Tag Archives: Postaday

PAD 2/24/2013 – Buffalo Nickel

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Dig through your couch cushions, your purse, or the floor of your car and look at the year printed on the first coin you find. What were you doing that year?

I found a twonie, which is to say a Canadian $2 coin. The date is 1996 and that year I turned 21. I was in the middle of my college years and I was finally legal enough in the United States to drink. I had already been cultivating a simmering alcoholism since I was 18 and legal in Ontario Canada just across the Niagara River from where I went to school in Buffalo, New York. I don’t have any log entries from 1996, but I do have memories. Mostly of college and all my friends that I had there. I was just starting to explore my life. Beyond high school, beyond family, college if nothing else gave me the time and space to see what I was going to become. I had already been friends with Jeffery since a few weeks after arriving at school, it’s funny but this year would be the tipping point where it could be said that he’s known me more than half of my life up to this point. As for that year, President Clinton was in office and we were occupied with blue dresses, whitewater, but for every bit of embarrassment he brought with him, he also left us with a budget surplus, the last time we saw something like that. Funny, but it was also during this time that I also let myself go, college led to stress eating and I gained a lot of weight. Now that I’m on this side of my heaviest and when it all began, which is during this time, it seems so tiny, so much water under the bridge – but there it is. I just wish I was journaling more and had entries that went back further. I suppose I should be glad that I started when I did, so at least I have something to turn back to and read when I grow old and decrepit.

PAD 2/22/2013 – Seconds!

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Describe the most satisfying meal you’ve ever eaten in glorious detail.

Without a doubt the most satisfying meal has to be the first time I assembled a Boeuf Bourguignon from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. There was a huge feeling of reward as I assembled all the ingredients, cooked them all independently and then assembled them. When the dish came out of the oven it was absolutely perfect. The scent of the wine and the beef were intoxicating and the flavor of the sauce was transcendent. The entire thing takes hours to make, but the reward was very much worth every moment, even worth going so far to not crowd the mushrooms and to individually hand-pat dry each chunk of beef before adding it to the cookpot. There were three distinct callouts to other recipes including braised pearl onions and butter-browned mushrooms that all had to have a hand in creating the final dish. There was a certain delight in preparing something as simple as egg noodles to serve as the substrate for this meal – the combination of the breathtaking complex paired with mindless simplicity really spoke to me. In later iterations of this meal I varied the substrate and discovered that I liked it more if the stew was resting in an island surrounded by mashed potatoes. Of course its a meal that isn’t meant to be eaten if you are on a diet – so you either have to live with the consequences or run around the block a couple times to burn off your caloric transgressions.

I’m glad I tackled it. I can’t do it without MAFC, but I know I can do it. Since it’s one the most complicated recipes out there there is a fair bit of pride in how well my first shot went. I’ve done it several more times and each time I think about sides that could compliment the dish. If I wanted to go over the top I could prepare a delightful Risotto while the stew cooks in the oven. That would be even more of a feat since I’d have pretty much every cooking tool in my house working all at once. It would be a gustatory tour de force but at that point you’d need an even stronger wine to pair with it and you’d need to also roast some asparagus on the side to serve as a counterpoint to the smooth richness of the Risotto and the delight of the Boeuf Bourguignon.

If I wanted to be really mean, I would pair the Boeuf Bourguignon with Grilled Cheese Sandwiches. That’s another contrasting pair that I love. The very high with the very low. It makes me laugh heartily.

PAD 2/20/2013 – A Plot Of Earth

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You’re given a plot of land and have the financial resources to do what you please. What’s the plan?

If I’m feeling philanthropic my answer is to build a utopian community for me and my loved ones so that we can share a large space and block out the harsh outside world. Much like the community in M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village”, a community cut off from the surrounding world and for that, far simpler and more direct way of living.

Then sometimes I’m not feeling all that warm and fuzzy and instead of a community I imagine a home for my immediate family far away and very much off the beaten path. There is a section of Ontario that I’ve seen from Highway 401 that inspires this idea. The road overlooks this heavily wooded bend in a small river and the shore of the river is made up of small stones, like pea-gravel. I imagine carving out some room on this little bend by the river and making a small place for myself.

In either sense, the core remains the same. The heart of any home for a Cancerian is necessarily the kitchen and that is where I would invest the most money. A place to cook and a place for my loved ones to enjoy what I’ve made. Over the years I’ve grown quite fond of cooking and in many ways it’s become an authentic route for me to express how much I care for other people. If I want to cook for you it means something. Something special. It does sting when my offers go rejected, but I’ve learned to not take those slights personally.

PAD 1/16/2013 – Crowing

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“Most of us are excellent at being self-deprecating, and are not so good at the opposite. Tell us your favorite thing about yourself.”

