I've a good head for numbers, and this one isn't too hard. I put six pounds of assorted chicken into a pot with three pounds of mirepoix, a sachet d'epis of negligable weight and volume, and two gallons -- that's eight quarts -- of water. Water is lost at almost every step: as vapour during simmering; in with the schmaltz during skimming; in the soggy mass of bones and veggies suring straining; in the cheesecloth during second-straining; and in little dribbles and spills across the counter during bagging. All the same: Bernard Clayton estimates a loss of no more than 25%, and by visual estimate I can guess we haven't gone even that high.

So how did I just put seven-and-a-half-ish quarts of stock into five 1-quart bags? I confirmed this by weight; each bag contains two and a half pounds of stock. (Water weighs, conveniently, one ounce weight per ounce volume. Neat! We can assume the dissolved poultry solids contribute fairly little to the mass.)

What the hell? Why would you make a thing called a One Quart Bag with a volume of A Quart and  a Half? Anybody? Anybody?

 But even I have my limits: today, after a woeful stretch of neglect, I logged into my dear dusty blog to discover spam adds left as blog comments! Seriously! Not only that, some comments have been left as responses to references -- which, since it isn't a true comment, I can't readily delete (I'll have to go through my host's administrative network to get the damn thing purged.) I'm deleting as many of them as I can as soon as I finish this post; leaving them up for peer review would simply let the add win, and I'm not up for that. This might be the stupidest thing I've heard of since forwarded spam chain text messages (oh yes, I kid you not!). Back me up here, people: apocalypse, or just one more nail in the coffin of America's mind?

 This blog, you see, is rapidly becoming a Food Blog. This wasn't my original intent; I was sorta planning on blogging about stuff in general. So, to try and promote ease of navigation and a healthy hobby, I've split my blog in twain.

 Right now you're reading the Not Food Blog, which I've given a couple of mildly pretentious names. I'll post here on my hobbies and my thoughts on various topics dear to me.

The main action will now be in The Chronicles of Kid Delicious. I'll post about why I chose that name pretty soon here. Kid Delicious is going to be about food, with a focus on eating it.

Right: I hope this isn't too much of a muddle. Please update your RSS feeds accordingly.

Ciao,

Ross 

It's difficult to say exactly how large a community I belong to; in America, some surveys put the number as high as 6% (roughly eighteen million). Certainly, the popularity of ADD as a diagnosis has sky-rocketed in the last 10 years, bringing it a close second to depression for both Most Diagnosed and Most Over Diagnosed. Over diagnosis has left a stigma on any diagnosis, leaving many ADDers in a state of crippling doubt, particularly when it comes to question of treatment. We're a drug-treatment county focused on silver bullets; the paradigm of treatment does not include healthy, drug free coping strategies. For many the perceived choices are drugs or life as normal.

Few people truly understand what ADD is, so I'll summarize: Attention Deficit Disorder, or ADD, is the common referential for a syndrome more properly called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or AD/HD, which then brakes into three sub-types: predominantly inattentive, predominantly hyperactive, or inattentive/hyperactive. This nomenclature is itself misleading and focused on the perspective of the observer. Commonly misunderstood to be the inability to pay attention, it would more properly be called the inability to ignore; for the ADD mind, every sensory input must be pair attention to, responded to, dealt with. A frequent cohort of this hyper-attentiveness is a mis-calibrated internal energy gauge. If we suppose that a healthy, well rested human sustained by the correct diet will have the energy level five, then his body will begin producing endorphins and hormones to artificially raise his energy level if he forces himself to function at a level of two. A healthy, well rested ADDer could easily have an actual energy level of five, but his body will mis-register it, believing it to be two, and thus will artificially stimulate him up to a perceived level of five and an actual level three above that.

It may seem counter-productive to give a hyperactive child stimulants, but it is surprisingly effective. Small doses of stimulants -- say Ritalin or Aderol -- boost the bodies energy level to five and a half or six, thus crossing the artificial production threshold at two and allowing them to function at an above-average but below-AD/HD-normal energy level. Neither Aderol nor Ritalin are focus aids; all the help comes from simply calming down.

