In which *LOUD SCREECHING NOISES*!!!
Embo told me she’d heard that an Oregon dairy might be opening a cheese shop in Walla Walla. I immediately went online and got my Washington state food handler’s card and updated my resume with the Wisconsin cheese course I recently completed.
Then I went to the dairy’s website, found their contact information, and sent them a friendly email with my resume attached.
THEY REPLIED. I REPLIED BACK.
THEY’VE ALREADY OFFERED ME A PART-TIME JOB BASED ON MY RESUME AND OUR EMAIL CORRESPONDENCE! And they totally want to meet the first week in July to discuss more!
They definitely have a cheese shop in Milton-Freewater, and they also do the Walla Walla farmers’ market. I don’t know if the Walla Walla cheese shop is real or just gossip, but:
I already have a job!
My current fantasy is that we move to Walla Walla, I train in Milton-Freewater while my better half looks for (and ideally finds) work (so he can drive me to and from training), and then I get to work in the new Walla Walla cheese shop, pairing delicious cheeses with local wines, and I don’t have to buy a car! HOW GREAT WOULD THAT BE?!
If the WW storefront is just gossip, I might have to become a car owner, which would be meh, but hey: CHEESE SHOP JOB. They actually make cheese, too, so I could learn about cheese-making and affinage.
I’m terrifically stoked right now, and totally ignoring all the fucking packing we need to do!
In which I know they can’t be persuaded until they’re ready so I’m not bothering to post this on Facebook, where I wrote it in response to someone’s anti-vaxx post, but I didn’t want to delete it.
The risks of being exposed to diseases are known, and they are horrible.
The risks of vaccination are vanishingly low, verging on non-existent outside of allergies or contamination (generally associated with lack of refrigeration).
We have decade upon decade upon decade of proof that vaccines are both safe and effective. Vaccines truly are one of the best things humanity has ever invented! They’re amazing and wonderful and gorgeous! Vaccines have saved millions of humans from disease, disability, and death! Unlike so much of the shitshow that is modern life, VACCINES ARE ACTUALLY WORTH CELEBRATING.
We know that vaccines do not cause autism. We know they do not cause “immune disorders” (this term is vague and medically meaningless). We do know they prevent disease and that they save lives.
To be a vaccine “skeptic” — without actually being an epidemiologist or biologist or in some way genuinely qualified to meaningfully contribute to the science — is to be anti-vaccine.
And to be anti-vaccine is to actively contribute to disease and death. Full stop. You don’t get your shots, you don’t get your kids their shots, you encourage others not to get their shots, and then we get ants. No, sorry, not ants: we get FUCKING MEASLES. A disfiguring, miserable disease that can not only kill you, but depresses your immune system for years, making you susceptible to diseases you’d otherwise fight off.
Your decision to cling to ignorance because it feeds your ego to “know something” the unwashed masses do not is the opposite of wisdom, the opposite of loving compassion, and the height of hubris.
“My intention is to allow others to make their own choices” is a pat set of anti-vaccine weasel words. What you’re really saying is this: “I mistakenly (and probably in good faith, for what it’s worth) believe outright lies, and I cling to them. And, even though my beliefs are demonstrably wrong, I expect my privilege to be respected in spite of my ignorance, the whole of the scientific process, and the overwhelming preponderance of evidence.”
People on chemo are catching measles because of the anti-vaccine movement. Babies are literally dying. Not very many yet, true, but this suffering IS PREVENTABLE.
The idea that letting a few people die in order to retain the privilege of flaunting one’s google university degree is AWFUL, and it absolutely breaks my heart to witness so many otherwise intelligent and loving people using their free time to be so-called vaccine-skeptics.
It’s a hobby that is LITERALLY killing human beings.
And yes, it’s a hobby. None of you are doctors or scientists or qualified in any way to do anything more than read shit online. And yet you “know” better than a over century of scientists and doctors and the self-correcting whole of scientific process?
