Category Travel

Season’s Greetings: Squeaking in under the wire

Merry Yulesolsticeweenmas!

A lot has happened these past two years while also not much has happened these past two years. I keep drafting and nothing feels right or complete, even as it expands far beyond its scope and the attention span of any reasonable human being, boiling ever outward but largely full of nothing, like a universe but comprised of navel-gazy pessimistic ill-informed bullshit. Or as Yoast SEO calls it, “unreadable.” Like this one is, two paragraphs from now!

What has there been to write about, when I’m largely either at home or a barn? The pandemic? Travel? The business I started? More horse stuff? Regular life stuff?

The Pandemic?

No one in my household has caught it, which is no small feat given that some half of Americans have had it at least once. We’ve had both the privilege which allows caution and the human hardship of living in isolation in a world that is determined to move on despite experts warning that we are not yet in the endemic stage. Particularly now, given the “tripledemic” going on this winter and what appears to be humanity’s total exhaustion with safety precautions. At Fred Meyer yesterday, nearly every elderly person I saw had their fingers in their nose, on their mouths, or were just open mouth coughing into the air because??

I’d experienced a brush with covid very shortly after it first emerged in the US: at first, it felt like a timely subject about which to write, but as “fifteen days to stop the spread” expanded into months and then years of fighting over masks and vaccines, with communities of color suffering and healthcare workers pushed to their limits, who cares about the two weeks I spent in my house, running on my mini elliptical and focusing on the day I could again go outside? I didn’t even get sick! The biggest hardship was underdeveloped grocery delivery infrastructure–the horrors of eating expired food from the pantry!! Riveting.

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Night Market: The Flavors of a Friendship, Sugar and Nine Spice

I first met Beth on a train platform in Taipei. I was eighteen and she had just turned seventeen and we each knew we were meeting “the other American” in the large group of exchange students from around the world who would be spending the next year there, living in the homes of strangers we were to call our parents. We’d each just recently arrived, and I was nervous that she wouldn’t like me and nervous I’d be recognized for the imposter that I was in equal measure.

An imposter is what I felt like: I coasted through school with ease, and the parts that weren’t easy, I relied on my social ties with my smarter or more studious peers to pull me through. Frequently lamented in progress reports and report cards was my inability to apply myself; a fair criticism. Between the stress of my home life,  my after school and weekend job, and my desperate need to be liked by my peers, I took relief where I could get relief, at school, by doing the bare minimum that would get me the grade that would avoid repercussions at home. I did thoroughly apply myself to one area: telling authority figures what they wanted to hear, and I used that skill to carry me almost seven thousand miles away, to this train platform, with assurances that I was eager to learn the language, embrace the culture, and be an ambassador of sorts for the United States. I wanted to do those things well but what I really wanted was what the Rotary leaders had promised over and over again: the best year of my life. I wanted it and I was interested in any country that was willing to take me in and let me have it. At that time, we were required to buy an open-ended airline ticket, a ticket where your arrival date is set but your departure could be any date within a year of purchase, the better to be wielded by the program managers as a “behave or we’ll send you home” cudgel.

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Burning Beast 2019

“Welcome to the world’s best feast in a field!” Held annually at Smoke Farm in Arlington, Washington, and organized by chef Tamara Murphy, Burning Beast celebrates all things carnivore, inviting chefs to compete with one another for the title of Ultimate Beastmaster glory and a plaque with a skull on it. Each chef is assigned a protein, but it’s up to them how to prepare it to stand out from their peers and win the accolades of the 500 hungry attendees. 

This was the first year I was able to get my hands on tickets (they typically sell out in minutes and though I purchased my tickets in a harried frenzy, this year they appeared to still be available on the date of the event itself), and I was eager to experience the beefy bacchanal for myself. The chefs generally arrive the previous day, camping at the site and preparing for the event. Ticketholders are invited in at 3pm, with the dinner bell ringing at 5pm or thereabouts. As ticketholders arrive, they’re handed a menu for the evening and a station at which to start.

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