Cooking As a Pastime

Heart onigiri at Bar Eden.

Until I went to Japan, I wasn't much into cooking. The most complex dish I made was Rice-a-Roni. Not that I'm making gourmet dishes now; I'm not. But, I wonder if I should be, or at least learning how.

My cooking...

Three of the people I lived with while in Japan were excellent cooks. I know; I got to eat some of their creations. The first person was my roommate when I lived in a NOVA apartment (NOVA is the name of the first company I worked for in Japan, since gone bankrupt and bought out by another company). The other two were housemates when I lived in BB House, which, sadly, ceased to exist soon after the death of the owner, may she rest in peace.

The one thing the three of them had in common was preparing complex-looking, delicious Asian cuisine. Only one of them prepared Japanese cuisine; my roommate was originally from Indonesia (he's Australian), and one of the housemates was from Myanmar.

For the sake of not embarrassing them, let's call my roommate M, my housemate from Myanmar Y, and the housemate from Japan K. M often made more food than he could eat, so I got to try much of what he made. Of Y's food, I only got to eat an occasional soup, but they were tasty. The one who did the most cooking, however, and whose food I ate the most of, was K. In fact, K cooked for the whole house on occasion, and also spent a whole night making food for a hanami matsuri (cherry-blossom viewing). If not for her, I wouldn't have eaten my final day in Japan, since I spent most of that day making my room look immaculate.

...versus K's cooking.

I bought a Japanese cookbook while at the Tokyo Animation Exposition. Not surprisingly, it had a manga slant to it, its title being (wait for it), The Manga Cookbook. So far, the most complex recipe I have tried is a bento, but due to the amount of resources (food) required and the amount of time it takes to prepare, I have not tried many of the advanced recipes in the book--like okonomiyaki--and the ones I have tried, I haven't done often. In fact, most of my cooking in American (and in Japan, too) has been relegated to cooking spaghetti in a pot and adding spices to the sauce. I also make a mean tuna for sandwiches.

My attempt at bento.

Cooking is a lot like writing. It involves creativity, the look and taste (style and substance) must be appetizing, and the best cooks, like the best writers, aren't afraid to experiment. And ultimately, food and books are labors of love, which are then turned loose on the public in order to await judgment--though their verdict doesn't much matter, in the end. The process is what's important.

I remember watching the anime for Video Girl Ai, where Moemi cooks for Yota, who is secretly in love with her. Even though she cooks for him out of kindness, and not love, I thought (and still do) that a woman cooking for me--out of love--would be the most wonderful thing in the world. Hmm, maybe the way to a man's heart really is through his stomach. The reason I find such a declaration of love so moving is because of the work involved in making a meal for someone. You are devoting your time and energy (lots of it) to someone else's happiness. Time and energy are what we give to endeavors that we love, and to people that we love. To spend so much time making something that will disappear so quickly is, in effect, the ultimate sacrifice that one can make for another human being.

Sashimi (raw meat) in a restaurant in Sapporo.
(note: those are my friend's hands, not mine)

Getting back to my original thought, I have been thinking recently that I should learn how to cook like my friends in Japan. The timing has to do with the Korean soap opera that I've been watching, since the main character is a pastry chef, but I feel that the show is just stoking flames that have long been smoldering in my soul. Cooking and preparing food appeal to my sense of creativity, as well as my love of solitude--though cooking is never as solitary a pursuit as writing is, even when done alone. Plus, none of the jobs I have looked at since I returned from Japan have captured my imagination. Cooking would. Maybe not in a crowded restaurant where the patrons care how hot or cold their meal is over whether it's a masterpiece of cuisine, but rather in a bakery or a cake shop, or at a small restaurant with a dedicated staff. If nothing else, I can cook at home, relieving the stresses of the day with a culinary delight created with my own hands.

I don't know. All I know is that I can't keep doing what I'm doing. Writers may need rooms of their own in which to write (to paraphrase Virginia Woolf), but they need a life beyond their rooms in which to live.

Options

Sometimes I think too much.

Sometimes I overanalyze a problem that I don't want to solve, in an effort to make it go away or seem like it's a problem to be dealt with far in the future. Case in point: the idea of going back to school or taking courses to acquire a skill set. The endless loop that my analysis leads me on is 1.) I'll have to pay for either program with money I don't have, and 2.) I'll still have to work while getting the degree/certification, so pursuing it now doesn't help me find a job.

