Cooking, Writing, Learning

My wife was a little worried she was shirking our shared duties. "I'll help you cook in a little bit, but I need to finish this." I was peeling garlic. I told her not to worry about it. I'm not feeling obligated tonight. This is fun. I'm in the mood. I had the ingredients set out, pots on the stove, and a recipe in my head. Go Go Penguin was on the speakers. The dog waited for me to drop cheese. I'm good, I told her. The stars were aligned. The moon was in the seventh house. All of that.

Peeling garlic, done correctly, something I've only recently learned though I've been cooking with fresh garlic for twenty five years, is a soothing meditation. So too is chopping it with a good, sharp knife. Better still if I've sharpened the knife on my own stone, something friends helped me learn after many failures on my own. It's a skill I'm still honing. Rocking the knife on the bamboo board, turning the chunks of garlic into tiny mince, feels good. Smells good too.

A friend wrote of his first attempt at aging beef. It didn't go well. "This experiment went, in a word, wrong. Horribly, terribly wrong." This is the point when I often have to step back, curse all over the place, give up and swear I'll never try whatever it was again. It takes a while for me to cool down. Sometimes I go back to it, but it takes longer for me to get to the attitude he expressed in his very next sentence: "The good thing about failure is there is so much to learn from it. The bad thing is I can be a really slow learner." He's anything but slow at these things. He is dogged and skilled, something I've admired about him from the first. Often I need to remind myself that he's learning just as I am.

The garlic minced, I diced an onion and threw that in a pan with some oil. The garlic followed shortly thereafter, the sauce shortly after that. I put the cover on, checked the water in the big pot I had put on to boil, and, back at the bamboo board, grated cheese.

Baked ziti, at least the way I make it, is the easiest of dishes to prepare. No need for a recipe. It's a natural progression by now. Because of that, my mind can wander as I cook. Good thing I was done with the knife and am pretty well wired not to grate my fingers with the cheese. I was thinking about learning and change, advancement and mastery, practice and discipline.

A well-meaning friend, as several others have before him, stated that there isn't any money in the writing I'm doing and trying to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. SHut up. There's also no money in the short run I took earlier but I ran anyway. The other night when I said that I had to get a blog post together, my wife asked, "do you have to?" She was trying to give me permission for a break, but yeah, I have to. I've posted every day this year and am learning something from doing that. "The bad thing is I can be a really slow learner." The only way forward that I know of is to just keep going, slow and steady, and see what I can make happen.

The water boiled and I dumped in a bag and a half of pasta, stirred, rested the spoon on the stove, checked the sauce and adjusted the heat while I stirred that. I preheated the oven and brought out the big glass pan. Every so often I stirred the pasta and checked the quasi-recipe in my head for mistakes and omissions. The water bubbled and boiled, the pasta floating calmly in that storm. I watched it boil and waited as the minutes uncoiled on the timer.

There's no money in the things I'm doing but there seems a clear future in them. Not that I see the future clearly but it's clear to me that this is my future. It's such a big part of my present and has been a huge part of my past. I'm following it, trying to learn, wondering how to make some kind of leap.

The friend who is aging beef waited forty-five days to find it hadn't worked. Maybe someone could have intuited earlier that it was going wrong, that there was no profit in waiting. Maybe that would have been more convenient and less painful while being just as instructive. Maybe. But I doubt it. The very idea of aging beef for so long sounds ridiculous, counter-intuitive, maybe even foolish. Food is supposed to be fresh! My friend knows better than that and he's willing to stay in the game until he has it down. He will listen to advice but he needs to learn it himself.

Me too.

I drained the pasta, poured it back into the pot, took the sauce off the heat and poured that in. The parmesan went in along with a tub of cottage cheese (my family doesn't go in for ricotta) and some of the mozzarella. I add an egg too, don't tell anyone. I mixed all this up in the pot, poured it into the glass dish, sprinkled with more mozzarella, covered it with foil, and put it in to bake. Even before I uncover it for the last five minutes of baking and smell the goodnes, I know just how it will taste. I've learned this thing by heart. I've got it down. It will be perfect.

