THAT IS NOT FOR EATING!

We all eat. We have to, or we’ll die. Some of us eat to live, others of us live to eat, and we all have preferences--even people who self-identify as human garbage disposals. Food brings sentient beings together. A pride of lions will share a wildebeest. Insects will devour the corpse of a dead raven. Koalas congregate in eucalyptus groves.

A bucket full of piranha fish will happily eat your face off if you’re reckless enough to put it in there in the first place.

The act of cooking our food is what separates humans from animals. Somewhere along the line we added fire, and that one little change made us smug. “Look what we can do! We can make the mastodon steak kind of chewy and burnt, and now it’s better.” But fire wasn’t the end of the road by a long shot. Oh no. Then we started messing around with food combinations. Weeds became herbs. We developed a taste for spices. The spice thing was such an incredible discovery that a great deal of trade (not to mention colonization, war, and subjugation of others) was based upon the availability of certain parts of certain plants in certain places for an extended period of recorded human history.

Humans have an ingrained lust for one-upmanship. We can’t help it. We want something better than what our friend has. It’s the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ mentality. It started with something as simple as, say, black pepper--of course, at one time, black pepper was anything but simple in some parts of the world. Native to India and only successfully grown in tropical climes, black pepper was a sought-after import elsewhere, and being in possession of it in any quantity was a social boon.

***I’m going to sidetrack here for a second and impart to you a delicious little tidbit about raspberries. At one time in England, raspberries were a status symbol because they were expensive to grow and harvest, and raspberry jam was the height of fashion. People who couldn’t afford actual raspberry jam would make jam with whatever red fruit they had on hand, and then they would add little wooden pips made by craftsmen who specialized in making, well, little wooden pips, to simulate the raspberry seeds, thus creating the illusion of the more expensive jam without the cost. (The cost to people’s insides after eating a pile of little wooden pips, however, was something else entirely.)***

ANYway, what I’m getting at is that we use food for many things, one of which is to survive, and one of which is to thumb our noses at our neighbors when we have more or a higher quality of it. ‘More’ is simple. It’s quantity. Quality, on the other hand, is subjective, though that subjectivity is usually filtered through the lens of whosoever sits at the ‘First World-est’ societal peak rather than some sort of average inclusive-of-all-humanity subjectivity.

Money makes the world go around, after all.

Trends in food have always rivaled trends in fashion--you can style your look, why not your lunch? Cake was a big one for a while, and I suppose it still is, really. My YouTube homepage is always full of videos of ‘desserts that look like other things but are actually desserts OMG’. I’m not going to claim there can’t be a great deal of artistry to food, because there absolutely can, and it can be loads of fun to watch it being made. I have nothing against food creativity. The thing that IS really winding me up right now, though?

GOLD LEAF ON FOOD.

Gold. The ultimate status symbol. It makes the timid brave and the covetous foam at the mouth. It adorns all that is beautiful, be it a person, an item, or a building. Or, you know, a toilet, but that was satire...and recently stolen, as a matter of fact.

True story: in my childhood bedroom, my mother stenciled carousel horses between wood trim right the way around the room. The posts upon which the horses were mounted she did in gold leaf. It was a delightful effect.

Not once did I try to eat it.

So why in the name of all things holy are fancypants restaurants and pâtisseries throwing gold leaf on food?! Gold leaf is not for eating!

Seriously. That can’t be good for your insides.* Or your teeth, for that matter! Think about what chewing tinfoil feels like, then add about seven dollar signs to the price tag--both of the thing you’re chewing, and to the resulting dental bill.

I mean, the whole activated charcoal in your Starbucks thing was bad enough, but at least that was based on science. Science that works really well in my fish tank but not so much in a human body--eating or drinking activated charcoal is, on the whole, a terrible idea if you like your insides--but still, I’d rather see people making themselves sick over pseudoscience than purposefully eating the stuff that gilds the dome in the Vatican.

Then again, like the bucket of piranha fish, if you’re willing to do it, on your own head it be.