ADD has the distinction of being a vague condition defined by tendencies. ADDers usually seem to not be able to pay attention for long, have trouble sitting still, are probably terrible sugar-fiends, and have poor impulse control. However, unless these behaviors exhibit themselves incredibly powerfully, there's really no way to say if a child is ADD or just bored silly. Maybe they're hyperactive because of ADD, but maybe its a chemical imbalance of a different kind or simply a terrible diet. An ADDer is impulsive, but so is a child whose parents never taught them to stop and think before acting. The result is an internal struggle for those of us who, essentially, recognize enough of ourselves in the description to decide we have to condition. Certainly my experience has been one of long self questioning: am I ADD, or just a failure?

 My mother wanted the best for me and so, when ADD was first brought up,  she put me on Ritalin. To be fair, it helped (a good indicator that the diagnosis was an accurate one). Due to my large size, I was given a very high dose every day until it occurred to me that I didn't have to take it any more. This turned out to coincide well with my junior year of high school (a perfect time for angst-driven traumas). I decided that I'd had enough of being medicated, quit the stuff, and triumphantly nearly flunked out of my private college prep school while my mother watched on, horrified, able to do little but try to convince me to go back on my meds and stop failing.

 I graduated from high school by sheer force of intellect, made it in to college through force of personality, and proceeded to very nearly fail my second semester there. I stayed on and flourished only by dint of two phenomenal teachers, who hauled me in to their respective offices (two meetings a slim half-hour apart), sat me down, and gave me two similar-yet-different versions of a "you need help and we want to give it to you" lecture. Never one for special treatment, I had neglected to mention to either of them my "status" as an ADDer, so I told them then, fully braced for another round of discussions roughly to the tune of "take meds, you need them to not fail."

 "My dear boy, this college employs an ADD tutor. As a student, his services are free to you. I suggest you go see him." My advisor (also my choral director, and later my undergraduate dissertation advisor) said this as though it were the most obvious solution she could see -- which, in fact, it was. I was shocked; like a boy in a bomb shelter who heard no detonation, it was only very timidly that I lowered my guard and admitted that going outside sounded like a very good idea.

It shames me to admit that I can't actually remember my ADD tutor's name; "Richard" is a fine approximation. He espoused a simply philosophy, in my mind most easily likened to architecture. One is bourn with a foundation upon which our teachers, mentors, and experiences help us to build a house. ADD people are simply starting without a level foundation; care must be taken during construction to accommodate for differences that not every builder faces. The dilemma is in the way the world raises ADD kids to be adults; that is, they are raised just like everybody else. We as American's have a hard time with the notion that "different"  does not equate to "bad." Enter drugs, which attempt a sort of retro-leveling of  the foundation. Drugs seek to allow a person whose mind operates in mode B to behave as though it operated in mode A, because mode B is considered inferior or problematic.

Richard, then, made a business of remodeling. By helping kids to learn about themselves he worked to help them develop the coping strategies and habits they needed all along to survive happily in the world they were presented with. A house built on the side of a mountain presents challenges to a builder, but in the end it is no less a house than any other -- it might even be a more interesting house, in the end. One must simply utilize different construction techniques.

(I should mention that Richard managed his eloquent instruction without ever succumbing to building analogies and I regret not being able to simply quote the man to you now.) 

In an elated phone conversation with my father I discovered that Richard made a profession of telling me the same things my father had been telling me for years.  Relax, slow down, and take clear notes; try and structure the beginning and end of each day. Make habits: wake and sleep at the same times, have rituals for each. Leave your house keys always in the same place. Make as many lists as you need too, send yourself as many emails as it takes, record as many voicemails on your own phone as you have to to remember everything you need to get done -- and get in the habit of attending to your own scribblings. Eat a high protein breakfast. Get exercise every morning.

Richard also elaborated on the ADD tendencies. "We tend to be quite intelligent," he told me, "ADD is often a sign of genius.  We're often healers, deeply sympathetic to our friends and able to give a shoulder to any who need it. That said, we usually have a very hard time in groups; we feel like we don't belong, or we get overwhelmed by the number of things happening and either shut down or misbehave. And to make life better, we're often angsty as hell and wildly self-critical, so try and go easy on yourself." To me, this read like a survey of my soul; impressed by his insight, I believed every word he had to said, immediately. I set about trying to take his advice.

