The Taste of Sanity

So I'm wondering today if everything I do is viewed through the bipolar lens, or if I'm just a regular guy that has bipolar moments in his life.

Comments?

*cricket sounds*

Okay.  How about we talk about Jersey Shore?

*insert din here*

I've looked back, not today, but before, at some of my posts and re-read them, with the thought of "I wrote this while I was manic," or "I wrote this while I was really depressed."  And I'm actually surprised by the writing.  It seems that through all the disabling feelings of depression and mania, I'm able to have a voice.  And it comes through regardless of how I'm feeling when I'm writing.  So it seems.

So press on, and do the work, regardless of how you feel.  It will show when you're feeling better.  There are some speedbumps and potholes, sure, but the over-arching theme of the work will come through, radiantly.

Or maybe I'm just manic now.

No.  I am hungry though.  So maybe that distracts and distorts my experience.  Do they have a pill for hunger yet?  Something I can take with my daily medication so I don't have to bother with all of this chronic eating?

Just kidding, of course.  I don't want to rid myself of the pleasure of eating.  But I do want to slow down and get a hold of myself when it comes to eating.  I could stand to not gain any more weight.  I'll be flirting with the 300lbs. mile marker if I keep on like I've been.

I really can't afford to eat the way that I have been.  Grabbing meals conveniently (read "fast food") just isn't convenient long term.  I can't afford it financially or physically.  And I pay a mental price, too.  Having a good nutritious diet is good medicine.

So for lunch today, I'm going to go out for Chinese food.

Hmm. 

What was I talking about?

Pass the Stuffing, Please

Tell about family traditions: Christmas, birthdays, graduations, Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, weddings.

For those keeping score at home, this is the #3 journal jar prompt left, soon to be not a part of the jar anymore.  Okay, so it's out of the jar already.

Family traditions most of the time involve or revolve around food.  Perhaps I'll take them one at a time.

Christmas involved my parents and my sister and me talking ourselves into being able to open one gift on Christmas Eve in the mid to late '70's.  This became our tradition.  I think it was instituted to ease some of the anticipation of Christmas morning, and to spread the celebration out a bit.  I don't know, maybe we just couldn't wait any longer.  We traditionally would go and get a tree-- something we do with my sister's boys now.  I wrote about that here.  And there are even pictures there, and other links to other musings about Christmas.  There is quite a tradition of making cookies-- first just decorating sugar cookies with all sorts of colorful sprinkles as young kids, and now with my wife and her family all baking up numerous treats of all different types at the annual cookie party competition that renders the family awash in cookies for the entirety of the holiday season.  And Christmas morning sausage bread has become a favorite new tradition at the Kolb Christmas.  It can hardly come out of the oven fast enough.

Birthdays are usually a time to gather and eat.  Cake, ice cream, pie, cookies, candy, plus entire meals are planned.  Many times a "favorite meal" is prepared at the request of the person celebrating his or her birthday.  I can remember requesting tamale pie more than once for my special occasion.  With a growing family, we've taken to combining celebrations at times, making one 'great' meal for two or more celebrants.  It's nearly impossible to get through a week in June without tripping over a few birthdays in our family.

Graduations are much the same as birthdays.  There's gotta be a feast.  More often these celebrations take advantage of kinder weather conditions and occur in the outdoors.  They also often involved grilled meat and wine and or beer.  And maybe a pen and pencil set.  Nowadays, gift cards seem to be the traditional gift for graduation.  But when I graduated 8th grade, it was pen and pencil set in a velvet lined carrying case.  Times change.

Fourth of July is most definitely a "cookout" sort of holiday.  The traditional menu comes to mind-- mom's macaroni salad and baked beans, paired with barbecued chicken and garlic bread.  Pardon me while I wipe the drool from my mouth.  Barbequed steak with sauteed mushrooms and gorganzola cheese crumbles is a favorite, served with red wines and grilled or broiled vegetables like asparagus or potato wedges.  A given regular at this time of year-- Suzy's flag dishes go into the rotation, usually around her birthday, Flag Day.  And baseball on the radio-- we love our SF Giants announcers, who are entertaining regardless of how the game is going.

Halloween traditions have really changed in the past ten years or so.  It used to be that we'd get all geeked about a costume party, but we've really calmed our jets on that one.  I kind of lament the fact that the house decorating goes so overboard, so that it just looks like Christmas in black and orange.  We still hand out candy, but my heart hasn't been in it these last few years.  Maybe something will change, but I just don't get the hype right now. 

Thanksgiving is definitely an eating holiday.  The tradition involves a slew of tried and true favorites-- the turkey, oven roasted, stuffed with the special stuffing, and paired with all the favorite side dishes, like mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, and olives.  And then of course there's the pumpkin dessert, usually pie but increasingly frequent is the cheescake.  And the whipped topping, of course.  But just as important is the leftover turkey and stuffing sandwich on sourdough, made the next day.  That's a great tradition.

