Interests, Curiosities, and Hobbies

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

05: Capitalism

As soon as I decided that I was going to let other people into my life and have them partake of my resources, I failed at capitalism. This is offered not simply as a trite observation or a tautology, but as a condemnation of the system itself, because capitalism as a system is about hoarding and always trying to have your resources be used in a way that produces advantage to you, and usually, it demands that the advantage be financial in some manner. The person with the biggest bank account wins at capitalism, and therefore it can't be anything other than the height of folly to willingly share your resources with other people without expectation of being repaid or otherwise reimbursed for such a thing.

It's why we have corporations that allow humans to evade responsibility and accountability for actions intended to reinforce greed, hoarding, and scarcity, with bad results to everyone else who is caught in this amoral situation.

If I had, instead of taking up with the idea that I might want to have companionship in my life, decided that I was only going to live alone, with my books and my poetry to protect me, then I would not have encountered so many of the expenses that I have in this world, regarding vehicles, and mortgages, and repairs, and replacements, and so many other things. I would probably have a much more comfortable retirement position, and savings, and possibly be wistfully wishing that I could afford a mortgage on a house of my own, but for the entire and complete bubbling of real estate right after the last bubble exploded. Or I might be aggravated about the rent and the presence of all the condos driving the rent up further. Who knows. It certainly would seem like I would be in a far better position with regard to capital and the use thereof if I hadn't embarked upon the choices that I did.

It's possible I could have some of those things to myself at this point if I hadn't made the choices that I did about trying to make a bad relationship work, because I wanted to make it work and ignored signs that it wasn't doing so. And because, as the entries so far have hinted at, I'm not exactly brimming with self-confidence in any domain outside of a space that I have both expertise and a firm understanding of the problem. Except, I guess, in some places where I have the confidence of a mediocre white man and don't notice that I'm outside of my expertise. So, I made bad choices and then continued to suffer from them for a significant amount of time. My failures at capitalism are numerous.

But even before that point, I'd definitely been failing at capitalism before. I decided to go into a profession that requires graduate schooling and that doesn't pay for shit, because it's a profession that's been heavily feminized and therefore discounted and devalued. I took on significant debt for something that wasn't going to give me great returns from it. (And that has an entire awe section about how crass it is to expect to be properly compensated for the job that you do, because if you are in it for money, then you lack the passion and devotion to the profession and should go somewhere else.)

Even before that, of course, I was also making bad decisions at capitalism, choosing to go to the more expensive and prestigious university that had the graduate school I eventually wanted to go to, rather than taking the scholarship offer to a different school for my undergraduate experience and then to go into graduate school with the grades from there and have saved significant money along the way.

It's not hard to set my life up, at least from a certain point, as a series of failures of capitalism and making poor decisions about money and therefore, if I am in a situation where money is tight, stretched, or otherwise a source of stress for me, then it's completely my fault because I made poor decisions. This is the mode that I generally operate on in my life, because I've also internalized the belief that I am the only thing I can control and change in my life, and used it as a way of making sure that I blame myself for everything that happens that may be negative. Other people may have contributed to this, and some of them may, to outside observers, hold significant or even primary responsibility for the situation, but that's not usually something that I will admit to, because to do so would be to let go of the belief that I have total and complete control over my situation and therefore I can simply will myself into a better situation. This is the curse of being brought up in a society that believes I, by privilege of my assigned gender at birth and the membership I have in whiteness, should be the unquestioned ruler of everything around me that is neither my assigned gender at birth and/or those who are not permitted entry into whiteness. It then encourages me, through media accounts, advertisements, and other means to blame those people who are not me and not part of my group as the cause of my unhappiness and lack of comfort. From there, I'm supposed to either vote in politicians who promise to hurt them for having the gall to try and exist or take some part of the resource share that is rightfully mine or to engage in direct action to dominate, control, or remove resources from those other people who have been taking from me through their mere act of existence, or who have been "taking" from me because my government is redistributing my tax dollars to the "undeserving," instead of refunding them back to me to that I can use them more effectively and efficiently on myself.

