No More Fucks To Give

This Man

I haven't had much motivation to write, but I've also been busy with work, which this school year includes a lot of translations for the public school district. It's been a good challenge, and I totaled up my invoices this afternoon to find a nice chunk of change (not a penny of which I have seen yet, ha).

Anyway, I wanted to share something here, so voilà: A timely song by the ever-excellent Robert Cray.

 

On Monday I Get My Teeth Back

Well, my teeth have never gone away, but they've been wired in braces for almost the last three years.

You can read about the why here (this is deep background; you can skip it unless you want to read some sexism in action) and here, although I do recall getting tired of writing about it in that second entry.

COVID-19 delayed my treatment by a few months, so I likely would have gotten my braces off sooner than this, but the whole process took much longer than the estimated 18 months. I'm not complaining. I'm completely satisfied with my results. I still do have some facial pain, but it's soooo much less aggravating than it was. And I got my smile back.

Here's a photo from December 2017, two months after I got my braces on.

 

And here's one from May 2020, two and a half-ish years later.

Perhaps you can't really see a difference in my smile, but I sure can. Look at my dimples in each photo. In the first one, they're very deep, because I was smiling hard. In the second, they're not so deep, because I was giving a casual smile. And yet my smile is wider and my teeth are more prominent in the second photo.

100% worth it.

Trouble

Yesterday morning as I was driving to work, Coldplay's song "Trouble"* came on the radio. This song always takes me back to a certain time in my life in the early aughts, when I was dealing with a situation that I won't elaborate here. I loved the song then and I love it now, but yesterday the opening piano notes brought me to tears, which was a total surprise.

I thought of changing the channel, but I'd rolled up to a stoplight and decided to just feel everything. What came to the surface wasn't really nostalgia for that time of my life, but rather the current-day grief I'm feeling because of Covid-19, the political situation in the US, and the way those two are entwined.

I wish I could write more about it. I'm so out of practice! My eyes cleared in time for me to continue driving, and I decided to write about it here, but what I imagined and what's emerged from my brain are two different things. That's probably proof that I need to just keep writing about everything, no matter how mundane, so that I can get my mojo back.

*The album this song is on, Parachutes, is most excellent, and I can't believe it's 20 years old.

Salvation(?) in This Pandemic

It's been a little while since I've posted, and I've been afraid of falling into a not-writing rut again. It's so easy to do. But this idea has been pinging around in my brain for the last few days, and I want to talk about it.

I think cooking every day is saving my sanity during this health crisis.

My husband and I used to eat out six nights a week due to some combination of laziness and lack of motivation. Every once in a while, I'd think, "This is a terrible habit," but I made no effort to change, because it was so easy to roll on over to the neighborhood joint for drinks and dinner every day.

The thing that initially changed that habit was my son's arrival for his spring break. It was March 6, I think, and while we would eat out (or bring him home takeout), I would always make an effort to cook some while he was here, both to save money and you know, be a mom who cooks food for her kid. When his spring break turned into online classes at home, I just kept cooking more and getting less takeout (which, at the time, was the only way restaurants were operating at that point). My hours at work had been cut, so I had a ton more free time. By the time my kid moved back to France in mid-May (after graduating from college, I should add), I think we were getting takeout or pizza delivery about once a week, maybe twice. It's hard to remember, but it was a huge reduction in how much we had been eating out.

Even after my son left, I kept cooking. We could have gone back to our habit of eating out getting takeout, but we didn't, because I remembered how to meal plan—at least vaguely— and shop for a week at a time. Living half a mile (about 800m for my metric friends) from the nearest grocery used to mean that if I was cooking and needed an ingredient, I'd just pop over there for whatever I needed. In these Covid times, if I don't have an ingredient, I make do until my next trip. So my meal planning and weekly-ish shopping has gotten more efficient.

And really...I'm just having a lot of fun trying new recipes and new-to-me cuisines. My grill and my Instant Pot are my best friends this summer. This passage from Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, which my sister-in-law gave me years ago, encapsulates kind of how I feel:

"Many of our individual and social difficulties come from arbitrarily compartmentalizing our lives. Work is what we do for a living, and it is so often unrewarding that it becomes something to be avoided. Cooking provides a metaphor and a vehicle for making our lives whole: finding pleasure in handling food instead of thinking that pleasure comes when the work is over."

The food preparation and mise en place is most of the fun for me. I enjoy slicing, dicing, and julienning vegetables, and just letting myself concentrate on the task at hand. Sometimes I bust out Allan's mom's 1970s food processor, an original French Robot-Coupe that's still going strong, although I do baby the bowl a bit, as it's starting to crack. Sometimes I get out the mandoline, but I usually just wield my knife and have at it. I enjoy the rhythm of preparing produce for cooking.

