Cat Toys

The other day Nikola and I got swayed by the precooked food in the supermarket. We went in to purchase green onions and udon noodles and somehow decided that we could justify greasy tater-tots and a cheese-filled hot dog as a valid lunch choice. We finished our shopping and sat at the bus stop in front of the store to eat. With the first bite I regretted our decision. Yes, I was hungry, but that was no excuse for the processed grease-bits sliding into me. They didn't even taste good. By the second bite I was looking around for an animal to feed. A young puppy looked like a promising target, but he wasn't interested and padded off in the other direction. I was sorely disappointed, and kept eating the tater tots, but holding the hot dog in hopes of attracting another animal-friend. I am not sure what it is about animals begging for food that feels just fine when I am so hung up on humans doing the same. For some reason the motivation of animals seems pure. They are hungry. I trust that.

Except, the cat that came around wasn't hungry. She was an adorable white cat, not yet old but no longer a kitten. She came right up to Nikola, curious, but it took her awhile to make her way around his legs to the piece of hot dog I had torn off for her. Eventually she found the piece of meat, tongued it a bit, and then reached her paw up to swat it out of my fingers. It was very playful and I laughed with approval. I continued to break off chunks of meat to feed her, and she continued to swat them suspiciously from my hands. Eventually her interest in actually eating the food waned, but she was obviously enjoying playing. I tore off a bigger chunk of meat and dropped it down for her. Instead of eating it she merely batted it, playing with it like she would a live mouse. Since the hot dog wasn't alive I assumed she would tire of the game and move on, leaving a dirty piece of food for another stray to find. But she didn't. She decided that my skirt made a lovely place to play and amused herself by batting the meat out from under my skirt and then chasing it back in. I was a little concerned for the fabric, but the cuteness of the cat prevented me from doing anything to stop her.

At this point what amazed me was not the extent of the playfulness of the cat, but how many people stopped to watch her. At first it was just me and Nikola. After awhile another couple stopped at the bus stop and the girl laughed at the cat. Laughed, out loud. Laughed so I could hear that joyful tinkling fall from her throat. It was quite pleasant and we shared a smile. After awhile the cat grew bored of my skirt and took the meat away to play on her own. She went to the steps of the underpass and batted the meat up and down each step, pouncing on it, circling around it, and then batting it away again. I went to the steps to continue watching, and the girl from the bus stop moved with me. Two young men paused on their way up the stairs and then one turned to the other, mimicking the batting of the cat. An old woman stopped at the bottom of the steps and watched the cat for five minutes. When another woman passed she stopped her, pointed out the cat, and they both laughed. By then Nikola and I decided to continue on our way. I marveled. I don't remember the states very well, but I can't imagine people stopping on the sidewalks to watch a cat play with a hot dog. Watching them stop here somehow made the sun a bit brighter and my spirits, despite the heavy lunch, lifted. 

Fall

I am starting to think that I might enjoy fall if it wasn't twinged with the foreboding of winter. Also, if it didn't feel like it had the right to rush in so suddenly and cut off summer in the middle of ... existing. The weather the past few days has been unusually enticing for me. It has cooled down just enough to turn the heater on for a couple of hours each day. It takes two or three hours just to heat up the core of the unit, and then we turn it off and broil as we wait another four or five hours for the thing to cool back down. I love that heater though. I know how cozy it becomes during winter and so I can't be upset that it doesn't quite fulfill the demanding desires of climate-controlled humans during the precarious swings of autumn. Then sun rises later and sets earlier, already slicing off hours of daylight, but the change in the path of the sun means that we get patterns of leaves dancing lightly on our faces to wake us up in the morning. Besides, I am not much for going out these days. I have become quite a hermit. For the most part I stay in our room, or the kitchen. Occasionally I venture as far as the yard when Pavlina makes me. But I feel neither bored nor lonely. I have an endless supply of projects at the moment: the novel that I am working on, the guitar always wants new songs, learning CSS and html for our new babybook website, knitting, drawing. It seems that I never have quite enough time, and if I ever do get bored I simply have to wander into the kitchen and there is supper to be made or something that could stand to be canned. I could take my bike into town and go to a yoga class, but having the opportunity to curl up under the flannel sheets, with the weight of ur duvet over the top of me, always seems like a better idea. When I do go out it is usually just cool enough for a light jacket and I take one of the knitted wraps Jez left with me. It hangs quite perfectly for strolling or sitting in a cafe and drinking tea.  I tend to feel quite old and alive in it. There are nuts to be peeled and shelled and when I sit outside under the old walnut tree it smells of earthy decay and I am quite happy. If this was all that life was- writing, cooking, loving, and snuggling- I would probably stay quite happy. Unfortunately worry always finds a way to creep in. I know that winter is coming with its slick, icy sidewalks and ever-cold days. Days that last about four hours and long nights. It makes me panic a bit. But I think that I am slowly learning how to deal with it. Last winter I discovered the joy of body suits and leggings. My world opened after that. Plus I have my never ending coat. Maybe I am learning how to deal with it.

