Warning- Not About Food
Sometimes life sucks. Even when you engineer everything to be good, things just aren’t what you expected. There’s too much time for some things, and the rest of the time just slips away while you helplessly watch while holding your life together.
I never write things like this in the blog, because I feel like this is “a blog about eating, drinking and opining,” and people read it because they want a few recipes, maybe some tidbits about Sicilian language anomalies or acerbic comments about cheap ingredients or potshots at the USDA. But the fact is, nobody reads it, so it doesn’t matter a frog’s fat ass what I write.
[Shuna](http://eggbeater.typepad.com/) inspires me in so many ways. Her blog is enormously popular, and she writes all sorts of deeply personal things that make her so emotionally vulnerable to all of her readers, in a way I’m barely vulnerable to the Agent.
I took all this time off from work to take this journalism class and to spend time with the Agent and to reconnect to this Italianate concept of social communion. The time away from work was good in the sense that I was burnt out and now am refreshed and ready to go back. I have a meeting tomorrow morning, actually. Something small, but challenging. Meanwhile, I feel like I got off course in the journalism class, and now I’m floundering. I have a wonderful teacher, too, who has gone out of her way to be supportive to me, and- in addition to all the other stress I have- I’m stressed that I’m letting her down by underperforming. The problem is that I went into the class wanting to write recipe articles and ingredient profiles, but then got interested in actual journalism. Then, naturally, I realized that real journalism is a real and textured craft that I am capable of, but just don’t have the time for right now. I’m still not totally unpacked, and of all the things I have to do today, I spent a good part of the afternoon cleaning my espresso cup collection, because I was so sick of seeing the box lying around the apartment.
This, of course, has lead to me fishtailing in the journalism class, since I once I realized for the time being I should stick to recipe articles and ingredient profiles, I found out most of that kind of thing is written by famous people (Pam Kaufman, Jacques Pepin) or by staff writers. So I’m almost back where I started.
Meanwhile, the Agent is working *all* the time. He works fifty hours a week, then has to see any number of shows, so all that went out the window, too. What does that leave that I’m supposed to be doing? Oh, right, fixing up my place (hasn’t happened) and exploring this whole social communion thing. Well, that’s been a total bust, too, since I’ve spent most of my cooking time alone, and the way our kitchen is set up, any hot cooking I do requires I’m separated from the guests. Add to that the fact that most of my closest friends have moved to New Jersey and California, one not as calamitous as the other, but more calamitous than you might think if you don’t live in New York.
I read Jacques Pepin’s autobiogrpahy “The Apprentice” recently, and it was so good for many many reasons, but his description of the times they spent at their place in the Catskills has this idyllic timbre that I long for. He describes hunting and fishing with Pierre Franey and fermenting apple cider in his basement and living this textured food-centric life that all of this shit- the blog, the class, the time off- has been an effort to realize.
Meanwhile, tonight, I’m just another cranky New Yorker, listening to [music from my childhood](http://www.low-road.com/lr_music.html), wondering how to navigate this funk I’ve found myself in. One good thing: I’m not wondering what I did wrong; only what to do now. And for all you Strunk and White automatons who think I misused the semicolon back there, FUCK YOU. Check out the MLA usgae guidlelines, you rotten, spineless Oxford-comma-slave.
Listening: The Low Road, “Just Another Dog In This Town”