As for writing. Who knows? It might make money or it might not, but it will teach me something. There's no guessing about that. I've already learned plenty from it. Enough to know to keep going.

Maps & Legends

My friend John says nice things about me for some reason. I wrote about how I can't imagine hot to write a book. John wrote back with a post on his blog entitled The Compulsion. And now here I go again. You can eavesdrop on our conversation. We don't mind.

The last paragraph of John's post begins with this line that got me started:

I'm sure all of this sounds preachy and kind of sanctimonious. Take it for what it's worth."

John, it's crazy how often we excuse ourselves for having opinions about writing. You did it by saying that you haven't been published. I do that too. I say, "I'm a writer but not a real writer," because I just have a blog and write every day. I think this comes from a lifetime of English classes in which we've elevated the writer. We have for so long read writers who are far removed from our experience. It makes them feel otherworldly and that they are capable of the impossible.

I was reading The Sun Magazine and found two unbelievably good stories by a woman who, I saw in the author bios, lives in Central New York. Turns out I could walk to her house. (Don't worry. I have no idea which exact house is hers and only know because she told me that she is in the vicinity. I'm not a stalker!) She's an ordinary human being who lives just like I do. The difference is that she has had her words in print. That is seemingly miraculous but not a miracle and not the work of anyone but one of us mere mortals.

All we do is return to the work again and again.

I like what you said about goals bringing on regret and self-loathing, not much else. Scott Adams (a turd of a human who nonetheless has this good idea) says that "goals are for losers." Working toward a goal means we have failed at reaching it so far. So even when we're doing the work, with regard to the goal we are in failure. Maybe we achieve a goal, but that achievement often feels like a failure because there is no end. There's just the next thing. Focus on the goal also takes away from focusing instead on the work and the reward of just doing the work.

I'm thinking of Dani Shapiro who has been on the best-seller list for the last few weeks. I'm sure she has wanted to be on the best-seller list, but I doubt that was her goal or that she had any goal other than to do the work, become a better writer, tell her story, and do some more of the work. That's the returning that both of us are talking about. It's a circle of returning to the work rather than some kind of straight-line goal.

You mention that you're notoriously lazy. I wonder how often you were told that as a kid. I heard it a lot and read it on my report cards as "Brian is not working up to his potential." That sort of thing sinks in and sticks with a guy like me. It's about time we both said, screw that. I'm finding lately that when I feel lazy there's a reason and I'm trying to go with the feeling not to indulge in indolence but to see what not doing anything has to offer. This seems at least slightly better than beating myself up about it. I know you're not beating yourself up too much, but just for kicks count the number of pages you've written and see if you know ten other people who have written as much. Then go back to writing. Or, the hell with it, skip all the counting and just write some more.

There are road maps and we can use them without having to think about destinations and goals. My current map is like some pre-Columbian map where there's this mysterious section far from home that is blank except for a drawing of some sea monster and an ominous line about the edges of the known world. I can never fold those maps up again, so I leave them spread out on my floor or tacked to the wall, reminders of where I want to go and all the possible routes that could get me there. Stare at them long enough and the squiggly lines of rivers, roads, and borders almost resolve into letters, words, and a story.

Thanks for writing that post, John. You're a good guy. Write on.

Let's Just See What Happens

Keep going. Don't quit five minutes before the miracle.

The first part of that is the title of Austin Kleon's new book. The second part is my paraphrase of a Dani Shapiro idea. I like both thoughts and how they fit together to inform what I'm doing and trying to do.

Last night's sticky note, a reminder to myself and a start my morning pages, says: The slow work. Just keep doing it and believe in the worth of what I am writing. It's easy to forget that the tiny thing I do today adds to whatever I did yesterday and will be followed by what I do tomorrow. I forget that, especially when I want to be published and successful in this writing thing. Successful? Isn't this successful? Does making money equate with success? If money is success, I may be out of luck. A friend wrote me that "Trying to earn anything from memoir is...well, possible. But it helps if you were raised by religious fanatics in Idaho and wound up with a degree from Cambridge." My degrees are from Onondaga Community College, SUNY Oswego, and Radford University. I grew up in Syracuse. My parents were not fanatics about much of anything. I'm so screwed.

