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greenstormThey say that gratitude practice is supposed to make people less materialistic but I find that's the opposite for me? So many things I appreciate are enabled by things, by the infrastructure of our society. I'm not saying I wouldn't appreciate things without that infrastructure, but so much of it brings so much ease.
For instance, my vacmop. After using the kitchen pretty hard yesterday (coming in and out through it for a week in dirty shoes, two kinds of canning, smoking some meat) I ran the machine for fifteen minutes while waiting for the last canner batch and the upstairs floor is miraculously unsticky. I cannot overstate how much better this thing is than the typical sweep-vacuum-mop or even just vacuum-then-mop protocol. There's no weird stuff that gets missed by the vacuum and moved around by the mop, as always happens when the mop is not also vacuuming, and it gets the floors a lot cleaner on a genera level (it's not good at taking off clumps of stuff that are dried on, but the majority of the surface does feel cleaner).
Also, the smoker. Ron gave it to me, he'd clogged it up with non-smoke wood pellets using it as a BBQ, and Avi fixed it. Inagural run was yesterday and it made some very tasty ribs and smoked some bacon; I still have half a bag of pellets left and I'm going to run some of my prosciuttos etc for it for a bit before setting them to dry.
Aged pork. This... sounds weird, and honestly I'm not sure how to feel about it, but pork aged even in a vaccuum bag (obviously no swelling on the bag and no discolouration or off-flavours on the meat) for even up to a couple months is really, really good. It's got depth of flavour, it's a little more tender, I can't do all my pork like this but it's worth doing some. I trim all the outside so I'd have to cut chops after the aging process is done but I do want to try some of that.
The morning ritual of corn pollination is dear to my heart.
Growing corn is as well. I'm so grateful to have effectively limitless garden space.
Chocolate the muscovy, who is a fabulous mother and one of my original animals. She's hatched a set of 10 ducklings and I'm concerned they'll get the muscovy disease and die (it was a hidden nest), but she's just such a good mother either way.
The new butcher down the next town over. They seem like they might be willing to do the kind of custom work I need, and they don't slaughter so I can have my guy over to kill, skin, and gut and then move the meat down there to have it processed. That may be the way to help me get over the last bits of the excess of pigs I have right now.
Saskatoon berry lemonade. This is a collaboration between my favourite saskatoon bush, which just drips a ton of berries so I have to pick some of them, leftover lemon juice from Avi's lemon curd, and a half-remembered recipe I saw. It's super tasty and an amazing colour. I only got 5 jars out of it, I need to make some more.
I shared a meme about thinking of the world as a set of systems to engage with, that you can't just treat it as a set of structures to behave in an authoritarian way towards but that information flowing both ways is necessary to poking and learning. A ton of people in turn shared it, and I'm glad to know so many folks around me feel that way. I feel seen.
And when I shared the meme I said: "If you want to know anything about me, know that this is fundamental: everything is a system, everything is relating to everything else, to and from. If you're expecting to have information and effect go only one way, you will not achieve your ends and will probably mess a lot of things up in the process of failing."
Cool morning air through the window is so lovely, as is sweet tea.
I'm looking forward to a conversation with my usual people. I've had visitors so continuously that I think part of my feeling of lonelines and destabilization is just that I haven't made the time on my end to talk to folks like I normally do. That leads to me feeling adrift and unmoored and isn't about anything they've done, really (though it may be about us not being able to make time to talk when we're both busy because we don't coordinate schedules, but that's not for here or now).
It will be so nice to have some time alone with the garden.
This coming week has a bit of a social day at work on the jetboat. It'll be a long long day, we leave at 5:45, but I get to go up to the other end of the lake which I've never done before.
I have learned so much about my PDA this week. It's amazing to see it in action and know it for what it is.
A coworker I spent a lot of time with last summer came and said hi when he saw me at the grocery store yesterday. I'd recently had a dream about him, it was good to see him. Maybe I should follow up with a social visit? With my coworker from the last job who hosted hot pot night too, I think.