No, you don’t know better. You’re not in on some secret. What you know is what you’ve read, and what you’ve read is garbage written by snake oil salesmen who want you to buy their cleanses and herbs and books and unregulated, useless supplements. Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine not because he knew too much, but because he was an unethical bastard trying to sell an alternate vaccine he would have made money from. All the rest of the anti-vaxx brigade are shady at best, from Oz to Chopra to Mike Adams to Scudamore, and they’re all selling you something.
Supplements are a multi-billion dollar industry, as are “alternative” health books and retreats and seminars. The ridiculous irony of the anti-vaxx movement is that it makes more than actual vaccines do, but screams “Shill!” whenever presented with facts.
The anti-vaxx movement is like Trump: everything it accuses others of is something it is doing itself.
In which there are NO MORE DRAWERS!
Yesterday, I put our shitty, old, used, and dinged up $99 IKEA chest of drawers on Craigslist, and got three responses in under three hours.
A kid came and picked it up this afternoon, and now all the crap that was in it is on the bed.
I don’t really understand why the listing got three responses, but boy did it. The third person even said, “I’ll give you twice as much as you asked and come pick it up RIGHT NOW,” which really baffled me. You haven’t even seen it, what if it’s worse than I said?
Oh, well, whatever, now there aren’t any drawers! And it really feels now like we’re moving!
In which we’ve decided to move!
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m not a fan of the weather out here. There’s no spring or fall, just sweltering, muggy summer, and blizzard season.
Living in Uptown is kinda cool in that there are art stores and coffee shops and diners and bars and bookstores all within a few blocks, but it’s also very loud, never dark, and pretty expensive. We’ve had two bikes stolen from inside our locked apartment building. And there was that episode with the goddamned fire extinguisher, too. I mean, it’s city living.
But we’re not really city people. We don’t take advantage of concerts or museums. We don’t bar crawl or see shows. We barely even go out to eat. We’ve been to two Twins games in five years.
We haven’t put down any roots or made any friends. We’re just here for his job, and that’s it. Nothing else ties us to Minneapolis. I’ve been getting Meetup emails for years, but everything I’d like to go to is always when I’m at work. I never did find a band.
They, his job, sent him to Illinois for half a month, and when he got back he said he hadn’t gotten pissed off at all driving around Springfield (pop. 115k), but since being back in Minneapolis he’s just been aggravated. Hates his commute. Said he’d like to go live in a smaller town. Didn’t much have a preference of which smaller town, isn’t really interested in moving back to Michigan, knows I’d like to go back to Washington state.
So. We’re moving across the country when our lease is up at the end of next month. I’m so fucking happy I could scream!
Plan right now is to get rid of/sell our furniture because none of it is particularly fine or worth hauling (except, hopefully, the microwave cart, which is really cool, and the bedroom mirror, which is also really cool), box up the remaining stuff (clothes, quilts, towels, hobbies, kitchen, and a prodigious amount of electronics: I’m estimating about 800 pounds/40 boxes), and either tow it or have it shipped, and drive to Walla Walla. Crash at the ancestral pile for the time it takes to get jobs. Live in the Pac NW again!
Well, “again” for me. He’s always lived in the Midwest, being from here.
Have a social life again! Have family force us to show up for Easter brunches or whatever! Go to open mics. Rent a house with a porch (I mean, on the one hand I’d love to live with G’ma forever, but on the other, one does like having her own kitchen, and S. definitely likes his privacy). Buy a bicycle. Find a new couch!
Truth be told, I want to live in the side apartment, with the tiny gas stove and the patio with the steel furniture, but my brother’s still living in it, though he does speak constantly of wanting to leave.
I want to get a part-time job in a tasting room. If I can sell cheese, I can certainly sell wine. I want him to find a nice job in Walla Walla (fingers crossed we don’t end up in Pasco or Spokane) with banker’s hours and holidays off and the easiest commute ever.
Suddenly my To Do list is MASSIVE. Move across the country in two months! Egad!
We’ll be taking a lot of trips to Goodwill in the next eight weeks.
I need to go post some furniture on Craig’s List.
In which this is really weird.
