I haven’t written to this blog in so long now that this post
needs to be extraordinary. Grand. Epic, even. And it’s not.
What can I say? I’ve entirely dropped the ball. It’s not
that I haven’t written at all over these past few months. At one point I thought
I just had a mild case of writer’s block. I even tried to feng shui my writing
space by shuffling around my desk so it faces dead east. Instead of gazing out
the window I now stare at the third wall of my bedroom. It sounds droll, but
then, I do pay a lot of money in the overly competitive Boston rental market
for this wall, so I may as well examine it like the luxury piece of
architecture it’s currently priced as. The thing is, I don’t have writer’s
block, not really, I just don’t have the endings.
Over the past few moths, I’ve started a few—several,
many—blog posts, all of which are currently cluttering the virtual desktop of
my too old laptop in various states of unfinished. That, perhaps, is what I
struggle with most as a writer: finding the endings. And then, maybe more
importantly, being patient while said conclusions slowly materialize.
I spent every Thursday afternoon of my senior year of
college at one particular table of one specific coffee shop with my computer
and a friend. Highly over-caffeinated, we’d type furiously for hours, each
trying to knock off significant portions of our senior writing theses. And then
we’d distract each other with an interesting bit of research, or wishful plan
for travel, or, that ever-nagging assertion, “I don’t know how this ends.” When
I inevitably, repeatedly, uttered this proclamation, I was referring to the paper,
of course, the thirty page marathon of a nonfiction essay I was churning out as
my anticlimactic magnum opus of college (the essay, I believe, has still been
read by a grand total of 1.5 people; one of my readers gave up half-way
through), but I just as easily could have been referring not the paper but to college as a whole, or my chances for landing a decent career, or then life in
general.
When I had finally tacked on the final sentence and handed in the piece, I knew, in my heart, that it was a lie—a false conclusion crafted from the constraints of time and the fact that it was spring in Saratoga, New York and I would really like to end the flipping thing already so I could graduate and go read in the park and covertly feed the ducks leftover bits from my mozzarella, tomato and basil on ciabatta bread sandwiches. In subsequent years, I’ve ended several pieces of significant writing in this same manner—a final sentence to seal the deal in the moment, but which I know isn’t really the end. The ending never really arrives when I want it to, but slowly materializes, often years later. It’s something that just has to be waited out. And that kills me.
When I had finally tacked on the final sentence and handed in the piece, I knew, in my heart, that it was a lie—a false conclusion crafted from the constraints of time and the fact that it was spring in Saratoga, New York and I would really like to end the flipping thing already so I could graduate and go read in the park and covertly feed the ducks leftover bits from my mozzarella, tomato and basil on ciabatta bread sandwiches. In subsequent years, I’ve ended several pieces of significant writing in this same manner—a final sentence to seal the deal in the moment, but which I know isn’t really the end. The ending never really arrives when I want it to, but slowly materializes, often years later. It’s something that just has to be waited out. And that kills me.
Speaking of waiting, I’ve started something else new in an
impatient battle towards answering the ever present question: what will I do
when I grow up? While it’s still fairly unnerving to say certain goals out
loud—I’d like to work in dietetics counseling and nutrition communication—for someone who hasn’t taken a legitimate
science course since high school, I’ve nevertheless started to put in some
serious effort in hopes that the ending will, eventually, fall into place.
In the meantime, I’m spending my summer taking undergrad, basic, biology courses with, you guessed it, undergrads. A lot of them. Having graduated from college myself in 2009, and having already gone through two years of grad school, perhaps you can imagine how thrilled I am. I had convinced myself that the age difference wouldn’t be that apparent, and then when my lab partner leaned over and asked if I thought our lab TA looked just like that guy from Degrassi, and I had to go home and Google "Degrassi," I realized there was some pretty strong evidence for this, imagined or not, unnerving generation gap.
On the first day of class, I pulled out my new notebook and ballpoint pen while everyone else took out their laptops. I spent the better part of the class trying to see the professor’s powerpoint presentation around the screens and heads of my classmates who had all pulled up the slides on their own personal computers, and were busy cross-referencing the professor’s lecture material to relevant e-articles while simultaneously updating their Facebook status and still typing notes faster than I could write. A brief scan of the other females in my class was no more comforting, as they were all clad primarily in brightly colored spandex of certain notable brands that cost more than the totality of my own wardrobe, and often with color-coordinated headbands. When did gym wear become the popular collegiate attire, I wonder? I am about to spend this summer either shamefully overdressed for class, or woefully underdressed for the gym, and neither one offers great odds for fitting in.
In the meantime, I’m spending my summer taking undergrad, basic, biology courses with, you guessed it, undergrads. A lot of them. Having graduated from college myself in 2009, and having already gone through two years of grad school, perhaps you can imagine how thrilled I am. I had convinced myself that the age difference wouldn’t be that apparent, and then when my lab partner leaned over and asked if I thought our lab TA looked just like that guy from Degrassi, and I had to go home and Google "Degrassi," I realized there was some pretty strong evidence for this, imagined or not, unnerving generation gap.
On the first day of class, I pulled out my new notebook and ballpoint pen while everyone else took out their laptops. I spent the better part of the class trying to see the professor’s powerpoint presentation around the screens and heads of my classmates who had all pulled up the slides on their own personal computers, and were busy cross-referencing the professor’s lecture material to relevant e-articles while simultaneously updating their Facebook status and still typing notes faster than I could write. A brief scan of the other females in my class was no more comforting, as they were all clad primarily in brightly colored spandex of certain notable brands that cost more than the totality of my own wardrobe, and often with color-coordinated headbands. When did gym wear become the popular collegiate attire, I wonder? I am about to spend this summer either shamefully overdressed for class, or woefully underdressed for the gym, and neither one offers great odds for fitting in.