And then there's the experimentation. I have a cabinet full of spices and spice blends, oils, and vinegars. I have a fridge full of condiments from at least four continents. Girl can make a whole lot of different types of foods. And I mentioned my fermentation in the previous entry.

I'm sure that if I had kids to feed and a full-time job, I would not be loving preparing all this food every day. But I have a captive audience who loves almost every kind of food. I am fortunate to have the means to buy pretty much whatever I feel like at the grocery—although I drew the line at a giant Flinstones hunk of beef on the bone, knowing that it would take us a week to eat it—and I have all kinds of resources to give me ideas if I need them.

It really is the act of creating, I think, that's keeping me from going mad. I haven't been writing, I haven't been doing other artistic things, I don't have much of a garden, so cooking it is. And at the risk of being totally cheesy, I'll quote Martha Stewart: It's a good thing.

Venting...and fermenting.

I haven't been writing here, even though every day I think about things I could write about. I have a tendency to think that other people are writing about these issues much better than I am, so why bother? But gahhhhhhhh, there is SO MUCH BULLSHIT happening at the federal level right now that I can't even. I think that's the point: The president*'s goal is to sow chaos, so that it's hard to keep track of what's what, especially the more nefarious stuff.

Take yesterday: There was abysmal economic news, so 45 tweeted about possibly postponing the election (which he cannot do all by himself), which got everyone in a tizzy, and the economic news was temporarily forgotten.

Also yesterday was the funeral of John Lewis, américain extraordinaire. I didn't watch the whole ceremony, but I did see President Barack Obama's eulogy, and it was most excellent. That reminds me: Last Sunday, Allan was watching soccer when NBC News cut in with a live broadcast of John Lewis's casket being carried over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The TV was muted and we were listening to music, and ELP's "Lucky Man" was playing as the carriage and driver made their way across that bridge. The juxtaposition of the lyrics and the scene were almost too much for me to bear.

Getting back to venting about bullshit...have you seen what 45's new Postmaster General is doing to the Post Office? The Post Office that is enshrined in the Constitution? Here's a decent summary. The P.O. has been in trouble since Congress made it prefund its retirement benefits until 2056, and this opinion piece gives a good overview. You can't tell me that the most recent changes to the USPS aren't intended to a) deliberately slow down mail delivery in order to annoy Americans who will then be all on board for privatization and b) cause fuckery with the unprecedented amount of mail-in ballots that will be cast this fall due to Covid-19.

This is infuriating—so much is infuriating right now—and I really think I need to stop doomscrolling on Twitter. I just learned the word "doomscrolling" the other day, by the way. I'm slipping with my internet cred.

In other news, I'm having a lot of fun pickling vegetables and now fruits—I made fruit kimchi today, which would just be fruit salsa if I didn't put it in a jar to ferment. I do love the Easy Fermenter Lids from Nourished Essentials, and no, they're not paying me to say this.



I'm planning to keep pickling and start preparing and freezing meals (for easy reheating) in anticipation of our kitchen renovation. The last time it was redone was 1975 or so, so it's almost as old as I am. And it's something we've been talking about since I moved here in 2006. The architect has been here, and we're anticipating her plans, which will include a new dining room added onto the back of the house. We're both very excited, and I'm sure I'll be writing more about that as things get going.

WOW, I feel so much better. I should write more often.

 

The Weight

Just as I was about to start typing this, "The Weight" by The Band* came on the music channel I am listening to. It felt appropriate, so that's what I'm calling this blog post. *Please do enjoy this video; it's from the film "The Last Waltz," and mmm, that Robbie Robertson is easy on the eyes and Mavis Staples just nails the vocals. "Beautiful," as she whispers right at the end. 

It's come to me in the past few days or maybe even weeks—I'm really having trouble with time these days—that we as a country are in mourning, and I'm not even talking about the number of deaths from Covid-19 (which, as I type this, is 135,235, according to the CDC). I mean, YES, we are collectively mourning all those lives lost. I don't mean to downplay that at all. If you have lost someone to Covid, you have my condolences. This is a terrible disease and we have lost far too many people to it.

What I mean by mourning is the loss of normalcy. I know this isn't groundbreaking news at all. Life hasn't been normal for four months, and I'm pretty sure we'll never get back to "normal." I would hope that our new normal is a more equitable and just society, but I'm not holding my breath.

There's the loss of jobs/income/housing/healthcare/you name it. And on top of the life-sustaining things, there's the loss of projects/plans/travel/visits with family/you name it. It doesn't matter what income bracket you're in. You've probably lost something.