He’s gone for two weeks, and I have the place to myself. Off managing the integration of a satellite office for work. I can do whatever I want! Including nothing! I don’t even have to make dinner if I don’t want to! I can do absolutely NOTHING AT ALL if I like!
Except the dishes are dirty, there’s still a load of laundry left, the floor could really use sweeping, and the throw rugs haven’t been washed in most of a year. There are also a couple bags of recycle to take out, and the stovetop needs a scrubbing because it’s greasy and gathering dust and looks gross. I should clean all my random shit off the table and do a general tidy. Nothing’s been dusted in months, either.
In other words, there’s a list of chores to do like there always is, this is just another Monday like any other, but now I’m also feeling sad and lonely. He won’t be home at six. He won’t be around at all. It’s just me and the apartment.
There’s still snow on the ground, barely a quarter of the lawns are showing green, and there are no flowers. The trees are barely starting to bud.
I’m not on the schedule at work until Friday. (There’s a new checker in training on the liquor side, so I’m guessing that M. and T. are getting extra hours in the cheese shop to keep their F/T schedules? I dunno. All I know is that I have four days off in a row, which is pretty fucking great, really.)
Except I’m home alone, and there’s nowhere to go, nobody to see. I could go out for a $6 coffee, but I have espresso and dairy here, and I really should finish the whole milk before it has a chance to go off. I could take myself out for dinner on Lyndale or Eat Street later, but I have a couple slices of pizza to eat, plus Indian food from the other night, plus stuff for nachos, plus unused produce that’s almost a week old that needs to be thrown into the Instant Pot before it turns to sludge. (Wow. Not to mention some lentil soup in the fridge, and two or three soups in the freezer.) In short, I have a fuckton of food to eat. No need to go out and spend money.
I could walk over to the art supply store, but nobody needs stationery less than I do.
Could go to the bike shop, but have I really decided to buy a bike this year? I love the old Schwinn, but I didn’t ride it at all last year. I should just sell it on Craigslist. And my work commute is two blocks, and I’d have to find somewhere to park a bike while I’m working. It’s a liquor store on Lake street in front of a bus stop; I bet bikes get vandalized and stolen from there all the time. Better to just walk. Don’t need a bike for my work commute.
I don’t need a bike at all, technically. I mean, I want one. Rides to the lake or the global market are really lovely… during the three weeks each “spring” and “fall” when I’m willing to ride a bike around here.
There just aren’t enough days per year in that sweet spot between 45 and 75 degrees. I don’t mind a little rain, but fuck biking in mud and snow, and absolutely fuck biking in 80+ heat and humidity.
Today would actually be a good day for a ride! It’s 51F and heavily overcast, and while there is snow on the ground all the pavement’s clear, and the Greenway looked free of snow and ice when I walked over it yesterday. Buuuuuut my bike’s got two flats, is too tall for comfort, and where would I go? The park around the lakes is grey and ugly as fuck because THERE IS NO SPRING IN THIS GODFORSAKEN PART OF THE COUNTRY, and I don’t really ride for its own sake–I greatly prefer it as a method of getting somewhere.
(I’m actually surprised it’s in the 50’s out there; all the pedestrians on 28th are wearing parkas and hats, so I thought it was colder.)
Could go to a movie, but I have a fiber internet connection and streaming everything so putting on pants seems like a lot of effort.
Everyone I know is at work so there’s no one to chat with online. Notre-Dame de Paris en proie aux flammes, and my president is a tit.
I don’t want to fucking do laundry.
E. tells me that when her husband travels for work she gets drunk and has a cry the first night he’s gone; I thought that was weird until last night when I got home from work and S. was in Illinois for the rest of the month and I felt heavy-duty sadness and separation; I guess I’ve never been with anybody before I liked to have around more than I liked privacy and space. I was always relieved, before, when whoever I was living with fucked off for a few days or a couple weeks. I didn’t expect to feel so fucking sad.