*My editor assures me: "Actually, gold leaf is chemically inert, so as long as it's pure enough, it will pass right through your system. And it's thin enough that you'd have to be chomping on it night and day before it would affect your teeth. The only effect of eating gold leaf will be to make your poop worth more. :P"
I STILL DON'T CARE. GOLD LEAF IS NOT FOR EATING. KNOCK THAT SHIT OFF.

The Great Cosmic Eggbeater

The other day, I had occasion to think of a person I once knew.

Velzoe Brown (b. March 1, 1910) was a friend of my mother’s, and they met through some musical endeavor or other. Velzoe’s instrumental prowess extended to piano, trombone, drums, and flute. She was the daughter of musicians. She traveled as a trombonist with an all-girls jazz band, The Pollyanna Syncopators, in the 1920s, a group she joined when she was just 16 years old. She was a performing musician until the end, which came on May 4th, 2011, when she was 101 years old.

Velzoe was fascinating. In addition to being a walking history book, she was quirky and whimsical and perpetually interested in the people around her. I remember once going to her house and taking home a chunk of snowdrop bulbs my dad had dug out of one of her flower beds in a plastic grocery bag, because I had happened to mention something about liking snowdrops. “Oh, I have some of those somewhere.” And then suddenly there was a shovel and me trying to make sure not to get any dirt on the upholstery in the car. And her house, hoo boy, that was a trip. Her music room was full of books and sheet music (I’m pretty sure I ended up sitting on a pile of sheet music, to be completely honest), and you had to move things around to get at the piano. There was a lifetime of stuff strewn all over the place. In keeping with the Santa Cruz lifestyle, there was a gong you had to ring (the significance likely explained to me at the time, but I was a teenager and you know full well they don’t listen to a damn thing), and a GIANT FUCK OFF GEODE that rivaled anything in the geology exhibit of a natural history museum.

All things considered, middle and high school me thought Velzoe was pretty neat, insofar as old ladies who are friends with one’s mother go. Present day me looks at the life she led and goes, “Holy cow, this was a woman who gave absolutely zero fucks about convention.” In a time when young ladies grew up to become housewives and mothers and not much else, this woman never married or had children, and instead traveled the country as a musician, starting in the 1920s. Prohibition was on. Jazz was new and scandalous. Hemlines were shorter than ever. Velzoe may have been a paragon of virtue, but part of me likes to think she may have spent a little leisure time in a gin mill or two, knocking at the little opening in the back door in an alleyway, saying, “Joe sent me.”

We don’t think about any of this being even remotely abnormal these days. Yes, there’s still an overtone of the antiquated traditions surrounding the assumption of the mantle of adulthood, but for the most part, if a woman decides to run around the country playing rock gigs and not willingly subscribe to the heteronormative narrative, no one really takes issue. (I’m speaking through an admittedly western lens here. I know there are still places where showing your ankle is the basis for a scandal. Unfortunate, but true.) I like to think that for the most part, as a society, we have reached the consensus that going against the norm does not automatically equal rampant hedonism or cultural upheaval or the end of the world as we know it. You can be moral without subscribing to a code set out by religion. You can spread your love around in a way that is respectful to yourself, your partners, and your respective bodies.

You can rock that Goth vibe and still smile at puppies.

The old societal molds are cracked. We’ve cobbled together new ones. We’ll keep doing that until we’re satisfied--and part of me hopes we’re never satisfied. There’s something to be said for the constant pursuit of improvement. As long as we keep tacking on new things--moving them from the ‘taboo’ to the ‘nobody bats an eyelash’ category--we can continue to expand our acceptance. And no, not everything fits everyone. That’s the beauty of humanity. Diversity keeps things interesting. Do we still have a long way to go insofar as achieving an across-the-board understanding of the validity of humanity, with all its quirks and facets? Yes. Have we come a reasonably long way in the pursuit of this? I think so. Some days, does it feel like we’re still living in the Stone Age on this one? Fuck yes. But we’ve made a start.