Weddings?  Well, lots of people, a little dancing maybe, plenty of wine and beer, and no doubt food.  Got one coming up next year, and the bride is still shopping for her dress right now.  But traditions merit that family will gather, converse, and sometimes bicker, but more often laugh.  But again, eating will be a big part of things.

Now I'm hungry.

A Couple Delicious Family Recipes

Getting down to the nitty gritty.  Start the countdown on the journal jar.  Here goes #5...

What is your favorite food?  When you cook for my family, what do you enjoy makinng most?

Interesting.  I wonder who wrote that.  And if I've ever cooked for his or her family.  I don't think my mom wrote all of these prompts in the journal jar, but I could be wrong.  So there's a mystery person out there, that I've secretly been cooking for before, and that I enjoyed cooking for-- so much in fact that there are a series of events from which I should choose a favorite?  Or maybe it's just a typo.  Hmm.  Yeah-- when I cook for my family, when you cook for your family...  Alright, enough.

My favorite food is undoubtedly pizza.  I love pizza.  Pizza, pizza, pizza.  Mushroom and olive, sausage and green pepper, sausage and pepperoni, ham and pineapple, chicken and garlic... all so good.

But when I cook for some other person's family...

No.  When I cook for my family, I enjoy making recipes with the pressure cooker.  Two of my favorite recipes involve the pressure cooker--  homemade shredded beef burritos and stuffed artichokes.

Hmm.  Those two don't sound so good together.  But they're delicious on their own.

The key to the burritos is the stew meat.  You place some stew meat-- chunks of beef-- in the pressure cooker with some water, maybe a little white wine, and close it up.  Cook it on medium heat (with the pressure cooker rocker valve a-rockin' away) for about 25 minutes, until the meat is tender and stringy.  Then you can add spices and refried beans to get your base substance for the burrito, and then assemble as you like into a warm tortilla with cheese, olives, sour cream, guacamole, onions, tomatoes, lettuce, hot sauce, salsa... but remember you gotta wrap that tortilla around all the goodies, so don't over stuff!  Fun to prep all the fixin's and assemble at a burrito bar sort of thing.

The artichokes are yummy and quite healthy.  You cut the tops off of the 'chokes and spoon into the leaves a mixture of breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese.  Then you place them in the bottom  of the pressure cooker with about a quarter inch of water.  We've been adding a dollop  of flax seed oil onto each 'choke so the edges of the leaves don't singe.  I also like to add a little white wine to the mix--  pour a little over each 'choke.  Then cook 'em for about 25 minutes, until the leaves are spread out and easily peeled off.  Then you just eat your way down to the heart-- you've gotta dig it out of a bit of spiney stuff, once the leaves get too small and tender to eat, but man, it's worth the work.  The heart is a wonderful delicacy, salt and peppered to taste.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

What?  Like you haven't noticed it yet?  I've been humming Christmas tunes already, dreaming in egg nog and pine scented happiness.  So why not just roll with it?  Screw Halloween.  And like Lewis Black says, Thanksgiving is just Christmas Halftime.

So speaketh the Journal Jar.

Describe getting a Christmas tree as a child, when did you put it up and decorate it?

I think I've already blogged about our jaunts to the hills to visit the Christmas tree farms.  We even passed the tradition on to our nephews, driving them up there several different Christmas seasons to select a tree and bring it home for decorating.  See Christmas in February for some o' dat.  For now, though, how about a picture?  To the left, to the left...

We've borrowed my dad's truck and driven up into the Santa Cruz mountains with the boys, playing the Beatles and singing as we snaked through the hills on the winding roads.  The weather hasn't always been very kind to us, but we got out there and got a tree, nothing stopped us.  One year it was windy and raining and we took a wrong turn and ended up in the back access road, kind of four-wheeling our way until we could find our way back to the tree lot.  We made it back, and little Michael exclaimed "That was COOL!"  And you know what, it really was.

Once we'd get home I'd set to work cutting the bottom of the tree to prep it for the stand, and Suzy would get the boys started unpacking the tree decorations and such.  Christmas music would be played on the stereo, and once I got the lights on it was a decorating free-for-all.  Pretty much ended up with all the decorations hanging on the front of the tree, but that was fine.  It was perfect that way.

We even had fun having the nephews overnight before we'd go to get the tree in the morning.  There's always great food on our get-togethers-- monkey bread, Psycho Donuts, mac-and-cheese, and of course, grapes.  Suzy can elaborate on the food angle better than I can.  Maybe she will.  All I know is, we don't go hungry.

