Yeah, this is going to be even harder than I thought.   You guys, I am a terrible misanthrope.  I knew this – it’s something I have taken pride in – but even I didn’t know the extent of my misanthropy or just how entrenched it is until I started really paying attention to how many times I day I think or want to say something excoriating about somebody.

Some of the biggest challenges so far have been at work, particularly when someone else is complaining.  I have found in the last 24 hours that I’ve almost completely forgotten how to respond to someone’s complaining without either joining in or telling them they’re wrong.  Clearly the first option is a flagrant violation of my promise to behave myself, and the second doesn’t really feel exactly right either.  Also, people complain A LOT in my office.

Also, I’m probably going to have to think about avoiding … the entire internet?  Which would quickly lead to my hospitalization with severe withdrawal symptoms.  The problem isn’t that I regularly seek out content with which I disagree.  I avoid the fuck out of it, in fact.  My Google Reader subscriptions list is not heavy on the Free Republic types.  I’m not one of these people (like Mr. DiSnazzio) who can find much amusement in the words and antics of the political right wing.  (What I find is that I badly need a drink or a Quaalude or something, because my heart rate goes through the roof.)  So I was already not just deliberately looking for people to be mad at and say unkind things about.  But I’m having a hard time not erupting in a spasm of “OMG WTF” at the missteps of the people with whom I generally agree.  Because that is what I do even on the best of days.

Now I’m not about to engage in or endorse a life of silence in the face of fuckery, not even for 40 days.  This is about Christianity, after all, and our main dude was not a meek acquiescer.  He was a fired-up radical, and that is why I like him.  He had Things To Say about oppression and inequality and cruelty.  So when something needs dealt with, I intend to deal.  I just intend to deal in a way that doesn’t involve me going, “Look at this jackass over here.”  I’m going to try to address people directly and use my big-girl words, like, “What you have said here is hurtful/offensive for the following reasons.”  I might even throw in some pleases and thank yous.

But I’m also going to try to ratchet back the massive hypercriticality of others and instead work really hard (REALLY, OMG IT’S HARD) at figuring out, in the moments when I feel like I’m going to quite possibly literally* choke to death on the “evil words” I want to say, what exactly is going on inside me that is making me feel so “hooked” (as my awesome Jungian analysis used to say after I told him that the general public overuse of the word “trigger” made me twitch… ’cause um… I’m hypercritical…) by whatever is making me feel like I’m bursting at the seams with evil.

Also, my sister-in-law wrote something yesterday that reminded me that there is a component of Lent that we often ignore that I didn’t write about here: the giving part.  Because it’s not just about self-denial; it’s about sacrifice.  And, for me, it’s about sacrifice for the common good specifically.  I have some things going on that dovetail with this that have been in the works for many months – namely, volunteering at the jail – that I’m going to focus extra hard on.  I’m hoping to use Lent as a springboard for very consistent and frequent future efforts to make myself useful in this way.  The blizzardry (that’s the actual blizzard plus the aftermath) has made this really difficult, but now that it’s subsiding a little, I will – I HOPE! – finally have some more to write about this stuff very soon.

*Yes, fellow hypercrits, I know.  Not actually literally.

Me, on Twitter:

That hategasm was brought to you by my Lenten goal to “build up” with my words, a la Ephesians. Today is like Snarki Gras for me.*

(Normally I try not to get all self-referential, but c’mon, Snarki Gras.  You know you LOLed.)

Tomorrow begins Lent, when recovering Catholics the world over still give up alcohol and cussing just out of habit.  Oh, and also when Christians spend 40 days preparing ourselves for Easter to represent Jesus’s time in the desert telling Satan to pipe down.

I want to explicitly state something here that – shocker – probably won’t be popular with any more devout/fundamentalist Christian who wanders by.  I observe Lent not because I believe God will be mad if I don’t, or because I believe God has an opinion on this one way or another.  I think that view of things assumes a pretty egotistical God.  It’s hard for me to believe that God wants us doing all these things to prove something to [him].  I observe Lent because I feel the exercise and discipline of it brings me closer to God through my focus on what I believe [he]’s expecting of me in my life in the world.  Therefore I try to make the observance meaningful by not merely giving up caffeine (though I probably should, for myriad other reasons) or whatever.