What I'm doing now, writing on this blog, sending out an essay or two, earns me no money and likely won't for a while. I have very few followers on the Twitter account I set up only for writing and connecting with writers. I have just over fifty people subscribed to the blog. These are the facts of my networking efforts. But that is less than half the picture.

I have been writing every single day. A lot of writing. It adds up. The effect is cumulative.

Just now I went out and shoveled the driveway and sidewalks for the second time today. The snow is still falling. I may go out later and clear it again. Then tomorrow morning there will be more snow and I will clear that. The snow will keep coming until it isn't coming any more and we see and feel spring. Each time I clear the driveway is one more push to keep things orderly, to keep going, knowing that the miracle of spring is only minutes away if I squint at my watch just right.

Do Tell

Most of what I thought I was keeping private I've really been keeping secret. The former is keeping confidence for the sake of others, not revealing something because it would be a burden for them. The latter is hiding. I'm speaking here of the secrets and privacy of the self, myself really. Secrets can be valuable when carried for a loved one. Secrets kept about myself seem less so. Also, privacy, like solitude, feels healthy and good while secrets, like loneliness, mostly do damage.

Don't worry though, I'm not about to reveal my deepest secrets here today. That's another kind of burdening that does damage. Instead I'm looking to consider the effects I'm feeling of having let go of a couple secrets.

Start easy with one I've talked about before: I'm quitting my job after this school year. That's the sort of thing I would usually kept to myself worrying What if my employer and colleagues find out? What if I change my mind? Fearing these things, I have the habit of making such decisions but keeping them secret. Privacy isn't motivated by fear, but secrets usually are. My habit says, don't tell anyone.

I bucked that habit and have announced the decision and then some. The effects help me see the value of going public. I have been surprised by the support, suggestions, and gratitude with which my announcement has been received. I expected it to be a burden to others, but it turns out to be a type of kindness.

It has been kind to me as well. There have been other times I've said I need to quit my job, but that was only my inner voice echoing inside the empty warehouse of my skull. I kept it secret because the idea felt shameful and made me seem weak. Transforming the secret through telling, I felt lighter and open to ideas. The secret had me thinking I had to go on until retirement. Telling others had me feeling the truth of it.

A second example. At my in-laws, talking about my job, I said it was making me sick. To show I wasn't just whining, I let go of a secret: I'm 219 pounds, technically obese. My mother-in-law was shocked and did not want to believe. No way, she said. That's not possible.

I never want to reveal that I'm fat. It's embarrassing and feels like failure, a lack of will, and weakness. Being fat is something I keep secret out of shame. This is what I've learned. That's my habit.

Saying it didn't change my weight but I felt lighter, less trapped in my weight or held down by it. Letting go of the secret I found that no one reproached me. There was no shame. There was understanding and I felt good.

My recent experience has been that sharing secrets is strengthening. Still, I resist the urge to share because shame, the heaviest of weights, feels so crushing. Shame drives my habit of hiding, of keeping secret while claiming privacy. The habit is so strong it overcomes most logic and experience.

Of course it matters how the secret is told. It's no surprise that telling honestly and in straight-forward fashion without hoping to elicit any response, least of all shock is best. I didn't want to shock my mother-in-law. Instead, I wanted to share something and help her understand how bad my job has become. I told her about my weight not to say, Look at me! but more to offer, This is me. Here I am. I was giving instead of asking for something. For me, that's a radical approach.

There are implications in this for writing. When I tell of my job and weight, I'm not looking for a result, effect, moral, or even an ending. There is no moral. I don't know how the story will end. It's a thing in process. I tell the story without drama or effect and go forward in the belief that someone, maybe me, might benefit. Secrets are hidden stories. Telling in the right amounts — and here there is a border to explore — is good for all.