Words’ End

I got bitten by the cooking bug, bad. I mean, worse than usual. And I don’t remember when I last had almost an entire weekend’s worth of unstructured time, so this morning I took the bus to the Brazilian supermarket and got a ton of edo roots (“like yucca and potato combined! SO GOOD”) and plantains both green and ripe, for alcapurrias. (Those are Puerto Rican, fried starchy-dough pockets with a meat filling.)

Turns out, the alcapurrias are for making tomorrow, because today I turned five cups of flours into a boat load of dumplings.

Housemate Marta is much happier not eating wheat gluten, so I decided to try making wheat-free dumplings. Much as I love to cook, anything involving dough is not my forte; add to that weird flours, and I was in unfamiliar territory — a noteworthy event in the kitchen. Lo, I experimented, and it was good. No, it was great.

I found a gf dumpling dough recipe online, but the proportions seemed all wrong. Here are the ones I came up with, for the dough:

1c tapioca flour [same as tapioca starch]
1c white rice flour
2t xanthan gum
2T oil
14T cold water

Whisk the first three together. Add oil and water, then mix well first with a spoon, then using your hands. The dough should neither be crumbly nor stick to your hands.

Separate the dough into four parts. Cover three of them well with a damp towel. Using rice flour on both the board and the rolling pin, roll out the fourth as thinly as you can. This takes more patience than with wheat doughs, but patience is worth it. Do work quickly enough to not dry out the dough too much.

Using a small glass or your favorite thing with edges, cut out as many circles as you can from the dough. Immediately gather up remnants, ball them up so they don’t dry, and stick the ball to the next quarter of dough, under the damp towel. Cover the cut-out circles with another damp towel.

Take each circle into your hand, put a bit of filling in the center (a line works better than a ball) and pinch the edges closed to make a half-moon. Take care not to break the dough; it’s a pain to patch.

The filling I used ended up needing 2.5 of the above dough recipes, and consisting of:

1lb ground pork
0.5lb ground beef
0.5 can pumpkin
garam masala
crushed cumin
Penzey’s dried onion flakes
Penzey’s dried garlic flakes
soy sauce
salt
pepper

A note on the Penzey’s spices: their onion and garlic are worlds different from any powdered stuff. They’re essentially dehydrated (freeze-dried?) flakes. The garlic is actually spicy.

The dumplings turned out delicious, feeding four people with two cookie sheets’ worth left over to freeze. I boiled them until they floated, dumped in a mason jar of cold water to slow the dough cooking and allow filling to catch up, brought to a boil again, then took them out and fried some of them. Because there’s nothing in the dough that really browns, they weren’t exactly well browned after frying. Butter might have helped with that, but I was using pork fat mixed with canola oil.

Both the boiled and the fried dumplings were delicious with Shane’s dipping sauce: half soy sauce, half rice vinegar, with a motherlode of garlic and ginger. (If you are not a fan of Very Vinegary Flavor, do a 2:1 with the soy sauce.)

Today was victory over unfamiliar cooking territory. We’ll see how I do with the alcapurrias tomorrow.

Got five more from a woman of much insight, so naturally, they’re good to write about.

Thoughtful. A quality I am told I possess, and certainly one I seek out in others. My default synonym for it is not so much “considerate” or “compassionate” as “thinking.” A person of action who thinks before she acts is even better. I personally tend more toward thinking than action, and work to balance the two out. Right now, spring into summer into fall, is the best time for me to do that.

Provided that, you know, we get any actual summer over here. My friend Rosa recently remarked that summer had fallen on a [4th of July] weekend in Boston this year, but I hold out hope that we’ll see some summer yet. Meanwhile, when it’s not raining, it’s perfect biking weather.

Changes. Sometimes they’re like stray kittens that start tagging along on the street, whether you want them to or not, follow you home and settle down there. Sometimes they tear your house apart, and you wish you’d never met them. Other times you look at them and see possibilities that might, in other circumstances, not have occurred at all.