Sometimes, all you can offer is a pair of lungs and some wicked trombone technique, but if that’s what you’ve got, you can still be the initial drop that starts the ripple. You don’t have to take on the world, only your part of it. So yes, Velzoe Brown defied the conventions of her time, but she did it in a way that reflected nothing but the best of intentions.

Though I’m pretty sure she’s gazing down from the ‘great cosmic eggbeater’ tutting about my liberal application of the f-word...

The times, they are a-changin’

Milestones.

Life is full of them. Being born. Learning to walk and talk. The first day of kindergarten. Losing your first tooth. Turning 10 and entering double-digits, then turning 13 and becoming an official teenager. Learning to drive, becoming an adult (at least on paper) and getting to vote, buy cigarettes, and die for your country...then waiting three more years before you can drink. (Please tell me how that one makes sense.) Graduating from college. Your first “for real” job. Getting married. Having babies. These are all things we celebrate in one way or another.

But what about the milestones no one ever really wants to hit?

Your first broken bone. Getting braces. Your first pimple. Your first breakup. Your first hangover. Your first really terrible haircut, which you got in your hungover, brokenhearted state.

I talked to one of my friends in England this week. She had some news. It wasn’t great.

I’ve gotten to the point, at thirty-something, where most of my friends who are going to get married have already gotten around to it. We’re still in the first round of babies, barring a couple of outliers. But I have now hit a truly shitty milestone: the first divorce.

It was a shock, I’m not gonna lie. It took the rest of the day for my chin to come up off the floor. We like to think that our friends and loved ones are exempt from the divorce rate--at least, I guess I do--and the thought that this would eventually, inevitably happen to someone I knew had yet to occur to me. But happen it has, and it’s horrible. If you subscribe to all that ‘Five Love Languages’ nonsense, my predominant one is ‘Acts of Service’, which means that it is figuratively killing me right now that I can’t really do anything to help my friend out in any tangible way. If we weren’t separated by most of a continent and an ocean, I would currently be occupying her spare room and helping with the school run, the laundry, whatever. But instead I’m here, thousands of miles away, unable to do much more than send daily obnoxiously saccharine messages and being an ear if she needs one.

I know, I know, being available to listen is just as important blah blah blah. It just doesn’t feel like enough, okay?

If you think about it, at a certain point in life the milestones just start being bleak. Financial issues, job issues, expected deaths, unexpected deaths, diseases...and no one gets out of here alive. Death is the ultimate milestone. There is a literal stone on top of you for eternity. “Here lies Gerald. He was okay, we guess.” There comes a time in life where people start to lean into the whole ‘one foot in the grave’ thing. My mother used to refer to telephone conversations with my grandmother as ‘getting the doom-and-gloom report’. “So-and-so has pneumonia again and you remember what happened last time--they don’t think she’ll make it through again. Oh, and her husband has something, but they can’t figure out what. I read the obituaries this morning and I knew six people, can you imagine?” That’s a morbid milestone, when you start reading the obituaries to find out how many friends you have left. Oy…

It’s not like everything automatically goes to shit at your ‘Use By’ date--mostly because people don’t have ‘Use By’ dates--but at some point I think everyone finds themselves looking around, thinking Can a person catch a break? And it’s not like there aren’t breaks, either. Just because I don’t get excited about babies doesn’t mean other people don’t, and so they have them and get their kicks vicariously through their small humans. Of course, they also get the flip side of small humans, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole today. Our friends do cool things and we enjoy that. We get cool jobs or join cool clubs or have cool hobbies. We travel. We meet new friends. We fall in love. We buy new houses. We get pets. We get fun new technological toys and hide away in our houses with our pets and do all of our hobbies digitally and hang out with our friends digitally and—

Oh, snap. A milestone. And a cultural one, at that. We’ve reached the age of total isolation and dependence on technology!

Okay, exaggeration.

For now...