This year, I’m not exactly giving up something specific so much as very intently focusing on something.  My priest suggested this a few years ago, that maybe we could think in terms of “doing” instead of “not doing.”  So I’m doing and also not-doing, and for the first time ever, I’m actually paying attention to the actual bible instead of just looking around my life and going, “Well, I’ve been meaning to quit mainlining soda anyway, so…”

Ephesians 4:29 has popped into my life a couple of times recently in different circumstances.  I don’t know about signs, and we’ve covered that Nick Cave and I don’t believe in an interventionist God, but for reasons probably having to do with what’s going on in my own psyche, I have noticed it when it’s popped up.  (Because in my religious practice, “God” is pretty much interchangeable with “Jung,” apparently.)  It says:

Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.

I know this is going to be ridiculously hard for me.  Evil talk is in my DNA.  I love evil talk.  Without evil talk, I will be silent about 60% of the time.  And a good half my relationships will probably quickly die from a lack of anything to discuss.  But I was thinking about this today and realized that I also have a great example for how not to be an evil, snarky bastard all the time in the form of my mama.  “What is useful for building up” is pretty much always what comes out of my mom’s mouth.  You can’t complain to her about anyone without getting her hypothesis about why said anyone might be acting like a complete jackass (which is something that has many times caused me to contemplate strangling her, and I can say that here because she already knows).

So for the next forty days, I’m going to follow in my mom’s footsteps, and I’m also going keep that verse stashed someplace where I can see it when I need it, like seventy times a day at work and every single time I am caused to interact with health insurance company reps, hipsters, or my own reflection.

*For context, the referenced hategasm was about two OMG INSUFFERABLE interns and their excruciatingly annoying and loud conversation at a coffee shop downtown today.  What?  Lent starts tomorrow.

Is there a significant difference between the makers of the asininely-monikered Booty Pop underwear (look it up yourself if you must) using a woman’s barely-covered ass to advertise a product, and twelve dozen feminist/progressive bloggers posting the commercial in its freaking entirety on their blogs, especially if those blogs sell ad space?  You’re still trafficking in bare female ass.  It would have been perfectly reasonable to discuss the commercial, describe it, and voice your complaints while also not rebroadcasting it.  You could explain your unwillingness to rebroadcast it by explaining that since you’re grossed out by the makers of this bullshit selling women’s body parts like so much disembodied meat, you’re not going to participate in that same display.

Just. A. Thought.

I almost forgot.  This will be quick, because I expended all my energy on my earlier post and on work and on bracing for what I can already tell is going to be Migraine Friday (it starts, often, with EXTREME sleepiness – or The Omgsleepies, if you prefer [The Omgsleepies is totally going to be my new band name... for my not-band]).

So a blasphemy quickie: I think all this “whoever does not believe is condemned already” business is really ridiculous.  It irritates the bejesus (heh) out of me every time I hear it.  I assume this is self-explanatory, but in case it isn’t: I cannot and do not believe my atheist and non-Christian pals who do all types of goodness are condemned, certainly not by my Good Buddy.  In fact, the idea of condemnation doesn’t sit well with me, theologically, socially, or in any other way.  Condemnation is the opposite of grace.  Condemnation is for the birds.*

I’ve been reading and listening to a lot of writings and talkings of non-literalist Christians like Marcus Borg, lately, and I feel confident that I will get to the bottom of this matter with my Christianity and my affinity for John intact (it is hard not to like him, I picture him as this wild-eyed, enthusiastic hippie goofball, kinda).  In the meantime, though, I cringe when I hear this… it seems almost always to be said by someone who is using it as justification for offensive, Christian-supremacist purposes, and it leaves more than a bad taste in my mouth.

*Note: I like birds.  Birds also should not be condemned.  Big up to birds.

So, the mayor.  Let me tell you about my fee-fees on this matter; gather ‘round!

I could cop out here and just post a link to Mobtown Shank’s post from yesterday about what the hell everyone is so happy about, because that describes a lot of my feelings about the reaction.  But I always find that I spend half an hour ranting to Mr. DiSnazzio about something in the car on the way to work and then don’t say anything about it here in this space I made just for such umbrage-y things.  Perhaps Mr. DiSnazzio’s ears will get a break in 2010 if I can just remember to write it all down.  (And perhaps we’ll hear from Mr. DiSnazzio in this very space if he takes me up on my offer from this morning to guest-post his own umbrage.)

