In the last couple of days I’ve cooked chili, teriyaki chicken, hamburger patties browned in their own fat. I may need my amino acids, but there is also something to be said for cooking away the last stubborn days of winter.
There is something to be said for cooking, period.
I currently work at a Section 8 apartment complex. This is an ironic turn of events for a conservative Constitutional activist, isn’t it?
Sure is. I refuse to work in my previous career in corporate, digital commerce and marketing. But as a recovering metro techie, I have very few actual skills (the kind that involve using one’s hands). And the job market where I live is appalling.
Put more simply, I took the job because it was offered to me. The real mystery is why I’ve kept it. Two reasons should not be unusual, but are: My boss treats me with respect, and I have a set schedule that suits the rest of my life.
But the third, and more amazing reason, is that the business is locally owned by elderly gentlemen who do not trust the internet. That, and the fact that we’re funded by HUD to manage the housing of humans, means this job is ultra-local and involves minimal use of technology. (HUD = government = still uses paper.)
There was no onboarding software to log in to, no payroll app to learn, no video training. There are no corporate decision-makers monitoring my customer satisfaction rating from another state.
I have sanity, at this job, because I engage in my work by verbally communicating, face to face, with other humans. Plus we do paperwork, like, on paper. Where you shape letters. With a pen. Using your hand.
What it is about using our hands?
My Kitchen Year, by Ruth Reichl, has been a favorite cookbook for a long time. I love the way Reichl, longtime editor-in-chief at Gourmet magazine, writes about the act of cooking. This book recounts the year after Gourmet closed, a year she spends looking for work, trying to relax in the country, and cooking. She cooks and cooks. She cooks while grieving a beloved industry and institution, as well as her own career.
Reading it now, I’m struck that Reichl’s struggle is not just that of a woman losing a prestigious job, but of a woman finding solace in homemaking.
But is it just solace?
Power still out. Storm raging. Running out of food. What can I cook with this sad cabbage?
Open any book on gardening, herbalism, cooking, knitting, sewing, and you will hear a woman describing the sanity and peace she has found in her “hobby.” We dabble, painting a piece of furniture or planting a few seeds, and feel a little calmer. But it’s hobbyist grade stuff. Silly stuff.
Hobbyist homemaking is the knitted hat no one wears, the purse no one would carry, a fussy appetizer no one would make twice. If Martha or Jo Gaines gave us useful proiects to make, they would also be hard, and we don’t want to admit we can’t do what our mothers could.
Relegating the homemaker’s skills to that of the Hobbies & Crafts section at Barnes & Noble implies that one’s survival no longer requires you to learn those skills. After all, you can buy food ready to eat, buy clothes ready to wear, buy toys and movies ready to entertain your children.
The only reason you would sew or garden would be to fill your idle time.
As a hobby.
Many of us are realizing it’s not a hobby. We’re realizing we can’t buy things good enough, safe enough or desirable enough to replace what we could make ourselves. We’re realizing we’ve been lied to for too long, largely to enslave us with debt by convincing us we had to buy. All. The. Stuff.
We’re realizing that cooking is not just solace. It is survival.
Meanwhile, and I will connect the dots, I worry about the homeless population growing where I live now, in Idaho. I lived in downtown Portland in 2019, where I lost faith in the liberal narrative that homeless people were otherwise functional folks who had “fallen through the cracks.” The KOMO documentary “Seattle is Dying” has it right: homeless camps are full of people struggling with addiction, trauma and mental health issues, and the criminals (dealers, traffickers) who prey upon them.
In other words, homeless camps normalize the wicked feeding upon the unwell.
ln my experience, some people who live in and around homeless communities steal stuff, behave in unpredictable ways, and/or act like Demon #6 from the band we call Legion.
Meanwhile the homeless population has grown in my lifetime, once limited to a handful of our largest cities, then spreading to smaller cities, and now to areas that don’t even have a bus route to them. It is a sign of national decay, and yet all we can do is bicker with each other about it, using irrelevant partisan soundclips about prisons and the price of housing.
Comic strip scenario: A politician grins widely, his hand on the shoulder of a startled younger man, as they walk quickly through a party. Politician: The trick is to give them options that will only make the problem worse.
Homelessness has nothing to do with the cost of housing and everything to do with the people you are trying to house.
The question is why so many people cannot be housed, because their behavior makes it impossible with any modicum of economy… anywhere but a prison.
