Irrationally Exuberant

Hey everyone, my name is Abby. I’m originally from Massachusetts, but consider myself a native Vermonter. Until recently I’ve been a nomad; I’ve lived in or visited forty six states. I like agricultural education, integrity, building community and photography. Like Adam said, none of that really matters…on to what I’m excited about!

In college I used to confound my family with my idealistic perspective on the world. I rooted for the underdog and questioned every system I deemed unjust. Whenever I challenged the current cultural paradigm, they would acknowledge my perspective, but then skeptically say, “show us another way.” Recently I rediscovered an idea that answers that question, and it just so happens to be the one of the things that I am irrationally exuberant about!

I am excited about permaculture. Permaculture is a number of things; a complex concept that defies tidy definitions. Austrialians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the term, and it means a blend of permanent agriculture and permanent culture. It’s a series of principles that focuses on “consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature…[where] communities, food systems, and living systems are integrated and mutually supporting as opposed to separated, exploitative, and destructive.” (Holmgren, Pathways to Sustainability) Basically, this is a fancy way to say that permaculture is…well, everything! More specifically, permaculture has two main ideas: a design system and a lifestyle ethic.

Permaculture is a design system whose beauty comes from it’s simplicity and focus on “what works.”It’s a way of thinking that acknowledges and encourages interactions between elements of an ecosystem instead of treating each seperately. Because of this, there is no such thing as waste in a permaculture design system, only an unused resource. Within this system work is minimized, productivity increases, and the the health of the environment is maintained or improved.

Permaculture has evolved into a lifestyle ethic which seeks to create a culture that is sustainable and inclusive for all. This aspect of permaculture is most exciting to me. When I first learned about permaculture years ago, I thought it implied a radical change in lifestyle. I wasn’t ready to own land or to be a farmer, so I couldn’t see how I could incorporate it into my plans. Recently I’ve discovered that permaculture doesn’t neccessarily imply land ownership, homesteading or a wealth of knowledge about ecology, it’s about living with intention.

These days my plans don’t include living off the land, but I have been thinking more about the sustainability of my daily choices. This summer I’ll be growing some of my own vegetables and hopefully getting my eggs from a small flock of hens housed in a nearby backyard. I’m looking forward to deepening my knowledge of permaculture and living with more intention….I’ll be sure to share my discoveries!

In an earlier post I talked about growing my own food. This is just the beginning.

The first three wandering onions sprouted and now I have a beautiful light in my room. At a time when the ground is still frozen, the trees bare, and the grass covered with a nasty black snow, it is refreshing to have something living in my room. The lack of floor space in my room is immediately worthwhile by way of a full-spectrum grow light. Now it is sunny outside and inside!

Beyond the instant gratification of being near something living, is the thought that I’m finally motivated to grow my own food like I always wished. In the past, I loosely connected myself with the growing process through purchasing CSA shares and going to the farmer’s market. I maintained a great container garden of lettuces (made out of milk cartons and cardboard boxes), but the lettuces and my enthusiasm typically died out by late July. Similarly to how fellow writers Adam and MermanDan explained their desire to put themselves into the experience or to actually live their lives, I’m finally doing that through onion seeds. It makes me happy to be around plants and to be connected with the process. Growing food satisfies my curiosity of how things work. Instead of wondering incessantly about what it is like to grow an onion and catching its seeds, I’ll be doing it!

I watched Waitress a few weeks ago.  I was sitting at home bored and decided if I was gonna have nothing to do, I might as well watch a movie.  So off to Redbox I went… 

The movie was good, I would definitely recommend it.  However, like many movies the best way to go into it is not expecting too much.  It’s fun, and it passes the time.  Not a masterpiece but definitely a good solid movie.

Anyhow, that’s not what this post is about.  This post is about pie.  Now, if you’ve got any inclination towards baking and you watch this movie you will understand why I suddenly have an urge to make pie…and not just any pie.  I want to make fabulous, one of kind, newly invented pies.  Pies that are magical and delicious.  Pies that have a heart in the middle, as the the main character sings in the movie.

So, here is my first idea for a pie:

I make this baked brie dish…it’s not unique I’m sure, I got the vague idea from an appetizer I shared years ago with a couple of friends.  From there I just did what I usually do, bought the ingredients I thought should go in it and started cooking…with lots of tasting until I had a final product.  Anyhow, it’s basically pears in a sort of caramelized sauce made from brown sugar, butter, and spiced rum.  Then I dump the mixture on top of  some brie…bake it till the brie is bubbly and serve with french bread. 

That dish turned into a pie will be my first attempt.  Now, to be completely honest…I haven’t made a lot of pies in my life.  In fact I would say I’m not usually a big fan of pie in general, but perhaps we can change that!