Anyway, Mobtown Shank pointed out a thing that’s been disturbing the crap out of me lately: the unremitting, gleeful celebrating of our mayor’s downfall.  It’s really creepy, y’all.  Not because I necessarily believe she is innocent of the crimes of which she was accused.  A jury found her guilty of theft, she pled to perjury, and I accept that she is guilty of those things.  And also not because she was such a great mayor.  The city’s in no better shape than O’Malley left it, and you can assign blame in whatever percentages you see fit to him, to her, to a number of other persons and entities, up to and including George W. Bush, I’m sure.  She probably didn’t do things that should have been done and did do things that shouldn’t have.  I was kind of agnostic on her to begin with, and I also don’t know that her resignation and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s ascendancy are going to make much more difference than Dixon’s coming into office in the first place.  (It’s hard to be anything but agnostic about Baltimore politics and the possibility of any particular candidate for anything to bring about change.  Look around.)

All of that is to say that I don’t care about this because I’m a huge fan or anything.  I neither love nor loathe Sheila Dixon, personally or politically.  I care about the reactions because the reactions tell a rather unsettling story about the reactors.  I should say here, by the way, that the majority of the “ZOMFG YAY DING DONG THE WITCH IS DEAD” reactions, along with the “ZOMFG GET THE TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS” stuff I saw leading up to Dixon’s convictions, were online, usually in the comments to articles on the Baltimore Sun’s website.  This is noteworthy for two reasons: one, people are much bigger shitheads online than in person, always; and two, there’s no way to know whether the commenters were actual City residents, and I tend to believe they weren’t in most cases.  I’m sure the City has its share of rabid Dixon haters (all of whom probably fall into the categories outlined by Mobtown Shank), but I have lived here for almost seven years now, and it is not my sense of this town that the majority of its citizens are the type of people who get quite this frothed up about stuff.  We’ve got bigger fish to fry, usually.

Again, not because it’s not a big deal that Dixon broke the law.  That is a big deal.  Mr. DiSnazzio said his heart isn’t breaking for her, because people lose their jobs all the time when they fuck up on their jobs.  I agree.  (But I also have a certain pesky Catholic sensibility about this stuff, and it leads me to feel empathy for her and to sincerely hope she finds some peace and clarity after the dust settles, no matter how much that might annoy the pitchfork-wielders.)  It’s just that we’re talking about $500 – and that’s the amount she was convicted for after this excruciatingly long (for the City) ordeal.  Most of the Baltimoreans (Baltimore Cityeans) I’ve talked to about this have said that this is a lot of hullaballoo over something that doesn’t seem worthy of this much hullaballoo, and that we’ve got other problems that need addressing.  Meanwhile, the commenters on the Sun are melting down like she ate a baby at City Hall.

So the disproportion unsettles me.  It can’t be separated from the fact that she’s a black woman, first of all.  It also can’t be separated from what has always seemed to me like suburban residents’ views of Baltimore as some aisle of pure criminality/leper colony/some shit (I keep seeing comments that start with “only in Baltimore,” and no, not only in Baltimore, you jagoffs, not by a long shot).  Which also can’t be separated from the fact that Baltimore is a majority-black city.  It’s just deliberately ignorant to pretend race isn’t a factor in this case, and lots of people are pretending (and INSISTING overly much on) that very thing.  Seeing this outpouring of vitriol about a black woman is disturbing, especially when I know damn well – as every intellectually honest person does – that it absolutely would not be at anything near this pitch if she were a white dude.

This all just contributes to my persistent general sadness about people’s unwillingess to meet our capacity for goodness and for… bigness of heart, I guess.  It bothers me to watch people – especially people who apparently live close by – default to hatefulness and knee-jerk bullshit reactions, like it’s a contest to see who can be most awful or mean, or who can walk closest to the line of overt fucking bigotry without going over.  Do you get a prize?

