Friday, May 20, 2011

What I Do on My Day Off

It's really wonderful to have a day of rest. By rest I mean a day in which I only worked for four hours, researched for one hour, and spent the remainder walking in the woods with a friend, picking up a book from the library, biking to Wal-Mart for trash bags and toilet paper, cleaning the apartment whilst listening to audio Russian lessons and YouTube videos about free market economies, and finally, baking up some hot cross buns with which I have every intention of blowing Panera Bread's mind.

The buns aren't done yet, and they will probably be minus the crosses. It seems wrong to make hot cross buns on a not-Easter weekend, but this is coming from someone who doesn't do Christmas music before Thanksgiving either. Just ask Brittany, my room mate. She knows.
Still to come is the book I got from the library, about Ghengis Khan. I'm in one of those Central Asian moods again, mostly due to a study abroad program my supervisor suggested casually at work yesterday. It's in Kyrgyzstan. (Anybody wanna buy a vowel?)

This is a map from a Wikipedia article about Kyrgyzstan that I was reading earlier. Kyrgyzstan is the little one tucked between Khazakstan and China and smattered with brown, indicating that people there speak a lot of, well, Kyrgyz. It borders Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and it's just a hop-skip-and-jump (only over a few of the most colossal mountain ranges on the planet) to Turkmenistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

According to Wikipedia, which was quite thoroughly cited for once, the population is mostly Muslim, with some Russian and Ukrainian orthodoxy thrown in. It used to be part of the USSR. Interesting place. And then there is this program that almost seems too good to be true for a history major who would like to get acquainted with that mysterious part of the world and already has a smidgin of Russian to give her a start. There are summer internship opportunities with NGOs if you go in the spring. And to top it all off, the program is in Bishkek, the capital, where I believe there are some friends of friends living. So the ends of the earth are not really that far. And of course Ukraine is right on the way and I could make a little jaunt to see some people who are very dear to me.

So many dreams. The crazy thing is, these opportunities are open to me. And it's not something I take lightly. Even though spending the night in a yurt and learning a language a tiny portion of the world's population uses (not Russian, the other "Stan" languages) seems frivolous, it isn't. I don't understand where my life is headed exactly, but I know that something beautiful happens when worlds collide. Something in my soul is wrapped up in this part of the world. When I tell people I'm planning to major in history, they say "Going to be a teacher, hm?" And I look at the floor and say "No, not exactly."

It isn't that being a teacher is tame by any means. Ask any teacher with a classroom full, working 8 to 5 and then into the evening, riding the highs and lows of light bulb moments and discipline issues. This is an ultimate and fulfilling goal for some people, and rightly so. But for me, there is an urge to push further, past the expected. Maybe it's stubbornness or pride, wanting to prove the expectations wrong. Wanting to prove the voices in my head wrong when they tell me I don't have the gumption to do certain things, to talk to people I don't know how to talk to, or to learn to do jobs I never thought I could do.

Well. I don't have the gumption. Not yet. Or the skills. Not to do some of the things in my head.
But one thing I am learning at school, at my job with Kay, who seems to know how to push me way out of my comfort zone without actually making me bitter, is that I can learn. I can't just sit around waiting for ninja skillz to fall on my head. And in beautiful correspondence with that is the promise of Proverbs that God does give wisdom to those who seek it. It's a thing to be sought.

Well. In the time that has elapsed since I started this entry, I have managed to burn the hot not-crossed buns. This is a grave disappointment, because I was so proud of them and they took a lot of time to make. I will probably eat them anyway. A little charcoal never hurt anybody. After all, it's just the undersides that are pushing inedible. Darned oven. Turn my back for six minutes and it's toast. I mean buns. You know what I mean. My head is still in the steppes of Central Asia.

And now for my rendezvous with Genghis Khan, that old scoundrel...

Saturday, May 7, 2011

In Which I Forget an Important Purchase and Wind Up Cooking Ground Beef in My Mostly Deserted Dorm at Midnight

It is 12:42 am and I am still not quite ready to go to bed. In fact, I've just spent the last little while (while not on the internet) reading a novel and cooking meat in the basement. Which I must say, is an excellent way to end an excellent day, which this has been...

Although now I want to eat the meat. I wouldn't have been cooking it at such an odd hour if I hadn't been so forgetful. But then, finals week seems to be a good enough occasion for dementia. I went to the farmer's market with my friend Kaleigh and her mom, who ran into another friend and her mom, and I was there without my mom...which was a sad situation. But anyway, I put my big girl panties on and got over it.

I bought a half pound of salad greens and splurged on a pound of ground beef from the college farm. Then I put it in my backpack. Where it stayed until this morning when I suddenly snapped out of deep meditation on the faithfulness of Jesus in Hebrews chapter 2 to remember it. The frozen beef had thawed (luckily in a plastic bag) but it still felt refrigerated and had kept the greens cold while it was at it. Brittany and I don't call our room "The Lair" for nothing. It has been damp and chill in here for several weeks now and there was one night I could swear my blankets were sprouting mushrooms.

Having been warned of the dangers of refreezing raw beef, (I do have my food handlers license, after all, courtesy of the Berea College labor program) I made a mental note to cook the beef today, and then I put it in the fridge. Where it stayed until tonight, when I suddenly snapped out of my Facebook reveries and realized it was yet lying uncooked and bloody in the recesses of the icebox, where four whole dollars and a hunk of cow meat would go to waste if I didn't face my responsibilities.

The only problem is that my skillets are packed off in storage as of Wednesday and most of the suite mates have left, taking their generally free-for-responsible-public-use dish collections with them. A lone saucepan was left in the cabinet, which one of the remaining three suite mates claimed. It is only about six inches in diameter. And the community hot plate is packed away as well, which meant that I trundled down to a deserted basement at half-past midnight with the pilfered pot, a spoon, the copy of The Devil and Miss Prym that a graduating friend loaned me, and my bloody meat.

There was just room enough in that pot for the pound of meat, and with a good bit of stirring, I got it sizzling. Then I turned to the book, which I've been enjoying the past few nights. It is by Paul Coelho, a Brazilian author, but it has been translated into a lot of different languages. He also wrote The Alchemist, which I haven't read. The Devil and Miss Prym is a sort of philosophical thriller; short, a quick and engaging read, with deep questions. One of the main characters is on a mission to figure out whether people are naturally good, naturally evil, or both.

In the midst of reading I managed to not burn the meat or set off the infamous Kettering fire alarm and thereby incur the wrath of several dozen lingering dorm mates. It had a wonderful flavor; I could tell that must have been an exceptionally happy cow. It lived a good life.

I found, while I was cooking, a quote I especially liked in the book:

"Silence does not always mean consent-- usually all it meant was that the people were incapable of coming up with an immediate response."

-The Devil and Miss Prym

Often true for me, I thought. And often the case in classes this semester, which made me grateful for required online forum posts. And as I contemplated this I climbed the stairs and located a yogurt container for my meat in my small, boxed pantry. Then I contemplated the pros and cons of using the cucumber melon body wash to clean the dishes since the other dish soap was gone and someone had obviously set the body wash there for that purpose. It didn't strike me as being the most healthy thing to put on the dishes, but then, what is Ajax?

I taste tested the meat again--lean, juicy, and almost sweet. Oh, lasagna. And then I put it in the fridge. Where, one may predict with reasonable certainty, it will stay until I suddenly wake in the middle of the night in the new apartment tomorrow night to realize that I have left my pound of precious ground beef in the dorm fridge, never to be seen again.