For now I will just try to love fall.

The Way Things Are...

Today I went to the "borsa" in Varna. It is one of those words which translates into English, but without the feel of the actual thing that it describes. It is a market, but as opposed to a bazaar, which is like an open-air farmer's market, it is the wholesale side of things, where fruits and vegetables are sold by the 10kg bag, imperfections and all. It is mostly small shops that purchase there, but occasionally families go for bulk products- especially as fall nears and canning, wine-making, and rakia season start to ramp up. I mean, if you are going to fill a 50 gallon drum with pickled things your garden, which can usually feed a family of 6 for the entire summer and half the winter, might need a little boost. The wholesale side of things is, as would be expected, a little more gritty. Packaging and display has not yet touched the products, and this is reflected in the prices. The food there was painfully fresh, and every vegetable I saw pressed into my vision and olfactory system, screaming to be appreciated for its fleeting life. Bulgarian summers burst with freshness. I still don't understand why the big markets are importing. The borsa is for serious food-people, maybe a step above my level of research and planning.

The borsa is directly next to the roma "neighborhood." I use the quotes because in all senses of the word, such as a tight-knit community living together, it is a neighborhood. But it doesn't look like a neighborhood. Shacks pieced together over years of scavenging... the occasional bull roaming to find trash... When I first moved here I accidentally ran through the borsa down to the roma neighborhood. It isn't really a place for a girl with fancy running shoes and an mp3 blaring in her ears to go jaunting through, head up, shoulder's back. Good running posture can easily be mistaken for prideful disdain. But no one had warned me not to go there. It turns out that everyone is so aware of it that they don't really think of possibly going there and so it didn't cross their minds to tell the new girl. We often drive through the area though, on our way into the city center, and it is almost as if no one else even sees it. It is one of those places covered by the invisibility of silence. They don't talk about it, except tiny comments about safety and appearances. I find it sad, and a bit frustrating. Very few of my Bulgarian friends would ever admit to being racist, but almost all of them make assumptions about roma people, and why they live the way they do. They say it is a problem of culture and laziness. But I drive through that place filled with kids without shoes, which must be so cold in the winter, and I wonder if people really think that these kids, which barely have money for food or clothes, really make a conscious choice to not go to school, or to not work. But there seems to be no answer to the problem and so people don't think about it. It is just the way things are...

We made a brief loop into the roma neighborhood and then pulled back up to the borsa. Back into the land of selling and buying. We were still looking for cauliflower, which is just starting to come into season and so is difficult to find. (But I am craving it, and besides the Mexican food that doesn't exist here I am denied very little these days). We bought greek olives, and canning lids, and then headed around one more corner where we finally stumbled across fresh, white cauliflower. While Pavlina purchased a few heads, one of the young men stared me down. No, he didn't stare at me at all, he stared at my breasts. His eyes narrowed in that possessive desire, and I suddenly became very aware that the shirt I had chosen was a little low-cut, and that I had unbuttoned my final button on my pants because they have gotten too tight. I felt exposed, a bit dirty and a bit angry, as I crossed my arms in front of and around me to cover myself. I couldn't really blame him. My breasts have swollen insanely lately, and swollen breasts have a different fall than just large breasts, which are apparently attractive for some reason. (Although I don't fully understand why because it is a sign that I am already pregnant.) Besides, my husband is quick to point out that men are trained to pull women apart like that- to fixate on a piece of them until the woman herself disappears in hot shame. They mean no harm, it's just the way things are...