I mean, S. leaves every closet, cupboard, and drawer he uses ajar, snores sometimes, and often sleeps in the very center of the damn bed, but that’s really the worst of him. (Well, that and his habit of saying he’s “going to order us food” and then having to read multiple menus and “think about it” for three hours first, until I’m starving and end up eating cheese straight out of the fridge.) It’s not unfair to say he’s a bit boring in some ways, but it’s also true that every time I walked into the other room last night and saw that it was empty and dark, I felt absolutely hollow. No hugs or smooches. No “I love you”s. I mean, we chatted online, but he’s not here.
We were apart a few nights last year when I went to DC to see Amma, but other than that we’ve never been apart more than the length of a workday since I got here, five years ago tomorrow. You get used to a person, don’t you.
Oh, and part of what made yesterday and today so melancholy is likely The Curse. This cycle was 44 days long, and I had nearly a week of PMS symptoms (irritability, bloating, cramps) before I finally started bleeding, so there’s a whole hormonal component affecting my emotional wisdom. (If you can help it, don’t start your period the day before your favorite person leaves town for half a month; it’ll make you weepy.)
So, what will I do? Likely fuck-all. I’ve made the bed and a latte. I’m online, at my desk. I’ll probably surf Twitter and stream shit I’m barely interested in watching until I get hungry enough to go nuke something; then it’ll be dark and because I slept badly last night and stayed in bed until mid-afternoon I won’t be able to go to bed early, so I’ll just keep sitting here feeling weird and alone and not even getting anything checked off my to-do list.
Odds are I’ll go get a cocktail or two, wearing a knit hat because my hair’s dirty and I won’t bother to wash it, then come home and fall asleep listening to 15-year-old music on my iPod next to a basket of dirty laundry.
In which the weather’s weird.
It’s 3:01 pm on April 11th. It’s overcast. It’s… hailing? There are several inches of snow on the ground. Earlier today, there was thunder.
What the fuck.
Here’s my lunch:
That’s leftover cucumber raita, basmati rice, and chana masala from last night’s dinner, with some dal I just made.
(I can’t stop making this dal recipe. It’s DELICIOUS. It’s super easy. This is, like, my fourth time making it. So good.)
The bed’s made, and I’ve got my laundry corralled in the basket to take down to the laundry room when-and-if I ever stand up and walk away from this stupid desk where I’m blogging and watching the first season of Get Krack!n. It’s a couple years old, but those Aussie chicks are droll and tight and hilarious.
I got four days off in a row. It’s glorious! Much sleeping and cooking and laundry. And snow-avoidance.
Sunday, Scott goes to Illinois for work for two weeks. We’ve only been apart three nights — or was it four? — in the past five years, so this’ll be weird. (We’ve been shacked up five entire years on the 16th. He’ll be in Illinois on that date, so I’ll buy myself a pizza! We’ll probably Skype or something. Five years!)
In which there’s a chant.
aum, aum
my salutations to that guru who revealed to me that truth
which is unfragmented, infinite, timeless divinity
and which pervades the entire universe, moveable or immovable
my salutations to that reverential teacher who, by applying
the divine collyrium of self-knowledge into my eyes
removed the cataract of ignorance
guru is the creator, sustainer and destroyer, she is verily
the very transcendental divinity
(the timeless life-principle, the very essence of the creator, etc.)
