Month: February 2022

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I think I’d rather have had the madeleine.

Has anyone reading this ever had a moment like that famous one Proust had with his madeleine? Where something just hits you and you are suddenly swept up in a torrent of memory and emotion?

I have not, though I have always sort of wanted to; I have wondered what it would be that triggered such a thing for me. The foods of my childhood were mostly processed, and it’s hard to imagine having a huge, nostalgic wave of feeling over a Little Debbie snack cake or a box of what they call Kraft Dinner here. (I mean. Perhaps it’s possible, but my inner aesthete objects to the notion, and my palate has…adjusted…after some years of cooking for myself. I doubt very much I would still enjoy many of the things I used to subsist on.)

I have had a recent incident of something triggering unexpected feelings, though: I listened to a song. Not a favorite, or even one I was all that familiar with; I had perhaps heard it once before, in the kind of “shuffle songs” situation that comes up when you are exploring an artist or a genre.

And, for no apparent reason, I cried for almost an hour as though my heart were absolutely broken.

And then I felt like maybe it would be a good idea to check and make sure people were okay, just in case I was having some kind of premonition. (They were; I was relieved but felt rather stupid for acting on such a thing.)

And then I felt rather confused (and maybe a bit ashamed as well). That was weird.

I have since been advised that perhaps I should consider any such unexpected emotional outburst in a bit more depth. The song in question is, as I interpret it at the moment, about striking out on one’s own when those around you are unable to take care of you; it does not appear to be going well for the speaker, so there is a strong undercurrent of loneliness and of the loss of relationship(s?), perhaps of identity as well, after a fashion. The new world is hard and loud and cold, and in it it is easy to forget one’s name.

Considered with a little distance it is not difficult to see how that might possibly have some impact on my reptile hindbrain, but the degree of the reaction is still a bit of a surprise. I haven’t really been having that bad a time. Things are stressful in the usual areas of adult life (work and sometimes finances and so on, compounded of course by the pandemic and all of the business down south), and yes, I’ve spent almost two years holed up mostly in my house but I’ve worked very hard to reach out to people consistently and to try and keep some semblance of a social life going.

…I do sort of feel lonely anyway. There is a…hunger, I think the same one that for some reason often translates into a craving for cake. (I don’t think I quite understand that, either. Cake is a special-occasion food, certainly, but I do not remember having any particular kind of special relationship to it as a child, other than being happy to see it on said special occasions. Why that particular sweet, brain? Why not chocolate or cookies or ice cream? A doughnut, even?)

This is preposterous, exasperating; I have literally talked to someone, at least digitally, every day all this time, and I live with a partner, who is generally good company and might justly wonder what on earth I meant by that and whether they were chopped liver or what.

I feel the same irritation looking at this feeling as I might watching a little kid have a meltdown because the packaging of the chocolate bar you have just bought them is the wrong color, and no amount of telling the kid that it’s just the packaging that’s different and the contents are exactly the same seems to make a bit of difference and everyone is staring at you and you find yourself perhaps wishing you could invoke a bolt of lightning to end this and all other awkwardnesses forever.

It IS the same chocolate bar, right? Everything is fine. What the hell is wrong with you?

I guess I’ll have to sit with this one for a while and keep thinking about it.

Still hoping to have a bit of a nicer version of this experience some day, though.

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At least it’s Friday?

Today hasn’t been a great day for writing. Thanks to yesterday’s snow I had shoveling taking up the morning timeslot, which is great for bolstering my failing attempts to build an exercise habit but less great for building a writing habit. Lunchtime involves…well, lunch…and this evening we’ll be busy with groceries and whatnot, so…yeah. This may not be the best day for something thoughtful and complex.