The salmon are in the creek that runs through downtown. It's early, I think. Salmon are magic, especially up here. Imagine that journey! Most of my friends won't make the effort to drive or fly it, let alone swim up 1000km of river rapids. (laughs)
I'm also just so glad to be sitting here with Threshold in this quiet morning, guest asleep, just me and the cool air and bird sounds coming in through the window.
And now I get to get some snuggles and get back to sleep for a bit before driving Avi to the airport. Both sleep and snuggles sound nice.
For instance, my vacmop. After using the kitchen pretty hard yesterday (coming in and out through it for a week in dirty shoes, two kinds of canning, smoking some meat) I ran the machine for fifteen minutes while waiting for the last canner batch and the upstairs floor is miraculously unsticky. I cannot overstate how much better this thing is than the typical sweep-vacuum-mop or even just vacuum-then-mop protocol. There's no weird stuff that gets missed by the vacuum and moved around by the mop, as always happens when the mop is not also vacuuming, and it gets the floors a lot cleaner on a genera level (it's not good at taking off clumps of stuff that are dried on, but the majority of the surface does feel cleaner).
Also, the smoker. Ron gave it to me, he'd clogged it up with non-smoke wood pellets using it as a BBQ, and Avi fixed it. Inagural run was yesterday and it made some very tasty ribs and smoked some bacon; I still have half a bag of pellets left and I'm going to run some of my prosciuttos etc for it for a bit before setting them to dry.
Aged pork. This... sounds weird, and honestly I'm not sure how to feel about it, but pork aged even in a vaccuum bag (obviously no swelling on the bag and no discolouration or off-flavours on the meat) for even up to a couple months is really, really good. It's got depth of flavour, it's a little more tender, I can't do all my pork like this but it's worth doing some. I trim all the outside so I'd have to cut chops after the aging process is done but I do want to try some of that.
The morning ritual of corn pollination is dear to my heart.
Growing corn is as well. I'm so grateful to have effectively limitless garden space.
Chocolate the muscovy, who is a fabulous mother and one of my original animals. She's hatched a set of 10 ducklings and I'm concerned they'll get the muscovy disease and die (it was a hidden nest), but she's just such a good mother either way.
The new butcher down the next town over. They seem like they might be willing to do the kind of custom work I need, and they don't slaughter so I can have my guy over to kill, skin, and gut and then move the meat down there to have it processed. That may be the way to help me get over the last bits of the excess of pigs I have right now.
Saskatoon berry lemonade. This is a collaboration between my favourite saskatoon bush, which just drips a ton of berries so I have to pick some of them, leftover lemon juice from Avi's lemon curd, and a half-remembered recipe I saw. It's super tasty and an amazing colour. I only got 5 jars out of it, I need to make some more.
I shared a meme about thinking of the world as a set of systems to engage with, that you can't just treat it as a set of structures to behave in an authoritarian way towards but that information flowing both ways is necessary to poking and learning. A ton of people in turn shared it, and I'm glad to know so many folks around me feel that way. I feel seen.
"A bit from a recent conversation I want to hold onto... Back in the early 90s, I had a temp job providing IT support to an office of mostly-computer-illiterate workers, and one of the things it took me a while to understand was that they had a strong commitment to a one-way communication model where they are the agent, the computer is the tool, and they operate the tool. And in what I think of as the DOS-and-WordPerfect, pre-Macintosh model of user interfaces, that mostly worked. They had lots of post-It notes with keystroke sequences to do various tasks, and they got through their day just fine, but if something deviated from that route they were lost.
So I would get called in to "fix problems" that weren't really problems at all... the user was just lost... and I would navigate out of whatever cul-de-sac they'd gotten into and get them back to somewhere where they knew where they were, and all was fine.
And they would ask me "how to do that" and I would try to explain, but it was difficult, because we were approaching the whole system in different ways. They wanted yet another post-It note's worth of directions for what to do when in this cul-de-sac, and sometimes I could provide that, but it was not very useful. So I would ty to explain that what they needed to do was pay attention to what the machine was telling them... that this was a two-way interaction. That what I did when they called me in was basically poke the computer and see what it did, and respond to the response I got.