my reverential salutations to that glorious teacher
my salutations to that reverential teacher who revealed to me
that which pervades everything in this world, whether
animate-inanimate or movable-immovable
my salutations to that glorious guru who revealed to me
that self-effulgent divinity (pure, unconditioned consciousness) which pervades
all the three worlds, with all its movable and immovable objects
my salutations to that reverential teacher who is like a sun
for the blossoming up of the lotus-like mantras of the upanishads,
and at whose lotus feet lie the beautiful flowers
symbolizing the best jewels of the vedas
my salutations to that reverential teacher who is verily eternal consciousness,
which is the nature of peace. she transcends space and time, the concept of zero,
the primordial sound, and all the parts
my salutations to that glorious gurudev, who is established in knowledge and power,
who is adorned with the garland of knowledge and who grants
both worldly prosperity and spiritual liberation
my salutations to that reverential teacher who, by imparting self-knowledge,
has burnt away the very bondage of actions in a whiff,
which had taken infinite lives to accumulate
even by sipping the charanamruta [the water with which the feet of the guru is washed]
we are blessed by eternal wealth of liberating knowledge, which dries up
the endless ocean of seeking and subsequent sorrows
my salutations to the lotus feet of that glorious gurudev
there is no higher truth than the guru, no higher penance than service to the guru
nothing higher than the realization of the knowledge of truth imparted by the guru,
my salutations to such a gurudev, who is herself that very timeless truth
(and who has taken up a form to bless her disciples with real knowledge)
my lord is the lord of the universe; my teacher is the teacher of the entire universe;
and my self is the self of all. my salutations at the lotus feet of such a guru
who has revealed such knowledge to me
the guru is the beginning of the universe, yet she herself is without beginning;
the guru is the highest deity and there is none higher
than the guru. my reverential salutations at the lotus feet
of such a gurudev
o god! you alone are my mother, father, my brother, and my friend! you alone
are the knowledge, my real wealth. you are everything to me, my all in all
In which I served soup and salad for dinner this evening!
The soup is this one, more or less. (I added a carrot and red pepper flakes, used bouillon and water rather than broth, used tomato paste rather than sauce, and winged all the amounts, BUT OTHERWISE, it’s basically that recipe! Yum!) Salads were of lettuce, tomato, hard boiled egg with paprika, parsley, and grated parm reg, with bottled Italian dressing.
If you’re Brad, you should know that I used the microplane you gifted me to grate all that parm reg!
I also had oyster crackers, because I bought oyster crackers today and was weirdly excited about them so I put some in my soup!
In which I had an epiphany about interconnectedness while drinking a dark mocha latte breve.
Was just over at the coffee shop with a pile of stuff in front of me.
This pile of stuff:
That’s a fountain pen, traveler’s notebook, my prescription glasses, a mason jar lid and ring, an instant camera and nylon/pseudo-leather strap with plastic connectors, a mason jar filled with a delicious coffee-and-dairy beverage, and a saddle leather jar holder. I don’t need any of them to survive; they’re all leisure-time trinkets, except my glasses, which correct a defect, and without which my quality of life would be much lower.
One, look at my pseudo-retro, analog, reuse/recycle aesthetic! (Apparently I do sorta have a style, even if it only applies to crap I take to coffee shops, and not how I look or dress!)
Two, I can’t produce ANY of these things. Not a single fucking one. Not to these tolerances.
I don’t know how to make glass, let alone glass suitable to use for canning. Nor do I know how to turn hide into fine leather (I could probably produce something rough and crappy), although I could cut leather and I can sew… but I can’t make knives or needles or thread.
I don’t know how to make fine paper, or build machines to print on it, cut it to perfect size, and bind it. I don’t know how to produce metal charms or even elastic cord. I have no idea at all about any of the thousands of steps required to create that camera: the plastic body, the battery, the lens, the instant film itself.
I could make a camera strap from cloth, I suppose, but most assuredly don’t know how to create nylon or faux-leather or little plastic connectors. I don’t know how to grow cotton, spin it, and weave it into cloth, either.
I don’t know how to grind corrective lenses.
I couldn’t even build a fountain pen from scratch. Although I do understand the concept, I have no way to make a nib, and what would I make the feed from? Carve it out of rubber? I don’t know how to produce rubber!
I don’t know how to grow coffee. I don’t know how to grow or process cocoa for chocolate. I have no dairy experience whatsoever, though I could probably milk a cow and Pasteurize the results. Probably.
The mason jar lid and ring: pretty simple, in concept. Punch out of metal. But I don’t know how to make metal, nor build a punch.
All of these items represent the intelligence and cleverness of other human beings. All I did was buy them.
All of these items require a functioning, interdependent society to exist. I doubt there’s any single person on earth, now or ever, who could build all the tools and technologies needed to create these items from scratch.