What also unsettles me, on a more macro level, is how this all feels kind of clandestine and politically motivated.  I know no one put the gift cards in her hand to set her up.  If she did it, she did it.  She made her choices and she’s dealing with the consequences.  But doesn’t it seem like other mayors have probably Done Things, too?  This goes back to the disproportion, but it does seem kind of strange that all of this money and time and effort was spent on what amounted to $500, doesn’t it?  Especially in Baltimore.  Again, not saying we shouldn’t prosecute lawbreakers, but it’s odd to me that we suddenly have this seemingly endless pot of resources for this matter but there are open murders all over the place and people keep taking things from my car.  You know?  Who decided that this particular matter was this level of serious at this particular moment?  And if that person or group of persons benefits from this in any way, what way is that?  Does anyone in Baltimore feel like they really know the answers to those questions?

It just feels awfully disempowering – not to Sheila Dixon, who was the mayor of a big city and had plenty of power.  It feels disempowering to me as a citizen that it went down this way.  I have the strong sense that long before charges were filed, someone, somewhere knew what the desired outcome was, politically, and that we’ll start to figure that out in the next election cycle, but that we’ll never know for sure.  And I don’t like feeling like these decisions – about who is the mayor and who isn’t the mayor – get made someplace other than behind that little curtain in the voting booth.  Whatever this was, it wasn’t a democratic process, and I am left feeling, certainly not for the first or last time, that Baltimore and Maryland are both quite happy to collect a little of my paycheck but not hear even a little of my voice.

I don’t know why I need to note this publicly, but I’m gonna: right before my period starts, I just about cannot stop eating things.  I have been ravenous all day and for the second day in a row am having to very loudly talk myself out of making a batch of brownies at 10 p.m.

Ladies who hover over public toilets, y’all need to step up your balance game.  Or at least wipe up after yourselves, for crying out loud.  I have a hard time understanding the physics behind the messes I’ve been confronted with the last few days, or why it is really necessary to hover in the first place in any but the most egregious bathrooms… in any case, if that’s your thing, fine.  But if you’re disgusted by wiping up your own pee, what in the hell makes you think I want to do it?  Did you ever consider that you’re contributing to your own problem?

Inspired by the reading at Mass tonight, tomorrow is going to be Blasphemy Thursday.  Try not to stay up all night jittering with anticipation, because as you know, “writing in my blog regularly or at least when I say I’m gonna” was not one of my resolutions.

I’m not going to make a whole long list of resolutions for the new year.  They all fall under this one umbrella: I hope that in 2010, I will deal with my health and my circumstances within the framework provided by my current, observable circumstances more than I did in 2009.  You would really think someone of my advanced age (33 is totes advanced!) would not need to make full-on resolutions about such matters, but let me just tell you two of the things I have pretended are true lately:

I am not a person who needs to wear a mouth guard to prevent jaw-clenching that results in vicious headaches – this despite the fact that literally EVERY time I forget (“forget”) to put the stupid thing in my mouth at night, I wake up the next morning in life-altering agony and can’t focus on anything but the pain until it is gone, many hours (if not days) later.

I am someone who can mind-over-matter out of a migraine. This is patently ridiculous.  Maybe such creatures exist, but it has not at any point in the last three years been true that I can just decide not to have a migraine.  However, this has not stopped me from just trying to think really hard about not having one, again EVERY time, just in case that will one of these times cause the mysterious sudden subsiding of this thing that causes twelve different things to be wrong with my body at one time.  All while not taking medicine that I already know WILL make it stop.

Basically, my motto for my neurological and maxillofacial health in 2010 is going to be, “If [stupid shit du jour] was going to work, it would have worked by now.”  And also, “Since I already know what works, I’ll do that.”

I’m also going to try very hard to stop pretending that anything but my own taking of action is going to cause me to start waking up at the early hour at which I know I should be waking up.  And that I will magically become stronger and have more stamina without exercising.  Or that some designated (by God, I guess? the universe? my mom? your mom?) day is going to come along and that will be the day that I suddenly start reading books again, going to bed at a reasonable fucking hour, calling my Nonnie more, hosting dinners, and recommitting myself to all the other stuff I need and want to get done in the house (and out of it).  For instance, as far as I know, one of the many services God doesn’t provide (with all due apologies to fundies and a tip of the hat to Nick Cave, I am compelled to announce that actually, God isn’t in the direct-service intervention business) is picking my lazy ass up and driving it to church.  I mean, if you have information to the contrary, please tell him I prefer the Wednesday evening service and I get off work at 5:30 downtown, and I tip very well.  But observed reality tells me that if I want to be a person who goes to Mass every week, I’m going to have to… be a person who goes to Mass every week.