The choices that I have made that are not according to the dictates of capitalism have had many other benefits for me, of course. As, presumably, they have for you. The decision to go to the more expensive university also came with several years of participation in campus life, including the marching band (where my face was on national television for a brief moment as I marched in a parade), intramural sport and refereeing such sport, which may have further cemented my interesting in the Olympic program, and in several of the things that are charmingly referred to as "non revenue-generating sports" that are equally as excellent to watch, if you have the opportunity), and it likely expedited the process of acceptance into graduate school (as well as giving me the opportunity to understand whether I could function at that level) by making it so that the reviewers were comparing the grades of their own institution, rather than trying to decide whether the other institution has sufficient academic rigor for them to believe that my good grades really do mean that I can hack it at that level.

Choosing the profession that I have, even knowing that the money wouldn't be great, has resulted, all the same, in plenty of opportunities for my mental health to stay good (as well as several opportunities for it to be regularly trashed). Doing programming for tinies is still a thing to look forward to and enjoy. Helping people find things and showing them that we have access to the materials they're interested in is helpful, and sometimes there's a fair amount of appreciation expressed for it. There's something satisfying about being able to help people work through their various issues regarding technology and using it for their purposes, even if there's also sometimes a fair amount of frustration expressed at various entities because they made things obtuse, or because they dumped a device on someone, made some statement about it being intuitive and not needing any learning, and then skipped town instead of supporting the device they had just thrust on someone. Sometimes we get back a little bit of our teens who have gone on to other situations and parts of their lives, and they come back and appreciate what we were trying to do with them, now that they're adults who have to deal with the life outside. And there are always people who use the resources and appreciate that we're still here, even as they are themselves confronting capitalism's failures of them. And doing the work I've done has had me met all kinds of wonderful people and attempt all kinds of things that I might not otherwise do, like practicing my art skills, or penning articles for publication, or presenting at various conferences about the intersections of my profession and the professions and careers of others. Often in a "we should be able to work better together" way, but that working together is often curtailed by lack of resources and by the often aggravating, but very true assertion that a public library that has to be heavily involved in making sure people have basic needs met is not able to sustain more complex and more interesting programming for the majority of their users. (Much as it would be cool to do some of those things.)

The decisions I have made about relationships and about wanting human companionship in my life have resulted in having a house that I can then use to help other people have a house and companionship in their lives. And in pets, who are often yell, but routinely are also love. They have proven to me that there are friends that I still had outside of a bad relationship, and that the worst things that I think about myself are often not as terrible as I might otherwise believe they are, or that what I think about myself is the shadow on the wall being cast by something much smaller and less terrible.

And that some things are forgivable. And that others can be worked through, or around, or with, in a way that results in the thing getting done, instead of a way that results in the thing getting done and me feeling terrible about my failure to be a normal human being who can do all the things that normal human beings do without needing additional assistance from outside sources. Or without building structures and systems of reminders and pathways so that whatever the last mistake is, it won't be made again, making sure that all the mistakes of the future are novel ones. So long, of course, as the system performs flawlessly and I remember to engage it at every juncture that I'm supposed to.

Having other people around can mean articulating to them the secret fears that you have, or the ways that things used to go in other situations, so that they understand why you are expecting them to do one thing, or that you want them to do one thing, because if they do that thing, that will signal to you that there are no further things that will be sprung upon you later.

And, despite all of those things that I have done capitalism wrong with…I keep surviving. I keep finding ways to make the money work, even if it makes me fret a lot about whether or not the whole enterprise is going to hold together long enough to succeed. To me, this seems like standard operations, but to others, it might suggest that there's some sort of financial wizardry involved in here, to keep rolling with life and still managing to stay afloat, even with all the things that have been in my way. To me, it's mostly just persistence and sometimes a fair amount of denying myself anything that might be fun.

