new new new new new

The new year bears down with a slow creeping insistence.  It moves closer, one day at a time, the same pace as always, but closer such that you can feel the wind from the void of 2015 just beyond the bend.

I met a talented woodworker in Nashville but a few weeks ago, and in the way that full hearted artistry does, I've been inspired. Everyday there's a new photo in my Instagram feed of a spoon he carved that day. We're but 5 spoons from the end of his project. I wonder if the time passes the same for him now as it did in the first five. (How much of mastery is of yourself, not your craft?)

I've been thinking about year long projects for a while now. What would I dedicate a year to studying? Julia Childs dedicated six months to learning French cooking (which became a lifetime). A Nashville carver made spoons. An artist and dear colleague at Etsy drew cats.

It's not a resolution. It's a project. I've had much success in the past by throwing myself into new things. The 5 day a week veganism. Portuguese. 750 words of writing a day, for a month (I made it 40 days straight before quitting, cold turkey one hungover morning in July.) Taking singing lessons.

But what to dedicate myself to? There are many things that I'm interested in getting better at, or exploring more deeply. Picking just one and sticking to it for a year is daunting.

Commitment is a hard problem.

I've already narrowed the list of options a bit. I'd like it to be an output project, such that by the end of the day I have something that didn't exist at the beginning of that day. That leaves out any "consumption" projects - read an article a day, listen to a lesson in French a day,  eat an apple a day... et cetera.

It also needs to be tractable. Something that no matter where I find myself in 2015, I can do this thing. Nothing that requires an inordinate amount of equipment or tools. If need be, Id be willing to take a break during a trip (backpacking, rafting). It needs to be doable within the time frame of a single day. Repeatable, but with room for improvisation.

Current ideas include:
- sew a pocket a day
- bread making
- short story writing
- a photo of the sunrise or sunset
- a problem from SICP
- a new knitting stitch
- ???

Feedback loops

A few years ago, more or less with the prodding of my mother and paleo sister, I made some life style changes.

I stopped eating most forms of sugarcane. And I stopped using aluminum based* deodorant.

These are hard things to do. Assuming that you're stopping from a normal American lifestyle, chances are your system is used to being chock full of sugar, and ditto for aluminum under your arms.

There's a detox period. It's horrible. If you're giving up aluminum, something in your body overcompensates for the sudden lack of the metal. The result is a terrible personal stench. It goes away after a few weeks as the microbe ecosystem that is your sweat glands recalibrates itself. But the in the meantime, you're standing 10 feet away from everyone and avoiding all stressful situations. I used to try to time this with spring break or winter holiday when I was in college. It took more than one try to drop it completely.

For sugar, it's also a few week adjustment period of insatiable cravings and irritability.

But! Once your over both of these and your body has recalibrated to be sugar cane / aluminum free, strange cool science shit happens. You can smell when you eat sugar!! My BO changes, not in a good or bad way, it just smells a bit sweeter the day after having a slice of cake. Same goes with veganism and meat. My diet makes me smell different. I find this amazingly cool.

The smell changes, to me, are a bigger indication of the impact diet has on your body composition. What I eat matters for more than how I feel, or how much the scale says I weigh**. It also matters for the dude sitting next to me on the bus.

What a sweet feedback loop!

*Aluminum is an antiperspirant. You can buy deodorant that doesn't contain aluminum.
**Weighing yourself is a sloppy proxy measuring health.

"Jesus Christ It's Cold Outside, Is That a Savoy Cabbage? How Hard Could Soup Be?" soup recipe

I made this for the first time a few days ago; it's delicious.  It lasted me for three days, and tasted as good on the third day as it did on the first.  It'd work well for a hearty starter or as the main attraction.

Ingredients:

- 1 head of savoy cabbage

- 2 Idaho Potatoes

- 1 bunch of green onions

- 8 cloves of garlic

- Heaps of freshly ground black pepper (~2 tbs?)

- 1 1/2 tbs flakey sea salt (+/- a bit to taste)

- 2 tbs Olive Oil

- ~2L water*

Directions:

In a large pot, add the water and olive oil.  Bring to a boil.  Add the salt. 

While the water is boiling, remove the two outer leaves from the cabbage, and chop cabbage and potatoes into chunks, no bigger than an inch thick.  De-paper the garlic cloves, and chop up just the white parts of the green onions.  Leave the green tops for garnish later.

Once the water is boiling, add the cabbage, potatoes, green onion whites, and garlic cloves to the pot.  Pepper heavily.

Lower to a hair above a simmer, cover and cook for about 20 minutes, or until the potatoes are mashable with a spoon on the side of a pot, checking in every 5-10 minutes.

Season to taste.  If it needs more salt, add it.  Note that using table salt will probably result in needing less of it than large flake sea salt.  Ditto for black pepper.

Chop and sprinkle on the green tops of the green onions.  Serve piping hot, with day-old french bread.