And we do hot chocolate.  I think we've even made coffee for them (decaf), with lots of cream and sugar, of course.

But none of this would have happened, potentially, if it hadn't been for my parents taking my sister and I to the hills to cut down our own Christmas tree when we were young.  I remember getting the tree about a week before Christmas and listening to Christmas music while we untangled the lights, drank hot chocolate, and hung all the decorations with care.  Each decoration brought back a memory, and we came to look forward to unearthing each one from the tissue paper and boxes of all our prized Christmas stuff.  My aunt Bernice used to make lovely bread dough ornaments that she sculpted and hand painted.  They were some of our favorite things and we treasured them as if they were worth more than their weight in gold.  Many of them came to an untimely end because we stored them in the attic of our garage, and during the summer in the Central Valley everything was cooked at well over one-hundred degrees.  We lost a lot of keepsakes to the summer heat, discovering the melted mess when we went to decorate for Christmas that year.  It was sad, but we didn't fret for long.  But I think I'm still grieving the loss of some of the things.  Like the marshmallow ball I had made as a kid.  What a sticky mess it became.  But it had been beautiful, and I had made it.  It's often hard to say goodbye...

Anyway, I now have an even greater appreciation for my parents taking us out like they did.  As a kid it was great fun to hike around in the hills, looking at all the trees, breathing the brisk air.  As an adult-- it's a lot of work!  But so worth it.  The kids love it, and hopefully they'll have fond memories of it when they are adults, just like I do.  And maybe they'll even want to take me up into the hills and run me around in my old age.

Maybe.  Better get in shape just in case.

I Want To Ride My Bicycle

"I wouldn't call myself a proponent of [internal combustion engines], I just believe that if something works (cost effectively), keep doing it. I'm all for alternative fuels and sources of energy/power it's just that none that I've dealt with or read about are cost effective. I hope this changes someday, but for now fossil fuels are what makes the world go around as they say."

" You do have a valid point-- I would be the first to break the exhaust line in the vehicle if it pointed inside ...I truly believe that our need for something better ,faster and fancier has lead us to the point that the environment has been critically damaged and we have caused ourselves illness because of it."

"Another idea: Instead of moving forward, you can move backward. There are many answers around us, or things from our past, that still have great value today. We don't have to innovate new things. Think of the bicycle, for example. When we say we need to innovate, we are really saying "we need our scientists to create solutions," which makes us helpless. If we say instead, "what has already proven to work and how can I use that?", we allow ourselves to find our own solutions. It's empowering!"
 

"How many could really go back to old world ways of life? Would you give up all modern technology?  I personally could live in the country near woods and water ...ride horses down the road... but that is not the world we live in...we live in the days [where having] something more than your neighbor makes you better...who is to say a new technology in the auto/transportation industry would not add yet another chemical that could cause cancer?  [I'm] just a simple girl that would love to go back to basics and stop thinking about competing in this modern world of new and more is better."

Man, good discussion, folks.  Yes, bikes are a good alternative, but their application is limited mostly to individual use.  That is to say, not many trucking companies are gonna be breaking out the bikes to get their work done.  I doubt FedEx has a bike fleet.  Should they?  Maybe, but it wouldn't solve our energy problems.  We need more innovation because there are better answers out there.  The fact that we are discussing this acknowledges that there is an issue.  We need to innovate our thinking.  And that's not to say that we need to create something new with new chemicals and further manufacturing that degrades the environment even further.  We can work along with nature.  Nature has been doing things in ways that are sustainable, waste-free, and beneficial to all life for billions of years (depending on your beliefs about it...) Mimicking what nature already does successfully is the objective of the work of people like Janine Benyus.  By observing what nature does to survive, cooperate with other species, and democratically exist in a competitive environment, we can find the models and the practical applications to bring forth and apply to our reality.  We can teach ourselves to live in ways that are truly in balance with our environment.  And right now, our culture is one that is out of balance and in danger of destroying itself.


So in a sense, I'm saying yes to looking backward-- but farther back than the bicycle.  Let's go back to finding our priorities.  To making the conditions conducive to life.  To growing our own food instead of having it trucked or flown in from all elsewheres of the world.  We need to localize our food production, get to know our local farmers.  But now I'm getting out there on another tangent.  Forgive me that.  I speak what comes to mind.  But living with organic foods grown within walking distance from your home would do a lot to combat some of these issues of environment that we're talking about.  


The issue is much more complicated than I've been able to outline here, but I'm trying.  And that is more than we are wont to do these days, as we discuss certain subjects with only the choir, if you know what I mean.  I would love for this to grow into something greater than I have even imagined yet.  But that is up to you, dear reader.  We've got work to do, for sure.  What say we Keep On Truckin'?