a year in review

"Tragedy may be defined, here, as an attempt to 'recover' the distance which exists between man and things as a new value; it would be then a test, an ordeal in which victory would consist in being vanquished. Tragedy therefore appears as the last invention of humanism to permit nothing to escape: since the correspondence between man and things has finally been denounced, the humanist saves his empire by immediately instituting a new form of solidarity, the divorce itself becoming a major path to redemption.

"There is still almost a communion, but a painful one, perpetually in doubt and always deferred, its effectiveness in proportion to its inaccessible character. Divorce-as-a-form-of-marriage is a trap - and it is a falsification.

"We see in effect to what degree such a union is perverted: instead of being the quest for a good, it is now the benediction of an evil. Unhappiness, failure, solitude, guilt, madness - such are the accidents of our existence which we are asked to entertain as the best pledge of our salvation. To entertain, not to accept: it is a matter of feeding them at our expense while continuing to struggle against them. For tragedy involves neither a true acceptance nor a true rejection. It is the sublimation of a difference.

"Let us retrace, as an example, the functioning of 'solitude.' I call out. No one answers me. Instead of concluding that there is no one there - which could be a pure and simple observation, dated and localized in space and time - I decide to act as if there were someone there, but someone who, for one reason or another, will not answer. The silence which follows my outcry is henceforth no longer a true silence; it is charged with a content, a meaning, a depth, a soul - which immediately sends me back to my own. The distance between my cry, to my own ears, and the mute (perhaps deaf) interlocutor to whom it is addressed becomes an anguish, my hope and my despair, a meaning in my life. Henceforth nothing will matter except this false void and the problems it raises for me. Should I call any longer? Should I shout louder? Should I utter different words? I try once again... Very quickly I realize that no one will answer but the invisible presence I continue to create by my call obliges me to hurl my wretched cries into the silence forever. Soon the sound they make begins to stupefy me. As though bewitched, I call again... and again. My solitude, aggravated, is ultimately transmuted into a superior necessity for my alienated consciousness, a promise of my redemption. And I am obliged, if this redemption is to be fulfilled, to persist until my death, crying out for nothing.

"According to the habitual process, my solitude is then no longer an accidental, momentary datum of my existence. It becomes part of me, of the entire world, of all men: it is our nature, once again. It is solitude forever." Alain Robbe-Grillet

* * *

I was planning on writing a recap of the year, but what for? I know the mistakes I've made, and I know the necessary changes in mentality I am taking to fix them; there's no need to enumerate any further, however positive the intent. Anyway, the above says everything I needed to say.

I understand that I will be okay on my own.

* * *

My laptop has been officially pronounced dead. I will continue to sporadically use F's while I'm staying with family. I am a little irked because I had planned on using these two weeks off of work as time for writing (and yes, I sadly need a computer to do so properly), but such will have to wait. Instead I'm reading and taking lots of notes, which I hope to elaborate upon once I acquire a new machine.

MIA

My hard drive crashed. I'm trapped at home (massive flooding) with family sans computer. F worked his magic and recovered all my files, but I still may have to buy a new laptop if the parts in his basement electronics graveyard cannot repair it.

Not sure when I'll be returning to internet land, but luckily I brought lots of books home with me.

Illness Day 7 and the trouble with soup

I have gotten sick more times this year than I have in probably the past decade. My co-worker, who oscillates between calling me the socialist and the watermelon, comes by daily to remind me that I'm only sick because I "don't eat no meat." Over the past month, I had been doing remarkably well defending myself and finally even becoming victorious on a few of our various political debates, but days of incessant coughing and fatigue have left my voice sounding like that of a whining toad, thwarting any defense I try to make against his verbal antics. Mainly he has been alleging that the only effective remedy for my ailment would be the fatty broth of a good chicken noodle soup (and also insisting that the reason I'm getting sick so often is because I've become a vegetarian). Although I do not doubt that my poor nutrition and general disinterest in eating of late is partially at fault, being vegetarian in itself is not the problem but rather my laziness.