The persistence part is probably to good one. The long bouts of self-denial, probably not. But, there's another way in which I'm failing at capitalism, by not choosing to extend myself out to as far on the margins as I can, either in hope of a great payoff or because money is meant for my happiness, and so I should spend it profligately.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

04: Repair

I tried very hard not to absorb any of the things my father was trying to teach me about tool use and how to approach problems in logical ways, and how I might understand things about electrical circuits and the ways that things were constructed (or deconstructed). Often because those learning experiences forced on me were at times where I wanted to do something else, or when I wanted something to be done, instead of learning all the process behind it and then having to do the thing anyway, and to work through all the problems that would inevitably crop up while I tried to do things. I would rather have been using my skills to solve game puzzles instead of having to help out with real-world ones. These were also supposed to be bonding exercises or other opportunities for father-child interaction outside of playing board or card games together, and in the way of most children, I was not necessarily interested in having my father interested in the same kinds of things I was getting interested in, especially the ones that I was studying on my own and that I knew he would neither approve of nor be interested in learning anything about to have discussions with. (This general rebellion was supplemented with actual knowledge and experience on these matters, so it wasn't just that I wanted my privacy, it was that I knew conversational attempts would be impossible regarding them.)

To my eternal annoyance, not only did I learn things from my father about tool usage, repair, and how to diagnose and approach problems, they turned out to be useful. Especially when I became the class of person designated "homeowner." Because now I had situations where a thing needed a screw tightened, or a fixture replaced, or a piece of wood cut, or objects hung, or holes drilled, and so forth. The tool kit that I bought for myself when I became an independent being with an apartment of their own has followed me everywhere I have gone since then, and while it's been supplemented by a small number of power tools over time to assist with specific tasks, like carving up things or more firmly ensuring the screws are put into the right places, I have at least managed not to invest in some kind of handyman cave of my own. Because I still don't like doing those various things, even if I know how to do them, and I will end up doing them because I know how to do them. And I did this throughout the relationship that hurt me, and beyond that time.

It's not that I dislike doing various projects, like pulling up carpet and the tack blocks under them, or destroying a closet so that the people building the moat can get to everywhere, or hanging rails, brackets, and shelves to make a very neat book storage space, so much as I dislike doing the work of the projects themselves, and there's always an annoyance factor in there because doing projects inevitably reveals that some other tidbit of information from my father did, in fact, lodge in my brain, and it is now useful to me at this point. "Thanks, Pops." That's the kind of thing that lets me understand when a particular wire is still hot, even though the power to that box is supposedly turned off, and how to carve up large-sized bits of debris into things that will actually fit in containers, and how to use lawnmowers and trimmers, and many things. If I were better at capitalism, I'd probably be paying other people to do some of the things that are annoying and necessary, but I'm still stacked several deep in the "these things are expensive and necessary, so they're being financed" department. At this rate, I doubt I will have a situation in my life where I'm not making payments on something. But that's for a different entry.

I've picked up a new skill this year. It's not something that I think I'm great at, but it is something that I'm getting practiced at. You see, one of the things I did treat myself with were socks in my size that have things like cats in sweaters, or red pandas, or the Duck Hunt birds and dog on them. I wear them to work and try to keep them cycled so that I'm only wearing one pair for one day a week, and then laundering them. Well, the first set I bought has begun starting to develop holes in them simply from the years of use that I've put on them, and rather than discard the socks and buy new ones, I got taught how to use my needle and thread and do some re-weaving of the socks in the places that had developed holes. (It's nice to have someone with expertise in the thing you are trying to learn to guide and make suggestions as things go along.) Many of the same principles apply to other pieces of cloth that need to be rejoined to each other, although so far, the technique that I've learned tends to produce puckering, scarring, or other parts on the clothes that are of a different texture than the original. The socks are still wearable, and reasonably reinforced from having been re-woven in the spots experiencing failure.

Knowledge stars being transferable to different scenarios after enough practice, and so, when my lunch pail of many years had one of the cloth pieces that were the grab points for the zipper break off, I repaired it with the needle and thread. It's shorter now for the repair, but it works just as well as it did when it was longer. I repaired a hole in a cloth case for an object that I still need to think about how to display it in a place of prominence. I did repair a shirt that had been cat-clawed, but after that was done, the suggestion was to get some embroidered patch or similar and cover the entire scar with the patch to make it artistic.