Two of the three biggest changes in my life—emigration, life partnership, and then divorce—were not of my making. Some changes have happened to me, and then it’s a matter of managing my own reactions to them. Other changes, though, I have effected myself—to be clear, usually with the help of others. I like changes. They’re exhilarating, they terrify me, they shake me out of the everyday. Changing the course of my graduate education; sharing my home with people I hardly knew at the beginning, several times over the years; falling in love after falling down hard, and before the healing was over, letting my guard down and gambling and winning at lovers. So far the big changes have been a net gain.

Some changes require more courage than others. Some changes require more energy than others.

I also look for stability in some aspects of my life. For some things to be unchanging. For gravity to continue working, for my beloveds to keep flying with me on the wings of our own creation, for people I can feed with food I cook, for a home from which I don’t move for a good long while. But the changes, they keep coming, they don’t stop; and so mostly the stability I seek is an internal, core thing.

Rest. That thing I don’t get enough of. I’ve stopped making as many social plans as I’d like, in an effort to get alone time. To read, to cook, to sleep. It doesn’t happen every day, but it’s getting better. Energy reserves still mostly depleted, but rest droplets are re-filling the backup vessel little by little.

Reserved. I am, when I need it so I can rest. My heart’s energy is, mostly for those who give back. My respect is, for people who make things happen in the world, and also for people who keep their word.

Moving. Moving forward, which I do on purpose every day. Moving on, which I can’t do because the universe decided to throw a big protracted lesson in learned helplessness in my path, and I spend some time most days fighting to protect my integrity. Getting a move on in the morning, which always takes more time than I think it will and can be gloriously slow because I get up early enough to allow that to happen. Moving aside so as to not get in my own way. Moving out of And/Or and into SCD in pursuit of a life I want. Moving with the rhythm of my surroundings, sometimes adding my own drumline to it. Allowing myself to be moved by breathtaking beauty, kindness, light.

Today is a day off—U.S. Independence Day, Observed—so it turns out that I have all this time to do whatever I want. In reality that’s not exactly true, as Plans are afoot soon enough, but it’s positively glorious to have nowhere in particular to be for hours on end.

An occasionally resurgent meme has been going around on LiveJournal: “comment on this post, and I’ll give you five words that I associate with you. Then you write about them.” I asked, and I received, and so here they are.

Home. Ooh, this is a good one. I’ve been looking for that for a while. Thought I’d found it with Ethan, but that turns out not to be the case. I miss the home we had [in|with] each other in the first year and a half or so of our relationship. This is somewhat, though not even close to entirely, balanced by not missing the relationship in the months leading to its rather abrupt (for me) end.

When I stayed in Boston after graduating from BU, and commuted to Providence for grad school, initially I lived with Colleen. And other people too, but emotionally it was mostly with her When in late 1997 I abruptly needed to move from where I was living and posted about it to the Moxy Früvous newsgroup, a fellow Fruhead told me she was moving up to Boston in the next five months, and maybe we should think about getting a place together? Five months seemed like a long time, but we did meet at a Früvous show in December with the specific intention of finding out whether this was a good idea, and then wrote each other 300Kb of emails a month or something crazy like that, and in February of 1998 we moved in together. With some geographically and head-spatially induced ebbs and flows, Cee has been one of my closest people for longer than anyone who isn’t my immediate family (brother, sister-in-law, nephew, and mom).

(I have the hardest time calling Jo Ann my sister-in-law. It sounds so… remote. Usually I refer to her and my brother collectively as my siblings.)

In many ways, and up until very recently, that was a unique occurrence in my life. We weren’t related but were quite close, without being romantically involved. It was the quintessential Boston marriage. We seemed to have similar ideas of what we wanted out of a living arrangement, or in some cases we worked it out then. Cee had romantic relationships, and I did too, and eventually, when our adorable quirky 210-year-old house got sold, we moved apart because I wanted to move in with my then-boyfriend. I’ve wondered how differently shaped my life might be had we moved somewhere else together, but ultimately it might’ve been good for our relationship at that particular time. I certainly don’t regret the experiences I did have as a result of that move, either: namely, moving in with a boyfriend who didn’t turn all evil on me in three months’ time, being proposed to and accepting, living together for a while, deciding together that getting married wasn’t a good idea, and eventually deciding together that we didn’t want to be involved, and had in fact grown apart.

