procrastination... is the name of the game
Ah yes. It is that time of year again. The air is so crisp it burns the inside of your nostrils as you step from the house in the morning. The perennial sound of the furnace blasting in cyclical fugues is music to my ears. It means I don't have to get up. Or go anywhere. It means I will stay in my flannel pjs all day and avoid the work that is pressing down gently on my head.
Last night there was a sharp rapping on my door and my heart leapt into my throat. A muffled noise, and I gingerly opened the balcony door to a blast of cool wet air. "We have a delivery for you, m'aam." Still trembling (because the fear never completely leaves me, it is internalized, I will always be policed) I stumbled, knock the clean laundry off the railing where it has been perched for two days, and it tumbles with heavy thuds down the stairs. I race behind, whip open the door to a chagrined UPS carrier. "You ok?" he wants to know. "No injuries," I smile back lifting up the now-empty laundry basket as proof of my non-injury. His gaze follows the trail of multi colored undies, socks, skirts and shirts up the stairwell. I sign and he hands me a very heavy package of books. Hanukkah has arrived. Sort of.
"It's a mitzvah," I tried to explain to T. the other night over seaweed salad and shrimp tempura, "to eat fried food on Hanukkah. You know, the miracle of the oil after the destruction of the temple?" He smirks back dubiously at me, scolding me for my unkosher habits of eating seafood and a select few porcine products on rare occasions. "Treyf," he grunts teasingly at me, the non-jew lecturing the jew on how to be jewish. Ha! We will undoubtedly go out for Chinese food in San Francisco this Christmas and will do so with our paisanos, gladly. but I digress.
So I am feeling ill, my body having decided that its periodic unraveling would occur a week before the quarter ends and not after. And I don't want to be so self-indulgent, but I can't seem to make myself get out of the house, even though last night, after the scare, and after I explained to my long-distance companion that I am still afraid of the dark when I am alone, I did manage to drag myself to the library and rustle up a number of books on the Portuguese baroque and sermons as a literary genre. I sat on the 7th floor of Davidson library at 11:42 pm and read the beginning of Padre Vieira (mmm. scallops)'s sermon on Saint Anthony and the fish(es). There must be something intelligent that I can say. 15 pages of intelligent? Well, that is stretching things a bit, but if I just think of this as an exercise. A routine. Ach. Doesn't work.
My bones ache, and when N. texts me about going out dancing tomorrow I don't even know if I am going to be able to manage. No, I have to manage, this is a personal revolution, this discovering dancing as a source of trance-like joy. But I have a test on Monday, in Italian, and this paper just doesn't want to be written yet, so I must procrastinate.
I am up at 9 am, chilly, but up. My skin is a wreck, and my sinuses feel like they have been shredded with a cheese-grater, but I pad down my sand-papered stairs fully dressed for bed, and I decide that it is time to clean out my fridge. But by cleaning out, I don't mean with scrubs and brushes, but rather, a purging of all that which has been forgotten over the course of the last 3 (12?) months. Long ago, when I was an undergraduate I would go through a similar routine. Just before finishing my final paper for the semester I would take down all the posters from my walls, pack up all my bags for the winter holiday, in some sort of ritualistic ceremony of doneness. I suppose this is a variation on that theme. Granted, I will be leaving town in a week, and will likely not need to buy new food until I am back in early January, but this is much less about pragmatism and much more about my need to evade my work. AT ALL COSTS!
So I start pulling things out of the fridge and freezer, cupboards, pantry. And the work begins. Pots are on the stove and off, washed, rehung, I am rhythmically working, tantric cuisine? After a few hours I have eaten little more than a few rice-crackers with hummus and truffle-studded cheese, but my senses are embraced by such smells and colors that I will not need to eat for several days, I think, which is a shame, because there is so much food!
It is a secret pleasure of mine, this manipulation of food products in such a way as to render them new, and useful, and tasty, and unwasted. I realize, though, that I forgot to make polenta, which was what I really wanted when I began pulling things out of their semi-permanent homes in a frenzy of work-avoidance, which I was still calling mental preparation at the time.
