December 13, 2007

Sauces

Cooking is by all means the reason I am not writing as feverishly as I did last semester (while my life no longer shifts forward in semesters, I still somewhat subscribe to that chronology.) Working with Sharon has been an extremely interesting event in my life, and one of which I'm proud, but we're down to 2 meetings left, and the Holidays have us both so occupied and preoccupied that we can't seem to settle a good Wednesday to meet. Additionally, I've lost faith and interest in the two characters who are hanging around in an episodic piece of fiction waiting for me to revise and edit their existences. Oh, well. The Holidays are overall a distracting time, I suppose.*We've been quite busy, at work and at home and at play. The past weeks have gone by so quickly that I can barely account for them. Let's see...a few occurrences I recall: my friends Emily and Eric are moving to Singapore in the spring, a giant, giant life-altering event!; Craig and I have fallen head over heels in love with Thai food - we've always loved eating Thai out at Thai restaurants, but I've actually discovered a handful of Thai recipes that I can make which add the sweet scent of coconut milk and the spicy aroma of curry paste to our apartment as I prepare the dishes; I've been working tediously to get recipes copied onto my blank recipe cards to insert in my beautiful recipe book, and it feels very much like my organization of foods we love is finally coming together; Cabo San Lucas is less than two weeks away! Hurray!; last weekend, Saturday, I shopped with Alison and later in the evening Alison, Scott, Craig and I ate Korean food at Mandangsui in K-town - yum; most Christmas shopping is done, with slight exceptions; we received our photo Christmas cards today and will be filling out envelopes like mad over the next several days; Saturday marks our first day to go tanning (I know) before the trip (I think we're going twice each prior to leaving New York next week) among many other tasks required to be performed prior to leaving December 22nd (fun!); and basically, many, many other things. I've been a terrible poster recently but it's honestly the cooking thing. I love to cook so much that perhaps I'm guilty of the pleasure-delaying referenced in Vanilla Sky (one of my favorite movies ever, ever, ever) in which Tom Cruise's character is termed "pleasure delayer" by Penelope Cruz's character which altogether is interesting as a concept because if you like to delay the pleasure you are about to experience, what happens if something terrible intercepts the pleasure and in the delay it doesn't get delivered? Anyway, my point is that I delay my cooking pleasure at night, milling around in the kitchen envisioning precise cuts of red pepper or chicken in my mind but putting off doing, pulling out bottles of dark sesame oil, rice vinegar and a jar of crushed red pepper and lining them neatly on the counter, pouring dry jasmine rice into a measuring cup, poking around in the fridge for ginger and garlic, and whatever else it is that I do to procrastinate the making of the meal because it's genuinely my favorite single hour of the day (the preparation of the food) and once it has come and gone, I am subjected to wait a minimum of another 18-20 hours before I begin again. That's a long time! There's this whole thing about people and work and living to work or working to live...I work to live, and there's no changing that. I could never become a culinary artist and make it my lucrative living. I know firmly because of all the things I love, love, love to do, ie. writing, sketching, watercolor, daydreaming, cooking, believing, wanting, loving - if any of these became tasks due by a deadline, or if any of them were owed to anyone, I likely wouldn't love them as much. There are certainly people who do love what they get paid to do, and that's great for them. But for me, I get a day out of the way so that I can have my night: my kitchen, my food, my apartment, my Craig. My hobbies are important to me. Sometime I won't live so far from the place where I generate income that I have so little free time to do stuff like write poems, write stories, write blogs, cook meals that drag out over hours, hit the computer for some time, go to bed before 10! and so forth.*Tonight I'm staring at this unbelievable gorgeous Dell monitor, 22" and silver rimmed and high-def and terrific! This is our gift from Craig's parents to us for Christmas. My parents contributed to our trip, his to this radical computer monitor upgrade! Alas, I approach 10 and plan to turn in soon. I feel so elated as we arrive at the weekend before our trip to Mexico. Craig is my best friend in the whole world and going to a place with him where we're subjected to nothing but sun, swim, sky, sunsets, holding hands and each other is going to be like a dream come true. A girl could want for nothing more.*

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