Homework

Good news!  I’m writing a new, improved, wholly rewritten and updated version of my first book, Big Big Love, the first and still the only book about sex for people who are fat and for the people who love and desire them.

(Don’t start with me about how fat people don’t have sex.  Just because you personally don’t like to imagine a particular type of someone having sex doesn’t mean they don’t.  To wit, your grandma. Enough said.)

The original came out in 2000, and has been out of print for a while.  I’m writing the new one for Ten Speed Press, and it’ll be out sometime in 2011.

As I did with the original, I’ve written an extensive survey for this one, in order to collect as much information as I can from the folks who know best about fat and sexuality — namely, the people who deal with it every day.

If you are part of the target demographic for this book, that is, if you identify yourself as being fat, thick, hefty, plump, zaftig, stocky, roly-poly, rotund, Junoesque, amply-proportioned, or whatever… or if you are romantically/sexually interested in folks who are…. get yourself on over to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BBL2010survey and tell me all about it.  Your anonymity is assured, as are my profoundest thanks.

And do feel free to pass it on!
Sorry I’ve been so lacking in blog content.  I’ve needed a little time to grow back after turning in Straight to the publishers and while getting everything up to speed with the Big Big Love project.  There’ll be some garden pics and other goodies soon, I promise.

I turned in my manuscript today.

Now it’s someone else’s problem for a while.  Then it’ll be my problem again, for a bit, then the publishers will carry it off and make it into a book, God willing and the crick don’t rise.

So that’s done.

Now I just have to finish the other book, the one that’s due at the end of September.

I believe I mentioned that I have a book due on July 15, and am consequently in what we refer to as Book Deathmarch.

This, consequently, is what the interior of my fridge looks like right now.

My household has been eating, this past week, mostly courtesy of what’s been found in the freezer and the garden.  Right now in the fridge there are two packages of seasoned tofu, two bottles of beer, some garlic scape pesto, half a dozen eggs, a chicken carcass waiting to be turned into soup (that’s the plastic box), a quarter of a container of soymilk, Vitamin D liquid, some olives, some miso, some garlic, and the Magic Forest of Pickled Peppers And Other Condiments.  Oh, and pint of cream because I keep meaning to make caramels for someone and it keeps not happening.  There are some breadcumbs in there too, and almond meal, popcorn, and, in the plastic baggie you can see just poking out of the door, some salt cod.  The rest of the door shelves contain condiments of all sorts, from pomegranate molasses to four kinds of mustard.  And the cat’s insulin.

The cupboard is also starting to look a little less like its usual self.  There’s a big hole where several bags of dried beans used to be, the muesli stocks are pretty much gone, there’s no more peanut butter.  Even the tea cupboard has some wide open spaces in it, a state of affairs so rare as to be shocking.

It’s kind of an interesting challenge to feed yourself and your household when the fridge mostly holds condiments and not many things with which one could reasonably use same.  It strikes me that this task might be easier and less stressful if I just went out and did the hunting and gathering.  I guess I’ll have to carve out some time and do that.

Oh, I took photos.  But would they really express the satisfaction, a long day of writing behind me, an evening’s worth still to go, of spending a half an hour in the kitchen with the cool crispness of bok choy and cucumbers and scallions?  Would they convey the sizzle of the tofu hitting the hot oil in the wok, so loud it made me flinch even though I expected it?  I’m fairly sure they wouldn’t give the remotest impression of how mud-luscious (oh e.e.!) the sensation of mashing soaked fermented black beans with your fingertips can be, or how tantalizing the pungency that rises to the nose when you do it.  And as for the visceral gratification of whacking a peeled whole cucumber with the flat of a cleaver blade until it cracks into chunks, well, I think we can agree that no photograph could do that justice.

We ate a shrimp-broth based egg flower soup, black bean sauce tofu with bok choy, and smacked garlic cucumbers.  No rice, we usually don’t unless company’s in the offing, the better to spare my temperamental metabolic system.  Thumb-thick, winey-ripe blackberries for dessert.  Salutary indeed.

And so, back to work.

I admire Michael Ruhlman for several reasons, only one of which is that he has the good sense to continue to live in our shared and quite wonderful home town.  I also admire him for his attitudes about home cooking and about the tendency of modern food writers to tout “quick and easy” recipes whose primary virtue is not how they taste or how nutritious they are but how little time and energy they require.  Ruhlman recently waxed eloquent and a little bit righteously wrathful on the topic at the International Assocation of Culinary Professionals conference in Portland, Oregon, causing a bit of kerfuffle in the foodie blogosphere.

