I Love Goats

One thing you should know about me is how much I love goats. I’m really partial to all farm animals: horses, chickens, pigs, cows are alright I guess, ducks, border collies, sheep, llamas if you’re on a really exotic farm. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a city and the only time I ever really got to get close to an animal that wasn’t a dog, cat, or gerbil was in farm-like situations: petting zoos, horse stables, what my mother told me was a petting zoo that later turned out to be a pond of ducks behind an Italian restaurant. Anyway, I love goats the most. I don’t know if you’ve interacted with a goat, but it’s like interacting with a dog. They are playful, affectionate, and really want you to pet them behind their horns. Also, they make the best, creamiest cheese, really good caramel, and in 800 AD roaming goats discovered coffee beans so really goats are just the best and pretty much invented Frappachinos. 

Matt meets a kid.

Goat cart

        One of the fun things about not having a job and living somewhere new is that I never know what’s going to happen to me in a given day and I’m learning to just go with it. For instance, the adult softball league that Matt sometimes subs for needed a girl player so I played catcher in a softball game last week, even though I’m generally terrified of playing organized sports mostly because I don’t fully understand the rules to any sport besides bocce ball and like, capture the flag. (I don’t want to brag or anything but I hit a pitch and made it to first base.)So on Saturday Matt and I went to visit one of my professors from grad school at White Lotus Farm. She told me there were goats there, but I didn’t realize the sheer amount of goats or that half of them would be kids or that they would wear little dog collars or that their hooves would be so tiny. In general, I wish all my days of taking a break involved playing with baby goats and even though I’m not supposed to be actively looking for a job I’m not going to pretend like I didn’t Google “goat shepherd” to see if this job still exists. Maybe one day Teacake and I will take to the Italian hillsides to shepherd our herd from villa to villa as the goats prepare us artisan coffee drinks, but for now I will have to make do with just visiting. 

Goat watch 2013

Goat stampede

Natural goat herder?

        

Day One: Placemats!

                When I was in first grade, my mom sewed me an elf Halloween costume. The costume worked like this: my legs were hidden inside the trunk of a toadstool and around my waist was the toadstool’s cap, on top of that were two fake legs constructed from pantyhose stuffed with cotton filling. From the waist up I was dressed in a green vest and a pointy green cap, giving the impression that I was sitting on the toadstool. My mom sewed the entire thing from a Martha Stewart Halloween costume book, that if I remember correctly was full of clever children’s costumes like the sitting elf and adult costumes that were mostly literal interpretations of common phrases. The “jailbird” costume featured a woman wearing a feathered headdress and fake chains around her ankles, the “serial killer” costume was a guy dressed all in black stabbing a box of Wheaties, a “stool pigeon” had a beak attached to his forehead and was sitting on a three legged stool (perfect if you plan on staying stationary for an entire Halloween party). My mom spent hours making the elf costume with her sewing machine, but when I wore it to school, every single other first grader in the Halloween parade was wearing a pink Power Rangers costume from CVS, even the boys. It was a parade of 45 Kimberlys and one pair of stuffed pantyhose sitting on a fungus. Every time I turned around I knocked over a pink-masked six year old with the girth of my mushroom cap.  I was super embarrassed. Nobody elses' legs were encased inside a toadstool trunk. Nobody elses' mom had made their costume. That night, I refused to trick-or-treat in the elf costume (because seriously kids are the worst) and my mom quickly whipped up some cat ears and black leggings and I went as a cat instead.

                I always took for granted that my mom was so good at sewing. In fact, throughout elementary school and into middle school it always seemed a little embarrassing. Sewing was so domestic, and women were supposed to be liberated from all that household stuff when they set their bras on fire in the seventies, right?  But I didn’t argue during ninth grade crew when she sewed up the flared leggings she bought me to run in when everyone else had bought straight-legged leggings. And I didn’t argue when she altered my prom dress when I realized it didn’t fit twenty minutes before my date arrived.

                I thought that sewing would be a good project for my first day of taking a break because it’s how I used to take a break when I actually had real things to do. I asked my mom for a sewing machine two years ago when I really wanted to make my own pillows for my couch, and it didn’t take long to realize why my mom had spent so much time sewing when I was a kid. It’s relaxing and mentally challenging at the same time (you even have to do math sometimes!) and producing something that you can hold and use is incredibly satisfying. Another great thing about sewing is it’s an excuse to watch TV and feel productive at the same time. Today I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and then accidentally, Mean Girls 2. (It’s just as bad as you think it is and unironically involves a lot of girls walking in pyramid formation with an unidentified wind source blowing their hair dramatically and the line “Maybe we can talk about it over some non-fat soy raspberry lattes!”)