All of these items, after they came to be, traveled to me on roads, in trucks, in ships, in airplanes. The fountain pen is German, the notebook and camera are Japanese. A couple of the metal charms are from India. The phone I used to take the picture was designed in Florida and South America, and probably manufactured in China of globally sourced components. The image was transmitted to the cloud through a series of pieces of network equipment produced who knows where.
Point being: there are no self-made people. Even if you developed self-discipline early on and studied hard, you still used infrastructure and knowledge and technologies made by others. You may have made the best of what you were given, but you were given it. You do not live alone, no matter how much contempt you may have for others. You cannot live alone; the world is so profoundly intermeshed that isolation is a joke concept. Even if you were to fuck off to an island, you’d travel there in a ship or plane, and arrive with fucktons of technology in the form of clothes and tents or radios or cooking implements to aspirin.
And here’s what selfish people miss entirely: you do owe for what you’ve been given. It’s your duty to contribute to the society that produced you. You have to make sure there are roads and schools, hospitals and firehouses, municipal water and opportunities for not only your kids, but all kids. And adults. Straight and gay, sick and well, theist and atheist, conservative and liberal, smart and dumb, good and bad, lazy and driven.
Some people are smarter than others, some people start several laps ahead. Some people find a path and follow it doggedly, and achieve whatever goals they feel are worthy of achieving — whether that goal is to master photography or law or illegal drug trade or dance or French baguettes. Some don’t. Most of us achieve mediocrity and don’t do much beyond consuming resources, and the best that can be said about us is that while we don’t really contribute to the sum of humanity’s knowledge, we’re not actively evil.
The reality is that all people depend on others for everything, even if they like to pretend their unique existence somehow earned them their indoor plumbing and refrigerators and automobiles and the medical breakthroughs that kept them alive long enough to even have opinions about what other people do or do not deserve.
Preppers and isolationists like to think they could be dropped into the wilderness and not only survive, but thrive. That’s bullshit. It’s a rare human being who could create, even with access to abundant natural resources, clothing, shelter, and safe and healthy food, let alone knives or cast iron pans or medicines or instant cameras. Most people would die of exposure, injury, starvation, poisoning, or illness. And rather quickly. Because it’s fucking difficult to live outside a functioning society. And that’s really the only definition of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps that matters; anyone within a society benefits from it, and owes their success to everyone else.
And this is the whole point of society: we share our contributions, and rather than struggling to eke out a subsistence existence, we can just go buy flour, in a store, easily reachable by sidewalk or bus or car, to bake our bread with, or, hell, we can just bypass the entire bread-baking learning curve and buy it already made. I mean, consider something as simple as a loaf of bread: even if you understand all the steps from plowing to planting to growing to harvesting to drying to grinding to mixing with water to baking, can you, personally, yourself, perform all those steps? Can you design and build a plow, a scythe or harvester, a grinder, a peel and an oven?
Sure, probably. Maybe. But God, how much time it would take, merely to make your own bread. Now imagine you also have to make your own cloth and design and cut and sew and mend your own clothes. And locate/harvest/slaughter/process and preserve all your food for winter. And ferment your own booze for drinking and sanitizing. And build your own house. And collect and store your own water and fuel. Now you’re indoors, clothed, warmed, and fed. But that’s it: no life of the mind, no entertainment or distraction or hobbies. That’s what you want if you think you’re an island, that’s what you want if you loathe other humans.
In which LEFTOVERS.
So I decided to go out for coffee or something. Got dressed, organized my backpack with all my stationery crap and devices, put on shoes… and then couldn’t decide where to go.
Realized I was hungry. Sat down at my computer and looked at food delivery and recipes.
Finally got so hungry I wandered into the kitchen and made emergency fried rice.
It was delicious! And also very weird: Butter, garlic, onions. Cumin seeds. Diced tomato. Hmm, the last few tablespoons of leftover mattar paneer. Leftover rice. Some leftover pinto beans. Some water. Salt and pepper. Fried until hot and fragrant and topped it with grated jack cheese.
Yum!
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4 random books from my Library!