Black beans in a bag, in a pressure cooker. I remembered not to let them burn this time. 2 points for Ilana. I also remembered not to salt them on the first round of cooking because it leaves them dry and unhappy. Then I chopped up tomato, onion, garlic, and a bit of cilantro, chipotles, sausage (chicken, even if the casing is pork), and added the drained beans, fresh water and salt. Meanwhile the chicken that I used for broth which would then become 1) cream of broccoli (with yellow bell pepper) soup, and 2) mushroom barley soup, became a small salad with chopped onion, walnut, pecan, and dried montmorency cherries. If that wasn't enough, and my fresh produce not adequately depleted, I made a variation on my typical pomegranate chicken, substituting straight 100% cranberry juice (whooeee! sour!) by dredging the chicken breast in a mixture of cinnamon, sage, rosemary, oregano, parsley, thyme, zahatar, garlic powder, cardamom, all spice, nutmeg, black pepper (and other unknowable ingredients), sauteeing in butter and then removing to make a sauce with minced walnut and pecan, apple (new addition), onion and garlic, the remaining spices and the juice, which required several spoonfuls of honey and maple syrup to even approach edible. In the end, I was more than satisfied, but it was looking shaky for a few minutes.
After all that, I creamed the butter that I had taken out initially, thinking I would only make a coffee cake and maybe have some company for coffee, mixed in sugar, yogurt, egg, flour and the rest, folded in fresh cranberry that had been seared in maple syrup, and decorated with crumbled pecan, cranberries and turbinado sugar.
All would have been well, and my work would have begun, if it hadn't been for a 3-hour phone call from J. and the need for a shower, and dinner, and...
Well, we knew this was bound to happen, eventually, right? I'll just keep pushing back against the work until the work wins, and breaks me, and I crumble like a little girl, on her scraped knees. Whimper. Whine. Sigh.
Last night there was a sharp rapping on my door and my heart leapt into my throat. A muffled noise, and I gingerly opened the balcony door to a blast of cool wet air. "We have a delivery for you, m'aam." Still trembling (because the fear never completely leaves me, it is internalized, I will always be policed) I stumbled, knock the clean laundry off the railing where it has been perched for two days, and it tumbles with heavy thuds down the stairs. I race behind, whip open the door to a chagrined UPS carrier. "You ok?" he wants to know. "No injuries," I smile back lifting up the now-empty laundry basket as proof of my non-injury. His gaze follows the trail of multi colored undies, socks, skirts and shirts up the stairwell. I sign and he hands me a very heavy package of books. Hanukkah has arrived. Sort of.
"It's a mitzvah," I tried to explain to T. the other night over seaweed salad and shrimp tempura, "to eat fried food on Hanukkah. You know, the miracle of the oil after the destruction of the temple?" He smirks back dubiously at me, scolding me for my unkosher habits of eating seafood and a select few porcine products on rare occasions. "Treyf," he grunts teasingly at me, the non-jew lecturing the jew on how to be jewish. Ha! We will undoubtedly go out for Chinese food in San Francisco this Christmas and will do so with our paisanos, gladly. but I digress.
So I am feeling ill, my body having decided that its periodic unraveling would occur a week before the quarter ends and not after. And I don't want to be so self-indulgent, but I can't seem to make myself get out of the house, even though last night, after the scare, and after I explained to my long-distance companion that I am still afraid of the dark when I am alone, I did manage to drag myself to the library and rustle up a number of books on the Portuguese baroque and sermons as a literary genre. I sat on the 7th floor of Davidson library at 11:42 pm and read the beginning of Padre Vieira (mmm. scallops)'s sermon on Saint Anthony and the fish(es). There must be something intelligent that I can say. 15 pages of intelligent? Well, that is stretching things a bit, but if I just think of this as an exercise. A routine. Ach. Doesn't work.