My own losses (and I am very fortunate so far) have included scrapping my 50th birthday plans as well as a trip to see my kids, who live overseas. I made it through my birthday just fine, but in the last couple of days my anxiety has been ramping up and I'm wondering if I'll ever see my children again. Words can't express how glad I am that they live in countries with sane leadership.

What I'm trying to say is that it's okay to be sad about things, even if you still have it pretty good. Just because someone is worse off than you doesn't mean that your problems aren't valid. A dear friend of mine taught me that back when the tsunami hit the Indian Ocean in late December 2004. I was feeling guilty that I was suffering when others had it worse. And my friend gently told me that there was room for my own feelings and loss, that the tragedy did not negate what I was dealing with at the time. It's a lesson I've never forgotten.

So no matter what your situation is right now, if you're feeling the weight, it's okay to feel it. We're in the early stages of this epidemic, and we're all going to suffer in some way at some point. That's just a fact. Here's to loving our fellow human beings as we all struggle through. (But please, for the love of god, wear a mask when you enter a public place. And wash your damn hands.)

From Basil to Lasagna

I'd originally imagined writing this bog post in the manner of "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," but didn't want to have to offer apologies to Laura Numeroff, and besides, this isn't really a circular allegory about...whatever. It's just how one thought led to another, and I ended up with a pan of lasagna.

This past March, I planted some basil seeds in a cardboard egg carton, #quarantine, and a few weeks later, I transplanted them to a large planter that lives on our back porch. All of the seedlings took, and in hindsight, I wish I'd spread them out more in the planter, but you know what they say about hindsight. Also, I planted catnip in the other half of the planter, but those seedlings got destroyed by some animal, I'm guessing of the feline persuasion.

My basil seems to be thriving, and I keep pinching it back, taking the bigger leaves, which I sometimes use and sometimes don't. I love basil, but I don't really want to eat it every day. Today it seemed like I had enough to make a small batch of pesto—which I had prepared for by purchasing pine nuts and parmesan—so I decided that's what I'd do.



Isn't that pretty? I ended up with about 2 packed cups' worth of basil and proceeded to make pesto, but was still wondering what I'd do with it. I equate pesto with pasta, but all I had in the cupboard were some lasagna noodles (and in these Covid times, I'm not going to go to Kroger for just one or two things). But I didn't know how many noodles there were, so I thought I'd slice the lone zucchini I had in order to make a noodle-type presence.

I needn't have worried, because there was plenty of pasta and barely any zucchini, so halfway through assembling the lasagna, I microwaved a bag of frozen chopped kale to slip in there for more bulk and nutrition. Otherwise it was going to be a marginal amount of zucchini in a giant pile of pasta, cheese, and pesto. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

My usual method of making lasagna involves béchamel and grated cheese, which is how the French tend to make their lasagna. Well, they also use meat and tomato sauce, but that wasn't what I was going for today. I'm partial to making it this way, because I don't precook my noodles—again, how the French tend to do it—so the moisture in the white sauce hydrates the noodles during cooking. This time I mixed the pesto with my béchamel after it had cooled for a bit, but ended up needing more, so I made another quick batch of sauce to top the final layer of noodles. I'm pretty sure I could have used even more, because the end result was that the noodles on top buckled underneath the cheese after I took the foil off so the cheese could brown. (I'm sure Kenji Lopez-Alt could give me an explanation.)

Anyway! All this to say that the end product was pretty good for a hastily thrown together dish that stemmed from a small seed in my brain: I need to pinch my basil but I don't want to let it go to waste.

If there's one thing I can say about this damn pandemic (pamn dandemic?) it's this: I'm back in the kitchen, and that's a good thing.

The Bare Minimum

We ordered this sign recently (actually, we had to order ten, so if you're in Lexington and want one, hit me up; I'll just ask that you donate ten bucks to the social justice organization of your choice if you are able to) and stuck it in the yard.

I was sitting on our front patio the other evening, as I usually do when the weather permits, contemplating our new sign. The message is printed on both sides, so I can read it from where I sit. And it dawned on me that these tenets and truths should really just be the baseline of human existence. What if every person on earth believed these things, fundamentally? (Wait, never mind. I don't want to get into a bunch of hypotheticals right now.)

It boggles the mind that any one of these statements could be considered controversial, or even "liberal." Yet here we are. Although I will say that "Black Lives Matter" is much more accepted today than it was a few years ago. What has changed? Has white America finally had enough? And do we really understand that our entire system must be dismantled and rebuilt if our Black sisters and brothers are to be truly free*?

*I have some thoughts on freedom, but that will be for another post. In fact, maybe I should write a post for every statement on this sign.

Regarding the Title of this Blog....

