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.

Inspired NOT Stressed

One of the most eye-opening discoveries in my graduate school counseling preparation was that everything is stressful and has been assigned a point value by Holmes and Rahe  on their stress scale. Even events people regarded as positives in life carry degrees of stress based on the amount of adaptation a person has to do in their life routine to adjust to the event. They connected the measure of stress to a likelihood of physical ailment based on the number of “points” accumulated in a year’s time.

Since the mid-sixties when Holmes and Rahe’s research was published, stress has become the catch-all boogey-man for any type of inconvenience we have (such as performance expectations at work). It becomes the reason for mistakes and the low-quality work. These interpretations of Holmes and Rahe’s work completely misrepresent what they believed about stress: it is necessary for life. Our reactions to the stressor are where the harm lies. Some current research reminds us of that understanding.

WATCH: Turns Out, We May Have Gotten the Science of Stress Completely Wrong | TEDTalks:

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McGonigal cites a study that reported on the effects of the view of stress and health consequences, not the stressor itself. They re-discovered that our response to stress determines the likelihood of illness and even death. Holmes and Rahe assigned the points on their scale based on the general reaction people have to the event - not the event itself. That is why the birth of a child merited fewer points than the death of a loved one. Likewise, a promotion at work scores lower than losing a job. We generally experience less disruption to life with the first examples than the second.

Since discovering the work of Holmes and Rahe in graduate school, I have considered situations differently. I work in a stressful field - education. The challenges differ from school to school and some of them are entrenched and cultural. As long as they are challenges, I have the power to seek and implement solutions that may make them less challenging. When I call them stressors, I have given up seeking solutions.

I am glad that some are beginning to reframe the conversation around stress. For so many years so much misinformation spread so widely that if the number of times a lie was repeated changed it to the truth, then stress would be the villain. Replacing the false understanding of stress with a correct one faces an uphill battle at the start, but I believe it will be readily received: the old news about stress was a tale of weakness, but the new understanding is one of power! Shifting the conversation to our response to stress rather than the stress itself puts control over it within our grasp: we control how we react. We control the effects of stress.

We control our lives. There is no longer a reason to use stress as an excuse.

Queso Freak

I do not know when it first came about, but a few years ago my reward for a week of eating well was a Friday night trip to one of several Tex-Mex restaurants in Austin that served what I considered to be good queso. Queso, chips, and salsa became my Friday night fix.

I could have a worse fix than queso.

At various points across the years I have had an entourage who joined me on a regular basis. We would get into such a routine that the staff knew what to bring me when I walked into the establishment. For the last year, I have mostly had my queso fix alone because my regular friends moved away or our schedules no longer align.

Does eating queso alone make me an addict?

I am somewhat picky about the queso. Heated Velveeta does not do it for me. It actually has to be some kind of cheese sauce. I also prefer the queso compuesto which means it comes with pico and meat and sometimes guacamole. I mix everything except any included guacamole into the cheese. I do not care for the avocado taste in the cheese, but I leave the guacamole floating in the hot cheese because warm guacamole actually tastes really good.

Recently I have been mastering the process of making my own queso from scratch. Getting a smooth sauce is not as difficult as I long imagined. I just had never done it right. Simply melting cheese does not a queso make.

I firmly believe that, much like bacon, cheese sauce makes almost anything better. Mastering the base for a cheese sauce allows for so many variations. One of my favorite variations involves making a smoky cheese sauce. When mixed with the right meats and pasta, it gives a sense of the grill. Properly incorporating fresh peppers into the base makes a very spicy sauce without the lumpy nature that sometimes happens when going for spicy. Using a variety of cheeses creates sauces as varied as the variety of cheeses in the fromagerie.

As much as I look forward to the queso itself on Friday nights, the real enjoyment of it comes from the company with friends and lively atmosphere in the restaurants. By going to the same ones so regularly, I recognize, and even know some of the regulars now. Despite my naturally introverted nature, I am comfortable enough in these places to relax and enjoy the company of others. Queso is just the bait to get me there.