In the interest of not having it be a complete wash-out, here are some odds and ends:

  • This website collects games that include “dark patterns” – sneaky tricks that are intended to keep a user playing…or, even more sinister-ly, paying. Helpfully, it also explains what a number of these dark patterns are, and lists games that are more healthy – so if you find your favorite game on the “dark” list, you may be able to find a nicer alternative at the same time. Just mobile games for now, but I kind of hope this takes off; we could use more resources to aid in vetting such things. (via BoingBoing)
  • A favorite local chocolatier is doing a Valentine’s Day-themed array of goodies. If you’re thinking of something to send a sweetheart, consider giving them a try (they’re excellent!)
  • Lots of us (…me included) have been playing the silly little word game Wordle. Enough of us, I guess, that there was a little game jam recently to play with the concept, resulting in a bunch of variations on the theme that Polygon has done a roundup of. Check them out!
  • I have learned a lot about Nicholas Cage today.
  • To pick up on the recent theme of emotions and the naming thereof: this is an interesting article over at the Baffler on the subject. Can naming our feelings – and changing the names we have for them – change how we deal with some of the big Things we face in our future?
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But who will teach him fear?

So this week we made it through to the end of part three of the Ring Cycle: Siegfried, or as I call it in my head “The Broventures of Siegfried.”

Ok, so, as we may recall from the end of Die Walkure, Brunnhilde gets sent to do the Sleeping Beauty thing, but in the process she rescued Sieglinde and sent her off to live in peace someplace. And she was pregnant at the time. “Call him Siegfried,” Brunnhilde suggests, all eagerness.

Spoiler in the title: Sieglinde does indeed call him that.

Unfortunately that’s the only contribution she’s going to make to this story, as she conveniently dies in childbirth, leaving us to spend almost the entirety of Act 1 watching Siegfried grudgingly engage with the only caretaker he’s ever known: a nasty little Nibelung we may all recall from Das Rheingold: Mime, brother of Alberich.

This may at first seem especially baffling considering that neither of them appear to like each other in the slightest, but Mime does spend a lot of time monologuing to himself, and so it is we learn that this is really just an attempt at a very long game: He’s banking on the idea that Siegfried will become the hero he is prophesied to be, and kill the current holder of that pesky ring of power this whole saga gets its name from: Fafner the giant, who thanks to the Tarnhelm has turned himself into a dragon. (Oddly, he hasn’t really done anything ELSE with either his draconic powers or all that gold, just appears to be hanging out with his hoard, sleeping a lot. Living his best life, I guess?)

Anyway. Siegfried’s super keen to get going on this whole heroing thing, or perhaps just to get the fuck away from his skeevy pseudo-parental figure, but before he can do that he needs a decent sword, and Mime’s been promising for years that he’ll fix up that busted one his Mom had when she died (Nothung, the sword extracted from the tree at Hunding’s place back in part 2.) Problem is, Mime hasn’t been able to mend the damn thing, despite his obviously strong smithing skills.

Cue the arrival of Wotan, not fooling anyone (…in the audience, anyway) by turning up dressed like a Neil Young cosplayer. In this disguise he wagers his head against Mime’s and we get one of those old-school “answer these questions” games. Mime isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is, so this is probably not going to go well for him, but we do learn a little something that may point to why he’s never had any luck with that sword: Only someone who doesn’t know what fear is can repair it.

And wouldn’t you know it, we happen to have just such a fellow right over there.

What follows may be summed up rather simply: Siegfried, who has no idea what it means to be afraid of anything, resolves the sword-forging problem himself – rather than attempt to repair a broken blade he files the whole thing down and forges himself a new one. (Whether there is a comment here on artists who are excessively careful in their output, and whether or not it is deliberate, I don’t know – but I do wonder if more of us might not benefit from melting our own swords down, whatever those swords may be.)

From there we’re off to the races – Siegfried sets out to the dragon Fafner’s cave, where for some reason Alberich is hanging out waiting for someone to do something about it so he can get the ring back. Along the way he has a pleasant chat to a little forest bird, who of course just sings wordlessly along.

Taking out Fafner is…not really any big deal at all, in the end; in what feels like just a few bars the former giant is sprawled on the forest floor, his blood already beginning to taint the nearby spring. It’s very hot blood, too; when Siegfried pulls the sword out the blood burns his hand, and he thoughtlessly sticks a finger into his mouth. In our world, this would be a terrifying health hazard, but in this world, it means he’s just gained the power to understand the speech of animals, so from his little bird friend he learns that there are two very particular items of treasure he might want to pick up – the ring, and the Tarnhelm that enabled that draconic transformation.