Last night my family had a Zoom for my birthday, and it was a lot of fun. Early on, the older of my two brothers said to me, "Hey, I read your blog!" I replied, "I didn't know you followed me on Twitter," as that's the only public place I mentioned relaunching this thing. The next thing I knew, he was typing on his phone, and then my dad looked at his phone, AND MY BROTHER HAD SENT THE LINK TO THIS HERE BLOG WITH A SWEAR WORD IN THE TITLE TO OUR FATHER. Our father, the retired minister/pastor/preacher, whatever term you want to use.

I legit facepalmed when I realized. Dad chuckled, "I've seen that word before." I was pretty embarrassed, though.

But here's the thing: I feel kind of hypocritical having this blog declare that I have no fucks to give what people think about what I have to say, when I clearly do. Not all people, but certain people, like my dad. I was worried about readers thinking I was ignorant of certain things in my previous post, and I was pre-emptively defensive. That's definitely NOT having no fucks to give.

So which is it? Since this is primarily a place for me to write, and I'm publishing this on the internet, there is reason for me to polish my words beyond what I'd write in a journal. I started this up again as a way to use and hone my skills; if it resonates with others, so much the better. But I think I will keep the blog title, which I thought of years ago. It's irreverent, as I often am. It does lend a certain insouciance, which I wish I felt all the time. I plan to stop worrying about strangers reading my words: I know what I'm talking about, and if I don't, I do research before I write. Finally, as the subtitle states, I actually care deeply about a lot of things, so perhaps I can use this space to really parse what matters and what doesn't, or what I should give a fuck about and what I shouldn't.

Two Birthdays

Today is July 5, 2020, the day after the United States's 244th birthday, and the day before my 50th birthday.

I thought of a really good way to tie these two events together while I was in the bathroom earlier today, but didn't write that thought down, and now cannot remember. It was good, though.

So yeah, yesterday was white America's national holiday, and I really have no fucks to give about it. We're six weeks in to what I feel is a watershed moment, the catalyst of which was the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands knee of a police officer. There's so much more to it, and so many other writers—who are more knowledgeable and practiced than I am—have written millions of words about it.

There's no doubt that this country is in crisis, but this reckoning has been a long time coming. The crux for me is this: The United States is soon to become a "minority-majority" nation, and that scares the pants off the white supremacists. (Trust me, I am well aware that this nation was founded on the notion of white supremacy and its wealth was built on the backs of enslaved people.) And a bunch of white people LOST THEIR MINDS when Americans elected a Black man as President. Which is why we have a noted racist and below-average white man who's accomplished very little on his own merit as our President* today.     

*I'm using the asterisk here as writer Charles Pierce does when he refers to the current occupant of The White House.

All this is news to exactly no one, but because it's been ages since I've actually written a blog entry, I felt like explaining that yes, I am aware of what's happening in this godforsaken country at the moment.

So what does this have to do with my birthday? Not much, I think.

Except! We're in the middle of a pandemic! Which has been mismanaged by the federal government! (Shout out to Kentucky's governor Andy Beshear for his leadership for the past four months.)

And the pandemic means that I can't celebrate my 50th birthday the way I had planned to, which was—no joke—a long weekend in Cleveland to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And then I was planning to travel to Switzerland and France to visit my children later this year, but the European Union** has essentially banned Americans from entering as of July 1.

**I know that Switzerland is not part of the EU! god, why am I so defensive? I hate that I have to explain that I know things. I think it's because I don't know who will be reading this, because I'm planning to put this link out into the world.

So neither of those trips is happening, and I've had to come to terms with celebrating this milestone birthday in a different way, a very low-key way. I know it shouldn't matter. Fifty is a number, but American society makes such a big deal about people turning 50. Is it because arriving at that age meant you'd kept death at bay? I don't know. I do know that my life is more than half over, unless I take after my great-uncle R., who lived to be 101.

I don't feel fifty years old in my head. My body is another story. And until a few weeks ago, I didn't really care about turning 50. Something about this pandemic (and the actual date, and the fact that I can't celebrate the way I want to) flipped a switch in my brain, and I'm apprehensive. Societal pressure is a bitch, and the pressure to look good is especially a bitch. The rational part of me is saying, "Pffft. You're fifty. Be glad for it!" The irrational part of me is screaming, "YOU'RE FIFTY. YOU LOOK LIKE SHIT AND YOU'RE GONNA DIIIIIEEEEE!"

Tomorrow evening, A. and I are getting takeout from one of the nicer restaurants in town. He bought a bottle of Veuve Clicquot Rosé champagne and a French-style fruit tart. I originally said I just wanted a cupcake, but I changed my mind and asked for the tart. I'm hosting a Zoom with my parental units and siblings after dinner. As far as I know, I don't have any gifts to unwrap, but it's okay. I have enough stuff and life itself is a gift right now. It really is.