It would be foolish for any ADDer to try and structure the entire day, but having a basic set of predictable elements will give enough form that some of the basic unreliability can be smoothed out. The first trick is, of course, to figure out exactly which habits a given person needs to develop -- I went through dozens of different systems before settling on the right method for my life. The second difficulty is in implementation; just because Richard's approach is drug free doesn't mean it's any more a magic bullet than a pill. A classic ADD habit is the strong start with immediate segue to non-participation; after three weeks with my shiny new habits I collapsed into a heap of forgetfulness, sleep at odd hours, and sugar-rich breakfasts.

 Richard was both kind and firm, a non-stop advocate of a "don't give up" mentality I've taken to heart. It sounds cliché, but in this kind of pursuit one must see in every failure a new opportunity for success. I fought my way to my feet and got going again. Soon I had grades to be proud of (relatively speaking) and a sleep schedule that horrified most of my peers. ("What do you mean you're going to bed? It's ten-thirty!")

This has become the way I live my life. Eventually, the habits got easier to maintain, the small failures a little easier to accept and move on from. In no sense do I mean this was easy, but I've learned the value of completing a difficult task at all. I graduated with no honors but my own sense of victory, an ample reward and one I celebrate, quietly to myself, almost a year later to the day. In a culture of uppers at breakfast and downers before bed, I rise and fall with my own rhythm, more regular and stable and some of my "normal" friends. In victory, I find peace.

Written: 11/4

Last revision: 11/19

To the south is a city of rain and mist; bifurcated by the cruciform intersection of two great rivers, it sits quietly at the waters edge and lives a healthy life, growing slowly into the hills. As cities go it's smallish, though like a small bird it has all it's parts: infrastructure (or what passes for it); governance (generally good); shopping characterized by the eclectic, second hand, and gourmet; and citizens of every size, shape, and description living in an equally diverse number of neighborhoods.

I don't live in that city any more.

I came to it young, though not for lack of trying. Proud, loud, and somewhat overweight I took Portland by storm, roaring up the highway in an expensive car and gesturing expansively at my new environs. Intoxicated by freshly realized liberties and an impending undergraduate education, I might have been half as aware as I thought I was of my own state of mind and expectations. I was there to hobnob with peers, and real peers this time, not those hypocritical trust-fundlings I had spent the last twelve years associating with. I was there to learn and grow and become and conquer over all and, in the end, win the love and acceptance of the planet Earth, be crowned its king, and go on with the remaining ninety years of my life in peace and happiness.

A good deal farther to the south is a completely different city (though it's only recently grown enough to stop ranking "town"). A city of dust and ill-advised belt buckles and boots made from animals local (cow) and not (ostrich), Albuquerque's million-or-so inhabitants go on about quiet lives full of liberal politics and spicy foods. I fled as hard and as fast as I could. I had done all my growing to date there; like a garment worn since birth, it had never actually fit me and finally started to chafe. Though safely secular, my high school was jammed with all the same people I had attended junior high, middle school, elementary school, and kindergarten with. Our social circles thoroughly inbred and our opinion of one another hopelessly mired in the embarrassing formative years between 13 and 17, we hardly new what to say to one another by the time graduation struck in early May, 2002. Ever the black sheep (at the time I favored "pariah," for it's dramatic sting), I ached for people who walked and talked and dressed and thought and loved like I did. I wanted out, and I knew where I was going. Soon, I told myself, soon.

I could feel my mother wanting me to stay; my father flat-out told me to go. So I chose for myself as best as I could at 18 and went, driving the 2000 miles north to Portland, Oregon and it's scintillating educational systems. "Reed College, here I come," I actually said to myself as I-40 took me towards Flagstaff. A cliché on wheels, I could barely be stopped.