My bones ache, and when N. texts me about going out dancing tomorrow I don't even know if I am going to be able to manage. No, I have to manage, this is a personal revolution, this discovering dancing as a source of trance-like joy. But I have a test on Monday, in Italian, and this paper just doesn't want to be written yet, so I must procrastinate.
I am up at 9 am, chilly, but up. My skin is a wreck, and my sinuses feel like they have been shredded with a cheese-grater, but I pad down my sand-papered stairs fully dressed for bed, and I decide that it is time to clean out my fridge. But by cleaning out, I don't mean with scrubs and brushes, but rather, a purging of all that which has been forgotten over the course of the last 3 (12?) months. Long ago, when I was an undergraduate I would go through a similar routine. Just before finishing my final paper for the semester I would take down all the posters from my walls, pack up all my bags for the winter holiday, in some sort of ritualistic ceremony of doneness. I suppose this is a variation on that theme. Granted, I will be leaving town in a week, and will likely not need to buy new food until I am back in early January, but this is much less about pragmatism and much more about my need to evade my work. AT ALL COSTS!
So I start pulling things out of the fridge and freezer, cupboards, pantry. And the work begins. Pots are on the stove and off, washed, rehung, I am rhythmically working, tantric cuisine? After a few hours I have eaten little more than a few rice-crackers with hummus and truffle-studded cheese, but my senses are embraced by such smells and colors that I will not need to eat for several days, I think, which is a shame, because there is so much food!
It is a secret pleasure of mine, this manipulation of food products in such a way as to render them new, and useful, and tasty, and unwasted. I realize, though, that I forgot to make polenta, which was what I really wanted when I began pulling things out of their semi-permanent homes in a frenzy of work-avoidance, which I was still calling mental preparation at the time.
Black beans in a bag, in a pressure cooker. I remembered not to let them burn this time. 2 points for Ilana. I also remembered not to salt them on the first round of cooking because it leaves them dry and unhappy. Then I chopped up tomato, onion, garlic, and a bit of cilantro, chipotles, sausage (chicken, even if the casing is pork), and added the drained beans, fresh water and salt. Meanwhile the chicken that I used for broth which would then become 1) cream of broccoli (with yellow bell pepper) soup, and 2) mushroom barley soup, became a small salad with chopped onion, walnut, pecan, and dried montmorency cherries. If that wasn't enough, and my fresh produce not adequately depleted, I made a variation on my typical pomegranate chicken, substituting straight 100% cranberry juice (whooeee! sour!) by dredging the chicken breast in a mixture of cinnamon, sage, rosemary, oregano, parsley, thyme, zahatar, garlic powder, cardamom, all spice, nutmeg, black pepper (and other unknowable ingredients), sauteeing in butter and then removing to make a sauce with minced walnut and pecan, apple (new addition), onion and garlic, the remaining spices and the juice, which required several spoonfuls of honey and maple syrup to even approach edible. In the end, I was more than satisfied, but it was looking shaky for a few minutes.
After all that, I creamed the butter that I had taken out initially, thinking I would only make a coffee cake and maybe have some company for coffee, mixed in sugar, yogurt, egg, flour and the rest, folded in fresh cranberry that had been seared in maple syrup, and decorated with crumbled pecan, cranberries and turbinado sugar.
All would have been well, and my work would have begun, if it hadn't been for a 3-hour phone call from J. and the need for a shower, and dinner, and...
Well, we knew this was bound to happen, eventually, right? I'll just keep pushing back against the work until the work wins, and breaks me, and I crumble like a little girl, on her scraped knees. Whimper. Whine. Sigh.
posted by ilana at 8:31 p.m.
2 Comments:
Ilana: Gracias por el comentario que dejaste en mi blog. Te extraño. Escríbeme aunque no hayas leído mi novela o no te haya gustado.
:) Agustín querido... en efecto no la he leído, pero está lista para ser disfrutada durante mis vacaciones :) como habrás visto, no he parado de correr, pero te escribo de verdad ni bien termine este trabajo último...
un abrazo
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