All About Me(me) x 5

Thanks to Jonquil (whom you really should be reading if you're not already): Comment to this post and, if requested, I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your blog and elaborate on the subjects given. Here are the five that Jonquil provided to me:

Baking My experience with this enterprise has led me to begin to believe that I really have to go back to school every now and again, in order to master some new body of knowledge. Of course, one could argue, quite easily, that I have not "mastered" baking in any serious, Brazen-Tart-Top-Chef sense of that word, and, if I'm going to be doing that going-back-to-school thing, I really must either win the lottery or find cheaper ways of going back to school. Caveats aside, I find that there is, in fact, a subtle but real sense that I'm Much Better at this than I used to be. I was always a pretty good baker--I wouldn't have come up with the idea to start a bakery if I hadn't had some notion that I already had a frame on which to hang subsequent knowledge--but I can do more, and do it better, than I used to be able to do, and I like that. The chefs in school said that they would expose us to everything, and, indeed, they did. The bakery enabled me to use quite a bit of it, at one point or another, which embedded it even more deeply. This doesn't prevent me from forgetting useful bits (today, while making a batch of nougat, I'm looking at the pan of sugar, water, honey and corn syrup and thinking, "Hmm, I wonder if that's going to boil over?" Answer: Yes; all over the stove), especially because, now that I'm back in Officeworld, I don't use the bits every day. Flip side, though, I enjoy using them a lot more.

Buddhism Sometimes I think of myself as the accidental buddhist. I've never studied it or practiced it, in the sense of belonging to a sangha; I (mostly) haven't read the texts (though at two different points in my life I had a lover who studies one or another of the schools of buddhist thought, and one of them read Sanskrit, IIRC); I don't meditate or even practice yoga at this point; and i suspect my grasp of some of the concepts is more on the order of misconstrued lyrics than anything else. I also don't find myself in search of a religion or in search of meaning in my life. What I find useful about buddhism is that it focuses on finding truth (and provides tools for doing so); it doesn't have any deities; and it advocates compassion at all times. I find the distinctions between engagement and attachment interesting (though I have no clue whether I think about this in "buddhist" ways). I find it interesting that enlightenment is (at least theoretically) available to all, not through the grace of a deity or other intercessor, but through one's own actions, and that each being is responsible for his or her own actions. I have to add that my own attempt to practice compassion as Chuck and I were splitting up ended up being one of the best things I have ever done.

Homekeeping One of win-the-lottery fantasies has to do with buying or building a home that is a model in some way, or a home that has a masonry bread oven in the back yard, or a home that runs on solar energy, or . . . something. Even though I have lived in a major city for nearly 30 years, I have this fantasy of living someplace that is not-city (and definitely not suburbs; I cannot do suburbs, at all). What the fantasy is about, i think, has as much to do with the various arts and sciences necessary to keeping a home, especially the arts and sciences centered around the kitchen and the hearth and the sewing space (and the writing space and the art studio, as long as we've won the lottery here). I think that's actually the fundamental truth that comes out of a Marxist analysis, that we most of us, perhaps all of us, need and want to be able to do multiple things. (This notion is explored to interesting effect in both Ursula LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" (and some other work) and Sheri Tepper's "The Gate to Women's Country," in both of which the residents of the imagined societies are expected to learn and practice multiple arts, crafts, sciences, etc. Much of our capitalist society doesn't think in terms of home "keeping": instead, we're expected to use, dispose of, buy new, in order to create a market. That seems so fundamentally wrong to me, and so at odds with homekeeping.

Friendship I have spent much of the last 30 years living by myself. Since 1981, Chuck and I lived together for about 5 years, and I had a roommate for less than a year in 1983 or so, but I have otherwise lived alone. Given that my family is about a thousand miles away, this has meant that I've built multiple networks of friends over the years, and I love them all. Some fade in and out of my life; some were friends in a specific time and place; some are closer to me than some of my family; some are more casual; and, thanks to modern technology, some I've never seen or met in person. Doesn't matter. We're all a part of these great webs of life and death. Sometimes our intimate (read: marital and familial) relationships and the way our society puts those at the center of everything makes friendship seem like an afterthought, but it isn't. I don't feel as though I have friendships "instead of" marital or familial relationships, because I have or have had all of those; I feel as though the fact that marital/familial relationships haven't occupied the center of my vision and my living space has enabled me to see how friendship is the thing that makes the other relationships possible in some important ways.

Starting over again Oy. Sometimes I feel as though I've lived several lifetimes in this particular lifetime. What I mostly feel is thankful that I have some ability to be resilient, and thankful I have the friends and family who can help me and support me through difficult times. As y'all know, I can also feel sad or angry or self-pitying, sometimes even for stretches of time. But what else can you do except . . . do the next thing? Well, yes, you can blog about it, ad nauseam, but sooner or later you must get the fuck ON with it. I could easily allow myself to be consumed with sorrow & regret, and some days/times that happens; I wish I could have been a professor, or owned a bakery, or been a programmer; some days I even wish I could have had a kid. it's not that my life is somehow incomplete without those things--the Brazen Tart once pointed out, correctly, that one cannot do everything. It's that I would really have liked to do those things (or the first two, for sure, anyway), and I think I might have been good at them, and I wish i could have found out whether I would have been, and I feel like I would have been able to offer more to people if I had been able to do those things (i.e., it's not a purely selfish wish to have done them). Instead, I slog along, writing reports and proposals that maybe four other people will ever read, and it feels like a waste. But it is what it is. And I still get a comma in every paycheck and I still don't have to lug 50-pound sacks of flour up a flight of stairs, so, hey, it could be a lot worse.