And I wasn't for four years. Not by the day I was called into two different professors offices (the invitations to do so spaced fifteen minutes apart, the meetings already scheduled not to conflict with classes or the other persons meeting with me). Not by my grades as I struggled to cope, un-medicated, with ADD. Certainly not by two powerful, long term relationships (one of which is no longer in effect). I picked up even more momentum during a semester abroad, living in Florence, fumigating every recess of my brain with Italian culture (a process that killed off more French verb conjugations than I ever thought possible). I lost some energy the next semester in a meeting with a music professor who sat me down and, with machete like delicacy, told me he couldn't understand why I had ever thought I could be a musician. But I never stopped.

I hit graduation day running full tilt. I had survived the gauntlet of my undergraduate dissertation, including the fire storm of last-minute revisions and a laughably complex orals board, and I was ready to be done. Family cheering me on, friends wearing their mortarboards, and meals with people I barely new served only to launch my girlfriend and I at high speeds into the dizzy excitement of packing up and Moving North.

Within two weeks of graduating we were living in a pre-war apartment in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Hardwood floors below us and a lake view out the window, Seattle greeted us with what I now recognize as uncharacteristic sunny weather. The warmth was not a ruse; since arriving, I've found Seattle's charms plentiful and sincere. Statuary lurks under bridges, waiting to charm folks lost on their way to Golden Gardens. Imponderably steep hills rise out of nowhere to give cyclists the workout of their lives before flinging them down the opposite side a velocities appropriate for escaping the gravity well of our Earth.

And then there's the restaurants, who don't so much hide as conceal themselves with numbers. It takes an incredible amount of food to support four million inhabitants; thus, eateries abound, each promising different joys. Some are lackluster and disappointing, others worth twice the already unethical prices. From the ethnic groceries to the yuppie organic MegaMarts, Seattle will feed you anything, at any hour, any day you choose.

The inhabitants are more reserved, but friendly in their own way. The last time I had to meet people we were throwing ourselves at each other, hunting for our new friends in the mob. It's colder outside the bubble; I'm not used to trying to track people down. Growing a social group is like growing legs: painful, a process of years. Many people are uninteresting (to me). Others, obnoxious. Some simply lack the resolve to make dinner plans and keep them, and many don't care for the sorts of nuances I relish (is it boredom, or is it ennui?).

I found myself drifting in my new life; in almost the same manner as space ships break free from the protective grasp of terra firma, I had already fought for speed and altitude and was now drifting, only slightly decelerating, in my new habitat.

Do I live here? Strictly speaking: of course I do. I wake and sleep and do everything in between in this new Seattle of mine. Albuquerque was a garment, Portland was it's own world; Seattle is an apparatus that I still don't understand the operations of. I cannot yet produce predictable results with the set of techniques I'm accustomed to using. I've a job which provides relatively satisfactory compensation for only somewhat unsatisfactory hours. My living space is, by my standards, downright bourgeois and shared with me by a woman I love.

Recently I went back down to Portland. It teems with the bulk of my dearest friends, many of my favorite restaurants, and the best grocery store ever conceived. It wasn't my first return visit, but the first was sudden, crazed, and happened very shortly after my departure. Distance and my new life formed a lens by which to view the city anew, filtering out certain old habits and presuppositions.

I found Portland more charming and easier to navigate. It was cleaner, and for the first time I found myself genuinely impressed by how well maintained the roads are. On my first ride, every bicyclist nodded at me as they passed (a gesture I had long taken for granted and never knew I missed). I ate simple, affordable vegetarian cooking, watched the sun burn gold and rose behind the west hills, and felt with an almost tearful nostalgia just how far away from my beloved Portland I had become.

Best and worst of all were the visits with my friends. In high school I relished few people, called almost nobody friend and meant it. Equal halves my own confusion and a lack of people I liked, I arrived at Reed and made all the friends I visited that weekend. Seeing them crystallized previously unremarked qualities of my new life; specifically, the absence of my friends from it. Whether it's strictly a quality of having known them for years or the nature of the people themselves, I've known nobody like them since leaving.

I no longer live in Portland. I've neither permanent residence nor employ. All that remains of the world I used to know is the people I shared it with, most of whom still live blocks from our school. I return only to visit in intervals bracketed by my work weeks; rather than the comfortably intertwined class schedules we used to share, I now see my friends only during their breaks from their jobs.