I’ll let you know how it goes… 

This blog is supposed to be filled with people talking about their hobbies, their interests, the topics about which they are irrationally exuberant. The thing is, while I do get excited about things from time to time, what I am most excited about is learning how to be irrationally exuberant about life.

I ran across this quote a while back…

We are always getting ready to live but never living. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Unfortunately that sentiment is reflected all too readily in my life. I spend so much time worrying about getting things wrong or what other people think that I don’t do much of anything. With that in mind, my posts will document my attempt to turn this habit of always preparing for life into a habit of constantly living it…happily, vibrantly, and yes…in a manner you could only call irrationally exuberant. Wish me luck!

If you read, you may know that a Californian beef company voluntarily recalled 143 million pounds of beef and the USDA said there is a “remote” chance of adverse health effects. Hallmark/Westland recalled their beef primarily to protect their image after the Humane Society released a video of workers abusing a “downer” cattle (cows that cannot stand because of sickness or injury). Students whose schools participate in the National School Lunch program already ate a fair share of the 143 million pounds of beef shipped by Hallmark/Westland in the last two years. Parke at U.S. Food Policy collected some great commentary on this issue.

Does a recall of two years’ worth of beef ensure people are at ease about meat production? Is it possible that the incident changes consumers’ tastes? Maybe this is the time that people realize that cows are not the downers! They don’t walk up to the slaughter house and say “duhhhh, I may have a disease, I can’t walk.” The cattle didn’t ask to be fed grain, something unnatural for their stomachs, stuck in tight quarters in their own poop and forcibly fed antibiotics. The people are the downers! We put the cows and ourselves in this situation and point at the meat and slaughterhouse as the problem. Maybe if tainted spinach did not scare enough people to change, perhaps children fearing a possibly lethal hamburger will.

So how am I excited about this? I decided that it’s healthy for me to come out with the negative and then evaluate the positive of each action. Ah, balance. We’re at a point where our food system is failing some of the time, so maybe this is where it changes! How am I changing? Oh, this is where I get Irrationally Exuberant- I’m growing my food!!

What you see above is a flat of mini pots made out of newspaper. When planting, you can merely unfold the bottom and the newspaper will decompose in the ground. They’re neat and they have onion seeds in them. For once during this five month winter, besides the accumulation of snow or ice, I will see something grow!

Come summer, I will not have to worry about a company recalling the food I ate two years ago. As always, I’ll be posting about the natural cycle of things in my life. Expect to see these onions grow!

Books have always been a refuge of sorts for me. I grew up in a “reading” family. When I was ten I helped my mother catalogue all 1200 of her books on the computer (which ran off of DOS…uff da). Both my parents were members of book clubs. My sister and I were both reading before the first day of kindergarten. My mom used to say “You’ll never be lonely if you have a book.” Etc, etc, etc.

So it’s no wonder that I get this giddy feeling when I enter a library. I walk in and my heart races…so many possibilities! Who will be my new friend to bring home and get to know? Will I read about a specific moment in history? Or maybe a three year old girl dying of cancer? Or possibily my favorite: a sociology text? Each time before I move I research the public libraries in the town I’ll be living in: how far from my new home, how big, what kind of events do they have, do they offer ILL?

I have started visiting public libraries while on road trips as well. I was in Chicago last spring, staying at a hostel two blocks from the public library–TEN STORIES of library wonderment! I was there for over three hours, walking through the stacks, pulling books off of shelves, writing furiously a long list of books I want to read. It was awesome. Here’s a picture of Binkey in front of the library.

I must say that the library in Burlington is a let down. I expected the Fletcher Free Library to have a superb collection of books, periodicals, journals, music recordings along with national speakers coming to give lectures/chats. This is not the case. The book collection is mediocre. The building itself smells funny…not fresh and new like an unread book. But I think my biggest problem with the library is the creepy statue of a man sitting by the front door dressed in a cardigan sweater reading a book. Seriously creepy.

But back to books. It’s such a sensual experience reading a book. I love the way they feel, smell, look. They are a great escape, especially on these cold gray days in Vermont. They are great conversation starters as well as an excellent way to judge a person’s character. I believe that perusing someone’s bookshelves is better than snooping through their medicine cabinet. Are the shelves cluttered with tattered paperback copies of “classics”? Or maybe hardcover, obviously never been read self help books? Oh, dear God, maybe every space is filled with Nora Roberts and Danielle Steel?

I sometimes believe that I will find another bibliophile through my addiction to libraries and books. Maybe they will have written my new favorite sociology textbook. Or maybe we’ll both reach for the same copy of a book at the library. Or maybe we’ll make eye contact sitting at some bookstore while both reading “How to Post Interesting Blogs for Dummies”.