Favorites are just comfortable pigeonholes

I have a friend (Whaddup, P.V.?) who will every so often ask me out of the blue what my favorite something is. Color. Flavor of ice cream. Film. She never gets the answer she’s looking for.

The answer is that there’s really no answer--favorites change for me like Imelda Marcos changes shoes. Okay, there are things I like more than others, but asking me to pin down a definitive favorite anything is pointless. There are always variables to consider when choosing anything for, well, anything.

While I do make a habit of answering the inevitable “What’s your favorite” questions in the most maddening way possible--it’s fun, fight me--I really do consider all the questions I start to throw out in reply. Favorite color? What am I doing with this color? Am I wearing it? Am I decorating a room? Am I buying a car? Those are all different favorites of the same thing, and then there are sub-categories. I mean, rooms don’t have to be all one color. My favorite color for a t-shirt is vastly different from a color I would choose for an evening gown. (Not that I ever have occasion to wear evening gowns, but you get my point.) Besides, color is a spectrum. It has shades and hues. It’s all very well to say “My favorite color is blue,” but what does that really mean? There are infinite possibilities within the confines of ‘blue’!

And food? Forget about it. My favorite is whatever I feel like eating in the moment, and if I’m not hungry, good luck getting an answer out of me at all. (Of course, the opposite is true if I’m hungry and in a grocery store because then everything is my favorite, but I’m pretty sure that’s just being human.)

I sometimes think my world might be all gray. No black and white, just shifting, moving, living shades of gray. Nothing is definitive. Everything has wiggle room. It’s strange for someone who lives her life by a calendar, by to-do lists, by structure, to be so loosey-goosey at the same time. Chaos scares the shit out of me, but at the same time so does being bound by the confines of regulation. This is one thing I really, truly have never fully understood about myself in a ‘bigger picture’ capacity. I get it through the lens of creativity and work--and previously, school--which is to say that ‘controlled chaos’ is definitely my jam. Give me the parameters but grant me free rein within them, ya know? But in life it somehow feels like it should work differently. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s just me creating my own boundaries for the sake of comfort, except that they’re not so binding that I can’t fly.

“Don’t give me that boundary shit. You don’t get to force your boundaries on me. I’ll make my own, thanks very much.”

I guess that sort of makes sense.

Favorites, though? They seem like they can transform into the most rigid kind of boundary if you let them. “I like Mexican food best,” can turn into “I like this one burrito from this one taqueria and absolutely nothing else,” and okay, there’s comfort in that, but what if there’s another awesome burrito out there that you never discover because you’ve earmarked your ‘favorite’ and you don’t shake things up a little?

Maybe it’s my personal definition of ‘favorite’ that needs some fine-tuning. In my mind, if someone says, “My favorite crackers are Ritz,” I immediately think ‘name brand’. It doesn’t have to be that. It could be house brand. The Ritz-lover might not be fussy. After all, it’s very similar to that whole tissue/Kleenex thing--it’s a square of paper you blow your nose with. We say ‘Ritz’ and we all know what that looks like, but it doesn’t have to be The Definitive Ritz.

Or maybe it’s just preference. I like choice. I don’t like the thought of being shackled to something because I once said, “Hey, I really like that thing, it’s my favorite!” Come to think of it, that’s actually something that’s happened to me. I like giraffes. They were my ‘favorite’. Somehow word got around, and now I’m elbow-deep in giraffe paraphernalia. Have been for years.

Maybe what I have is a favorite-phobia as a result. Nightmares of being buried alive underneath mountains of giraffe soft toys and figurines and mugs and t-shirts and who knows what else…

You know what? I have preferences. Those preferences are subject to certain criteria. I don’t like pigeonholes. I refuse to knowingly and willfully paint myself into corners.

Speaking of painting, room decor revolves best around a neutral shade. I prefer cool grays (not too blue). And absolutely not beige! If your background is subtle, you can spice things up with all your kitsch and knick-knacks. Throw pillows. Go full-blown Property Brothers if that’s your jam.

It’s your room, after all.