All of the time I lived with Chris was hugely educational in that almost completely non-traumatic way, but it wasn’t home in the way that it had been with Cee. We gave it a good try, but ultimately it just didn’t work. I think that one of the reasons for that is my desire to live with other people in community. After some years of living with him, I moved to London to live with my siblings and help raise my nephew for a year, as I was applying for the special-studies PhD program at Brown. That was nostalgic in many ways, I missed my people in Boston, but it was in no way lonely. That was another unique experience in that we bonded, the nephew and I, ooh boy, we did. And I’d lived with Zhenya and Jo before, and we knew we all liked it, and frankly, if circumstances were right (which isn’t likely), I’d live with them again in a heartbeat.

Then I lived alone in Providence for a year and a half. That was perfect, some of my favorite time. I definitely had a home then. Found my feet in that way that’s only possible when you live alone, found my professional feet doing the now-approved PhD in humanities computing, found that having Talan living just downstairs was a good reminder of what it was that I liked about living with other people, without actually living together.

Then Ethan moved in from all the way across the country in Pullman, WA. Someday I’ll write about the arc of that as home, but today is not that day.

The day after I graduated in 2007, we moved to Somerville, a close neighbor of Boston that would be one of its boroughs, were this New York City. We were two humans and two cats in a house of seven humans and five cats (and a dog, and a bird). And/Or was and remains a great place, and was good to live in, but wasn’t that default, deep-down home unless I was actively working to keep my own rhythm aligned to the house’s. Ethan lived there for six months, and I stayed for two years; when I started thinking of how, some years from now, I’d like to be raising a child without a primary partner, And/Or didn’t feel like the right place for that.

So in May I moved to Something Completely Different. We’re experimenting, it’s too early to know, but for now it feels like it felt to live with Cee. People drop by and hang out, from the apartment upstairs and from the outside; a lot of cooking and significant communal eating goes on, insofar as our schedules permit it; there’s both a stated intent and an emotional sense of crafting a home. I’m comfortable here, and even if it doesn’t work, I’ll still have had this amazing reminder, in some ways maybe a crystallization, of knowing what I want in a home.

Heritage. I’m Russian by birth, grew up speaking Russian in a Soviet Republic capital where, like in all of the USSR, the predominant language was Russian. I also grew up in Moldova, where people speak Moldovan (pretty much Romanian) and have Moldovan culture and holidays and food and way of life—and all of that was alongside me, not part of my primary experience. So that’s weird. And it’s weird, too, that I am Jewish (ethnically if not religiously), but didn’t even know my dad spoke fluent Yiddish until I was thirteen and we went to visit his home village and his parents’ graves in the Ukraine before emigrating to the U.S. So I grew up with the Barry Sisters, but still don’t have most of the holidays straight, and don’t like gefilte fish. So that’s weird too.

I was never able to refer to myself as an American, though more than half my life (and therefore part of my heritage) has been spent here. It just didn’t feel like that’s what I was. Oddly, the entire last presidential election season changed that. Then again, I’m a fully vested citizen of the internet, so U.S. national boundaries are about as meaningful as other places in the world.

Dark. A place of introspection, and introversion. A season that’s difficult for me. A time when fun things happen. A time when, and I’m accepting this in stages, I need to take care of myself above most other things in order to remain functional. Also a time when having responsibilities to others (like small-girl-sitting once a week) gets me out of my head and supplies a kind of joy that’s unavailable elsewhere.

Curious. I am! Curious Vika is curious. This sort of gets me in trouble, though not in the way I’m making it sound. I ask people questions and listen to the answers more than I tell stories. In conversation, I tend more toward learning than toward teaching (unless I’m thinking my way through an issue by arguing, which can be great with the right conversation partner). There was just so damn much to learn from Ethan that I fell into this odd and stupid learned helplessness, looking to him for information when I should have relied on myself. When there’s stuff to be learned by talking to someone, I vastly prefer that to finding out on my own. It’s more fun. Unfortunately, it can get on a partner’s nerves.

These days I am re-discovering my curiosity, and pay more attention to balancing out asking questions and telling stories.