And they DID NOT WANT TO DO THAT. They wanted a set of commands they could issue to the tool so it would do what they wanted. They did not want to be part of an interactive human-computer system.
(In the intervening years, the idea of human-computer interaction being, well, interactive, has become much more standard, and the default level of frustration with computers has changed a lot.)
A few years later, I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the first third or so of which is basically about this distinction between engaging with the world as a collection of objects we manipulate, and engaging with the world as a collection of systems of which we are part. Pirsig talks a lot about his friend who simply refuses to engage with his motorcycle as part of a system that includes the driver, and how that results in a lack of harmonious motorcycling flow.
And that really resonated with me, because I am absolutely this way with machinery. I become frustrated with it quickly and I don't know what to do, and when I ask for help I quickly reach the point of stepping away and letting my helper just do the thing, because they are in conversation with the machine and I... I am not. Whether because I don't speak the language, or because I'm just not listening, or I dunno what, I'm just not.
When my mom first met my dog, my mom was really astonished to observe that the dog had opinions, preferences, desires, a personality. This puzzled her; she didn't know what to make of it. Thinking about it now, I think it's the same kind of disconnect... she was not willing, or perhaps not able, to enter into an inter-agent dialogue with the dog.
So I guess what I'm getting at here is the distinction between agent-agent interactions, and agent-tool interactions.
And from this perspective, a lot of the communications breakdowns in my life seem to come from people treating agents as tools. Which I suppose can also be described as breakdowns coming from people insisting on being treated as agents, depending on what we center/endorse/normalize.
I'm thinking about this now in the context of "nobody wants to work anymore," and how people talk about work. I've been privileged for most of my life to do jobs where my management interacts me like an agent, not a tool. And generally speaking that is a characteristic of "senior positions," and a big part of why I come off as uncooperative and not-fit-to-purpose to some people for the exact same behaviors that make me attractive to others.
I feel like I'm orbiting around the outer layers of something I don't yet understand, having to do with creating systems in which we are encouraged to treat people like agents vs tools, and with how that distinction gets signalled and understood, and with city-parl vs small-town-parl, and with hierarchical vs cooperative interactions.
Right now I can't get it to focus beyond "evil is treating people as things," to quote Granny Weatherwax. But, well, OK. Capturing the initial flailing around is part of the process. So, here we are."
And when I shared the meme I said: "If you want to know anything about me, know that this is fundamental: everything is a system, everything is relating to everything else, to and from. If you're expecting to have information and effect go only one way, you will not achieve your ends and will probably mess a lot of things up in the process of failing."
Cool morning air through the window is so lovely, as is sweet tea.
I'm looking forward to a conversation with my usual people. I've had visitors so continuously that I think part of my feeling of lonelines and destabilization is just that I haven't made the time on my end to talk to folks like I normally do. That leads to me feeling adrift and unmoored and isn't about anything they've done, really (though it may be about us not being able to make time to talk when we're both busy because we don't coordinate schedules, but that's not for here or now).
It will be so nice to have some time alone with the garden.
This coming week has a bit of a social day at work on the jetboat. It'll be a long long day, we leave at 5:45, but I get to go up to the other end of the lake which I've never done before.
I have learned so much about my PDA this week. It's amazing to see it in action and know it for what it is.
A coworker I spent a lot of time with last summer came and said hi when he saw me at the grocery store yesterday. I'd recently had a dream about him, it was good to see him. Maybe I should follow up with a social visit? With my coworker from the last job who hosted hot pot night too, I think.
The salmon are in the creek that runs through downtown. It's early, I think. Salmon are magic, especially up here. Imagine that journey! Most of my friends won't make the effort to drive or fly it, let alone swim up 1000km of river rapids. (laughs)
I'm also just so glad to be sitting here with Threshold in this quiet morning, guest asleep, just me and the cool air and bird sounds coming in through the window.
And now I get to get some snuggles and get back to sleep for a bit before driving Avi to the airport. Both sleep and snuggles sound nice.