He has just time to pick them up before Mime makes his appearance, all set to murder him and take the reclaimed ring for his own. Unfortunately for him, Siegfried’s new language-comprehension powers extend to (strangely) the ability to comprehend Mime’s thoughts, and so it’s not that long before Mime joins Fafner on the forest floor, with a general air of “good riddance.”

You’d think this would be Alberich’s chance, wouldn’t you? But…no. Weirdly, for some reason, he does nothing, even as our hero sits there lamenting in an extremely bro-ish fashion that even slaying this dragon thing didn’t teach him how to be afraid and that sucks. (Why it is he wants this knowledge is unclear.)

Oh well. Whatever! The little bird has another quest flag piece of information for him: High on a nearby mountaintop is a beautiful woman he can claim for his bride, if he is brave enough. Sounds like somewhere you could find fear, yeah? So off he goes.

Everything else from here is a foregone conclusion, really. Wotan shows up and (for some reason) puts forth a not entirely convincing resistance to letting Siegfried climb the mountain where Brunnhilde sleeps, and Siegfried shatters his spear (!) in the process. (That’s not going to have consequences or anything.) Siegfried climbs up the mountain, navigates the flames, and beholds the first woman he’s ever seen.

We get a lengthy and somewhat odd scene between Siegfried and Brunnhilde where Brunnhilde realizes that she’s in love with Siegfried (that was fast) but also is feeling the onset of mortality and cue existential crisis but also oh my god isn’t this dude hot, and where Siegfried at first thinks he’s learned fear but wait no actually maybe it was just the onset of his first experience of lust. Oh well, what the heck, now he has a woman!

The end.

This production of Siegfried is a bit more compelling than the last one we saw – possibly because the performers for both Mime and (crucially) Siegfried himself were a lot more into their roles, hamming it up from time to time and injecting humor into the proceedings as our somewhat exasperatingly-self-confident-yet-uninformed hero derps his way through Germanic Mythology-land doing his own personal riff on one of the lesser-known tales of the Brothers Grimm. The effects are also particularly spectacular in this one, with the piles of projected fallen leaves skittering away as Siegfried kicks at them, or a digital version of the little bird whose beak somehow is able to follow along with the singer’s voice exactly.

This show is a beast, though, with a full production running something like six hours. Anyone’s attention span might well be flagging by the end of it, and I admit mine was a bit by the end of that odd little love scene. (Is it a love scene really?)

There is something really sort of irritating in having a hero who is a decent but remarkably incurious fellow who insists on reminding you every couple of minutes that by the way he’s terribly brave, you know, never been afraid of anything in his life. Siegfried’s all right and all, and the performer playing him does a great job with one of the most legendarily difficult roles in all of opera…

But I cannot help but feel that Brunnhilde deserved better. (Then again, I suppose we’ll be getting to that as the cycle concludes.)

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The calculus of “and”

When someone asks “How are you?” (or any of its many variants), there’s always a calculus, isn’t there?

Not just of “Well, how am I actually?” – which can be tricky enough, some days – but of “Is it okay for me to tell this person how I’m actually feeling?” or “Is it appropriate in this social situation for me to just spill my guts, and if yes, to what extent?”

I wonder if this calculus happens for everyone, or if it’s just a symptom of my own tendency to overthink everything.

I imagine a flowchart. Are you at work? Do you know the person who is asking? Do you know them well enough that you would speak with them in an un- or lightly-filtered manner about major life events? Follow the lines and arrows and eventually you will come to one of the outcomes that involves sharing more or less of what is really happening.

This is a little ironic, considering how very un-flowchart-like my thought processes tend to be when I am not following them carefully and deliberately. If I do not force them to slow down and write everything through, I more often find myself somewhere without really having much of an idea how I crossed the intervening space. I have an answer before I have really completely parsed the question. I have teleported to the moon unexpectedly.

(This is not to say that the answers I come to by such proto-thought-processes are wrong, necessarily – often they are correct – but more that my brain is a sort of eager street magician, too quick for the eye to follow.)