Joy. Something I feel quite frequently, in short intense bursts, usually unrelated to any one thing but being rather a confluence of thoughts coming together in my consciousness. Perfect moments, like sunshine and Davis Square and ice cream, or walking under the flame umbrella in pouring rain, singing along with the stuff in my headphones, feeling the air that smells of ocean. Or even snow shoveling during the quiet, voluminous snowfall, under the night streetlights. Or that rare occurrence of having hours on end to do with as I please.

I’m at Digital Humanities 2009, my home conference, the place that actually feels like home. The people are fantastic, the energy is high but not crazy, and the entertainment is made of awesome. Tonight, about 300 of us (literally) went to a crab shack.

I’ve been blogging the conference–or at least, the sessions I’ve managed to attend. The posts are here; if you’ve been wondering why exactly I’m in love with my somewhat obscure (and yet pervasive and important to all of us, whether we know it or not) profession, this is a good way to find out what excites me about digital humanities.

Oh, and hey, I was lightning-interviewed! Now I have had 1m4s of my 15m of fame.

Life’s been tough lately. Another bout of non-communication with partner-that-was, about which I can do nothing. Missed communications with loved ones—happily, these being much more fixable, since they involve people who’ll talk to me. Utter dearth of sunshine, most of the time, and decidedly non-summer-like weather.

I could go on (and on), and tell you about the lightbox I got back out in June, and the several draft posts I haven’t made yet (among them one about my not-quite-ADD brain, and why the not-quite part is hard). But instead I’ll trap a little bit of today in amber, because it was perfect.

Never mind that yesterday gave it a run for its money. Yesterday I’d woken up gloriously late, and finally gotten all the parts of my tent in one place and set up and hosed off, ridding the thing of 95% of its playa dust quotient, just in time for a camping trip this weekend. Never mind yesterday, most of which is a tad too personal for this venue. Today.

Today I woke up at 7 (don’t ask). Had breakfast with coffee and quiet sleepy laughter with housemates. Unpacked and moved around some of the stuff that was cluttering the living room, slowly, minding how the house feels to me. (Like home, is how.)

Just before ten I was at Moosecasa, getting quite the reception from two very excited small girls. We took off a half hour later, the three of us, me and two three-year-olds, for Chestnut Farms, from where I get my CSA meat. They had an open barn today. There were goats and chickens and cows and pigs and sheep and baaaaaaaby animals, and they were so warm and soft, and the world was ringing with birdsong, and.

And it was a two-hour drive each way, and that went pretty much perfectly, even though everyone got tired at the end. Trips like this with one adult and two inquisitive, smart, engaged children are a complete toss-up, and this was my lucky day. We talked until we were hoarse, sang songs, listened to Puff the Magic Dragon like half a dozen times, and I got the best small-girl radio from the back of the car. Having the two of them entertaining each other was, I think, most entertaining for me.

We came home, tired. Cee and I got to spend time together, quietly. Three small children and six adults frolicked in a backyard exploding with the gorgeous fruits of gardening, eating cherries and a couple of almost-ripe mulberries and maybe even a strawberry. I came home and cooked dinner, and ate it with People of the House.

I’m exhausted, and for once, my soul is light-filled and well-fed.

Last weekend, I moved house.  I now live a fifteen-minute walk from where I used to live, a little bit (five minutes’ walk or less) further from the Davis Square T stop, with a different crowd of hippie geeks.  My reasons for the move are many, but mostly boil down to, this new place may be better suited to what I want to do with my life.  Appropriately enough, it’s called Something Completely Different.

I’ll miss And/Or. Then again, they’re still close by. And though there will no longer be a circus band practicing in my living room every Thursday night, they seem to have taken up busking in Davis! Do come out and see them, if you’re local. It’s a good time.

Last week, just as I was on top of things but suddenly sick enough to be unable (unwilling) to pack, moving stress suddenly struck full-force. Up until almost the last minute it wasn’t clear who-all would show up to help me schlep my stuff (of which much had been moved beforehand, in cars and thanks to the efforts of several friends). Lo, enough generous souls showed up to make it a three and a half hour move start to finish. Stressful, as such things are, but not nearly as much as it could’ve been. That, and sushi for a thank-you lunch afterward, and a tenth-wedding-anniversary party at the new house on my first evening there — all of these things made for a good welcome.