Hey all, I’m Adam. I run and write for hahamusic, a music blog that Matt contributes to from time to time. He and I also went to high-school and college together. The first time we hung out, we ended up listening to Rage Against The Machine at full volume in a car doing donuts around the school parking lot late at night (neither one of us was driving). None of that is really important. Ok, here we go!

Generally, at any given time, there are tons of options for free stuff to do in New York (where I currently live). Friday afternoons are especially easy pickings — museums throw open their doors to the non-paying public, art galleries and clubs all over town host dj sets and other live music, free wine flows like a river through the streets and all are made merry. It’s really quite exhilarating, in a kind of bum-like way, as if you were walking around hungry and dozens of restaurants just started heaping food onto plates and shoving them at you as you passed. Incidentally, as I wrote that, I realized there is a scene very much like it in the Marx Brothers movie A Night At The Opera, which you should all see as soon and as often as you possibly can. Here’s a still from another scene from the same film:

Anarchy at its very finest.

Like I was saying, there’s a lot of free stuff to do here. A couple Fridays ago, I walked up the block from work to the New York Public Library, which is hosting an exhibit called “Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac On The Road.” Now, if this was eight years ago, this exhibit would have been my own little personal paradise — my minute mecca — my humble heaven, because I was REALLY into the Beat writers around age 15. On a family trip to San Fransisco around that time I had my picture taken looking sulky and very much like a bitter little 15 year old under the sign for Jack Kerouac Street outside City Lights Bookstore, and met Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which at the time was a mind-blowing experience. Here I was, this little punk kid, talking to the guy who wrote “Dog” and “I Am Waiting,” and published some of the greatest works of contemporary literature in the world. Like wow, indeed.

These days, though my favorite poet is still Frank O’Hara (an also-ran from the same time), I’m not into all the Beat stuff as much. Now an exhibit like the Kerouac one is more interesting than life-changing. Interesting, and also incredibly intimidating. Because not only did the exhibit include the scroll on which Kerouac wrote On The Road, but it also included book after book after display after display of his journals, his notes, his letters, his sketches, his photos — a exhaustive cross-section of this (extremely prolific) man’s entire creative life. And that can be pretty intimidating to someone who likes to think of himself as a writer and yet hasn’t written anything substantial except music blog entries (not particularly substantial themselves) for about half a year, let alone produced any other kind of meaningful art or music.

But as intimidating as it was, the exhibit was also inspiring. And as I walked the few blocks from the Library over to the International Center of Photography (also free on Fridays after 5:00) — for an exhibit of an artist named Barbara Brown (a lot of physical pop art, a rug facsimile of the cover of the second edition of Nabokov’s Lolita, etc), and a larger exhibit including a piece which paired Edison footage from a moving train going through a mountain (in and out of tunnels) with a reading of passages from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (descriptions of falling asleep and waking without knowing sleep had occurred, each tunnel entrance marked with a corresponding narration about slipping into sleep) — as I was walking through those exhibits, I was thinking about my own creative output and how lacking it has been since I left college (and the deadlines and structure of writing classes especially). How sure, I go to a lot of comedy shows and go see a fair amount of art, occasionally going to a concert — plenty of cultural stuff — but thinking about how I never really do anything myself. All this activity is me experiencing without really DOING, without really producing anything.

The entire afternoon convinced me that I need to DO more, that I’m wasting time by being a passive viewer of life exclusively. Before, on weekends or lazy days, I would chide myself for not getting out and seeing more (as motivation to get up off the couch or away from the computer), taking in more of what this city had to offer (a LOT) and moreover, what life had to offer (also a LOT) — telling myself that experiencing life was the important part. But now, I’m starting to think that that just isn’t enough.

So what am I excited about? I’m excited about inspiration from unexpected places. I’m excited about new and unexplored avenues of expression, about looking at the world around me in a different way and finding a way to put myself into it — to add something of myself in a new way. Not merely resigning myself to the experience but reciprocating in as many ways as are available. To add myself to my own experience, to become a full collaborator in my own life. I haven’t come to any conclusions about quite how I’m going to be doing this, but I’m sure figuring it out is going to be plenty exciting as well.

Yeah!

In the last post I touched on the cycle of a turkey. Today I focus on the life of a beet.

Beets, along with celeriac and radishes are the few vegetables I have problems with finding uses. I can make a soup with celeriac or a salad with radishes, but I wish not to eat these dishes frequently. It’s the sad truth and yet CSA farmers tend to pack in the beets come storage crop season.

I loved beets the first three weeks of winter, but enough is enough! The demand for beets at this point during winter is practically non-existent in this house, but CSA shares are commitments. After much internal debate over the recently unbearable earthy flavor, I needed to make beet chocolate cake. It is the only solution for me to enjoy beets again this winter.