The increase in sub-employed people and homeless camps represent the migration of the American population from landowner to refugee, living on reservations managed by the government and paid for by the working few.
Fewer and fewer people are contributing to a tax base that must now support the rest. It appears that the Socialist fantasy is as attractive to some as it is terrifying to others.
But the vicious detail is this: A lot of the people who use government services or drift to the streets do need help. And by help, I specifically mean treatment of mental health issues and their sidekick, substance abuse.
Unfortunately there is far more profit “helping” an unwell population then there is in preventing or treating the illness.
What I’m trying to say is that this country is losing its mind, and the powers that be love it.
People say it’s the End Times, and maybe it is, but it might also be the result of technology, developed faster than we can track, weaponized by the powerful to control the masses. Your bank’s new app, is that for your benefit? Or does it help them monitor you? Was Alexa created to bless you with endless music, or to sell you stuff? How about the software sold to schools for remote learning - is that for the kids?
I’m not suggesting that Alexa developers work in nefarious labs, rubbing their hands together and cackling that they’ve just created the H-bomb of the information age. It may not be intentional at any level, even the highest (humor me). It doesn’t actually matter. The point is that we, the user, are increasingly stressed and overwhelmed processing the endless headlines, app notifications, texts, emails, messages, and “new information” that you can access if you just buy this monthly subscription.
Not only that, but technology is increasingly required to do our jobs, pay bills, shop and access critical services. Do you have to log in to the hospital’s system to read the message your doctor sent you? What if you can’t remember the login? How many days did you lose recently trying to log into that new app your bank is advertising? How is your relationship with your kid now that he has his own phone?
How many fights have you had with family in the last few years that started with a text message or a Facebook post? How many times have you used your phone to ignore someone right in front of you? How many times have you lost your temper with a customer support person - on the phone or online?
We get lost in these mazes all the time, yet none admit to the other, lest we look foolish. It is the Emperor’s New Clothes, this maddening frustration we feel about our phones, our computers, and that damn field marked “Password.”
If you ever feel that frustration, imagine how you would feel if you also had an abusive ex, a handful of kids, were living beneath the poverty line, and struggled with alcoholism when you weren’t on your meds. You’ve gotten a job, but to start the job, you have to read and act upon at least three separate emails containing different logins, usernames, and links to create various passwords and accounts. One is to give HR a bunch of information to conduct your background check, one is to read your schedule, one is to get paid. You haven’t even started yet.
People need help. They’re getting money, which understandably upsets many who work and watch their tax dollars disappear. But they need actual help.
Most of us do.
One may think a poor Mexican woman, a young man living on a reservation, myself, and an elderly man living in a tent behind the Walmart have nothing in common. But we all suffer from the same madness: We believe that survival requires working on things that don’t matter, to buy the things that do. And those things must be made by others, professionals. There is no food in our surroundings, we cannot create our own shelter, and we have no way of taking care of our own bodies. All must be purchased.
The question of sovereignty led me away from Washington and the office and the income. Because freedom isn’t free. You must be willing to fight for it. In my case, this is a very silly but very real fight I wage every day, not with others, but with myself. It’s the fight of the nerd to rejoin the real world.
I want to use a computer and the internet to solve my problems. I want it to answer my questions, generate my income, and absorb my boredom. I want it to be what it was, the helper, the drug, the “platform” by which I thought I could speak.
Until I learned that platform - we call it “social media” - would become a Gollum’s realm, where the weakest could hiss the sensible and the strong into silence.
A true millenial, I used to find a cat and a plant plenty of responsibility. I used to spend most of my time sitting in a car, on an “ergonomic” desk chair or a barstool. I used to think emailing was an awesome form of communication.
Now, I’m walking miles in stained “barefoot” shoes, ignoring the wild spring weather, chasing my dog, just to feel my feet, my calves, my hands.
Now, I come home disgruntled, and an hour or two later realize I feel so much better - after baking a pie.
Now, when someone comes into the office where I work, I turn away from my computer and slide the crayons over to their kid. Here. Draw. What color is that? No, I wasn’t busy.
If I sound high on life, so be it. We have sedated ourselves for too long. I dreamed once that the devil was called The Dreamskeeper, inventing all the computer games, all the drugs, all the porn, all the “immersive experiences” sold by Meta. It is so true.
Homemaking should not be a hobby, and it shouldn’t be women’s work, either. Making a home should be human work.
Well said and so true.
This is great. Thank you.