Practicing skills on broken, but mendable, objects is effective practice. After all, if it's already broken, the best thing that can happen to it is that it comes back to a repaired state. And the worst thing that can happen to it is that it stays broken, or that it becomes more broken, or that it breaks in new and exciting ways. The complete low-stakes-ness of it all once again allows me to sidestep the need to repair something to a perfect state. And it's not like anyone is going to be looking at the heels of my socks so they can critique my sewing technique. And if they are, one, we're in a situation where I've taken my shoes off, so hopefully these are people who can figure out how to offer useful suggestions rather than flat critiques, or two, someone has very much invaded my personal space to take my shoes off and complain about my socks. If it's good enough for me to wear, or to use, and I'm not actively making it worse, then it's a success. The secret to success at new things, when you are plagued with perfectionism, is to keep the expectations subterranean, so that accomplishing the thing at all is the only thing you're hoping for, and then to turn out to have done it well is a happy bonus. (Because the anxiety is always there that it's not perfect, but being able to use, wear, or otherwise demonstrate to yourself that the thing you repaired works fine can go a long way toward at least coming to a satisfaction about it.)

Like so many other things, if you ask me if I'm good at something, I'll probably tell you no, and this applies in the domains of tool use, repairing things, replacing things, handyperson matters, sewing or darning, and all the rest of the skills that I've picked up, practiced some, but haven't turned into a specialty or a professional grade of work. My amateur, hobbyist, script kiddie skills are that way because they're often just-in-time skills, or things where I've learned something for a specific purpose and not for anything else, and I don't expect that knowledge to be transferable to any other domain. (It often is.) And they stay usable because I haven't let the perfection weasels at them, or tried to make them a core part of my identity, to the point where something not coming out at a high grade of quality feels like a complete failure, even if it was a success. And so, there will be humility about the skill applied, even if it might seem like false humility or ducking a compliment (because taking a compliment means admitting to the possibility of skill, and admitting to the possibility of skill inevitably leads to attempting something that is beyond my skill and receiving criticism or ridicule for it.) This is maladaptive behavior, but you tell the child that the people making a big deal about having made a mistake are doing it for hostile reasons, yes, but this particular mistake will pale in comparison to blunders yet to come, and you'll manage to get through them, as well. Or a similar tack that is somehow supposed to help that child feel okay about making the mistake, even with all the people around them making a big deal out of it, and the young career professional feel any kind of confident that they will be able to continue in their pathway with a manager that seems incredibly poised to weaponize every mistake into a personal failing of "why can't you just?"

I'll wait. Possibly while practicing some of the repair skills I've had to pick up for my psyche, if there aren't any physical things that I want to or need to repair at that point.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

03: Chemistry

If you asked me about whether I can bake or cook, I would tell you no. If you then asked me whether I could follow a recipe, I'd tell you yes, and that I've successfully done it many times. When you point out that following recipe is literally the process of baking or cooking, I'll counter that with the idea that the sign of baking and cooking skill is somehow fixed in my head as being able to look at a basket of ingredients and understand how you could make a tasty meal with them, without the need to refer to recipe, only your own experience and technique. You can tell me that's a ridiculous standard to hold anyone to, and I'll agree with that, as well, and mention that my own head can be stubborn sometimes about what it thinks of as the baseline for being able to claim a skill. Because that kind of skill is not necessarily something that people who can follow recipes deliciously will ever develop, or necessarily desire to develop.

The domestic arts were not being taught that much in schools. There were classes with names like "life skills," which were often about learning how to balance a checkbook and keep track of your accounts, how to calculate what the additional costs of finance charges might be, including the one attached to a revolving credit account (more colloquially known as a credit card), and other skills that were meant to send us out into the world slightly less wide-eyed and terrified at the prospect that we no longer were bound to the school and would be considered, in the eyes of the law, contract or otherwise, as adults who could make life-changing decisions on our own. There were simulations about whether or not someone could live a month on the salary of the career they were thinking about going in to, which were also disguised ever so slightly as recruitment efforts to various places or career options, including the military. But at no point did I learn how to cook things while in school. I learned a little about it, using microwave technology and the conventional oven to do things like cook pot pies or make popcorn or other snack foods, but while I was a child, my stay-at-home mother handled the cooking, and while I was an undergraduate, I was on the dormitory meal plans, which covered most of my meals, and I could use some credit to have sandwiches or other such things for the one meal the dorm plan didn't cover. So, theoretically, I could avoid having to learn how to cook until I left the dormitories, and even then, I could have managed to avoid it by trading out cooking duties for other chores in the arrangements that I had while living with other college students. I didn't do that, but neither did I get much of an education in the arts of cooking and of shopping for myself. Not least because the last place I was in for graduate school had a strong infestation of ants, and those ants liked to turn up in insufficiently sealed cracker and cereal boxes. So I learned which foods not to buy because they attracted the ants to them.

