Liljumper’s Adventures

We were talking in class a while back about the power of the domestic and women’s roles. Mostly in the fact that if women are in the kitchen they are responsible for the taking care of the family. And this puts them in a position of authority, they can make food that is unhealthy or healthier, they can concoct broth to make someone feel better. They can control a lot of the way that the family and the home function.

I never thought about that.

Oh and they can poison the family as well. If they wanted to.

Just a thought.

I have a tendency to hoarde food. I hoard a lot of things because I am afraid when I need them, I won’t have them, but food especially.

In my apartment I have at least 2-3 extra flours and cans of things I might need. So I always have them when I need them. It’s a fear of not having what I need when I need it. It’s a fear of being unprepared, of wanting.

Because while they’re in my apartment, the desire for them is sated. For me, desire is a tricky thing. Sometimes I have used, let’s be real, a lot of the time I have used the rhetoric, I’ll eat it all now, so that I won’t have it/want it/be tempted by it later. And that’s how a lot of my food decisions can be made. It’s a fear, perhaps, of that overpowering desire. Because if I want it bad enough, and can’t have it, won’t that destroy me? make me upset?

Maybe it’s a realistic desire to want what I can have.

But maybe it goes back to that, maybe it goes back to when I was a baby and I learned the power and danger of desire.

Maybe desiring family or desiring shelter, love, warmth, was shown to be dangerous. Because perhaps it was wanting what I could never have, couldn’t dare to hope for. Because that’s a bit of how I feel about desire. For me they are never alluring, but fearful. It reminds me of the desire to want something I don’t know if I can have, it reminds me of disappointment and sadness.

Maybe this isn’t always all from my past, my childhood, but I think a lot of it is. Maybe that’s an excuse.

But regardless, this is how I feel.

I have a strange thought process to me. I have thoughts and I have to get them out. I need to put them on lists, almost like notes to get back to (in the case of blog posts), but mostly I just have them, they fly through my head and if I don’t put them down on paper, the chance of them being lost forever is quite high.

If they are super important, there’s a good chance they will come back, but usually it’s this way.

It’s almost like a compulsion. A semi violent need to expel the thought, to rid my mind of its weight. To throw it out in the universe and clear my head. I think that is the best description of how it feels.

I know this is a short blog post, but it’s an example. I needed to get this out.

It has been expelled.

Oh Dorothy, how right you are.

No matter how much I adjust, there just is no place like home. The imitation of the holidays, the new friends, the new family traditions, it is never and will never be like home.

Home is familiar, it’s warm, it’s….home. There is no other way of putting it.

I’m not saying everything else is rubbish, but I am just saying, there isn’t a place like home.

And maybe that’s an important distinction. I didn’t leave home to try to make home. I left home to have new experiences and make a different kind of home. Pining for what I left behind, doesn’t do anything necessarily constructive. It’s an emotion I have, that is okay, but it doesn’t, shouldn’t, because there will never be any replacement. There will be no place like home.

It’s hard to maintain a balance between wanting it to be like home, and making new things, between nostalgia and creation. But it’s something that is on my mind during this holiday season.

Sometimes I think I have it all down, that I’m all good and adjusted.

Then I turn the corner and I run right into a wall. And I’m reminded of how it’s such a long tiresome process sometimes. It’s something I always do, an adaptation I do each day. It doesn’t get done, it gets adjusted to.

So that’s a bit complex, but what I mean is I get adjusted to being adjusted. Not necessarily the individual action I am adjusting to, but the adjusting process. And it’s a process.

So much so. It’s something each day I think, okay, I will conquer this day and the things that are different, I will take in strides, and it will be okay.

The days when I just want to stay here where things are comfortable, when I feel like sensory overload, I will get past them.

It’s hard. It’s not perfect. And I’m definitely not done.

But, it’s a process. And so I keep on going.

(what choice did I have anyway?)

These are the best. I love them. Let the season begin! One is chocolate, duh and the other is tea, of course. A tea advent calender is the best thing ever. It has not been so fruitful yet, punny, but I have hope!

I have a fear of spiders.

I have a fear of eating them in my sleep, of them crawling in my ears, everything. The bigger they are the worse it is. I don’t actually know why I wanted to do this post, but I had an idea one day, and here we are.

I was thinking about how to control or conquer my fear.

Fear is what keeps us alive to a degree. If we aren’t afraid of jumping, we jump, if we aren’t afraid of the consequences we push the boundaries. Fear keeps us safe? To an extent, I think so. I am afraid of getting burned, so I don’t put my hands near open flames.

But what purpose does this spider fear serve?

Maybe it keeps me away from poisonous spiders, but I don’t even know what those are, just the image of them on my screen is terrifying.

It reminds me of a show I used to watch on tv when I was younger, fear factor. I wonder if that kind of experience would conquer my fear….or scar me forever. It could induce one of those terror states and I don’t know how I’d get out of it. Sometimes when I have intense dreams of spiders, I can’t go back to sleep afterwards, it’s just an intense adrenaline fear experience.

Am I less of a person for being so afraid of such tiny, sometimes, things? I guess it makes me human, but it also is scary.

What do I do now with my fear I guess…do I try to conquer it, manage it, or just leave it?

This has been my favorite part of Germany/Austria that I have experienced in the last two years. I love advent calenders, here they’re so big and everyone has them. From make up companies, to chocolate, to tea!

I’m a big fan of them, I love getting something small everyday to count down the days until Christmas.

I have a Lindt Dark Chocolate Truffle one and a Tea Advent Calender, because I kind of love tea.

There’s just something so lovely about them. Maybe I just like gifts, who knows?

I had a thought last night about how I was just putting my inner thoughts and life out there. I’ve documented parts of my life and my deeper thoughts. Of course I leave some for myself and I chew them over in my own head. But a lot of them, I put here.

I share them with my friends and family in other places…and the internet.

At first I was really kinda freaked out about it, but that’s what people do now. The internet was created to shorten the distance between people and allow them to communicate and share. And people do it all the time, they’re across platforms, creating videos, having personas.

Maybe that’s just where our society is headed, to our internet presence. Where distances get bigger, and the only way to solve them is for us to be on the internet.

I don’t know if I like the idea, but it seems that is where it’s going.

I learned in class that we learn the most about ourselves and our own culture when we travel. When we are presented with the unfamiliar, the strange, the new, we learn about what we think are the familiar. When we get back from the trip, the first things we want to do, usually, is to feel at home, comfortable. How best to do that? With something to eat/drink that’s familiar. For me,  a cup of tea? The ways in which our culture and food are connected are integral. And I feel it ever more so now, today.

Thanksgiving. It has never meant a whole lot to me. It always meant driving, and family, and food. It was always pleasant, but it was never something that made my heart quicken. It was a day, marked with a feast, but never something terribly emotional. Until now, of course when I’m away.

You always yearn for what you don’t have.

I yearn for Thanksgiving dinners, turkeys, preparing food, family.

This is my first year on my own without anyone to prepare food. Last year in Vienna, they had a meal for us all since we were all in the same boat. But now, entirely alone.

And boy do I feel it.

So in an attempt to make it feel a bit like home, I shall be doing all the cooking myself.

I have been dealing with a lot of questions, such as “why not wrap the meat in bacon?” “does it really have to be a whole bird?”.

In an uphill battle, futile as it may be, today will feel as close to home as it can.

You can never truly imitate the real thing, and in trying to do so, maybe you miss the real thing. But I will try.

My nostalgia is kicking in, and I want to try to make it feel as close as possible.