I love the world. I just hate the way some things are. 

Nutrition guilt

The other day a friend of mine posted this article about Gluten Free food choices. To be perfectly honest my first reaction, without reading the article, was annoyance. Yes, I believe that the Gluten Free "obsession," that many Americans are displaying is a fad. I also believe that just because it is a fad does not negate that there may be many health benefits to reap from a gluten free or gluten reduced diet for some people. But what annoys me is less of whether the article would be pro or anti gluten free diets and more that people get so riled up over food choices, especially that of other people.

I have many friends back in the U.S. who are studying nutrition or are interested in different aspects of food and nutrition. Because of this I get a constant stream of articles about different diet fads, research, and potential nutritional breakthroughs on my facebook wall. Yes, I know how to block these posts, but for me it is a bit like porn- I know it is not good for me to read it, I know I will probably feel annoyed by it, and yet I cannot help but be curious about it. So I click the links and I read the articles, some of them interesting and thought-provoking, and some of them filled with nothing more than bitterness and judgement. This need to click and read has got me thinking about why I am annoyed with all of the talk about food choices, and to theorize about why so many other people are also annoyed, and often defensive, when food becomes the topic of conversation.

I relate the gluten free debate very closely to the vegetarian debate. Of course there are differences: mainly, the vegetarian debate lacks the disdain caused by "medical necessity," vs. fad and desire, and the gluten free debate lacks the moral card of "ethical vegetarianism" played so brutally by organizations like PETA. However, they are both ultimately individual (or at most familial/communal) food choices, and yet are debated in a way that people imply others "should" eat the way that they eat. Also, any time the debate comes up in polite conversation half of the room is usually annoyed, or at least tired of the topic altogether.

The obsession with what goes into our bodies is definitely a modern one. Before the modern age many people did not have much of a choice in what they ate. After industrialization the packaging, preservation, and transportation of food made it quite a bit easier to put a million different combinations of food in our bodies at any moment. The flip side of that ease is the Foucaultian idea of measurement and expertise. With the worship of science we find so many different ways to measure and define our foods. We can measure calories, or nutritional content. We weigh ourselves and compare our bodies to different indexes. Most of all what the modern age has brought is a deferral to expertise in all areas, including (or most of all) our health.  A few measurements are thought of as ideal, and people are mostly trying to fit into that idea of perfection even though it was created from a spectrum with many outliers. How this applies to food is that one type of diet will not be appropriate for all people. Some people work better as vegetarians. Some people have no problems digesting the gluten from modern wheat. However, if something works for a large percentage of people, or produces results towards the ideal of scientific health people tend to fetishize it as healthy without necessarily applying it to their own individual circumstances. I think that is what many people are currently doing with the gluten free fad, which is what makes it a fad. I also think some people are doing their research and realistically making changes in their personal lives that work for them (that would be the majority of my foodie friends.) Either way it shouldn't matter to anyone except them. So, why do so many people get annoyed, or even defensive when they start to explain their food choices?

I think the main reason that our guard is raised as soon as anyone discusses food is due to guilt. Let's go back to this concept of the expert. From elementary school we are taught different ways of eating "healthy." This doesn't take into account our parent's habits, financial situation, or the ever changing research in the field of nutrition ("Are eggs good for you this year?"). We are teaching eight year olds how to eat 'properly' when the average eight year old has almost no control whatsoever over their diet. By the time a person does have control (to some degree) over their diet they have already formed/inherited many "bad" habits. Not to mention that eating in modern times is about so much more than just nutrition. It is about socializing, comfort, experience, and status at least. This makes it extremely difficult to "eat right" even though most of us have been basically educated about healthy diets. However, even if you dedicate yourself to eating right the amount of conflicting information can be overwhelming and absolutely frustrating so even if you are trying to do what the experts say is right you will inevitably fail. This adds up to a lot of guilt over our food choices and our failure to be healthy. Okay, maybe it is not guilt in everyone. Maybe for some people it is more of an irritation or annoyance or frustration. Whatever it is we are surrounded by the message that there IS a right way to eat, and whatever we do we are NOT doing it. (Which we can't, because honestly there isn't actually one magical way of eating right.) Because of this internalized sensitivity to being told that we are failures at eating we become defensive. So, when one of our friends starts telling us about something that worked for them, we hear what we are accustomed to hearing- that we are doing it wrong.