I may well be preaching to the choir here, but Mr. Ruhlman is  right.  We have time for the things that we make time for.  We all get the same 24 hours in a day, and there is no secret confraternity of special chefly people who are magically given extra time in which to cook.

As someone who cooks privately and sometimes professionally, I find it offensive when someone tells me they “just don’t have the time” to cook.  Really?  You are rushing about the world doing things that are so crucial, so vital to the ongoing functioning of the universe as we know it, that you don’t have time to do the work necessary to put food into your own belly?  What, pray tell, are you up to?  Is that the cure for cancer you have tucked into your handbag?  Perhaps a solution to the economic crisis has presented itself to you and you are spending all your waking hours communicating it to world leaders?  No?

I submit that if you have the time to read this blog post, you have the time to cook a meal.   Seriously, an omelet and a quick green salad take about as long to prepare as it does to read these words. If you have the time to read your RSS feed or cruise through your blogroll, you have the time it takes to do something a little more complicated — cube some tofu and cut up some veggies for a stir-fry, truss a chicken and get it in the oven to roast, whatever moves you.  And if you have the time to sit on your firm but pliant arse and watch Tony Bourdain or Paula Deen or whoever for an hour at a stretch?  Yeah.  Don’t bullshit me about how busy you are.

Let me break this down a little further.  We are animals.  Like other animals, we have two basic things we have to do in order to survive as individuals, and we add a third if we want to survive as a species.  We have to breathe and we have to eat.  If we want to survive as a species we have to reproduce.  That’s the real bottom line, those three things.  Those are the things we do not have a choice about: we must make time for them.

Certainly you can make choices about whether you want to eat well or eat poorly, whether you want to control what goes into the food you eat or whether you trust other people to make those choices for you.  You can decide which upsets you more, the idea of having to carve some time out from your schedule to prepare some food for yourself or the idea of never really knowing exactly what mystery substances might have been introduced into the prepared food you so blithely and obediently cram into your oh-so-busy face.   You can choose to make time to feed yourself in ways that provide you with aesthetic satisfaction, or in ways that give you particularly customized nutrition, ways that educate you or challenge you or comfort you or that do all those things and more.  Or you can choose to make only enough time to feed yourself in ways that stop you from feeling hunger pangs for the time being, but nothing more.

I understand that not everyone finds food terribly interesting.  Okay, so I don’t understand that, but I do know that it’s true.  Likewise, I am aware that not everyone enjoys cooking.  (My mother doesn’t and never has.)  And to be sure not everyone has a knack for cooking, just as not everyone has a talent for playing the piano or making small talk at parties.

But everyone can manage some basics. And everyone should.   Cooking makes you responsible for yourself in a very primal way.  It makes you accountable for some of the work that is required to keep you alive from minute to minute and day to day.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask of people.

There’s a Zen teaching that I love that goes like this:

A monk said to Joshu, “I have just entered this monastery. Please teach me.”

“Have you eaten your rice porridge?” asked Joshu.

“Yes, I have,” replied the monk.

“Then you had better wash your bowl,” said Joshu.

With this the monk gained insight.

There are a lot of levels here, and certainly serious students of Zen would be capable of elaborating on a lot more meanings than I could ever hope to draw from this koan.  But among the things I take from this is that part of being a reasonably enlightened human being, by which I mean someone who is aware of and accountable for  hirself and how hir actions fit into the world, is being conscious of and taking reasonable responsibility for the things that are necessary for our continued existence.

If we have eaten from a bowl, the bowl will then need to be cleaned so we can eat again later.

We could throw the bowl away, but that doesn’t solve the problem.  A new bowl would have to be made, because eating is mandatory.

We could make another person clean out bowl for us, but that suggests that we are above doing such things, while another is not, although neither of us is above eating so how could it be true that either of us is above doing the things that have to be done so that eating can take place?

We could stop eating from bowls, and eat with our hands, I suppose.  But that still leaves the problem of the knives and pans and pots.

We could dispense with the knives and pans and pots, and eat food as it comes from plants and animals.  Which still leaves the problem of getting the foodstuffs in the first place.

What I’m trying to say here is this: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

It takes work to keep you alive.

