Stuff

Damn, I am exhausted today, and not just because of the copious amounts of wine that got consumed last night. I invited my downstairs neighbor up for pasta with venison bolognese sauce (Friend came along as well), and yesterday I ended up making two kinds of crackers (whole wheat, and a rosemary flatbread), white bean dip (with a buttload of garlic, a shallot that needed to be used up, and some sage), a sharlotka from Smitten Kitchen, a blueberry caramel sauce to drizzle on the sharlotka, the aforementioned bolognese sauce (though I had to use red wine instead of white, because it turned out I didn't have any white wine), a batch of sourdough wheat bread with cracked wheat added to it, and a batch of fresh pasta, which I managed to screw up (luckily I had some dried, so no big deal). And I mopped up the cat hair and cleaned up the bathroom a bit.

The crackers were interesting. The flatbread was pretty good, but needs a bit of tweaking--a bit more salt, perhaps, and probably a lot more rosemary. The wheat crackers had a nice flavor, but the dough was a complete pain in the ass to work with. When I made the white bean dip, I put in what I thought was way too much garlic (which isn't really possible for me, but not everyone has my tolerance for garlic), so I took another can of beans and pureed it w/ some olive oil, then added about half of the first batch into it. Turns out everyone liked the full-on garlic version as well, so it'll all get mixed together for the leftovers.

The bread dough was quite a bit wetter than the other doughs I've made recently, even though I've been using the same baker's percentages. Basically, I take out all but what I'm going to refresh of my levain, and I weigh what I've taken out, and then add dry ingredients (flour of various sorts, cracked wheat, barley flakes, malted wheat flakes, oats--whatever suits my current fancy) and water as a percentage of the weight of the levain. Yesterday's was very active and puffy and wet--the bread tasted just fine--good, even--but I have no damn clue why it was so slack.

The sharlotka was pretty good, though I think I should have used more apples; the recipe gives number of apples rather than weight, and mine wasn't as high as the one pictured. I also thought the apples got too soft. (I reduced the total amount of sweetening, and I used honey for about half of the total--so probably 75 grams of sugar and 75 grams of honey--which might have affected that.) I'll make it again, though; it was a nice tasty dessert, and it's not loaded with butter, so it doesn't feel so heavy. The blueberry caramel was interesting, too. You see this dark purple sauce, so you expect fruit flavor, which is there, but there's this dark caramel flavor as well. Again, though, because it's a caramel that doesn't use cream or butter, it added some flavor w/o adding fat.

In other news, I had a job interview on Friday. The organization's entrance is literally ten feet away from the entrance I used for my last job--it's in the same building, down the same hallway, except you turn left for this place. They're building a new building and so will be moving out relatively soon, but it was still a bit weird to go down that hallway. I had to do a certain amount of la-la-la-ing.

It seemed to go well enough. It's a small organization, and the position is just the kind of jane-of-all-trades thing that I love, and it's a new position for the organization. The ED is interviewing a few more people, and then will ask a few of the interviewees back for a second round with the other senior staff; I don't even know that I'm going to be one of those people. Still, I felt pretty good about it, and felt like I had good answers, including about areas where I don't necessarily have a lot of experience. I also have a phone-screen interview on Monday; that one is for a lower-level position than the Friday interview, but it's a larger organization, so there presumably would be room for advancement.

I'm noticing that I'm not doing cartwheels with excitement for either position, but I think the reasons for that are a bit complex. For the Friday job, I think some of it is apprehension: although I believe that I can do the things the job requires, including the things that I haven't done much before, there's still a certain amount of fear around that, and a certain amount of convincing of others that needs to be done. That aside, though, what I'm sensing in myself is a kind of tiredness.

As I've said multiple times here before, my experience with "follow your dream!" is checkered, at best. I don't feel like rehashing that yet again today, but I also know that the backing and forthing and upping and downing I've done, particularly in the past ten years, has taken a toll on me. Hell, in those 10 years I have had three different careers--the biotech company, the bakery, and the most recent organization--and none of them quite worked out the way I had planned. (Sometimes I think my life course is teaching me to be a buddhist.)