 All the same, it's difficult not to romanticize my old home -- even to long for it. It was the epicenter of The Good Life; it rests on the map like a symbol of the intoxicating academia that was my world, the tight community in which I lived, and the bittersweet work that was my life. I walked across the Reed College campus and it tugged at me coyly, the brick edifices murmuring the praises of the Master's program I could enroll in. I did exactly what I used to: I went and walked the Library.

The Eric V. Hauser Library is a modest edifice which houses some half-million books, an archive of all the undergraduate dissertations ever written at Reed, and a warren of computes, desks, class rooms, and offices.  Referred to by connoscienti as "the Fundome," I once quasi-inhabited a desk overlooking the periodicals. Hunched over my laptop,  researching and interpreting surrealist French poetry and the music it would become, the Fundome was my epicenter on Reed Campus. Late at night, my eyes only half focused after hours of deciphering Éluard, I would take walks through the halls. Sometimes observing my pseudo-family of other students, sometimes fixing my feet with a glassy stare, I quietly circumnavigated the entire building, floor by floor, until some spark of intellect returned (or I finally took myself home). 

On this particularly half-sunny Sunday I retraced my old steps, better rested, nourished, and paid than I ever had been before. I saw last year's Juniors -- this years Seniors -- hard at work on their own dissertations. In a moment of clarity I paused, staring at my old desk, and thought with honest happiness, "This is no longer my life. I did a good job. Now I'm finished here."

Familiar but somewhat estranged, I could feel Portlandia beckoning me to return -- a process that by definition means that I've left. In the end, I trotted back up to Seattle.

What's strange to me, then, is not the well demonstrated, perfectly natural human prediliction for pack behavior. It's the irrepressable urge to stand up infront of other humans and make an ass of oneself. Professionals in this field go by any one or two of a hundred different titles -- "teacher," "politician," "comedian" -- but the basic premis is always the same: to convince the lister that what you have to say is important, thus eliciting an action. For two or three hours at a time, humans, alone or in groups, will draw as much attention to themselves as possible while mobs of other humans watch on. This service is accepted in our culture that people will often pay the performer in advance, having never actually -seen- what the act might look like. Consider buying tickets to a banquet to benefit a woman who desires to be mayor. Just what have you accomplished if over chicken cordon bleu she reveals herself to be a Nazi? Will you still back her because your sorbet set you back $200?

Or take my profession of choice: prostitu- I mean, professional music. Frequently I will, of my own clear minded volition, purchase expensive tickets to musical events. Often, I will never have even heard of the performers in question; I go because of the music being performed. Or I will know the performer and not the music. In the past, my friends and I have attended concerts for which we handed out our money without having any idea what we were getting into. As a performer, I am expecting to make a living on the assumption that there are thousands if not millions of people out there who will be willing to take five hours out of their lives to go throw money at me (long story short).

Does this seem like madness to you? It should, I think, especially when the performer is bad! I once purchased an exhorbitently expensive private skiing lesson for myself (with my father's money). He was horrified by the cost, and I felt guilty, but not half as guilty as when the instructor turned out to be an underwhelming teacher.By the end of the 2004 Teatro Communale di Fierenze's truly abyssal production of Mozart's Cosi fan Tutti I would have been livid if the production hadn't been so overwhelmingly sopporific; it was all I could do to get my poleaxed date and I home. If I had spent an equal quantity of money on a toaster and it had performed equally well, I would have gotten my money back post haste.

The obvious question is: why? Why do we as audience members willingly com-or-sub-mit to this bizzare ritual? Ever since the age of the Greeks (on whom I comfortably rest blame for most of the world's ills) human kind has been doing this, so, why?