Washing your bowl–or filling it with food in the first place–is not a waste of time.  It’s as important as any of the other things you could do, such as seeking teachings in the case of the monk.

Washing your bowl, emptying your bowl, filling your bowl, it’s the same thing.  The same crucial human thing.  It’s the work that life is.

And yes, you do have the time to do that.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of open-kitchen cooking, cooking where the diners can watch you work. In my case these days, I’m doing it as a one-woman-band in a pop-up restaurant that appears, like a mushroom in the lawn, on Sundays at a local venue that normally showcases local/regional agricultural produce of various sorts, some whole foods grocery, and the products of a few very good local small businesses along the food/health-and-beauty continuum.

It’s not a traditional restaurant. It’s not a restaurant at all. There’s none of the infrastructure you would associate with a restaurant, save for a walk-in refrigerator in the back where cases of produce get stored. There is no dishwasher, no flat-top, no grill, no broiler, no fryer, no oven, and no range, to say nothing of any more esoteric kitchen appliances. If you can’t cook it on a butane burner, you can’t cook it there. What we have is a long rolling worktop with a bunch of butane burners on it, and a dishwashing setup on a second set of rolling wire shelves. There are no stations, no convenient eye-level shelf from which to hang your order tickets, none of that. There are no conveniences and no crutches. What you see is what you get. Essentially, it’s a street food setup, only the diners eat with forks and knives (or chopsticks and spoons) and real bowls and plates, seated at tables. We’ve even got tablecloths. We’re civilized like that in Baltimore.

So no, it isn’t fancy. But the food is good and the low overhead means my prices can be much more reasonable than might otherwise be the case. And, for those who like dinner and a show, it’s a setup that offers an unparalleled chance to watch your food being made. The “kitchen” is about five, maybe six feet from the closest two tables.

I thought this would be intimidating. It’s not. Not everyone watches. Some read the newspaper, or talk to their dining companions. Some bring a book. But some people do watch me cook. Whether they watch avidly, as if trying to learn how to do it themselves, or distantly, like people tend to watch fry cooks’ backs at diners, depends on the customer. Sometimes they like to stand right in front of me and chat with me while I cook, and mostly that’s okay unless there’s a big rush on and I’m managing too many things at once to be an engaging and ingratiating conversationalist.

I worried, at first, about what people would think. Would they judge my technique? My looks? My headwrap and my Virgin of Guadalupe apron? Compare me unfavorably to the polished, coiffed, professionally-lit denizens of Kitchen Stadium or any of the zillion cooking instruction shows out there?

Would they look at my mise-en-place, in all its unglamorous dishwasher-safe plastic tubs, and decide my food wasn’t fresh enough because I wasn’t peeling/paring/chopping/zesting/mixing absolutely everything from its raw state for absolutely every single cover? (You’d be amazed the kinds of things that come out of people’s mouths and minds, sometimes, truly.) And anyway, what if I screwed up? What if I didn’t flip a crepe properly and I had to redo it? What if I dropped something? What if I messed up an order? What if I looked inept or amateurish? Hell, what if my technique just wasn’t very interesting? Or I couldn’t make conversation and cook at the same time and my customers took it personally? What if? What if?

The night before I first did this particular gig, I lay awake in bed worrying about all this stuff and a thousand other variations on a theme. I’d worked in kitchens before, but always well behind the scenes. It had never occurred to me then to be grateful for the anonymity.

But you know, it’s really okay. A beautiful thing happens when I get onto the line in the open kitchen and start filling orders. It’s actually a familiar thing, something I learned to appreciate from childhood as a musician. You take that couple of steps out onto the stage, out behind the butane burners, and you’re on. It’s showtime.

It takes a lot of concentration to keep everything humming and to keep everything straight. You have to be mindful to know when your crepe needs to be turned your mushrooms pan-seared your egg cracked your sauce spooned your wontons taken from the boiling pot your steamer base filled your dishrack emptied your backup container of chili-garlic paste fetched from the walk-in and at the same time hey, good to see you, we’re doing such-and-such for brunch today, what looks good to you? There is no time to care whether anyone is watching or what they might think, you’re busy. The shift is a single stretchy moment and your attention is right there, every minute. It has to be.