Which isn't to say there weren't good parts to all of them, but that's a lot of change in one person's work life in ten years. I think that's the reason I don't have a whole lot of enthusiasm for any particular thing. I'd like to find useful work, at decent pay, with companionable people. That's it. So if someone is looking for a person with Passion! and Dedication!!ll!, I"m probably not that person--but I also don't think those things are necessary in order to do a bang-up job for an organization, even one with a very specific mission (which most non-profits have). I'm not so stupid that I would say this an an interview, but it also means that I don't have a good answer to "Why do you want to work here at SuperCaring Organization?" Um, because I need a job, and the position you have available fits my skills? So I blather about wanting to share my skills in the non-profit arena and leave it at that.

One of the people w/ whom I worked at the last place was pretty insistent on people needing to be Passionate about the mission. I challenged him/her--as diplomatically as possible--and basically said, I don't care why people take the job, I care that they do it well. S/he didn't quite know how to handle that (and used to insist that I do have the passion, even if I say I don't, because s/he liked me and couldn't square it all up any other way), but in my experience, passion doesn't mean someone can do a job well, and doing a job well doesn't require passion, it requires competence.

Anyway. I'm certainly not going to go into this in an interview--and let's hope there are more of them, and that one of them leads to a job offer.

Better, with Mustard

Well, that was fun, wasn't it? I know that Doing Stuff--just about any Stuff--helps somewhat, but I also know that it's possible to do lots of stuff and still keep sliding. Whatevs; I also know that Doing Stuff has its own virtues and rewards (I don't just sit around, and Stuff Gets Done), so I'll just keep hacking away at it and see what happens.

The two Projects I have in mind are getting back to the paint removal in the sunroom and making a curtain or shade of some kind for the kitchen window. Neither will happen today--today's tasks were applying for a handful of jobs I've saved from this week's search and getting my health insurance squared away, and, later in the afternoon, getting my hair trimmed. ( I had thought to put this off, because the place I go isn't cheap, but it's looking pretty ragged, and if I do get an interview, I don't want to be stressing about that. Yeah, I know, it's unlikely I would not get a job because my hair isn't at its best, but it will need to be done sooner or later.) Nothing extreme, but all of it useful and at least some of it involves not sitting on my ass; I may even work out.

For today's amusing story, I must relate my entry in the Most Ridiculous Injury contest. Last Friday I was making beer-and-mustard-braised cabbage with venison ring baloney (an incredibly simple and incredibly tasty dish), and, as I twisted the lid off the jar of mustard, I sliced open my finger. On mustard. Yes. There was some dried mustard on the jar, and it was sharp enough to slice open my finger. I've heard of cutting the mustard, but I haven't heard of cutting BY the mustard.

Anyway. The discussion of job application processes will have to wait for another day--but I didn't want to leave that depressing whine at the top of the heap. I'm a bit better yesterday and today, and I seem to have stopped sliding, at least for now. No telling how long it will last, but I'm trying to stay focused in the present. It's not necessarily safer here, but there's a good bit less anxiety.

Tumble Down

Now I been lookin' for a job but it's hard to find
Down here it's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line
--Bruce
"Atlantic City"

I can feel myself sliding down a ravine. It's happening kind of slowly, and I keep thinking I should grab a boulder or a tree or a clump of grass and haul myself up, or at least pause the fall until I can get my bearings, but instead I just keep slowly sliding.

Oddly enough, the fear of falling is making it worse; I know that it can get very dark and deep and painful.

Back when I finished grad school, I was unemployed for more than a year. I had some temp work, and some small jobs, but it took me 15 months to find a full-time job. On top of that, I realize, in retrospect, that I was seriously depressed for probably two years before that.

It was hellish. I was miserable, and I knew that I was miserable to be around. I was sad and angry and scared. I was unemployed and deeply in debt and being forced to change careers. Despite having spent seven years and accruing the aforementioned debt to do what I truly loved to do, I wasn't going to get to do that, and I had to find something else to do, and I had to pay off all that debt.