In any case, my response lately, should the result of that calculus come out to “Probably best to keep it to the surface level…” has been:

“Well, I’m not sick and the furnace is working. So, okay, I guess!”

This usually gets a chuckle, and it’s meant to. Sort of a badge of how low the bar actually IS right now when it comes to our interior landscapes. I am not actually and immediately suffering? Nothing in my house is actively on fire? Guess everything’s fine then!

This is of course not entirely correct. I am not sick right now, yes. In a pandemic that seems like it will never end and that may have upended most of how we do reality, that is definitely a good thing, though I do not think I am entirely comfortable with the notion that the right answer is for all of us to just get sick, the way everyone expects to get the chicken pox as a kid. Unlike the chicken pox, there can be long-term consequences to this, no?

And yes, the furnace is working. And in weather like we’ve had the last few weeks I am grateful for it, to be sure.

On the spectrum of loss in an article like this one I am barely inconvenienced, so far. All of my friends and family are well. Only one person I know with any degree of depth has gotten sick (though that sickness was, to be fair, quite scary.) I appreciate the author’s thesis that the “and-ness” of things is kind of essential to our humanness, that in the midst of the worst times we will sometimes find joy and in the midst of the most beautiful times, sadness.

Certainly if I take any amount of time to seriously consider how things are Outside – the ridiculous convoy, the climate disaster nobody with power to do anything about is paying attention to, the political garbage fire that is the land of my birth, the bottomless desire of Finance People to invade and monetize every instant of my life – it takes very little time for me to go from zero to literal shrieking rage. (I mean that depressingly literally. I yelled at someone yesterday out of sheer frustration with the fucking stupidity of humanity, and I feel terrible about it. After all, it wasn’t that person’s fault.)

But I also listened to a podcast episode about burrowing owls yesterday, and it was fascinating and delightful – moreso because there are people working to make homes and habitats for them in spaces that used to house less delightful things, like chemical weapons. Also, I mean, look at them.

And I Kickstarted a mildly ridiculous little nerdy thing – a page-a-day calendar that is also an RPG, with little dice and everything, and which would have been a feature at my desk this year if I were…well, more at my desk. And yes, it’s a little goofy. But the moment of levity in the mornings is helping a bit, I think. Just a tiny bite-sized chunk of an adventure every day.

So. All of that and.

It makes “How are you” rather complicated.

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In which I find out what all the fuss is about

My birthday present this year was a real treat, as it turns out.

I am, as anyone who has spent any time here at all will have probably gleaned, an avid cook. And for many years I have done all of my braising and stewing and so on in a big blue Dutch oven – a sturdy Lodge, because that was in the Overton window of affordability for my twenty-something self.

And it’s been great. No complaints; I can heartily recommend it to anyone looking to experiment with cooking in a cast-iron piece like this. I’ve made all manner of stews and braises and pasta sauces in it; deep-fried things and baked artisan bread and tried out various culinary firsts like bourguignon and so on.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t still quite excited to try out the replacement for it that I got as a birthday gift this year – the Cadillac of Dutch ovens, a Le Creuset. It’s a tiny bit bigger than my Lodge, but lighter, strangely enough – the walls of it are surprisingly thin, making it quite easy to lift and use. And it is gorgeous. (I shall have to work to keep that finish as pretty as possible as long as I can.)

It’s also still blue. I debated going for the red or the orange, because those are both ALSO lovely. Perhaps if I splurge on one of those enamel-interior skillets one of these days.

Anyway, I’ve now at last got round to inaugurating it – with this recipe for braised Chinese-style short ribs with Soy, Orange, and five-spice powder.

I went ahead and shredded the beef for easy serving and packing-up.

The result is delicious – and, since it’s actually the second time I’ve made this, I got the salt balance right. (If you, like me, only have regular soy sauce around and not low-sodium, this is still quite doable – you just have to go very easy on salting the short ribs and whatever you’ll be serving the meat on top of; in this case, mashed potatoes.)

I feel a bit boring for not having something more interesting to say, but it was pretty fun to make!