Matters of control are fascinating to me lately, in my life and in the lives of people close enough for me to observe their controllings.  Almost everyone I know is, to some degree, engaged in the same thing I am: spending a lot of time trying to control exactly the things they can’t, while exerting nothing like enough effort controlling the stuff that is almost completely (and often solely) within their control.  Maybe we all need some kind of 12-step program for nonsense addicts or something.  I spend so much energy trying to argue my way out of reality about my migraines – energy that could be used just controlling the symptoms, which I can do most of the time, and even the triggers, which some of the time is also totally possible.  And it’s amazing that someone with the amount and severity of control freakery I have going on isn’t living a significantly more regimented life.  It doesn’t take a psychologist to understand that I probably grind my teeth precisely because I’m a control freak, right?  Apparently I think I can just cast that away by sheer force of will… a will so strong that it can’t make my hand reach over to my night table, pick up a tiny piece of plastic, and stick it in my own face?  I can bend reality, but I can’t bend myself at the waist into a cab bound for church on Wednesday nights, even though I actually WANT to be there?  Really?  Fascinating.

So that’s my overarching resolution: the serenity prayer.  Change what I can, and as for the rest, suck it up, buttercup.  That is how that prayer goes, right?  Suck it up buttercup, amen.

And one more thing: I resolve to unabashedly love the complicated, challenging, genuinely mysterious (not the God of “God works in mysterious ways”) non-interventionist God I alluded to up there.  Because of all the realities I had a hard time accepting last year, that was the hardest.  Not the non-intervening; I’ve always known that part.  The reality that I not only believe in, but love, any God.  It’s been hard for the people around me to swallow, but harder for me than any of you probably understand.  And I’ve resolved to accept that truth for real this year, and to let it guide me where it will.  This does not mean I’ll be evangelizing or trying to capture your soul for God.  It means I won’t be shushing myself in conversations with myself.  Shushing oneself in private conversations with oneself is madness.  I’m going to go ahead this year and really believe that consciousness and God (whether or not they are the same thing, and maybe they are) are beautiful and redemptive and that I deserve and can have overwhelming beauty and redemption.  Or at least walk toward it without acting as my own hurdle/cop/brick wall.  (You may snicker at the juxtaposition of this with my resolution to deal more in observable reality, and I will “heh” right along with you.  None of this has to make sense to anyone but me, after all.)

Sunday morning I woke up for a few minutes, long enough to stretch out my arms, shift around a little so I was less blanketed, and then, suddenly feeling unbelievably comfortable, decided to go back to sleep for a little while.  As I was sort of melting into that space right at the edge of sleep, where you have your weirdest thoughts and also the ones you’ll later wish you’d written down, I had this vague idea that stretching just to nestle back in was probably a good metaphor for something or other.  And then I was gone, taking that little seed of a blog post with me.  When I woke up, I couldn’t get my head back around it.

Later we went to the market, me, Joel, and Ruby, and I waved to some guys we know from our old neighborhood who were slinging coffee.  We had some lazy, noncommittal discussions about which vegetables to buy and doubled back once after realizing we really did want pad thai and pork buns for breakfast (the pork buns were great, the pad thai less so, in case you’re thinking of hitting that booth for breakfast next Sunday).  I posted to Twitter from my phone that it was the eighth anniversary of Joel’s and my first date – which we consider our “real” anniversary and usually bother to celebrate, which isn’t the case for the anniversary of our quickie elopement – and that we were celebrating by buying vegetables, because we are exciting.