This is easy. Anyone who knows me knows that my treasure is my sense of humor. I’ve also cultivated a sense of the obscure, the trivial, and a huge library of movie quotes which tends to make people do double-takes when I say something they don’t expect, but are accurate. Along with my sense of humor I pride myself on a good vocabulary and the willingness to use it. I don’t play coy, take stabs of innuendo or work much with subtlety. I prefer direct communication, being blunt, and not being shy about what I think when I tell others. Often times I’ll hear people exclaim to me “Oh Andy, tell us how you really feel!” because I’ve said something that is quite obvious but possibly upsetting. I suppose my issue is I hate bandying around the bush. If something bothers you, come out with it. Say it. Put a voice to your feelings and share them. If you just sit on bad feelings they can become physical manifestations and really hurt you. Resentment, anger, irritation – they all can lead to stress, sleeplessness, worry, and if left too long, they can become a real illness.

I can also almost instantly get an intuitive feel for the emotional state of a room. I can tell when people are upset or angry and often times this sixth-sense of mine plays tricks on me. I tend to reflect the prevailing emotional energy dwelling in a space. If I’m with someone who is angry or disappointed then I am angry and disappointed. Often a lot of this comes out unintentionally and if I stop to think about it, the issues evaporate as I stop reflecting the energy that I’m floating around in. I suppose it’s an irreducible vestige of previous issues with codependency. I think over time I’ll get a better handle on it and instead of reflecting it, be able to manipulate it and better manage it.

So, in a way, I’m more complicated and more trouble than most people assume at first glance. Sometimes it draws people to me, sometimes the opposite. I do not let those that don’t appreciate me for who I am bother me. I put those people in the dark and ignore them. They are just as happy being in the dark and ignored than if they were in the light and included.

PAD 1/19/2013 – Learning the Obscure

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“Describe your last attempt to learn something that did not come easily to you.”

Humorously the best option I have to answer this would be learning the Abacus. When I was a kid I learned it but then forgot it as anyone does when you don’t apply what you’ve learned to your regular life. As an adult I got curious and picked up an app and tried to play around with one seeing if I could re-learn it. I struggled a little bit until I realized that I was using it in the wrong direction. I was trying to apply the operators in right-to-left when I should have been doing it left-to-right. It wasn’t difficult, but once I figured it out it clicked and parts of my memory long ago came back along with the rediscovered skill.

The other thing, which I have training software for is to reacquire French as a fluent foreign language. Two years ago Scott gave me an entire Rosetta Stone course in French. I’ve been plugging away at it off and on and I need to put aside some time, make the time, and dive in. That should be a mixed bag as I have a primary majority of english, some german, and a lot of french bouncing around in my head already, so at some point what I can’t remember the Rosetta Stone system will re-teach me, and then the rest will come flooding back on its own.

About the languages, something that I’ve always thought but have no proof one way or the other about is the question of whether or not people think differently when they use different languages. That thinking one way in English is not exactly the same as when you think about something in French, for example. I don’t mean to say that any language is less than any other, English proves that is not correct – when English lacks a way to convey something English speakers just start accumulating new ways to do it. They harvest words from other languages, coin new words, even create new grammars just to get over the hump and explain something in English. But I do think there are subtle differences in between languages that might lend some credence that the way one person thinks in French isn’t the exact same as when that person thinks in English. The best way to answer this curiosity of mine is to finish the Rosetta Stone course and become operationally fluent in French. I look forward to it a lot.

PAD 1/22/2013 – Mastery

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“If you could choose to be a master (or mistress) of any skill in the world, which skill would you pick?”

I find this to be a problematic post to work on. I don’t think mastery in just one skill is a very good idea. It’s been my experience that when people elect to become a master of a skill that some other skill has to suffer to admit room for the extra material for the one you’ve selected. I think that in a life there is a kind of zero-sum-game going on with skills. I see this quite often, especially at work. I’ve seen many examples of PhD-level educated people unable to conduct themselves with common sense that other people take for granted. I’ve always used the example from when I was going to SUNY Buffalo. I attended a class where the professor, a doctorate professor, could not operate a basic rubber wedge doorstop. So I don’t think that mastery is something that people should necessarily pursue. I am far more fond of stretching yourself to familiarity with other skills and I’m a huge fan of “fake it until you make it”. As I grow older I discover that the only thing that can really buy you any level of familiarity (or mastery perhaps) is just experience and learning. My aversion to pursuing mastery doesn’t mean I am against learning, just the opposite. I think that when people stop pursuing new things, when they stop learning, that’s when we start to die. The death accumulates around us slowly, we know it will eventually claim us, but in cultures where people are very long lived, like Japan, people live for a very long time because they are important and valued and that helps keep someone fresh and running. When you stop running, you’ll be less apt to run and then you’ll slow down – eventually ripe for death to pluck. So, avoiding mastery for exploration is what I think leads to the happiest and longest life you can lead. Try something new, be something new. There is a great quote from Voltaire which illustrates what I’m saying:

If we do not find anything pleasant, at least we will find something new.