Example:

What our friend says:
"I am a vegetarian. It has been really great for me and I feel less depressed than I felt when I was eating meat."

What we hear:
"You don't think about what you put in your body. The meat you are eating is making you depressed. You fail."

OR

What our friend says:
"I think that I am going to try going gluten free. I hear that a lot of people who stop eating gluten feel more energetic and have an easier time digesting their food."

What we hear:
"Why would you ever put gluten in your body? I judge you. Everyone else can figure out how to eat right but you are too weak to give up your habits. You should do this too."

Okay, maybe that is a bit extreme. I know plenty of people who are a bit quick to give advice concerning other people's diets. But the fact is that most of my friends are excited about their own food adventure in life, and want to share their experiences. They are not (usually) on a crusade to change or judge others. A lot of that judgement and preachiness that we feel is actually imagined and internalized by a vague food culture filled with guilt and a lack of real discussions about food culture instead of simple food myths and "expert" advice.

I have been guilty of judging others on their eating habits. I have also been guilty of thinking others were judging me when they probably weren't. Sometimes there really were, though. This is why nutrition demands a holistic, cultural approach rather than the facts and figures that we "taught" our 8-year olds twenty years ago, and I love that some of my more aware friends are getting into this field.

And here's a picture of yummy food: :)

Bliss

Today was one of those days where everything feels slightly magical. It is almost as if just by touching an object, and listening hard enough, you can hear it whisper its story. Any object. The sand, the waves, the leaves blowing on the trees... I am not entirely sure where this magic comes from. Surely it is an internal positioning of myself. Perhaps a combination of expectation (or lack thereof), freedom from stress, and just the right blood sugar level mixed with the right amount of hormones. Everything takes on a rosy tint even though the external world has not really changed. Of course that is what it is, but it feels like everything is just lining up perfectly for me to float through the universe and learn/understand. It feels as if I can sense many wills rubbing up against me, brushing bubbly over my skin, and receding like sea foam. On these days the experience of being alive is quite enough, and I can sit, still, in bliss.

Today we went to the beach. The first beach we went to had a lovely river bending around a bar and emptying into the sea. We watched a line of clouds puff towards us, dropping sheets of rain into the sea only feet away from the warmth of sunshine. The wind and overcast sky set up the perfect expectation from the day. We weren't alone on the beach- there was a man playing fetch with his dog, and a couple lazily casting rods into the river- but there were so few people that the people stood out as individuals with desires and wills of their own. Eventually it started raining on that beach and so we left in search of another. By then I was in a heavy state of bliss, life flowing happily about me, and I was completely amused by everything I saw.

At the second beach the experience was completely different and yet kept the same blissful undercurrent. The sun was shining brightly and people were playing in the water. We laid out to sunbathe and Nikola buried me in the sand. As he added more weight I began to feel my heartbeat pressing out against the sand in a steady, slow rhythm. I lay there for awhile, watching nothing and just feeling. Eventually I found pipe expelling water onto the beach in the distance and was captivated by the way it rushed out onto the sand. We dipped in the water twice, and then prepared to leave. I dried, took off my wet swimsuit and was treated to the wonderful embrace of a flannel shirt. The sensation took me back to when I was a teenager, and everything was so very new and intense, and I considered where I had been, and where I was now, and tried hard to avoid judgement in either direction. As we left I watched the people sunbathing that we had to tiptoe around. Dark, sun-kissed skin that belied how much time each of them had spent on the sea this summer. I realized that I love bodies. Not just attractive bodies, but many bodies of different shapes and sizes because they all have these interesting signs of life.

On the way home we watched a storm roll in over Varna. I watched the last traces of sunshine play in the leaves of the trees. Somehow the English word for play does not hold enough weight. Play has become too cerebral in my American consciousness. This was a physical play- a dancing, a movement, a manipulation- so much more than just a concept. I tucked away that amusement, watched people jumping off the bridge, and as we made the final turn to Nikola's house the rain began.

All in all it was lovely, but more importantly, it was blissful.