We made our way to what has become our preferred Sunday breakfast location: the plastic chairs next to the pit beef stall, and we talked about Thanksgiving plans and upcoming events at Ruby’s school and the tastiness of our coffee, and at some point during a rare silence (our kid is seven, and quiet does not exist), Joel said, “I think we’re going to be together for the rest of our lives.”  I joked about whether he’d been paying attention during our wedding vows, but I understood what he meant.  I felt it too, that day – nothing I could put my finger on specifically, but I too was thinking about the night of our first real date and the things we said and all the years and all the growing pains and all the plain old pain that has transpired since, and the contortions and bending we’ve all had to do to make things fit, and how there have been times when I think Joel and I have both felt like if we really were to totally stretch out our limbs, we wouldn’t fit at all anymore, and how fucking terrifying that felt for so long.

But on Sunday – and, I realized, for quite a while leading up to Sunday – it felt exactly, almost unbelievably comfortable to stretch just to nestle back in.  Like that blissful, supernatural feeling of finding precisely the right spot, right position, right clearheaded calm in which to melt safely back into sleep.

OMG I swear I did not forget my login info or that I have a blog.  First I got sick, and then I got into a really disgusting anxiety spiral, and then I got writer’s block, and then I had anxiety some more (see: spiral, previously mentioned), and now I am listening to “Iesha” by Another Bad Creation on lala, and here we are.

So the thing with anxiety is that when I’m in it, my mind is going a million miles an hour, tiny snippets of thoughts flying around like dollars in that thing the “I Love Money” cast had to catch dollars in that one time.  Anxiety makes Twitter the ideal forum for me.  I never have more than 140 characters’ worth of anything to say when I’m in the throes.

As bad if not worse, in order to shut it down, I have to consciously, and with great effort, clear my head of all thoughts.  Here is how I have been getting to sleep at night: watching 30 Rock on Netflix, one episode after another until hours have gone by.  Even when I know I don’t have 22 more minutes of awake left in me, I will start another episode, just because the cast’s voices (okay, fine, Alec Baldwin’s voice) soothe me.

And here is how I have been getting back to sleep when I wake up (and when I wake up again, and when I wake up again): I shift my body into as comfortable a position as I can given the hideously bad pillows that will be replaced tomorrow.  And then I say to myself, “Right now, at this precise moment, [thing that is good].”  Like, “the one part of this godforsaken pillow that has any tiny little bit of comfort left in it is positioned right under the part of my neck that needed comfort.”  Or “the hall light is off, and there is no light getting into my eyes to make my head hurt in the morning.”  Sometimes I even try not to be so glass-half-empty.  I say, “Right now, in this moment, my body feels relaxed and my breathing feels calm, and I can feel the night coming back for me to wrap me up and pull me back into sleep.”  Stuff like that.

It’s okay.  It works.  I’m getting something like enough sleep and I’m doing something like functioning at work.  No one’s skin has been peeled off, no more than two crying jags have occurred, and I’ve had just that one for-real panic attack the day before we Officially Filed Bankruptcy (story for another time, but it’s been a long time coming and I am really happy about it, I promise).  It’s okay.  The problem is that having to consciously force myself to be in the moment – and ONLY in the moment – all the damn time is that I have not one thing to say here for weeks on end.  I mean, I guess I could make dozens of posts a day saying, “Right now I am snickering inappropriately about what I’m doing during the extra free time I just got because Mass was canceled,” or “Right now I am about to put a foot in my oven’s ass for charring the bottoms of my delicious muffins,” or something vaguely pretty, like, “Right now I am feeling grateful for the soft sounds of the ceiling fan and an instrumental ‘Julia’ cover and the gentle red glow of the little star-lights hanging on my living room wall in the house that has become a home I love.”  But that’s what Twitter’s for.

I’ll have content – not meta-content, but like, uh… content-content soon.  I know that the world is turning, news is happening, things are going on around me and outside of me about which I probably have some fee-fees to share.  And soon I will.

[title borrowed from "Lua" - specifically the Gillian Welch/Conor Oberst version]

I just realized that I’ve spent many of the Sundays over the last few months in my kitchen.  Rosemary iced tea, chicken pilau, cupcakes, pork chops, macaroni salad, and today… TODAY, chicken soup.  Chicken soup!  With my own hands.

I can’t quite explain what this means to me and for me, but I know that my gushiness is something I feel slightly embarrassed about, because I know that I am a late bloomer and most of the other grownups I know, especially the ones with kids, have always done lots of cooking.