Having left the tender illusions of schooling and moving myself to the Dragon Conspiracy Territory, with a job in hand, and soon, an apartment of my own, the lessons I had learned about frugality and making the dollar stretch meant that not only was I going to consider "eating out" to be a great luxury, it meant that I was going to have to cut back on the amount of already-prepared meals and foods and start using some of my spare time to cook up food that I would take for lunches to work. I had sandwich makings, and my indulgence, such that it was, was frozen pizza with a mozzarella cheese-filled outer crust, and some microwave meals for those nights when I was going to get home from work too tired to do much more than cook up that food and possibly vegetate or otherwise get caught up on the Internet's doings for the day.

(When I was in the relationship that hurt me, it was a point of pride for my ex that she did the cooking and feeding of me, and that I should not have to worry about it. Even when she was doing a fair amount of overspending the budget I vainly kept trying to set and explain to her that we had to adhere to, because my money was not infinite and I knew that if we got in the habit of overspending because she had money to draw on, it would hurt a lot when that money ran out completely. My attempts were all failures, because my ex was looking for excuses not to have to hold to limits and also told me that she believed anything other than a firm no was an invitation for her to more strongly argue her position. After telling me this, she would get unhappy and sulky when I switched to firm nos about things that I had been trying to use polite nos for. The no hadn't changed, but once she told me how to deliver it so that she would listen, that's what I used.)

However, 2dlife took, well, maybe not pity on me, but an interest, because C was skilled in the arts and was willing to teach someone who hadn't collected the necessary parts of being able to follow recipe and understand what techniques were being called for. This was meant both as skill-building and as lowering the intimidation factor toward cooking, because it's much harder to think of cooking as a daunting task when you can keep turning out delicious food by following the instructions in front of you. Under C's direction and instructional material, I made quiche. (The first one was perfect and delicious, and every quiche I made after that was chasing that first perfection. They were all still good, but they weren't exactly like the first perfect one.) I made braised chicken, and I made goulash, and stews, and I tried to make breaded, battered, and fried chicken, which didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, because while I'd made things, I hadn't made them to stick to the chunks of chicken I had as well as I wanted them to. And with each new item, I had learned new technique for preparation or cooking, to the point that by the time C was done walking me through things, I had a repertoire of things that I could make, depending on what I was in the mood for, and I could make them in sufficient quantities that they could serve as components for many different types of meals. The chicken went in lunches, but what accompanied the chicken changed throughout the week, so that I wouldn't get bored of it. And I still had the pizzas and microwave meals for variety and for those days where cooking just was not going to happen.

(Since the dishwasher in the apartment was broken, I also got very good at using the minimum number of pots and pans for these meals, because I dislike doing dishes by hand, and therefore would want to spend as little time on that as I could.)

Fast forward through the harmful relationship, and I am once again on my own and equipped with a kitchen to resume where I left off. Although by this time, C's dropped off the Internet, or at least LiveJournal, so I don't have the entries to refer back to again. What I do have, though, is the Internet itself, and so it's back to meal planning, figuring out what I want to make, and investing in a quality and sharp knife. Maki joined my repertoire of things I could make, and once again, the first one turned out beautifully, and many of the others turned out much less so. Presentation was not that important, however, because I was the one eating it, and therefore if it was delicious, it counted as a success. Shortly afterward, a long-distance relationship became a proximal one, and I returned to the more comfortable role of sous chef, doing prep work and assisting in cleanup while letting the person with confidence, skill, and practice do much of the main cooking work. My skills didn't atrophy, though, because these sessions had the same idea as C's in mind: I was learning things about how to gauge when something was done, I was handling preparation of various things, or at least the first stages of them, or being asked to watch them until they showed the signs of being done, and pretty often, I'd get the instructions on how something was done and the expectation that I would be able to turn out delicious food. And I succeeded in these matters, following recipe and instruction from someone who had the skills to look at a basket of things and figure out something delicious from them.