This whole week I've been struggling to find foods that are nutritious and simplistic enough for me to prepare in my weakened state. I first went for the canned soup aisle, frustratingly finding that the majority of vegetable soups contain beef or chicken broth. (This delayed revelation is due to the fact that I generally don't drink soup, particularly canned.) I bought a variety, consisting of whichever ones I could find, but found them all rather disagreeable (as my illness got worse, anything with more than a mild taste or smell became noxious) and instead stuck to a diet of plain oatmeal and periodically forced orange juice. Yesterday I again tried Amy's No Chicken Noodle Soup and remembered why I never bought it again after the first time years ago: even after adding water to neutralize its excessive saltiness and thereby disobeying the can's orders, the soggy spaghetti noodles and the tofu chunks, which were supposed to taste like chicken but had the consistency of over-chewed gum, made the soup still too unbearable to swallow.

Today I brought a can of vegetable soup to work for lunch, only to notice during the mid-morning the words "beef broth" on the ingredients list. I tried to trade it with one from my co-worker friend's stock, but all of his were tainted similarly. I left work early and went to the grocery store to buy the ingredients necessary to make my own damn soup and, as simple as it was, it turned out to be the best thing I've eaten all week (see recipe below).

I need to expand my culinary repertoire beyond the ten or so dishes I know how to make from fresh ingredients before I slowly starve myself to death. (I'm not even going to breach the subject of all the toxins that processed foods contain and their damaging effects.) I have a whole stack of untested recipes, so I'll just start working my way through those, tweaking them to taste until I get a feel for what I'm doing, all in the hopes of regaining a little creativity and health in a single activity.

Perhaps I'll continue to post the best recipes here pretending that someone actually has interest in my kitchen endeavors.

Ingredients:
6 tomatillos
1 large onion
1 red pepper
1 jalapeño
3 carrots
1 1/2 cups of elbow pasta
2 cans of white beans
1 small can of diced chilies
4 cans of vegetable broth

Directions:

Pre-heat oven to 450 degrees. Cut tomatillos, onion, pepper, and jalapeño into large pieces. Line a baking sheet with foil and oil (or non-stick spray) the bottom. Toss vegetables with a little olive oil and spread evenly onto baking sheet. Roast vegetables for about 20min in the oven or until edges are charred a bit. Blend roasted vegetables in a food processor (or blender) for a few turns until diced (not puréed).
Chop carrots into circles and boil until tender.
Cook pasta until al dente.
Boil vegetable broth in a large pot. Add white beans, carrots, roasted vegetables, chilies, and pasta. Cover and let simmer until ready to eat.

currently imbibing...

"They all sound benign and neutral until one asks: Tax who, for what? Appropriate what, for whom? To protect everyone's contracts seems like an act of fairness, of equal treatment, until one considers that contracts made between rich and poor, between employer and employee, landlord and tenant, creditor and debtor, generally favor the more powerful of the two parties. Thus, to protect these contracts is to put the great power of the government, its laws, courts, sheriffs, police, on the side of the privileged - and to do it not, as in premodern times, as an exercise of brute force against the weak but as a matter of law." Howard Zinn





"Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags."

the interlude

I have rediscovered tangerines (mmm!!!) and ABBA!



ALL IS WELL ONCE AGAIN!!!!!

notices

I turned my television set on for the first time in exactly one month (to watch a DVD and not to watch actual television).

I spent the majority of this evening reading a book, and with a wondrous jolt, I remembered that words do not only come in electronic form but on paper as well. Yes, months have gone by in which I have been unable to get beyond page ten of anything I try to read.

My last private journal entry is dated August 19th.

The obvious question that comes to mind: what exactly have I been doing in all this time?

My mind seems unwilling to answer its own question. Perhaps a weekend of isolation and toil will shake out more than just evasive quotes and vague utterances.

my lovers have arrived