Category — Uncategorized

I’m always looking for good tomato sauce recipes because we eat a lot of pasta.  After I try one, I go back to making the same one, over and over again, because it’s easy.  My sauce is ready in a half hour, and it’s fine.  But it’s lacking.

I’ve never found a pasta recipe that I like as much as this sauce my grandmother made for me one weekend when I was visiting during graduate school.

It was the best bowl of pasta and tomato sauce I’ve ever had.

I remember that she used Pomi chopped tomatoes in a carton, but then I sat down at the dining room table and I didn’t watch anything else she put in the pot.  It was the most incredible bowl of pasta I’ve ever had, and I think about it all the time.  I’ve never been able to recreate it.

Someone linked to a Marcella Hazan sauce recipe in the middle of the week, so I decided to try making it Wednesday night; just another sauce in a long line of sauces that would probably be fine, but I’d go back to making the easy sauce afterward.  This one took so long and it had so much butter and the onion thing was plain weird.  But what the hell; I’d try it out.

And it was my grandmother’s sauce.

This sauce is the sauce that has been inside my brain for 20 years, the sauce I’ve always kicked myself for not nailing down the recipe with her before she died.  I got to eat my grandmother’s sauce again.  And it had so much butter in it.  Like so. much. butter.

I got to taste it again on the sort of week when I miss her a lot because I can’t buy a Mother’s Day card for her anymore.  But I got to call my mother and tell her that I found it; I found THE sauce.

I like to think that maybe my Internet-unsavvy grandmother somehow guided the universe into dropping the recipe onto my screen right when I needed it.  Thank you, Grandma.  I’m not going to make it too often because did I mention the butter?  But it’s going to be the recipe I pull out when I need to feel close.

Mother’s Day is a hard day for so many people, whether due to infertility or loss or death.  If you want a good comfort dish, this is it.  Or leave your own favourite comfort dish recipe below so someone else can grab it.

This is what I’ve been thinking about.

Resting isn’t doing nothing.  Resting is work.  Have you ever tried to meditate?  Then you know how difficult it is to not think.  Have you ever struggled to fall asleep?  Then you know how hard it can be to relax and let go.  Resting is a skill, and some people don’t have it.

That’s because resting is personal.  What relaxes or recharges me might not be what relaxes or recharges you.  And there’s little guidance out there to help people find what helps them to unwind.  There’s no What Colour is Your Parachute for relaxation.  (Or is there?  I couldn’t find one.)

Finding what help you unwind is as difficult as finding a career you love.  Because career love doesn’t happen for everyone.  Some people love their career and other people do their job.  Both situations earn you a paycheck, but one route is a lot more fulfilling.

The same thing happens with relaxation.  Some people have a clear relaxation plan; activities that allow them to recharge and give them the fuel to power through work time.  And other people circle the standards — the things we’re told are relaxing such as going to a spa or the beach or watching television — waiting for the relaxation we’re promised to come.  And when it doesn’t happen, or it’s short-lived, we point at external reasons — such as a vacation not being long enough — rather than look at whether the activity itself was a poor fit or not explored in full.

What recharges you?

I’ve been thinking about this because I reconnected with an old friend and he told me about his work situation: a few hours of intense, daily work followed by hours to pursue his own interests.  It’s easier to figure out what recharges you when you have the time to figure it out.

Then a week or two ago, the Washington Post had an opinion piece on how we’ve lost sight of the importance of rest, elevating the narrative of hard work and turning work into a mirror for burnout.  The title says it all: “America is obsessed with the virtue of work. What about the virtue of rest?”

What about the virtue of rest?

And do you actually have a game plan, a relaxation career?  Or are you doing what you think might relax you without a clear plan in place?

It seems like a good time to put this in writing.  Josh is my best friend.  I have other close friends, but Josh is my best friend.  I tell him everything, more than he ever wanted to know. (Especially more than he ever wanted to know beginning around 11 o’clock at night when his eyes are fluttering towards sleep and I have a burning need to tell him all. of. my. feelings.  All of them.  Every last one.)

I recently read that “individuals who consider their spouse to be their best friend are more satisfied with their lives overall.  Twice as satisfied, as it turns out.”

[Big sigh of relief.  I was nervous about what the one view would be when I clicked over to read.  What if it said individuals who consider their spouse an attentive listener when they’re trying to fall asleep are happier?  Because we fail in that department.  I constantly have to say, “Josh?  Josh?  Are you listening to all of my feelings?”]

The New York Times had a beautiful infertility essay recently, written by a woman ten years after cancer that ended with this thought: “Nobody tells you how long marriage is. When you fall in love, when you have fun with somebody, when you enjoy the way they see the world, nobody ever says, ‘This person will change. And so you will be married to two, three, four, five or 10 people throughout the course of your life, as you live out your vows’.”