What I’m describing isn’t inspiration, it isn’t the cliched ecstasy of artistry that everyone assumes is the animating force behind anything that can be described as art. I’ve experienced that too, and it’s different. (It’s also not a requirement for art.) That comes from without, the proverbial bolt from the blue. This comes from within. It’s attention, it’s focus, it’s being so caught up in the activities of being a good craftsperson that that’s your whole world, the only thing you think about, the only thing you can think about, all there is. I’m lucky. There’ve been multiple kinds of work in my life, as a musician, a writer, a teacher, a public speaker, where I’ve been able to spend good chunks of working time with this kind of focus and flow. It’s a gift to get to work like this. To get to live like this. Even if it’s only sometimes.

I don’t mean to romanticize the situation. God knows it’s not romantic. It’s hard work. Really hard. There are steam burns and grease spatters and stains and broken dishes, confusion and mixups and all the rest. It’s intensely physical and enormously brain-consuming, for all that it isn’t intellectual. After the 48-hour or so cycle of prep and pack in, set up and service, cleanup and breakdown and pack out is all over, I’m dead tired, brain fried, good for nothing much more complicated than walking the long-suffering dog and running the dirty kitchen linens and tablecloths through the washer and dryer. (Linens service is another thing pop-up restaurateurs have to do for themselves.)

But it’s good, being in the open kitchen.

Sometimes the house is too loud for me to get much work done.

Not loud in a literal sense.  I can be home alone, sitting in my office, the animals all fast asleep, nothing stirring at all, and the house can still be deafening.

“Wash me!” comes the soft, somewhat muffled cry of the laundry in its hampers.

“I’m choking on all these hair tumbleweeds,” the floors join in.  “It’s shedding season, you know!”

“We stink!” shout the litterboxes.  “You can’t smell it from where you are but we do!”

“I’ve got an appointment with the trashman, I haven’t got all day,” notes the recycling bin.

Sometimes I just plug my ears, or perhaps turn on some music, metaphorically at least, and keep slogging away at whatever it is that I’ve got to do.  Sometimes I have to.  But the more I do that, the louder the house becomes.  Eventually I can’t stand it any more — not the state of the house, not the awareness of its needs — and I give in.

I try to deal with it strategically.  I’ve got work to do, after all, that has nothing to do with the laundry, the floors, the litterboxes, or anything of the kind.  Getting up from the desk once an hour or so to spend fifteen minutes dealing with the laundry, or giving the bathroom fixtures a scrubdown, or something like that, is actually a pretty effective pattern.  A lot gets done on both the house side and the office side, so long as I can handle the interruptions, the breaks, the fits-and-starts.

Today was one of those days where I just couldn’t manage it.  Most of the time I can do the strategic housecleaning-as-breaktime-activity thing, parcel out the dusting and sweeping and dish-doing and whatnot across the day, and be just fine with it.  Today I couldn’t stand it.  I couldn’t bear going back to the office when I knew the dusting had been done but the floors hadn’t yet been swept, couldn’t make my brain deal with history of marriage when it was yammering anxiously about the fact that the floors had been swept but not all the furnishings had been put back properly.

I’m sure it counts as displacement activity.  I’m equally sure that some people will consider it fussy, or obsessive, and think of me as a tight-arse and a bore and wonder how on earth anyone could give enough of a damn about the state of her floors or her laundry or her dishes in the sink to be unable to concentrate on higher, more meaningful, more intellectual and highbrow and, well, just plain better things.

Well.  The fact is that this is not just a place I come back to every night when I’m done working, it is where I work.  The well-being of my house and my household is the well-being of the environment in which I write and, in no small way, my work as a writer as well.  If you have the luxury of working in a place you don’t have to clean, whose rubbish bins you don’t have to empty and whose bathroom mirrors you are never called upon to polish, I can see why it might be hard to understand the intimate entanglements of the priorites here in my house, my home office, and my working life.  Then again, as someone whose office is all of five feet from her bedroom and directly above her kitchen, I have a hard time imagining how you office workers can spend so much time and expend so much effort in a place from which you are so physically alienated and from whose workings you have — indeed, I get the impression many office workers can’t imagine not having — so much emotional and practical distance.

Some days the house is loud.  Sometimes it wants attention.  Maybe it’s irritable, or itchy.  Sometimes it just has the blues.  Part of my work is to listen to it, and give it what it needs as best I can, so that it will calm back down, quietly settling like the dog when he’s contented, and I can concentrate more fully on other things secure in the knowledge that the house is in good order, that unpleasantness does not await me, that all is well and quiet.