When I finally got a job--literally weeks before I would have run out of money--I immediately set to healing myself. I worked through the shit, as best I could (pretty well, actually), and slowly rebuilt a new life. As I left that job, four years later, to work at the startup company, I got involved with Chuck. And despite the many, many good things that came out of that, nearly eight years later, once again, my life blew up: the company for which I worked went out of business (and the companty for which Chuck work moved, so we were both in dire straits there), my marriage blew up, and I was working in a low-paying, grueling job that had been intended to be an apprenticeship before I started, yes, something else I loved to do.

And then I pieced things together again, and quit the bakery, and found a new job, where, over the nearly four years I was there, I was promoted twice, and left the job making 60% more than when I was hired.

None of that matters.

What matters, right this minute, is that I have no fucking clue what's going to happen. I have some capacity for dealing with uncertainty, and some capacity for rebuilding, or moving to a new plot and building something else entirely. But will I be able to do it this time, before my money runs out? I'm over 50. Unemployment is at record levels. The jobs that are out there are either back at the level I was at in 1994 or they're just enough above my level of experience that I don't think I can do them; there's no guarantee that I can talk someone into hiring me for the former, and I don't see the point in trying to talk someone into hiring me for a position that I don't quite know how to do and don't think I can figure out in time.

Even that, well, something could turn up, or I could maybe get one of the lower-level positions that pays enough and, once again, work my way up (or not; there's a lot to be said for not).

But I'm sliding. I've spent the better part of the past two days sitting and doing not much of anything. (No, computer cards does not count as any fucking thing at all, except an exercise in mind-numbing.) I managed to work out Monday and Tuesday, but today, I managed to miss a train and I got off at the other end 15 minutes too late to get to the rowing class I had signed up to take, and I just turned the fuck around and got back on the train and came home. Otherwise, I have done almost nothing.

I was supposed to meet an ex-co-worker tomorrow, but it turns out that there's a board meeting s/he must attend--which added to my funk, as I was required to attend a board meeting in, what, September? maybe? And that means, if anyone I met remembers me, there will be questions, and my ex-boss will be making shit up or badmouthing me--most likely the former, about how I "chose" to pursue other options. I'm fucking UNEMPLOYED. Who the fuck would choose that? All I can say is that I hope s/he breaks out in suppurating sores and bloody pustules every time s/he says something about me that's bullshit. I'm trying very, very hard to keep away from the anger--I know, from the above-mentioned experience, that it is not a good path, and will only lead to more tears--but I think I can ask that bad karma rains down upon those who spew bullshit about me.

Then again, maybe no one will even notice.

For the ones who had a notion,
a notion deep inside
That it ain't no sin
to be glad you're alive
--Bruce
"Badlands"

(Yeah, sorry, Palladia is showing "Live in NYC" at the moment, presumably in honor of Clarence's birthday, and, as we know, Bruce is my personal deity. Or, at least, he keeps me going, and I'll take what I can get right now.)

So I know I have to find a way to stop the slide, to grab a boulder or a sapling or just dig in my heels. Because i just do not want to go back down into that ravine. I lived there for maybe three years, maybe more, in the early 90s, and revisited briefly five years ago, and I do not have the energy to drag myself out again, and the farther I fall the more dragging out of it I have to do. I have no fucking clue how I'm going to do it. But there it is. Drag myself out of it, right the fuck now, figure out a way to hold on and stop sliding.

Industrial Food

Time for another edition of Narya's Pet Peeves!

You may remember that my ex-in-laws had celiac disease (and a couple also couldn't do dairy, and one couldn't do soy or corn, either). I even had fantasies, for awhile, of having not one but two bakeries, one of which would have been gluten-free. (That particular fantasy required major lottery winnings.) It's a pain to manage it, though one gets used to it, and they did a great job of it. They own a store, as a matter of fact, that is all gluten-free, and they do a lot of mail-order business as well. I suspect they'll continue to face ever-stiffer competition, as many regular grocery stores are increasing their GF options dramatically. They have also been quite active in various celiac identification efforts. The condition seems to be on the rise, and not just because it was being under-diagnosed, though that's also the case. (I have my own suspicions about the increase, but I'll get back to them in a second.) Point being, I have a fair amount of close personal experience with people who really must avoid gluten at all costs; it's practically a poison for them.