There are many children around the house at various times, though none of them live there. My cats are making cautious acquaintance with the two resident cats (who will, alas, soon move out). The people are quirky and passionate and good. The kitchen is well-loved, and a social nexus. There’s a ton of space, genial conversation at breakfast, and at least three different things fermenting on purpose. (One of them is my kefir-like-but-not-kefir stuff! Thanks for the culture, mom.) There’s a garden, which I hope to learn to tend well.

Oh, and bacon. No, seriously. Lots of bacon. You’d think I were following some internet meme, but I’m not. Bacon.

And, of course, what do I do on my first weekday in the new house? Stay at work ’til past 8pm. Time to go home.

This video—not made by me—is about how I feel when I’m around water. Its power, maybe.

In case it’s not clear, this is a helicopter search-and-rescue training exercise. Read more about the video here.

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Since intersession ended on January 5th, I have not had a single full school-night’s sleep. Catching up on the weekends is useful but still not healthy.

Thursday was one mad dash after another at work right up until about 6:30pm, and culminated in drinking wine at a reception in our library, chatting with coworkers, then cleaning up and getting a ride home, arriving around 7:45. And immediately turning around to drive the car I time-share to its home, take the bus back, and collapse.

Friday was one mad dash af… well, you know. Ran around almost non-stop 8-6 with a two-hour break for a dental appointment (three cheers for my dentist, again), came home and had a fantastic dinner with this gorgeous babe who is funny and fascinating and has good taste in movies. I showed her An Ordinary Miracle.

Now it’s almost 2am. Not setting an alarm. Still, I’d like to figure out how to live life as fully as I want, and still get anything approximating enough sleep most nights. I feel my immune system wearing down.

Locals and Boston-area lovers,

This Saturday evening is the Wolf Moon – February’s full moon. No better time to go visit the ocean, I say.

If you were going to the ocean somewhere in the vicinity of Boston, somewhere wildish, where you can stand on a beach and not have a road twenty feet behind you, where would you go? I’ll be car-enabled.

(LJ readers, please to respond directly on Words’ End. Thank you!)

Earlier today (yesterday) I wondered why it felt so odd to feel kinship and rightness in both Solstice and New Year’s Eve-into-Day. I grew up with New Year’s like some of my friends grew up with Christmas. That’s when you had the tree (Yule tree, though I didn’t know Yule then), had the gifts, had the big party or went to one. We had no Christmas, nor Hannukah. Both of these have always been a bit alien to me, because I didn’t get exposed to either until I was almost 14. Then, six or seven years ago, I simultaneously tuned out of Christmas, repelled by all the consumerism and the omnipresent tchotchkes everywhere, and got into marking time by actual seasons – celebrating the solstices and the equinoxes.

Somehow, New Year’s didn’t get touched by this. It makes sense emotionally, but not logically – how is it that I deeply, viscerally relate to both? And I decided that they’re different markers. The Solstice is, for me, a turning point in the natural cycle. I move within it, and with it, and am happier following a moon calendar that changes ever so slightly to keep in tune with the planets and star and galaxy around us. Solstice/Yule is a social thing only because I happen to be surrounded by people who keep time by it, too, and for some of whom it is – as it is for me – a holy day. Not all of us have that privilege, and I’m thankful to live where I live.

New Year’s is a social thing in a larger sense. I’m part of a larger human community that keeps a 365ish-day calendar, and that by and large marks the midnight of December 31st into January 1st. I’ve taken part in that since I was little, staying up past midnight for the first time when I was six or so. (And stayed up until 6am! I should ask my mom exactly how insufferable I was the next day. If she doesn’t remember, that’s probably a good sign.)

Tonight I was with acquaintances and beloveds, eating good food and drinking goofy-making drinks and enjoying my brand-blue hair and petting the love cat, talking, listening, taking it all in. At midnight I was napping in a warm happy bed upstairs from the party. The new year is here, and it is welcome. My personal newest chapter began over a week ago; but the passing of 2008 actually closed the previous one. Couldn’t have happened soon enough.

Good night, fellow humans. Happy new year.