pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FOOD AND FRIVOLITY Fiddlergrrl is surprised by how many different facets there are to my creativity, which has me wondering how unusual it is for a creative person to express herself in more than one medium. Seems like many left-handed people I know are wildly creative—and, incidentally, bring the best dishes to potlucks. (It is probably true that most people are less ADD than I though, and so may focus their energies on a single outlet in a way that would probably bore me to tears.) I grew up left-handed in what was often a forced silence, which taught me to be observant. I sought out ways to express myself nonverbally and appreciated those succinct measures of music or vibrant colors or strung-together words that encapsulated my churning thoughts, made them recognizable. I also stuttered until I moved out of my parents' house, which encouraged me to focus on silent interior exploration. Good poems have always comforted me and reminded me that, in the midst of great change, there is a core me that knows how to survive even if I am temporarily overwhelmed by my world. I like this poem because it reminds me of our shared humanity. It also reminds me to just take in a deep breath when life is overwhelming and stand there in that hard wind that will, ultimately, heal me if I listen carefully to myself—that as Frank O'Hara said,"maybe they're wounds, but maybe they are rubies: • I was warming my lunch in the microwave a few minutes ago and thinking about all the crappy food I ate before I finally realized that, if I wanted to eat good food, then I was just going to have to learn how to cook. I was fifteen the first time I moved out of my parents' home and had no fucking clue how to cook. In fact, I had very carefully avoided learning how to cook because all those Southern Baptists kept telling me it was my duty to cook for the men in the world who, apparently, don't know how to read a damn cookbook. I also had the misguided notion that real lesbians do not cook. (Thankfully, I was wrong. In fact, the Ginger—an incredibly good gourmet chef—once surprised me with an elaborate seven-course gourmet meal for my birthday.) For years, my cooking skills were limited to frying an egg and making a salad and warming up food in the microwave and popping popcorn—which means I spent a whole lot of my fifteenth year opening cans of corn beef hash and Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-Os and dropping plastic mesh bags of dehydrated food into boiling water after spending my childhood eating fresh food grown on my grandparents' farm or fresh seafood that my uncle brought back from his regular deep-sea fishing trips. And this processed stuff tasted anything but real. But then I turned sixteen and was smart enough to go work in a kitchen, which guaranteed that I would never starve and had the added bonus of teaching me how to cook) I have had a hard time adjusting to living alone, foodwise, and tend not to cook as I did when I was cooking for two. I also throw away too much produce because it goes bad before I can use it all. Tonight, for example, I need to use several potatoes that are sprouting eyes in escalloped potatoes. And I need to eat salad for lunch every day next week. Oh groan. This huge freelance project that I expected in January will now arrive next week. It's a twelve-hundred- page manuscript in need of a substantive edit, which means that I will likely be working on it for a very long time. (Want to take a guess what I'll be writing under the What I'm Reading category for the foreseeable future?) All right. More on this topic later because my lunch is gone and I need to get back to work. But first I will share the best bumpersticker I've seen in a long while: Jesus was my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him. 3:21 p.m. - 2005-03-10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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