None of this makes me peevish. In fact, I have a great deal of sympathy for people with celiac disease. As a result of hanging with them for the time I was with Chuck, I was able to see, first-hand, just how difficult it can be to get food one feels safe eating. It requires constant vigilance, particularly when going out to restaurants--even ones that claim to have gluten-free menus or options. If you throw the dairy-free needs on top of the gluten-free, like my ex bro-in-law, it can be a complete nightmare. Yes, Virginia, butter counts as dairy, so those veggies need to be steamed, or sauteed in oil (and, in his case, not corn oil).

Lately, though, I've been running into people who are claiming they are going without gluten, even though they're not celiac, because they have some idea that gluten is bad for them. They don't provide any evidence other than anecdata--somebody suggested it to them, possibly even a doctor, but no, they haven't been tested for celiac disease, or they've been tested and are negative. They've "heard" that gluten is inflammatory or something. Even this only mildly irritates me: people can eat what they want (even if their choices are stoopid). I'm seriously irritated by the lack of evidence for their claims, and suspect that the problems aren't with gluten, but whatevs.

What really puts me around the bend are people who claim that they're going "gluten-free" and then have something with gluten in it. Look, people: either you're gluten-free or you're not. If you are, then that Danish isn't something you can eat, and you had best be reading the labels of the salad dressing and every other damn thing. Gluten-free doesn't mean gluten-free-except-for-things-I-really-like. It means gluten-free soy sauce, and beer, and pasta, and all kinds of other stuff. It means that you can eat oats, but only if they haven't been contaminated by being grown too close to wheat. It means no bread, unless it's gluten-free. It means constant vigilance, not occasional dalliance. If you want to dally with gluten-free, that's fine, too, but then keep it to yourself. So, yes, this is an irritation to me: if you really want to do without gluten, well, okay, I'm not going to force you to eat my whole-grain, crusty, tasty bread, any more than I would try to force a vegetarian to eat meat. But then actually do without gluten, not just dabble in avoiding it. I may roll my eyes a little (secretly, and only if you're not actually celiac), but if it works for you and it helps you eat more healthy food, hey, go for it.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the supposed gluten sensitivity is related to the over-processed crap that many people eat. Industrial food--like the food outlined in the first sectoin of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," for example--isn't healthy food; it's fuel, for an industrial cog, i.e., the workers. (Yes, I realize I sound like a Wobbly.) I also suspect that the flours used in industrial food fuck with the gluten in the food in ways that may well be unhealthy without causing celiac disease. That's not a problem with gluten per se, but with the industrial agriculture and manufacturing processes.

I realize that many people don't have much choice; if you're poor, you need as many cheap calories as you can get. I can shudder at the thought of the "meat" product in fast-food tacos or hamburgers, but I'm also, despite my unemployed state, much more financially able to make different choices. Even people who don't need to maximize their calories per dollar are besieged by shiny packages and convenience foods and, if they didn't grow up seeing someone cook from scratch, they're less likely to see that as something they can do. People get overwhelmed, and I understand that: I'm more annoyed by the producers of that crap than by the people who eat it out of necessity or even out of desire.

And I think a lot of the "gluten is bad" that's in the ether these days is a result of the same industrial food machine. It's a new market, a new way to sell Product. Take some half-baked data fragment and inflate it into a full-blown epidemic, one that can only be treated by going on this new (expensive, of course) diet and buying these (expensive) products. It helps the people who really do need a gluten-free diet by making more foods available for them, but that's incidental; the real aim is to create a whole other market for the products.

Said and Not Said

As I believe I've said before, when I was 14 or 15, I realized two things, nearly simultaneously: that, first, in some very fundamental ways, my mother didn't understand me, and, second, that there was absolutely no way to make that statement at the age of 14 or 15 and have anyone take it seriously--but it was still true. That conundrum might be apt for my current situation, but I can't tell for sure, and that particular uncertainty is one of the more difficult aspects of the whole thing.

