Three things you can’t make yourself:

• Happy
• Sleep
• Thin

I’m doing a Dry April. Observation so far: it’s boring waiting for food to come without enjoying a drink. Don’t tell me to order something non-alcoholic; I hate drinking calories. I think of beer almost like a foodstuff. I like the complexity of wine. Never cared for most cocktails. Not interested in having a root beer or mocktail out of boredom. Also, I think beer and wine complement food, whereas sugary drinks don’t. (Hence not into cocktails.) Will just try harder to make conversation.

Cupboard #1. Found an unopened bag of popping corn bought from the boy scouts years ago. I never make popcorn. Yet I’m embarrassed to say I’ve been known to buy $7 bags of gourmet organic local pre-popped popcorn in fun flavors. Anyway I said I should really make popcorn some time. Then I said dude it’s Saturday afternoon, make some damn popcorn. I looked up online how to make popcorn. I made it. It was delicious. I mean, addictively delicious. I said, why do I never make popcorn? It takes almost no time. It’s relatively healthy. It’s relatively cheap. I mean it’s effectively free once you’ve bought it from the boy scouts and it’s sitting in your cupboard.

This is just one out of three shelves, representing a little taste of my kitchen:

	Cupboard, Food Items	In progress
1	Hannaford diet drink mix, peach tea, unopened
3	Hannaford diet drink mix, raspberry lemonade, packets
1	Crystal Lite, pink lemonade, packet
1	Non-fat dry milk powder, bag, 8 quarts worth	x
1	Dried lentils, bag
1	Dried red kidney beans, bag
1	Dried black-eyed peas, bag
1	Grits, bag	x
1	Popping corn, bag
1	Vitamin C drops, bag
1	Ghirardelli baking chocolate, bar	x
1	Roasted cocoa nibs from Hawaii, bag	x
1	Dried currants, bag	x
1	Xanthan gum, bag	x
	Almond flour	x
	All-purpose flour	x
	Cake flour	x
	Vital wheat gluten	x
	Elbow macaroni	x
	Organic cane sugar	x
	Rye flakes	x

 

I somehow got it into my head to take an inventory. Of everything. In the house.

I started with the mudroom, probably the most difficult room, as it is partly full of Xopher junk, much of which I can’t identify. I am not inventorying stuff on the counter; I feel that, since it is soon destined for the basement, once my seedling trays take over the counter, it doesn’t count as mudroom inventory.

I’m never doing the basement, or Xopher’s office, as these are his domain. It was hard enough doing the shared space which is the mudroom.

We’ve got about 250 separately enumerated items in that room, that room which didn’t exist a few years ago.

The categories include:

• cleaning supplies
• items in daily use
• outerwear
• wildlife feeding
• hardware
• goat supply
• goat medicine
• goat wound care
• goat shearing equipment
• vegetation
• lighting
• miscellaneous liquids
• furnishings
• dye equipment
• biking
• stockpiled items
• uncategorized

I’ve been looking forward to this issue of Ply magazine for a long time!

For the pictures, I guess. Not sure the content is going to teach me much… from one of the first articles, “Angora goats cannot be jacketed, so vegetable matter is a given.” Really? Meaning I’ve done the impossible for years by keeping jackets on my goats on a regular basis? Amazing! I honestly have no idea what she’s talking about.

Coming along. But not tonight. Underslept and overworked.

A double whammy is when one of my heroes interviews another; such as Malcolm Gladwell interviewing Oliver Burkeman. This is a lovely interview and unusual in the welcome respect that they don’t spend all that much time asking Burkeman questions that just cause him to repeat everything I’ve already read in the book. It goes more like a therapy session. We learn that Burkeman started getting obsessed with maximizing him productivity at a very precocious age; he faults his over-anxious, get-to-the-airport-14-hours-early father. But I was like that myself, and I think some of us are just hardwired as such. When Burkeman tries to turn the tables, and prods Gladwell to talk more about how he grew up in such an opposite environment, I’m as fascinated as he is. While Burkeman’s parents said, “Just do your best,” which sent him into a tailspin thinking that he couldn’t slack off for a moment or it wasn’t his “best”… Gladwell’s easy-going parents said, “You’re bored? Good! It’s good to just drift along once and a while…” and Gladwell grew up embracing the easy-going life. But he keeps dodging the question of how he’s become so successful without that drive towards productivity – why isn’t he working at a surf shop in Bali? I’d love to know.

Large chunk of the relevant transcript follows, emphasis added by me; in these spots I particularly wonder if these people are genetically related to Xopher:

Oliver: What would be the motivation to have written all the books that you’ve written and to have created all the other content—podcasts, audiobooks, everything else—what would be the motivation to have got on to that escalator in the first place if you were just completely relaxed about your relationship to the world? 

Malcolm: I may have inherited it from my parents. I don’t think of either of my parents as being future oriented. They were people we never discussed tomorrow. We only ever discussed today. And I never think about tomorrow. Really. Not much. My most powerful memories of my parents—my father is no longer with us; my mother is very much—are of them being in the moment. 

My father would only ever talk about what he was doing, and he would almost never talk about what he intended to do. And my mother was always celebrating the thing that was happening. She’d make a fresh scone, and eat it, and then she would say something to the effect of: “At this very moment, eating this particular scone, I am insanely happy.” 

…

I’m not thinking about tomorrow. 

It’s slow going, but it’s so pretty to look at every time I pass by.

Even if it’s not supporting anyone in Kenya.

I had the idea yesterday that I should take any money I made from yarn & mohair consignment and give it to Give Directly. This will inspire me to be productive during craft time and make it all feel less pointless. But Tytania, you say, why not just give Give Directly twenty bucks a month and be done with it? It’s like walk-a-thons: why we don’t all just donate to the March of Dimes rather than making kids walk around 20 blocks for it? Because we need not just to be purposeful, to fill our moments with the illusion of purpose; because it’s a horrible, horrible thing looking into the void of meaninglessness!

So on that note, hey! Buy my yarn!