I ask myself this every time I step onstage. I'm a wannabee opera singer -- not so much a butterfly as a caterpillar awkwardly covered in what will, I swear, someday be a chrysalis. Whether or not I'm good at it, I've also been busy finding as many other opportunities as possible to do effectively the same kind of activity. I've got 300-ish hours as a Team Leader at the Oregon Food Bank (all those hours are volunteer). One year at my school I organized and trained a volunteer medical organization. I write essays for an internet blog (though I'll never admit which one). To make extra coin, I currently teach bicycle repair classes. On a regular basis, people call yours truly and willingly give him money (full payment in advance) in exchange for two hours of how-to know-how. In the past I've been in productions that charged admissions, events for which people gave money for the opportunity to sit in the crowd while some thing I was involved in happend infront of them. So why? Scopofilia? Do people just want to see some yahoo squirm for their pleasure? I'd rather think not. Morbid curiosity? Love of loud fat women in viking suits? What on Earth could it be?

I think it's all part of forming a group to begin with. What, after all, keeps you in a group once we've gotten there?  So you've managed to locate a mate: wonderful! Sex should keep you together at least long enough to discover you have incompatible parenting styles. But what about you and your neighbors? Or your friends on the bike team? Or your drinking buddies or your knitting group or your prayer circle? Everybodies favorite political theorists went on at some length about social contract and safety and the need of groups to have a leader, and perhaps there was a time where jaguar attack was a relevant concern for settlemants of thirty-or-so proto-suburbanites, but I think Locke and Rousseau's ideas exist to explain far larger social mechanisms than this. We humans form comfortably bite-sized social environments for ourselves and insist on staying there because we know what we can get done for ourselves.

With enough of us, we can choose who it is who governs us and what their powers are. We as the America Club eventually split off from Brittain because enough of us chose different membership. People likeJeff Foxworthy can make millions of dollars in the profession of redneck jokes because the Jeff Foxworthy Fan Club thinks his jokes are that good. On a smaller scale, we finance community projects and school activities by dint of numbers.  Human beings, convinced that God needed a House on Earth to celebrate His Majesty in, built Le Catedrale du Notre Dame, Der Dom Sankt Ruprecht, and Il Duomo di Santa Maria degli Fiori (which, if you've never seen them, are just about enough to convert you on their own). God's majesty asside, we hauled the stone, worked out the geometry, calculated the load points. Working in groups we've created everything from light rails and the textiles industry to couscous and cribbage.

Individuals are willing to make asses out of themselves in front of crowds because of the things that get done when enough people are convinced that what you have to tell them is important. We'll risk our fifty dollars against the dissapointment of wasting them because when those fifty dollars are well spent, nothing is quite like it. It takes thousands of audience members and generous government funding to make opera happen. When it's right, three hundred individuals at a time will weep at the beauty of the music. It's all the singer can do to thank them for making her presence on stage possible.

Editor's note: I've left this mostly as-was, meaning "I'm far too lazy to convert it from word-processor to blog formatting."  

