Coveting Another's...

In the last few months I have discovered what covet truly means. As a good and faithful Sunday School attendee all my childhood and youth I knew it was one of the top ten. I found it a bit silly; no one could want what someone else has so badly the want will send them to Hell.

I grew up.

I have worked in a profession that is also my passion for 23 years.

Then my friend Dave quit his job and retreated to a cabin in the Rocky Mountains to edit the novel he had written on a previous sabbatical.

I covet his experience.

The introvert me covets the isolation.

The exhausted me covets the time.

The stressed-out me covets the escape.

Every time I encounter an unexpected situation; every time the stress begins to build, my mind asks, “where’s my cabin?” Coyotes, bears, and hailstorms be damned - they’re easier to deal with than people. I ponder the question, “what would happen if I loaded the car and left?”

The answer is immediate: the student loan people will still track me down.

The fantasy ends that quickly, but the coveting does not. I have been working in my house lately to build my own cabin. The garage (too small for a car, I don’t know what the builders were thinking) is becoming a workshop for handiwork crafts. My office finally has enough shelving that I do not have piles of books covering most of the floor, and as soon as I refinish the old wooden desk I have, I will have my personal reading and writing space. I do what I can with what I have.

None of this is far removed from society - I still hear the planes arriving and departing. There are no wild creatures - there are roommates. It is not the high altitudes of Colorado, but when my mind asks for a cabin, I’ll have an answer and maybe the coveting will move to wanting. I’ll plan a vacation accordingly.

The Death and Birth of English

photo from Grammarly

A friend of mine recently posted the photo from Grammarly featuring the quote from Conan O’Brien. The most surprising thing about it is that it is almost a year old and still making the rounds. I have previously mentioned various words of the year as named by various groups. Each so-named word-of-the-year generates the usual pitiful wails from the language purists who remain convinced that Shakespeare, or Dickens, or (insert favorite English author) had the language in its perfect form and we are fools for changing it.

To those purists who have nothing better to do than grouse about the perversion of our language based on societal change I say, “Get over it! English ain't Latin." (Like it or not even spell check knows ain’t is a word.)

Some argue the words selected are too silly or represent a fad. Often they do. Not!* The truthiness** of the Occupy*** movement was challenged by some, but not if they had a subprime**** mortgage. The rise of words expressing the dynamic of society generate the energy that keeps English alive. Rather than killing the language, these words represent the continual birth found in any living language.

Truthfully, those decrying the various words of the year are not attacking the word so much as they disagree with the circumstances that promoted the word to prominence. That is not a question for the linguists who study trends in language but for the society that allowed “selfie” to become a thing. Why are people so preoccupied with taking photos of themselves? I would argue that in a world where everything is social, it’s a cry for attention, “Hey, look at me,” and when the world does not, the selfie offers the illusion of attention, “I’m looking at me.”

Maybe selfie is not so silly.

People, look beyond yourself.

No. Really. Pay attention to the background! No one wants to see your dirty underwear or any of the other embarrassing things captured in that moment of self-affirmation.

In November the various organizations that compile the lists of influential words will again offer their collections. At this point in the year I am at a loss to predict what words will be selected, but I know there will again be the usual uproar predicting the death of our diseased dialects. If it is the typical year, my voice will rise with the others - with the understanding that those cries do not draw us to the funeral parlor, but to the nursery, where we view the continuing birth of English.

*1992, **2005, ***2011, ****2007 words of the year. We may not use them as much, but we still know what they mean.

The Passion of the Kitchen

Recently I watched Julie and Julia, the movie adaptation of the book by the same name describing one woman’s goal of cooking all of Julia Childs’ recipes from her original cookbook in the span of a year. As much as I can empathize with Julie’s desire, if the scenes detailing Julia’s rise to kitchen stardom had not been included I would have turned the movie off in the first thirty minutes. Despite the unlikability of the focal character, her desire to do something daring in the kitchen struck a chord in me.

Each week,  I spend one quarter of my weekend making my food for the coming week as I rarely have time each evening to cook food from scratch. After gaining nearly 20 pounds from eating out multiple times a week during my last round of graduate school, I determined to never do that again, and cooking and pre-packing my meals for the coming week not only helped me lose those twenty pounds, but keep them off. Nevertheless, the idea of cooking, sometimes multiple, new recipes each evening seemed especially fascinating to me as someone who goes to the grocery store once (only by necessity twice) a month. I do not do a weekly menu; I do a monthly one.

Still, as a person who LOVES to cook and to teach others to cook in the way I learned from my grandmother and mother (smell is EVERYTHING), the idea of doing something challenging such as cooking a new recipe (the steps and ingredients of which I normally take as suggestions rather than directions) each night absolutely fascinated me. I have a wide variety of cookbooks ranging from the 75th Anniversary Edition Joy of Cooking to collections of recipes from various churches and high school classes. My favorites are those collections of recipes real people use on a regular basis. I know they are good because people shared them when they had the opportunity to give the one recipe they knew was good.

Discussing the value of taking on such a challenge, my roommate and I brought up a number of ways such a challenge could be taken and what ways we would do it differently. While the idea caused me to reflect on what kind of cooking challenge I would undertake. Living in Austin, Texas is vastly different than a borough of New York. I drive past a dozen grocery stores each day, but none of them are an easy access off and on the interstate routes I travel. That is why I only go to the store once or twice a month. If I lived in NYC, based on what I have seen in the apartments of the friends I have visited there, I would have to shop and cook each day; that is not my reality.

In the week that followed, the more I reflected on the idea of some kind of cooking challenge the more I realized I do not need a challenge to demonstrate my passion in the kitchen. My weekly meals and the other meals I prepare for friends from time to time all come from the passionate cook within. It exists in every dish I make and that is what I want to sustain.