Josh and I aren’t the same people we were when we first said our vows, almost seventeen years ago.  But he’s still my best friend.  And he tells me I’m his, except between the hours of 11 pm and 6 am when he’s trying to sleep and I have so many feelings.

We are in the middle of the Great Basement Renovation.

The baby stuff is done.  Mostly.  There are probably still boxes in there underneath other boxes, but the vast majority of the baby stuff is out of the house.  The stuff we kept is going to be here for the long-haul; the most special toys that the twins wanted the ability to revisit ironically during their teen years, a few outfits that mean a lot to me, a few odds and ends to have around when people bring babies over to our house (such as toys and a clip-on high chair for dinner parties).

We’re currently in the middle of culling the bookcases and redoing the main hang-out area; putting in a new sofa and moving down a gaming system.  We’re calling it the “teen” room, and I keep clapping my hands and saying things like, “Oh, isn’t it swell?  You’ll be able to have your little friends over for punch and cookies in the teen room!”  And then the twins roll their eyes at me and return to giving away their childhood.

*******

This is the problem with organizing; I want it to happen faster.  I want it to be done, now.  I want the old sofa out, immediately.  I want the new sofa chosen and in-place, two seconds after the old sofa is gone.  I want the piles to magically disappear, the books instantly donated, the whole project behind us.

I will say that it has helped to tackle it backwards in order of difficulty vs. importance.  The sofa situation is so much larger and important to deal with so the room is usable.  But the baby stuff was the most difficult to part with, so it helped to have it behind us instead of looming large.

Soon we will be down to just random boxes of tchotchkes and papers, and then we’ll start tackling all the other living spaces.  It’s a little addictive getting rid of stuff.  I’m not going lie; as much as I dreaded giving away even one book at first, after I broke the seal and dropped the first few in the bin, I became obsessed with tossing everything.  And after I saw the neat shelves, I started thinking about everything else in the house that I wanted gone.

It’s about gaining breathing space.

David Brooks had a column on social wealth, and I’ve been trying to write about it for days.  The gist is that while we speak somewhat (not enough) about monetary poverty, we rarely discuss whether people have social capital:

I summarize all this because loneliness and social isolation are the problem that undergird many of our other problems. More and more Americans are socially poor. And yet it is very hard for the socially wealthy to even see this fact. It is the very nature of loneliness and social isolation to be invisible. We talk as if the lonely don’t exist.

Talking about social wealth, it turns out, is just as squirmy as talking about monetary wealth.  I mean, there are clearly people who talk about their monetary wealth, but I feel pretty squirmy when they do.  I can guesstimate someone’s salary based on the nature of their position, but there’s something very different from assuming someone earns $80,000 per year and having someone concretely tell you, “Hey, did you know my salary is $80,000 per year?  And I spend it on X, Y, and Z.”

It feels equally weird to consider — aloud — your social wealth.  Inside your brain, sure.  But admitting whether or not you’re socially wealthy?  It turns out that it’s a hard thing to say aloud without sounding like you’re bragging or overstating.

And then the flip side is that unlike your salary, which is likely unlisted unless you hold a certain position, your social connections are numerically there for everyone else to see.  At the very least, we can see follower counts and friend counts.  We can see who has hundreds of career connections on LinkedIn, and who hasn’t organized their connections in those public spaces.

I don’t agree with many of Brooks’ assertions — I actually think that heavy internet users are just as likely to be socially rich offline and their online behaviour is a mirror of how they move through the brick-and-mortar world — though I did agree with this:

Such big subjects didn’t come up in the Zuckerberg hearings because socially wealthy and socially poor people experience Facebook differently and perceive reality and social problems differently.

His point: people in public office by default tend to meet and know a lot of people due to their position.  They are socially rich.  They are there representing people who may be socially poor, but they have no clue how the other side processes the social site.

Unlike Brooks, I don’t think the problem is just online.  I think the problem is offline, too.  And that the socially poor have always existed and been swept under the mental rug by the socially wealthy because they cannot imagine a world where people do not have friendships, or — at the very least — connections.

Because like monetary poverty, there is also a wide range to social poverty.  You don’t have to be friend-savvy or friend-rich to have a basic network; to live above the social poverty line.  You just need to have basic connections; people you can call on to help you out or give support.  Your friends, family, community, coworkers; they’re all part of that network; and it exists offline just as much as it exists online.  But Brooks is distinguishing between those who live near the social poverty line and the social 1%.  That wide discrepancy between those who move through the social world with ease, and those that struggle with connections.

I rarely agree with Brooks, and this is just one more case of that, but the topic itself — social wealth — definitely resonated with me.  It made me take a long hard look at my connections and where I fall on the social wealth continuum.