I'd still tell you no if you asked if I could cook, though. Even though there is one memorable instance in my cooking career where I may have shown up some people who did not have the necessary skills to prepare the food they had obtained for a gathering. Their chef had flaked on them, and so, because I was hungry and I knew how to make the food they wanted to serve, with one pan, a sharp knife, a silicone spatula, time, and spite, I made delicious food. There was definitely some incredulity that someone could just do something like that, but as someone who had trained with C's braised chicken and making C's quiche recipe, the food in question for the gathering was well within my capacity. And there were no complaints about the food that had been promised actually appearing, and being delicious.

(There is a story on my father's side of the family about one of the uncles taking over cooking and baking duties for my grandmother on that side as the cancer that eventually killed her (fuck cancer forever) made her no longer able to handle those duties. "I ain't heard no one complain," he said, when Grandma was trying to help him do things better. Being a person of sharp wit, she replied, "Are you still listening?")

As time has gone on, and other people have joined up with the household, cooking duties have been spread out and sometimes individualized, and sometimes not. I know that I've prepared the red beans and rice specialty from a housemate from recipe and direction, to excellent results, and I have been at last co-head chef for several years of the November feast and its requirements. This year, I flew solo on the November feast, and it was all delicious, and those who partook of the feast all agreed that it was delicious as well, so I suspect that means my cooking skills have significantly leveled up from what they were when I was just starting out with C, both for stunt chefery and feast chefery. I certainly have confidence at this point that I can follow recipe and turn out delicious things. (Chicken carbonara, oh, goodness, that was good, even if it was fiddly as fuck to get right.)

In the other half of chemistry class, most of what I'd learned how to do before University days were no-bakes and other items that required blending, but not necessarily baking and monitoring things until they were properly done, based on both the time that the recipe said and the eyeballing or toothpicking skills needed to ascertain when something is truly done and ready. The shutdown and shift to virtual services gave me a golden opportunity to practice skills that I had been self-conscious about (including art skills like drawing and crafting that I mentioned in the previous entry), and when I suggested to my co-presenters to try kitchen sciences with our child cohort, with the supervision of their adults, they were enthused about it. Which meant rustling up recipes for baked goods that could go from creation to full bake in approximately an hour, and then, live and in front of children and my co-presenter, actually doing the mixing, proving, rising, preparation, and baking for these objects. Shortbread first, then scones, pretzels, biscuits, pizzas, all different kinds of dough with different requirements of time, temperature, kneading, and the rest. I couldn't believe it when the shortbread came out of the oven and was delicious. I didn't believe I could do it well the first time. Some of the recipes I did a practice run with to make sure that they actually would go in the time that they claimed, and even the practice runs turned out well. As with the other things that I had made, I tried to emphasize to the children that if it was delicious, it was a success, no matter whether it looked perfect or not. Because the things I made were not uniform, perfectly-stamped objects all arranged in a row. They were different sizes, some a little looser or tighter than others, and showcased just how much of an amateur I was, and how much I was learning alongside them at doing this. But they were delicious, and the ones the kids made were delicious, as well.

I have had to learn how to adjust my spicing preferences to others' tastes, and to learn when to lean hard into spicing and when to have a lighter touch with it. But I am no longer intimidated by recipe, and the person I consider the cook in the household has been pointing out to me that I am already at the phase of making delicious food based on vaguer instructions than recipe, so I appear to be moving forward in skill and practice, so it's possible for me to make small diversions and adjustments to recipe based on the kitchen I'm in, and the taste of what I want. So, within a narrow band of possible parameters, and with instructions to hand, I can cook and bake, which is a lot more than I could do many years ago.