Serves 2 - 4

* I used a shallow pot called a rondeau to cook this in.  With the potatoes and cabbage, it about came up to the top of the pot.  That's how much water I put in.  I've since measured, it was about 2L of water.  I'm not sure if having everything that close together was a hindrance or a help to the soup, but it came out fucking delicious, so who cares.  A bigger pot's probably easier to stir.

A Bitchy Perspective on Audience and Sin

Some perspectives are hard to write from.  Take for example, that of being a beautiful woman with problems.  Let's say that you wanted to write about a problem that, in your experience, seems to stem from being a pretty female.

First, you commit the sin of calling yourself beautiful.  Not just pretty, but mind-blowingly beautiful.  This is a cardinal sin, one of the Seven.  It goes by the name vanity.  All of us have sinned, but usually in some empathy building way, like gluttony or sloth.  These are sins that we can all work on being better at, together.  Vanity is a consensus destroying sin -- it's the sin that we'd all be committing if we weren't all gluttonous and lazy.  Since we are all not able to be vain, the sin of vanity engenders the sin of envy.

What a terrible sin vanity is.

Second, you have enough self-confidence to see that others, particularly those with no stake in your personal well-being, see you as beautiful.  Most people can find at least one person who finds them beautiful, how do you know that you are not falling into a pit of lack of perspective?  In the process of discovering if you are suffering from impostor's syndrome, suddenly you find your physical attributes questioned, and in the process see your original self-confidence destroyed.  What a fugly bitch, the internet will say.  If you're so pretty, come on then, show us your tits, someone else will comment.  I've never seen a face that looks more like a horse, will be a common, and, if you're as beautiful as you say you are, erroneous response.  In science, they call erroneous test results such as these "true negatives".[1]

To summarize, if you come out as a beautiful woman writing about issues in your life, you may as well chalk up "having your self-identity questioned" as the next issue on the list of grievances to write about.

Third, you must commit the sin of complaining about a thing that others pay hideous amounts of money, submit themselves to torture and starvation in order to obtain.  This is not as cardinal of a Sin as Vanity, but it is whining.  Whining is a cardinal sin of the modern world[2].  To that audience that you're relying on to tell your story to, you've just revealed to them what a whining bitch they're spending their time reading the words of.

All this sin and self-questioning can detract from the story you're attempting to tell.

These problems in creating a relatable character or persona undermine your reason for writing about your problems in the first place.  These reasons normally fit into two categories: A) make yourself feel less bad about your problems by opening them up to a public forum, usually accomplished through B) engendering a modicum of either sympathy or empathy from you readers.  Connecting with an audience that probably cannot relate (are they a beautiful woman? If not, what are the chances that they've encountered the problems that you're ascribing to this position?  If they are A) not a beautiful woman and B) have encountered the problems that you're experiencing, then god what an asshole you are for even assuming that only beautiful woman have that problem in the first place).

All of those sins committed, and for what?  The lost goodwill of a once eager, but now disinterested and slightly disgusted audience.


[1] A "true negative" is the inverse of a "false positive".
[2] See #firstworldproblems.

Superego

And don’t let that superego eat you, he said.

Once about a year ago, I woke up and she stayed sleeping.  That day was the best day I’ve ever had.  She stayed asleep for a week.  That week changed my life.

Whatever the price, I would pay it if it would put her to sleep forever.

Sometimes I worry that I drunkenly made that deal, and every day since that one has been payment.

Hungover

Somehow it doesn't make sense. A bunch of assholes with a grudge hijack a few planes and terrorize Manhattan and in response we build a culture of fear and loathing. Ten years and change later and we're going to war with ourselves. A bunch of fat, mostly white dudes killing black men and throwing pepper spray at privileged Twittererz.

Wind of Fortune

She placates herself with mulled wine and well phrased quips that she posts to the micro-forum.  They're well received, by and large.

I'm not sure what she told you about herself but I'm here to set the record straight. She was right about karma.

You know, all too well perhaps, of her paranoia with fortunes. Every time a good thing would happen she'd be walking around with her head down, just waiting for the next thing to drop.

It never really quite worked out that balanced but she couldnt help but worry, all the same, about the misery her own luck was bringing down about the heads of others. Raining it down like hail in the Sierras in the late summer, angry and relentless in its fury.

Like the time she got that promotion at work and then the tsunami struck the East coast of Japan, knocking out a nuclear power plant.

Or when the boy she liked made a reply to one of her oblique posts on the 'forums. Her sister's cats escaped. They were found a few hours later when they returned home for supper. Their fleas wouldn't be discovered for a few days. It took two weeks to rid the house of them.

In the same way, she took a grotesque pleasure in her own misfortunes. She was happy for a week when her driver's license application was denied on the basis of lack of proof of residency. 
Her laughs could be heard echoing throughout her apartment complex when Jake, her new beau, called to break it off.

I asked her once, about her lighthearted approach to misfortune. She replied, at least someone else is making profit from this, my madness of a life.