoot somebody.

Well, it's not quite that simple. But the long and the short of it is, there's major violence and unrest in Kenya, and my students were supposed to have arrived there today. They are not. We've delayed their arrival until things settle down, or transferred them to other locations, as they wish.

Our onsite coordinator says things are already settling down, which is in contradiction to every media story I've read so far. But today, more than anything, what has struck me is a passage I remember from John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud: that the media generally reports on anything out of the ordinary. Rather than brood on the destruction and despair in the news, we should instead rejoice that our society still considers death of human beings an anomaly. It's when death becomes so banal that it is not reported in the media that we should become worried.

And we must calmly go about our business, with the thoughts of the Kenyan families in our heads, the ones that traveled great distances to vote, only to see their election stolen and their children burnt in church. I can't believe that this is the same country that I dreamed of visiting only a few months ago.

Wish List

There was a request to move that last post further down the page into oblivion, and so I am gracing you with my Christmas wish list.

Here is the list of wishes I sent my family:

• Yoga ball to replace office chair at work
• Yoga tops
• Yoga pants
• Silver watch
• BBC's Planet Earth DVD
• Books!
• White hoodie

Here's what I would actually like for Christmas

• My loose tooth fixed for good (boo to no dental insurance!)
• Sheets that actually fit our bed and match (can't ask my family for sheets for a full bed, as that would remind them (gasp!) we're not actually married!)
• Someone to take me makeup shopping and buy me stuff that actually works for me and show me how to put it on
• A bike, and to be able to ride it again without fear of it getting stolen or me getting hurt
• To be able to reduce the amount of stuff in my life, without actually having to get rid of any of my treasured possessions
• A really good night's sleep, or twelve
• Better eyesight without glasses or contacts
• A reason, a budget and a workspace to get out my sewing machine again and go to town
• An exchange rate in favor of the dollar, so I could travel more
  

Sometimes I Wonder

Originally written a few months ago.

Sometimes I wonder just what I am doing here. Not here in New York, which I've already discussed many times, but just here in general, at the point in life where I find myself.

We had a fight last weekend. General crankiness, wanting to finish Harry Potter, toothpaste and disagreement about coffee tables were involved.

From a distance of several days, none of those things seem very important now. I haven't learned to choose my battles, that's for sure. Nevertheless, during a fight, each new topic adds fresh rancor and resentment, at least the way I have been taught to fight.

Why is it so impossible to let go, to realize in the very moment that things are not as important as they seem? For several months I justified telling my boyfriend each time he did something I disliked, and exactly why it hurt me, by saying that at least I got it out in the open. Usually this backfired when he continued to do the same as always, which I interpreted as not giving a crap for my feelings. More recently, I realized it was rather a passive way to "improve" another person, to change him into the shape I thought a person should take.

At one point, I did swallow my pride and try to apologize, only to be pushed away. Perhaps we haven't learned exactly what pushes our buttons, when to step down and when to hold tight. There was more than one point this weekend when I thought, "Is this really worth it?"

But no matter whom I'm with, I'll still be struggling with the same tendency to resentment, the same loaded jabs, the same bitterness. I'm worried that as we have bigger things to fight about, our fights will get bigger, too.

Instead of trying to change the other person, how many years together does it take to change one's own personality?