===== 2025-04-15 =====
===== I Love Making Sandwiches =====
This entry is going to be a little embarrassing to write, because
I have to admit that as a man in my mid-40s, I'm just now really
coming to enjoy preparing real food.
I grew up knowing what good food was. My mom loves to cook, or at
the very least she takes pride in it because she does so
frequently and well. She makes all sorts of delicious
multiple-course meals with real ingredients. I wasn't one of those
kids raised entirely on garbage food, even though as a stupid kid
I often preferred the garbage food.
But as I got older and started preparing my own food, it was
pretty much always from a can, or in a microwave, or some
extremely minimal steps: mac & cheese, instant pancakes, stuff
like that. When I started making my own money, I'd just buy
convenient, already-prepared food, largely from fast-food places.
And I was perfectly content with it, and I don't apologize for
that. I've always felt that being content with less, with whatever
you've got available, is one of the keys to genuinely enjoying
life. Plus, I've been blessed with a metabolism that's still
somewhat kept up with me well into my 40s. Living primarily on
garbage food and still thin as a rail. (Well, okay, maybe the
beginnings of a dad gut at this point.)
Anyway. These days I've started preparing more meals, and not just
from cans or frozen packages. Like actual ingredients. Sandwiches,
man! Sandwiches! So simple, and yet there's something so
satisfying about chopping my own tomatoes and lettuce, cutting my
own cheese (tee hee - but seriously, none of that pre-sliced
stuff), cutting into a nice little bread loaf or crescent roll or
whatever - like the process is part of the joy, you know? I worked
on this myself. I browsed, selected, bought, prepared, and
combined all the ingredients. I'm not some helpless
hyper-specialized drone who can't do anything but what's in my job
description.
Actually, I think that last part is a big piece of it. I feel like
I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with how little I actually
know how to do. I have high-demand specialized skills in
technology, sure, but that's not a survival or sustenance skill,
that's a work-for-someone-else-to-take-care-of-you skill, you
know?
So heck yeah man, I'm going to keep helping myself feel empowered
by making sandwiches, and tacos, and salads, and fried rice, and
pasta, and casseroles, and I'm going to graduate myself to fancier
foods that I can actually make for myself, and enjoy the process
and knowing that I was able to do that. It sounds pathetic, but I
feel like this is a place that a lot of us are in. "We live in a
society", and all that.
I'm starting a garden. I've been looking up how to make my own
pottery and adobe bricks. I'd love to try my hand at some basic
bushcrafty woodworking, but I live in a desert environment, so
getting some material to work with will be tricky. Am I going to
*need* any of this stuff? Probably not. But it feels good knowing
that I'm on my way to knowing how to actually *do* things, you
know?
Learning to identify local plants and animals is really cool, too.
Feeling more connected with my local environment. One of my
favorite quotes by Ken Layne is about that kind of thing: "We are
a fractured and confused people in this strange century. Most of
what once connected us to a place - knowledge of the land and the
animals, origins of the regional beasts and abominations, shared
rituals and traditions - has been lost or taken away. We are
strangers in our own land. But it doesn't have to be like that."
I don't know, man. I'm just kind of rambling at this point. I'm
not sure what exactly this is about, except that it's about
feeling more "real." More than just a super specialized worker who
can do some specialized work but otherwise is entirely dependent
on others. And if everything went to heck, my specialized skills
wouldn't be worth much. I'm not saying I think that's actually
going to happen, but it still feels hollow knowing that given a
situation like that, I'd pretty much not have any appreciable
skills or ability to get anything useful done.
But yeah, man. These sandwiches I've been making have been so
good!
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