Plenty of people, including ex-co-workers, have said that I was sort of doomed from the moment Ex-boss was put in charge, not because I'd fuck up but because of the particular situation into which I had to fit. That is, I have people telling me that my ex team, including its head, do not truly appreciate or understand what I bring to the table. While that is a satisfying thought in some ways, it doesn't sound any more "say-able" than my observations at 14 or 15. And, more important, I don't know whether it's true.

If it is true, that I was never going to fit into that team, because of fundamental problems with the make-up of the team, rather than because of some fundamental flaw in my abilities or skills, then of course there isn't anything I can do about it. On the other hand, if I was fucking up in some way--more than we all generally fuck up on a day-to-day basis--then I would want to know that, painful though it would be to hear it. I can't learn from mistakes if I don't know what the fuck they were, and, in this case, I don't even know that I was making any.

Back when we had our first conversation about my leaving, Ex-boss really didn't give any reasons for wanting me to leave. S/he said one or two things, but they didn't make much sense, s/he backed off very quickly when I basically said "Whaaa?", and I had the distinct impression that s/he was . . . trying to build a case of some kind, but then realized s/he didn't have what would be needed. S/he probably also realized (or had been advised) that it would go better if s/he just got rid of me, rather than engaging in a protracted argument. (And, frankly, if it's really fucked up, then on some level s/he also realized, perhaps only subconsciously, that fighting about it would open up a whole can of worms about the Bubble Team that s/he didn't want opened. If you're going to present a standard of behavior that I supposedly violated, then you had best not have fellow team members who violate those standards all over the place; that will not go well. I doubt that was even at the edge of awareness, however.) The few things that were mentioned were ludicrous--or perhaps I am incapable of seeing how it was me that was fucking up. My gut tells me it was the former (and tells me pretty strongly, which isn't exactly empirical evidence, but isn't insane, either, and is in complete accordance with various other parties' reading of the situation).

Overall, I got the impression that s/he had made this decision and didn't want to go through any kind of performance improvement effort--s/he had decided I wasn't going to be useful to the team and just wanted to be rid of me. Which, as I've said before, is a perfectly legitimate thing to want. It fucks with MY life, of course, to which I will return in a second, and I think it's fucked up in about 87 other directions, but it is what it is. And if that's the case, it's kind of like my mom not really understanding me, especially when I was 15: it's true, and it has significant effects on my life, but it's not something I can say and have people take it seriously (outside of my close circle of friends, of course, but even with those people saying it just feels . . . weird).

So was I fucking up? I'll never really know, I suppose. It's possible I'll know if they really made a mistake in getting rid of me, which is a different thing: There are a number of things that could break or crack in one way or another, but it seems unlikely that anyone on Team Bubble would then conclude that the reason they're broken is because they got rid of me.

All that aside, it still fucks with my life. If I was making mistakes, then I would have preferred an honest chance to find that out and fix it; if I wasn't making mistakes, then it doubles the karma ginned up by getting rid of someone who wasn't fucking up. Even if I'm right, I'm still unemployed, and satisfaction in my own rightness won't pay the bills. Of course, if some luck falls my way, I could end up in a better situation. (Yeah, I know, unlikely; even the unemployment guy was saying to me yesterday, "You need to get a job, especially because you're over 50." Um, yeah; knew that. But he was being nice, and ended up telling me about how he lost his job when he was over 50 and this job is a result of an enforced career change.) But there's no way to predict how that will go, and it doesn't fix any of the 87 aspects of the fucked-up-ness of getting rid of me. All in all, it seems like yet another exercise in random events causing major changes in my life--and people wonder why I don't have plans.

Anyway; let's hope that's my last spewing about that for awhile.

So yesterday and today I made (wait for it) bread! I riffed off of the Maple Oat Sourdough formula in the KAF Whole Grain Baking Book (or, as I think of it, one of my holy scriptures), by using a lot of levain instead of doing an overnight preferment with a little levain; using some barley flakes in addition to the rolled oats for the soaker and only soaking the grains for a couple of hours instead of overnight; and throwing in some KAF high-fiber flour. It was really quite lovely yesterday, so I made it again today to see if I could do it again, and it was even more beautiful--seems like I have a keeper. If I weren't such a slug and if I hadn't already hacked off the crusty tasty end, I'd take a picture for you.