As I made the cake, I thought of the natural cycles involved with my food. The farmer decided last year to purchase a healthy amount of beet seeds as beet plants are favorable for farmers.  They grow quickly and yield both green tops and the bulbous root. Most likely, the beets were planted and harvest within six weeks and then placed in storage last November. My beets sat in a dark storage for months, only seeing light for a moment each week when the farmer opens the door to get this weeks’ share of storage crops. Finally, in early January the farmer looks in his storage and wants all of those red-devil roots off his property! The CSA shareholders receive even more beets. The next day, I pick up my share open the bag and laugh at the abundance of yet more beets.

The beets sit in my fridge for a few weeks until I decide to mix with chocolate to make a cake.

When you combine the two, along with oil, eggs, sugar, baking soda and flour you get a highly bearable version of beets. There is nothing quite like using veggies in dessert!

Oh and to complete to cycle, the beets are processed in my body, I compost the peels for use in the garden, and I give up on creating further exciting stories about beets.

Those who were brave and loyal fans of Post-Haste Taste encountered a story on slaughtering turkeys (catch it now before the website disappears)! Since I participated in the axing, plucking, and eviscerating of the turkeys, I did nothing more than freeze my bird. It sat in my fridge through Thanksgiving and any other designated time for individuals to cook whole turkeys, until yesterday.

Yesterday, I moved forward with one more step of the turkey’s purpose. While it sat in the oven for a mere 2.5 hours (it was a small 6 lb. turkey), I thought about the slaughter experience and an educator’s mention of this food experience as an empowering way for kids to learn. He suggested the farm as a valuable place to conduct biology. Students would be able to participate in applicable biology in a realistic setting. While some students may succeed in classrooms learning history, formulas, and how to study, nearly everyone can be empowered through learning humans’ interaction with natural cycles, be it growing plants or slaughtering and cooking turkeys.

My roommates and I ate most of the turkey, but the turkey is far from completing its cycle. The bones are now frozen for use in a future stock or broth which can then be used to cook grains or create a soup. Each time I use this turkey, I am forced to reconnect with the bird’s existence and the land it once used. Similarly, students could benefit from a connection between parts of the cycle for a turkey in our food system. From playing with the giblets, to utilizing the feathers, to finally using the bones for soup, students could gain invaluable experiences on a farm and in kitchens! The cycle of turkeys go beyond the “living and flopping to plucked and pink” stage and we can all benefit from that experience. Until next time, when I cook the bones and make a stock!

Intro to me:  My name is Annie, which means graceful and doesn’t describe me at all.  I am originally from North Dakota (one of 630,000 NoDakers).  I have had many different jobs ranging from A*VISTA to third shift cashier at a truck stop to beet piler…beets as in sugar beets.  I look forward to letting the world in on the corners of my heart and mind that are filled with joy at the randomness of life.

‘place to express what we’re excited about’…reading those words on the site’s description of itself made me think about what made me irrationally exuberant. What is it in this world that makes me giggle like I used to when Robby Lee walked by my fourth grade desk? The answer: boats. And not just any boats. (In fact, most boats scare me.) The boats that make my heart giggle are the huge boats that went in and out of the Duluth harbor in Minnesota.

I was slightly fascinated with the boats while I lived in Seattle, but once I moved to Duluth I became obsessed. I could hear the horn from the lift bridge and the boat’s response from my home. It was as if they were talking to me. I almost crashed my car several times while driving because I was busy staring boats as they came into or left the harbor. I was having a bad day and my buddy drove me down to Canal Park because he knew there was a boat coming in.

Now, some people insist on calling these boats ’ships’ or ‘cargo ships’. They are wrong. Ships are fancy things that rich people sail around the world on. These boats are amazing in how much they do for the Midwest and its industries. My dad works at the sugar beet factory (ask me about it some time) and he told me that after they get all they can out of the beet they put the pellets on railcars and send it to Duluth, where it is put on one of my big boats and sent to Asia to feed pigs. These boats also haul ore from the Iron Range in Minnesota (where the movie North Country was based and filmed).

I love the endless possibilities that these boats pose. What are they hauling? Where did it come from? Where is the boat going next? Who is on the boat? Where are they from? How the hell does it stay afloat?!!

I’ve looked into how to catch a ride on one of these bad boys…it costs a bit of money, but I plan on doing it one day. There is a Polish shipping company which regularly stops in Duluth. You sign up with them giving them a rough estimate of when you’d be able to go and for how long (as in: May 2009 for one month). You usually get a week or two warning about when the boat will be leaving and where it’s going. I could end up going to Morocco or Spain or Norway or Western Africa or Michigan! Endless, irrationally exuberant possibilities!