Cooking. Half-awake ringtones.
Today, I rediscovered the joy of owning a meat cleaver. (You may think, after last week's Shredder Incident, that I should not be using such an implement unsupervised. You may worry because of that thing you're imagining, with me standing in the kitchen giggling ominously. But you should relax.) It's such a nice tool. Far, far nicer than getting raw chicken all squishy under your nails.
Actually, this was a four-knife dinner. I kept my right hand on the handles and my left hand well out of range, and had a wonderful time rapidly making large chunks of raw food into small chunks of raw food suitable for cooking.
I realized again that I really like to prepare food. Alone, unhurried, and in a well-equipped kitchen, cooking is a beautiful and peace-generating activity. It's a rather ephemeral purposefulness, like the making of sand medallions by buddhist monks, but on a smaller scale. The whole thing takes on the feel of a casual, everyday ritual, the kind that integrates the mundane and the holy: dead animal flesh and raw onions and dried grains and ground-up seeds become food, and then the food stimulates taste and smell and touch and sight before it becomes integrated into our bodies... I'm making the muddiest possible explanation, but this line of thinking does run through my head, an undercurrent to "how many pounds of chicken do I need" and "I think I can add the tomato juice now". There's something intensely satisfying about the whole process.
And now, the interesting part of a ramble I wrote last Tuesday and didn't post:
What does it mean when the ringtone you set as an alarm clock sounds like an equation -- not a very complex one, but definitely one with some parentheses and exponents and things like "c" standing in for the constants? I think it simply means that you're still half-asleep. Listening to it later, in a quest to discover if it made any actual sense at all, I cannot fathom why it sounds like an equation when I'm half-asleep.
Actually, this was a four-knife dinner. I kept my right hand on the handles and my left hand well out of range, and had a wonderful time rapidly making large chunks of raw food into small chunks of raw food suitable for cooking.
I realized again that I really like to prepare food. Alone, unhurried, and in a well-equipped kitchen, cooking is a beautiful and peace-generating activity. It's a rather ephemeral purposefulness, like the making of sand medallions by buddhist monks, but on a smaller scale. The whole thing takes on the feel of a casual, everyday ritual, the kind that integrates the mundane and the holy: dead animal flesh and raw onions and dried grains and ground-up seeds become food, and then the food stimulates taste and smell and touch and sight before it becomes integrated into our bodies... I'm making the muddiest possible explanation, but this line of thinking does run through my head, an undercurrent to "how many pounds of chicken do I need" and "I think I can add the tomato juice now". There's something intensely satisfying about the whole process.
And now, the interesting part of a ramble I wrote last Tuesday and didn't post:
What does it mean when the ringtone you set as an alarm clock sounds like an equation -- not a very complex one, but definitely one with some parentheses and exponents and things like "c" standing in for the constants? I think it simply means that you're still half-asleep. Listening to it later, in a quest to discover if it made any actual sense at all, I cannot fathom why it sounds like an equation when I'm half-asleep.