I’ve signed up with one of those Community Supported Agriculture thingamajigs where I get a box of organic produce every other week. The ultimate goal is to be good to my body, the planet and organic farmers, and a bunch of similar hippie-esque ideals. But! I also hope that having a regular supply of random stuff will force me to make stuff I wouldn’t ordinarily. I like food a lot, so I’m going to post pictures here since I can’t go around the country making all my friends and family try my tasty treats like I really want to do. I imagine most will be kind of normal concoctions, some will be more fun, but all will be things I’ve never made before. Which is why something as simple as apple pie is here. I’ve never before happened to have a big pile of apples laying around just waiting to be made into pie. Now I have apples all the dang time (although I can tell from this week’s box that summer has finally arrived and with it a welcomed absence of apples)! Because I am crazy it is safe to assume everything will be from recipes I make up, at least that’s been the case so far.

Instead of pondering the universe in search of insights and meaningful joy, I’ve been working a lot, taking a kind-of-stupid class, and getting chemicals put on my head.

(More on the TaraTaraTara page)

Ian and I went and saw Fire On The Mountain last night and hot damn it was good! It wasn’t so much a musical as it was a narrated, in-character, ho-down concert. All the actors played their instruments on the stage, and there was some clogging, and a lot of soul-felt howling, and I teared up like four times (once before they even started–just the sight of these people in their costumes holding their banjos and dulcimers and limberjacks made me SO happy). It made me miss my grandpa and want to dance with him because he’s from that whole coal mining culture in the Appalachians. My great-grandpa was shot in one of the union picket lines! HARDCORE. I seriously wish there was a soundtrack to this because I’d pick it up in the time it takes for your heart to go “lubb!” (that’s right, not even a full heartbeat!!!). We knew a bunch of the songs, too, and felt quite proud. Yay for the theatre!

I had a fun little Islamic/Lesbian Feminist moment yesterday Downstairs.

I bend over a lot at work loading laundry, cleaning showers, and so on, and I noticed when I first started there that if there were people around, particularly behind me, I tended to squat down or work sideways, as if I was wearing a dress and afraid I might flash somebody. Now I just do my work and don’t worry about my ass sticking out at people all the time. We’re all women and nobody cares.

This intrigued me yesterday because there happened to be one of our males-who-identifies-as-a-woman and a couple of ladies-who-like-ladies present at the same time and my mode of going about my business remained just as functional and unladylike. This implied that my comfort wasn’t because we all had vaginas, and it wasn’t because there was a guarantee of absent sexual objectification, it was because we all had feminine identities. There’s something resembling visual assault when an unwelcomed dude does the leering, but when it’s a woman it merely is what it is instead of carrying all that weight of social power.

That last thought is what made me realize, “Holy shit, I’m experiencing the validity of Separatism!”

Both the Lesbian Feminism movement and Muslim culture preach the empowerment of private all-woman spaces. It’s a connection that amuses me and to a degree they’re right. Living every day in a man-dominated world can be downright exhausting, so a man-free zone provides a sanctuary where one can relax and just be. I see it work for the women all the time, and I am now seeing how it works for me, for after working a shift Upstairs I am often anxious and hyped up on adrenaline, whereas after working a shift Downstairs I feel content and focused.

It’s nice!

We went out into the Cascades and hid in a cabin for the weekend and it was really great. Really REALLY awesome and needed. However, in addition to all the goodness, the following anecdote also took place.

Late Saturday night we thought we’d hop in the hot tub before going to bed, but after getting in we realized the water wasn’t quite warm enough, and actually seemed to be getting colder, so we decided to go back inside. The fact that it was raining and seemed to be getting worse helped, too. Thus it was with visions of hot cocoa and a warm fireplace that we discovered we had locked ourselves out.

So there we were: wet, cold, in the rain at midnight in fucking Goldbar, and we had 2 robes, 2 towels, an umbrella, a locked car and a locked house. There was a neighbor down a ways on one side, but slogging through the mud while half-naked to wake up a potentially angry stranger in the middle of the night seemed like a good course to remain in the Last Resort category. Therefore we went around to the sliding back door and there was a nice heavy dowell placed so it wouldn’t open more than 1/4″ at the bottom and 2″ at the top. We went around to the kitchen window–another dowell (in addition to that squeeze-type of window lock). Both bedroom windows? DOWELLED. All the other windows were not of the openning variety, and we were beginning to consider which would be the cheapest to break. Fortunately, the dowell in the main bedroom window was placed at an angle rather than laying flat in the groove of the frame, so I went back to that one to mess around with it. To our delight the sliding panel itself popped right off and Ian boosted me up and in, I plopped onto the bed with muddy feet, and unlocked the damned front door.

HURRAY! We did it! We did it together!

It might disappoint Mr. Dane Cook to know that neither of us was willing to play the “Oooh, I don’t know, maaaaaaaan!” role in the B & E scenario. We both adopted the “LET’S FUCKING DO THIS” character and found it to be much more useful. Of course, we’ve both broken into our own homes and various relatives’ homes, but forcing entry into somebody else’s house, even if you’re renting it, is waaaaay scarier.

AND BADASS!