Part of the reason this is a new phenomenon is that for five years, we lived in a house with a tiny little galley kitchen that had no counters.  Food prep was a nightmare.  We ate a lot of pasta.  We ate out more than we should have.  (And before that we lived with my dad, who was quite amenable to sharing his kitchen, but whose extremely tasty cooking sort of made me lazy, heh.  And before that we were in another place with no counters – the kitchen was like, in the hallway.)  Having spacious countertops in our new place is making a huge difference.

The other thing is that I think I forgot that all you really need in order to be a decent cook is a belief that you can make something decent.  I mean, and ingredients.  You don’t want to just try to simmer your confidence for an hour; that will not be filling.  For the longest time I have not believed I can create.  It’s not just cooking; I have not believed that I can write, or sing, or make art of any kind.  (I still don’t believe I can create visual art, unless you count my extremely awesome stick figures.)  This has been true for – I shit you not – about 20 years.  I would get swallowed whole by anxiety at the idea of making… anything.  At all.

This might be one reason I melted right the fuck down about being pregnant with my daughter.  It might also be one big reason I decided to stay that way.  It was accidental creation; once the original decision was made, I’d be creating whether I felt confident about it or not.  (It turned out pretty good – my daughter is the best of all my creations.  She is even better than the chicken soup I just made.  No, really.)

But I digress.  Financial hardships plus counter space, with a little dash of some kind of awakening have combined to make me long, all the time, to be in my kitchen, turning ingredients into meals.  Today I tackled chicken soup, a food I associate with the best moments of my childhood, with the best moments of my dad’s parenting, with the cozy dining room in my grandfather’s townhouse.  I was supremely nervous.  When I realized, early in the process, that I didn’t have exactly everything I thought I needed in order to make it, I decided to scrap it.  I told myself I’d have to do it another day.  I knew as I was telling myself that lie that it was a lie, and that I wouldn’t do it any other day, either.  (This is a process I go through about pretty much everything that I don’t think I can nail perfectly on the first try.)

And then I thought about my dad, how he started cooking food to feed a family when he was not much older than HALF as old as I am now; he was a boy.  And how he, and my Nonnie, and his own Nonnie (my, uh… Nonnie Emeritus?) all, I know now the way you know these things as you grow into yourself and your family, have the same fears and anxieties and need for perfection that I do.  But at some point, each one in turn lit the stove and hoped for the best.  And so I did, with – seriously – a lump in my throat from the anxiety.

I put in the chicken, and the onions, and I decided that since I was winging it, I would really wing it.  I guessed how much thyme should go in, how much salt, how many garlic cloves, and so on, determined to just feel my way through it and believe that I could create what I wanted to.  And when it came time to pull the chicken out and separate what I was keeping from what I wasn’t, I stood at my counter, just figuring out how to go about it as I went, clumsily pulling and picking, burning the tips of my fingers, and I suddenly felt overwhelmingly happy.  Because I had no idea what in the fuck I was doing, but I was doing it anyway.  I thought about how my dad figured this out, and his mom figured it out, and her mom figured it out, and how for many generations, people in my family have stood in their kitchens, pulling apart chickens, throwing a handful of this and a dash of that into a pot and stirring and checking and figuring it out as they go, until they made something, and that something sustained them and theirs for another day.  The fact that it was delicious just means they did it enough times to figure it out.

The soup did not taste like my dad’s.  It certainly did not taste like my Nonnie’s, which is the soup of all soups, and I almost don’t want to precisely recreate that one, because I feel about it almost the way I feel about the ocean (yeah, it IS that good).  It didn’t even taste the way I wanted it to (which was mildly irritating since for most of the afternoon, it smelled exactly the way I wanted it to taste).  Next time I will throw in a little more of this and maybe a little less of that, and leave it simmering a little longer.  But what matters to me today is that I want to do it again.  I didn’t get it exactly right, and that’s okay.  It’s actually kind of exciting.  It means that I couldn’t write it down for you, and I would have to, just as my dad has driven me mad for years by doing, walk someone through it, with instructions like “a little of” and “for a while,” and I would have to trust you to figure it out.  But more to the point, it means that next Sunday, when I go into my kitchen for another chunk of hours spent creating, I will have to trust myself to figure it out.