I guess I thought I started this blog back
in 2011 because eventually I wanted to be a pop-culture, food writer, and it would be a good
way to practice my craft, and perhaps start building a brand. It’s now been two
years, and while I continue to love to write, and cook, and eat, there are
certain personality traits that are still stuck in the past, and as a deliberate, delightful, choice. I’m
only twenty-five but my technological prowess would peg me closer to being
eighty. I still don’t text or have a phone with internet capabilities because
some of the greatest parts of my day are the hours of ignorant bliss I spend
wondering about things that I can’t look up instantly on my smartphone. I haven’t changed my Facebook photo in about four years both because I don’t
really care, and I can’t figure out how to do so. I don’t actually know what Instagram
does. My computer is so old not even charities want it as a donation, and it's crashed three times during the crafting of this post alone. And, finally, the only effort I’ve put into brand development is buying my parents lunch when they come to visit so they’ll keep
reading. In fact, if I were being totally honest with myself, I really started this
blog not because I thought I was going to be the next, most famous food writer, ever, but because I was pretty sure in the summer of 2011 that I was going to
die...of ennui, heartbreak, or anticipation of a future that wasn’t
materializing, and I needed a distraction.
My first posts on this blog were from a time in my life when
I’d moved back in with my parents two years after graduating from college, I’d
been hit by a car, I didn't know what my dream job was, my boyfriend of the
time was, literally, phoning it in, and I'd spent most of my summer lying on a yoga mat in my childhood bedroom pretending to find some sort of mediative peace but really just stewing in my own bad mood. My parents have both politely forgotten
what it was like to live with me that summer, otherwise they would have changed
their number, and the locks, by now. I think I had anticipated that this blog
would mark only grand and significant occasions and meals—special restaurant reviews
and labor intensive spreads to make for dinner party gatherings. Really, Mal
got the closest to that with her show-stopping baking recipes, (award winning cake!) but my posts, the better ones anyway, are about much less
glamorous, and less significant things.
I joke a lot about all the unbloggable moments that I have—stand-eating dinner leftovers over the sink to avoid doing dishes, the bread that proofed meticulously for hours and still baked flat—and which I often refer to as mistakes in my greater culinary repertoire. Except the thing is, I’ve started to like them. I’ve started to get cozy with the idea that the omelet that flopped is the better story than the one that came out picture perfect. And I guess that’s how I ended up with this post, that’s about nothing, really, and then kind of a lot at the same time.
I joke a lot about all the unbloggable moments that I have—stand-eating dinner leftovers over the sink to avoid doing dishes, the bread that proofed meticulously for hours and still baked flat—and which I often refer to as mistakes in my greater culinary repertoire. Except the thing is, I’ve started to like them. I’ve started to get cozy with the idea that the omelet that flopped is the better story than the one that came out picture perfect. And I guess that’s how I ended up with this post, that’s about nothing, really, and then kind of a lot at the same time.
Not surprisingly, I don’t actually know how this post
should end, so I think I’ll refer back to a certain, favorite role model:
I think Julia Child is a constant inspiration to me, not only because I was recently awarded a teaching assistantship in her name, but also because I find her written work and gregarious personality equally exciting. What I read of Julia’s meticulous crafting of her cookbooks—years of painstaking work, research, recipe testing, and editing—is not motivation for creating my own cookbook, but rather solid evidence that such an endeavor would probably kill me. I don’t remember the last time I followed a recipe exactly when making a meal. As I am an insufferable perfectionist in most parts of my life (thanks, parents), arriving at the stove is the one moment of improvisational relief, and I like it that way.
But that’s the thing about Julia, her written work set an unprecedented, national, culinary standard, while her public personality reminded us that letting loose was essential too. We certainly didn’t love to watch Julia cook a chicken simply for the art of the culinary masterpiece; we loved to watch because it seemed she was just as likely as any of us at home to drop the thing, pick it up, brush it off, and go on with the meal. One of Julia’s foremost principles of cooking was, in fact, “Never apologize. Serve it up and move on” (Bob Spitz, 448). I like to think that Julia Child would sit down with a glass of red wine and that floor chicken and be perfectly happy.
I think Julia Child is a constant inspiration to me, not only because I was recently awarded a teaching assistantship in her name, but also because I find her written work and gregarious personality equally exciting. What I read of Julia’s meticulous crafting of her cookbooks—years of painstaking work, research, recipe testing, and editing—is not motivation for creating my own cookbook, but rather solid evidence that such an endeavor would probably kill me. I don’t remember the last time I followed a recipe exactly when making a meal. As I am an insufferable perfectionist in most parts of my life (thanks, parents), arriving at the stove is the one moment of improvisational relief, and I like it that way.
But that’s the thing about Julia, her written work set an unprecedented, national, culinary standard, while her public personality reminded us that letting loose was essential too. We certainly didn’t love to watch Julia cook a chicken simply for the art of the culinary masterpiece; we loved to watch because it seemed she was just as likely as any of us at home to drop the thing, pick it up, brush it off, and go on with the meal. One of Julia’s foremost principles of cooking was, in fact, “Never apologize. Serve it up and move on” (Bob Spitz, 448). I like to think that Julia Child would sit down with a glass of red wine and that floor chicken and be perfectly happy.
Day-Off Brunch: smoked salmon, brie, fresh asparagus and spinach, savory, buckwheat crêpes. Crêpe recipe still being perfected, but the test batches are pretty happy mistakes.
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