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Monthly archives for January 2010
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575 Words Not about Cheese
I have all these little blogging … agenda items, I guess you could say. Hmm … that sounds unnecessarily bureaucratic. No, no. What’s the word? Gah! Okay, from time to time, I think of blog-worthy … topics of discussion … while I’m driving or in the shower or what have you.
Sometimes I can’t get the thought back when I sit down to write, and I have to wonder how many War and Peaces never were because of just such lapses in memory. Then again, sometimes I remember the idea and wish I hadn’t.
Once in a great while, though, the stars align and a genuinely blog-worthy thought comes ’round again. So I’ve got a few of these … ideas strikes me as too lofty, thoughts too serious, notions too too. I’ve got a few of these things turning the transom of my mind into a flophouse.
Well, cripes. Now that I’ve built this all up, the first “thing” doesn’t even seem to fit the thorough yet concise definition of thing I laid out for myself. In any case, I will press onward.
The first you know is the name of the blog … cheese for dinner. When I relaunched and—I apologize in advance for using this word—rebranded the blog, it had been rechristened as well. I spoze I don’t owe anyone an explanation, and god knows nobody’s asked, but I feel like it’s as interesting a thing as any, so … yeah.
When I settled on cheese for dinner, I was mildly concerned that lots of folks would stumble onto the site looking for a blog about, well, about cheese. It’s not a completely outrageous scenario. As my brother was kind enough to point out, this is the top Google search result if you search for cheesefordinner.com. Go ahead. Try for yourself.
Anyway, while I can’t promise cheese will never be mentioned or that you won’t find my occasional pun … cheesy (oh!), I can attest that this is not a blog about cheese.
Yes? You in the back row.
Then what *is* the blog about?
Well, reader in the back row, that is a very good question. cheese for dinner is a searing vision of the wounds our century has inflicted on traditional masculinity. It’s positively Vonnegutesque.
If you’re wondering whether that’s a quote from Bridget Jones’s Diary, yes … yes it is. If you were not wondering that, then I won’t even dignify that with a response.
Seriously, though, the blog’s not about anything in particular, particularly cheese. All the same, I’d like to see it, in time, be about all things, or all the big things anyway. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Paper or plastic. Fries or apple pie, boxers or briefs, lions and tigers and bears! (Oh, my!)
This is just a place for me to write about what’s going on in my life, what’s going on in the great “out there” and whatever else comes to mind … a large universe of topics indeed. May it please you, I invite you back.
So, to reiterate, the blog … not about cheese.
And yet …
The inspiration for the name cheese for dinner comes from my tendency to have cheese—and cheese alone—for dinner, on nights not so unlike tonight, in fact.
What can I say? A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou. Only with cheese … and no bread. Or wine. Or, strictly speaking, thou.
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Long Night’s Journey Into Day
A few weeks ago, Time ran this cover … proclaiming the aughts “The Decade from Hell.” It’s provocative, to be sure. Unfortunately for Time Warner, it didn’t provoke me to read the article (or buy the magazine). It did get me to thinking, though, about my last ten years and just how much they, well, sucked.It rolls off the tongue easily. This sucks. That sucks. And I way overuse the word (cf. awesome). However … when I say the last decade sucked, I am—if anything—downplaying matters.
2000 through 2009 saw: separation from husband, revelation of husband’s affair, uncle’s death, aunt’s death, grandmother’s death, betrayal by business partner, other grandmother’s death, bankruptcy, divorce, annulment, grandfather’s death, ex-husband’s engagement, ex-husband’s marriage, loss of business, return to live with parents, uncle’s death, layoff, Molly’s death, year of unemployment concomitant with nervous breakdown, uncle’s death, end of serious committed relationship.
These events span the time between December 2002 and December 2009, so, to be precise, the last seven years have sucked in earnest. The previous three were more of a low-grade kind of suck.
It goes without saying that I’m far from alone in facing adversity and suffering. Clearly, too, I’m leaving out the many unambiguously good things that happened. I don’t tell you any of this to court sympathy but simply to share more about myself than I have heretofore been willing, with the idea that it might just be liberating somehow.
See, I’ve come to think of the last several years as my dark night of the soul. And while a new decade provides as convenient a bookend as any, I don’t know that my dark night is necessarily coming to a close any time soon. (In my experience, these things are unmoved by the Gregorian calendar’s invitation to orderliness.)
I do know I’ve spent the last seven years struggling to push through it—to will it to be over—hoping the latest loss would be the last, frantically trying to keep from losing my shit altogether … to no avail.
…
Five years ago today, my grandmother passed away. She was 94, and at the end her memory was quite bad. On one of my last visits she said, “Is everything okay? I feel like I should be worried about something, but I can’t remember what it is.”
It broke my fucking heart, and not because she was old or because I knew she’d be gone soon. It broke my heart because I realized something disquieting: She’d lived so much of her life in fear that even when the content of her worries escaped her, the fear remained. And so it broke my heart, for her and for me. That is my legacy. Now, I think it may be my salvation, too.
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Once in a Blue Moon: A Meditation on Auspices
Because … well … because I’m me, I’ve adopted an attitude towards this “inaugural” post that could be best described as impotent. Unable to get it up, as it were.
Verbal impotence is nothing new for me. Nothing new for anyone who writes, I guess. This time, though … this time I goaded the hobgoblins in my head. To wit, I told myself:
There’s a full moon coming up. It’s a blue moon. It’s on New Year’s Eve … the eve of a new decade. It’s the perfect conceit around which to hang this critical post.
Wait for it. I told myself:
It’s auspicious.
Okay, the title gave it away a bit. The fact remains: thoughts of auspices are to writing, as thoughts of one’s mother are to sex.
It’s not enough to hit the ball; you have to hit it out of the park. It’s not enough to get an ovation; they’ve gotta be on their feet. It’s not enough to have a blog that a few folks enjoy; you have to be the second coming of Edward R. Murrow, only funny and pretty and smarter than your cousin who got into Princeton. But I digress.
See I think an astronomical event that happens once every 19 years is genuinely momentous. Order in chaos. Beauty and science married. Then there’s New Year’s. New Year’s, New Year’s, New Year’s. All our twitchy, sweet-tart yearnings distilled into one night … one second, really.
In the past, on January 1 or thereabouts, I’ve made patently insincere New Year’s resolutions to mock this inescapable milestone. A coping mechanism, mind you. But you knew that.
Day, night, fall, spring, first tooth, first kiss, and on and on until the day we die. Self imposed or celestially so, milestones are important. We imbue them with meaning … we wave them before the gods to show we’re in charge of our own mortality, even if only its units of measure.
A Buddhist monk once shared a bit of wisdom with me. (Full disclosure: He shared it with me and several hundred people subscribed to a publicly available podcast. Nevertheless, it is germane.)
Lay down your burdens of fear and hope.
Hearing these words, I finally understand the sway of resolutions. Fear and hope are a package deal. Not bad or good, black or white … just two sides of the same coin. In order to embrace one, you have to accept the other.
So, after all this ponderous navel-gazing, when I lay down those burdens what’s my resolution?
Simple. It’s this. Me … and you, perhaps. Here.
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Name's Kirsten. I'm a splitter of hairs, a hillbilly, a rock horns devotee, an ellipses-lovin' fool, and queen of the conceptual jinx. I'm also a geek and the grateful human of littleblackdog. I do this and that and some of the other … up to and including writing this here blog.
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cheese for dinner by kirsten k. hammann is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
SuperMini by unnerkrunt and nocreativity.