Non te preoccupare

 I only actually know his first name: Giuliano. I cant imagine any other for him – last names would be useless ornaments. He is elemental, communicating competence and knowledge as fire communicates warmth. Only his hair, a simply coiffed grey affair, betrays that he is more than three times my own age.
    I met him by moving to Florence and buying a bicycle. Never content with the easy way, I bought a used racing bike frame, perfect but for minor refurbishing concerns. “Where d’you say I should take it?” I inquired of the American race cyclist who sold me the bike.
    Dominick just grinned, pronounced “Giuliano” as though it were a benediction, and gave me cryptic directions to the shop.
    That shop has been my real Italian classroom. The first lesson was “I Pensionati,” a mob of older Italian men who hassle, critique, praise, or ignore everything that happens in the shop. Always good humored, they fill the air with a thick smoke of italiano fiorentino, a viscous conglomeration of aspirated “Cs” and oddly placed “Th” sounds. They hold no punches, rattling on with raucous enthusiasm. Giuliano is silent only when doing something difficult or precise; otherwise he talks with brutal speed as he chastises their laziness or praises a new make of bicycle part.
    He is gentler with me, intentionally curbing his accent and slowing his syllables until I can follow his dialogue. His skills as an English speaker are limited entirely to “Hello!” and “Miss? Miss?” So we speak in Italian, gesturing in grandiose style, trying to communicate the finer points of bicycle malfunction without using any nouns or verbs. Somehow, we’ve succeeded well.
    I owe my success to the most profound lesson I’ve learned in his shop (and, in fact, in Italy). In truth, calling it a “lesson,” isn’t accurate – it was more a practice that I mimicked and only later comprehended. That understanding struck me, as such things do, while I was paying no attention whatsoever. Indeed, it was a day where I was preoccupied with everything, embroiled in a logistical mire that was starting to make me panic. My sea of troubles eventually cast me ashore at Giuliano’s shop, gasping for time and trying to take stock of my lost appointments.
    Giuliano was supposed to have repaired my bicycle. It was supposed to be done. I had to get to the opposite side of Florence 20 minutes ago. I had to get to and from school. I had to have the bike back.
    The work hadn’t even been started.
    I had never before seen a man apologize with only his eyes. Giuliano’s voice betrayed little, asking me “Is it urgent?” His eyes said something else: I’m sorry. How bad is this?
    Biting my lip, I mimed the behavior that I had witnessed in others:
    “Non te preoccupare,” I told him.
    And he didn’t.
    With the most calm manner, he went about his work. Went back to grinning and bantering. Went back to a point of life where he didn’t have to hurry himself to get this done. Shocked, I realized he was taking me at my word, something most Americans would never do. American’s would have questions, would have demanded “Are you sure?” until I wasn’t.
    He took me at my word and calmed right down, not stressing himself.
    Since then, I’ve discovered that other Italians expect the same. “Niente,” really does mean that it was nothing to them. When they tell me “Non te preoccupare,” they are shocked when I keep apologizing, almost to the point of being frustrated with me. They can’t understand why I don’t. As a philosophy, it spans from their intrapersonal relationships to their driving (why worry about dying when you could enjoy the ride?).
     And it is profoundly un-American.

By way of introduction, let me say that I'm a twentysomething male recently transplanted (by way of graduation) from the worlds best undergraduate program to the curious town of Seattle, Washington. I consider myself well groomed, well educated, and well intended (though perhaps it's most important that I consider myself at all). My education and my employment have little direct relevance to one another, I live with a girlfriend of whom I am terribly fond, as I write this I am voluntarily listening to harpsichord music, and I have spent the last thee years hating blogs.

 By now you're either as confused as I am or you know something I don't. (If the later, for the love o' Pete, share!)

Perhaps it's both too harsh and too general to say that I hate blogs. I should say that I dislike journaling blogs and what they've done to the way I relate to my friends. Gone are the days when personal information was exchanged primarily via shared meals, phone calls, and the odd letter or two. Even the two biggest forms of communication contemporary with my generation, emails and instant messages, are no longer the standard for many of my colleagues. Instead, many of them blog. I, who blog not, have had it to the back teeth with the remark "Oh, I forget that you don't follow my blog."

 It is to their great credit that most of my dear friends are sensitive to this and no longer say such things to me. It does nothing to explain why I'm writing here now.

 What I'm doing here now is writing (duh). My intention, however, is not to journal. Fair reader, whomevever you are, you'll be hearing little of the travails of my job, the triumphs and failings of my love life, or my mood. Instead, I hope to present cohesive writing on one of my greatest loves: my hobbies.

 I have so many hobbies I don't know what to do with them. Many of my possesions are hobby-specific pieces of equipment, from juggling artillery to belay equipment to a variety of highly explosive liquids. I'm in the process of considering if my career of choice is suitable to my extracurricular-rich lifestyle (the answer: probably not). When I'm sad, nothing cheers me like learning how to do something new, and I learn faster than most.

About a week ago,I took  a very sage man out to a burrito dinner where he suggested to me that I should start writing again. I chuckled at him and made some sort of self deprication like "Oh come now, I already know I'll never be half the writer you are." (My dinner companion has sold millions of books in a dozen countries.) Chewing his asada reflectively, he fired back "Sure. But there are things you can do in an essay that I couldn't do to save my life."

Flattered, I considered this.

 Earlier today I signed up for a blog. A place to practice my new hobby: writing about my other hobbies.

 And with that: enjoy.

"And remember: if you've had half as much fun watching this show as we've had making it then we've still had twice as much fun making it as you've had watching it." -- Aaron Sorkin, Sports Night