PAD 1/27/13 – Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

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“Most of us have heard the saying, “That’s the best thing since sliced bread!” What do you think is actually the best thing since sliced bread?”

The best thing would have to be something that had universal appeal and enabled the most good for the most number of people. It would definitely be in the realm of technology and I think the only real option is wireless information technology. It comes in many different flavors like 3G and LTE. There is a joke which actually led me to think about this particular PAD topic and that is, in the early 21st Century we have technology that puts the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips but we just use it to take pictures of cats.

That first part of the joke is what I think is the valid part for “best thing since sliced bread” – that you could search the breadth and depth of human knowledge anywhere you are anytime you want for anything at all. That could, if we took it seriously, exponentially accelerate our intellectual development. Perhaps the pictures of cats just keep us modest and rationally constrained. Yeah, that’s it.

 

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PAD 1/21/2013 – Hindsight is 20/20

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“When you were 16, what did you think your life would look like? Does it look like that? Is that a good thing?”

When I was 16 I didn’t really have any clue what I would be doing for the rest of my life. I wasn’t really thinking about the future at that point. There were more important things, like school and sleeping. Honestly, sleeping. When I was a teenager I found myself really craving a lot of extra sleep, so much so I would pass out after school, wake up for dinner, and pad back to sleep. It wasn’t until years later did we find out that for a lot of kids in that age range, that they really don’t get a lot of the sleep they really need. I was a little science experiment right there.

I knew on some level that what I wanted had more to do with computers as I was running an old-style BBS and was exploring social media even before social media was a term that was coined. The technology back then, when I was 16 wasn’t really all that great – at least not compared to now. Now there are so much better things available to everyone, a lot less bulky and work without surprise failures.

So I guess what I had in mind, what little mind I had, did come true. Was it a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy or was I destined to end up where I am now? These are things that I’ve thought about on and off again for a while. I’ve written before about how I wouldn’t change anything about my past because that would make my current life a lie. I don’t really think time travel will ever be possible, and I’m thankful for it. To go back in time and change something would cheat you out of learning those things that you needed to learn. If you travelled back in time, I bet anything your life would fall apart.

Wether or not it is a good thing is only partially part of the deal. It is what it is. The biggest thing I think that anyone can do really is to make the best of what they have. If it’s not much, do your best and be happy with that. It’s just another cheat to set some artificial conditions on your happiness because how many people actually get there? It’s far better for you to establish that you are happy now. Instead of pursuing happiness, declare that you have it. It makes chasing it far easier.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unique

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2012-08-20 17.30.42 Last August I was walking out of where I work and I just happened to glance down and saw this flower growing all by itself in a crack that had developed in the concrete stairway leading out of my building down to the sidewalk. It struck me that something so evocative would grow without encouragement in a place that really is unlikely for any flower to thrive. It didn’t really last very long as someone from landscape services (I assume) came along and plucked it. Now all that is there is a crack in the concrete stairway. A little bit of special was there only for a brief time.

Unique.

PAD 1/26/13 – Music

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“What role does music play in your life?”

There is two kinds of music for me. The first kind is filler music. The clever hooks and poppy nothingness that I play all the time on my Spotify account while I’m at work. I keep it low and quiet and it helps to pass the time. The music is good, just because it’s meaningless doesn’t mean it’s not pleasant. It would do a disservice to declare who and what is “poppy nothingness” so I just won’t. If you think your art is deep and moving and transcendental then so do I. Whatever floats your boat. But…

There is another kind of music. The fundamental delight that it brings is beyond description. You just have to sit back and let it wash over you, changing you, as the tingles rage along your body when you hear the music that changes your life. I don’t know what thematic musical styles do it for me, but I know it when I feel it. If I’m listening to music and I feel that tingle – it doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does it’s unmistakable, then I know. I place all of this sort of music into a special playlist on Spotify and when I want to be agape with musical wonder I double-click on the playlist and shuffle. It doesn’t matter what track comes up first, they all do it for me, each and every time they play.

I used to think of music as the frilly doilies of life. Easily ignored and really compelling for doily collectors, for which I am not one. But over time, and since I discovered that some music brings the tingle, some music is more than others. I would say, much like books, going fishing for good music can lead you some truly excellent catches.