That's square one: finding a job. Gone are the days when I could languish on a college campus and be content to fire off poetry in my free time while attending class, taking notes, writing papers, analyzing texts, and studying the rest of the time. What I want approaches more of what I had in Japan--a job that allowed me, in my free time, to travel, to go to my favorite hot spots, and later (when I had weekends free) to meet up with my friends. Nothing is worse than having a different schedule than one's friends. Right now, I have too much free time. I need something to fill up the time when my friends aren't around, but even when they are around, I can only meet up with the few who live nearby, since Connecticut lacks the public transportation system necessary to make travel beyond Hartford enjoyable.

So, option one is to pursue some sort of degree or certification. For a master's degree, I could major in anthropology or Asian studies (concentrating in Japanese). For an associate's degree or certification, there's cooking classes or reflexology. Cooking classes make sense, since I could work in restaurants while pursuing my degree. On the other hand, the hours would be wacky, since I'd be working when other people aren't, minus a weekday evening or two. And the pace would be fast. So, the other option is to work in a shop (like a pastry shop or a butcher's shop). That way, I get regular hours, and the pace isn't as fast, since most of the food would be made ahead of time. On the other hand, cooking for me would be more of a release than a job skill, so perhaps that certification should wait until I find a job doing something else.

Anthropology and Asian studies would be great degrees to get, but again, I'd have to find work during the two or so years it would take to achieve those degrees. Some of them have work study programs, but could I get housing, as well? The less time I spend here, the better, but even better would be to come home to my own place, not the place where I grew up. See what I mean about overanalysis?

As for reflexology, pursuing that certification has more to do with my fascination of the human body than my fascination with doing it as a career. I like receiving hand and foot massages, but giving them to strangers? At least the hours would be good, since massage workers are limited in the amount of hours they can strain their hands every week (around 20 in Connecticut, I believe). And I could intern while pursuing that degree. In fact, that was my number one option when I came back from Japan, killed by my too detailed thought processes. It's a wonder that I can write anything at all with such a powerful inner critic. Perhaps I need to learn how to shut it off when job hunting the same as I do when I write.

I forgot curatorial and archival work. I'd need degrees for either position, but I have enough museum experience to pursue a career in one of those fields. The problem with a museum job is 1.) the hours can be wacky (though curators and archivists also work for businesses, and can keep regular hours), and 2.) I wonder if I'm interested in doing either job only because I've had prior museum experience. Then again, why do something similar to something I've done before? Including summer jobs, I have worked at an outdoor sports complex, done customer service in the video and book sections of a store, cashiered, given tours in a historical home, taught non-native speakers how to speak English, worked in a foreign school system, and substitute taught in an elementary school. So the real question is, what do I want to do next, and of those options, which one would best allow me to leave this house in the shortest amount of time possible?

And what about jobs I could do without furthering my education? Well, I could continue to substitute teach, though I'd have to apply to more places than the one I worked at last year, so that I'm working almost every month, instead of less than twenty days out of the year. Since my dad is planning on selling off the car which I've used previously to get around (a blue van that we've had since 1994, my sister's freshman year of college), I feel it's best to find a job in a large city, where public transportation can take the place of a vehicle. Of course, not all cities have good public transportation. I wouldn't, for example, be able to live in L.A. Then again, who'd want to drive in that traffic? I mean, unless you want to work in the movie business, in which case, I would drive, too. But writers can live anyone, can't they? The "Lost Generation" of American writers congregated in France. Pearl S. Buck was in China when The Good Earth was published. Haruki Murakami lived in Europe while he wrote Norwegian Wood.

As for me, I could've stayed in Japan, but that part of me that wanted to thrive, not just "get by," wouldn't let me. And while I have many friends still in Japan, whom I miss very much, what I once had in that country that might have kept me there was gone long before I left that island nation and headed home, to be greeted by family, friends, and disappointment. Well okay, the disappointment happened later, but it sounds better when written that way, don't you think?

Anyway, I'd love for all of you who are reading this to comment on what you think I should do, but let me add a caveat: think of what is best for ME when writing your responses, not what would benefit YOU. For example, don't say I should move to San Francisco just because you happen to live nearby, or that I should work for the federal government because you happen to. Many of you may, in reply, say, "Well, what do YOU think would be the best course of action for you?" or "What kind of job are you looking for?" or "Where would you like to live?"

My reply: I really don't know.