 I’m not a super accomplished sewer yet, and today I went for something easy: placemats.

Not super accomplished or organized:this is how I fold and store my pattern pieces.

Right before I realized I should have measured before I cut.

I got the fabric at the Ann Arbor Sewing Center, an independent sewing store. Not because I only shop at independent stores (although it's great to support independent stores! I'm just poor!), but mostly because the Joanne's Fabrics in Ann Arbor pretty much only stocks weird colorful fleece.Welcome to Michigan, I guess its cold here.

Reversible placemats!

 I was going to say that I wasn’t going to go step by step through how to make these placemats because anyone should be able to figure out how to cut out rectangles and sew them together, but then I immediately mis-measured and didn’t have enough fabric. (Like I said, sometimes sewing involves math).But luckily I had some extra fabric that sort of matched, so I made two of the four placemats reversible, which ended up being a happy accident because I actually really like the way they turned out.

So, there it is: my first day of taking a break. I didn’t even feel guilty. Well, now I sort of do because I’m still watching Mean Girls 2.

Twenty Eight Days of Taking a Break

I just graduated from an MFA program where everyone’s mantra was the same: work. Work every day, for hours a day, work when you don’t feel like it, when you aren’t inspired, work on Christmas, work instead of sleeping if you have to, work instead of eating (Psh. Whatever). In general, the people in my MFA program were some of the hardest workers I have ever met in my entire life. And the work worked, all my friends are slowly but surely making names for themselves. They are appearing in journals and on websites, winning awards and receiving fellowships. And this is isn’t just true of writing, I read everywhere in every field that the people who are the most successful are never the people who just happened to have a particular talent, but they are the people who worked hard for something they really wanted. There are all the famous examples of extremely successful people who pushed through failure and kept working: Stephen King’s first novel Carrie was rejected 30 times before it was published, Van Gogh never sold a painting in his entire career, Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Even people who seem to be instant successes at an early age often still worked incredibly hard to get there, Mindy Kailing writes in her memoir about how after she graduated college she moved to New York and would spend days in Borders reading books about screenwriting she couldn’t afford to buy, then she wrote, produced, put up, and starred in a play with her best friend that got her noticed. (She also writes about how her best friend and her wrote that play while watching reality TV and eating snacks, which sounds like my kind of work.) I listened to an interview with Nick Offerman the other day, who talked about how it took him a really long time and a lot of work until he finally had some real success. He said “When I got the job of Parks and Rec I was 38. I had learned to be incredibly happy with my life as it was, I was working as an actor, I was unknown, but I had an incredible household, I had my wife, I had a woodworking shop. I was happy as a clam…and then I got my dream job. I was grateful I was able to become pretty solid before I had some success.” The point being, if you work hard enough at something you want eventually you will see results, even if it takes a long time. Unless you are Van Gogh in which case you will never see success and die alone with one ear.

 I’m all for hard work. But the problem for me is that even though I am willing to work hard, I'm not sure what work is the most important. For the last three years in graduate school and the last two in college before that, I’ve worked really hard as a writer and then as a teacher, but I don’t necessarily know if that is what I want to do forever. And now I've graduated, I'm unemployed and I'm not sure what exactly I'm supposed to be doing. I like a lot of things. How can I know which one is the most important? Which is the one I’m supposed to be putting all this hard work into? Writing nonfiction? Writing screenplays? Food writing? Or is it something entirely different? Teaching? Sewing? Working with animals? Cooking? Running? Everyone is always saying to work hard at the thing you are passionate about, but I think the trouble for me is trying to distinguish my passion from my hobbies. I listened to a radio story yesterday about a 23 year old guy who walked across the entire country asking people what advice they would give themselves at 23. In the end, he decided the most common advice was that "you already know what you want to do, do it." At firs this sounded nice, kind of mystical and important, as if I could just sit down and think really hard about my dreams and suddenly be guided in the right direction like a pointer on a Ouija Board. But then I thought "Bullshit." If everyone knew exactly what they wanted to do at 23 and worked towards it, there would be a lot more rockstars and like three mailmen. So for the next month, I’m going to do the opposite of what everyone has been telling me to do for the last three years: I’m going to take a break. Every day I’m going to do something I like to do, but that doesn’t contribute to a larger goal. And here’s the big thing: I’m not going to feel guilty about it. I’m going to stop feeling guilty for not writing enough, or not cooking enough, or not running enough. In fact, I’m going to do away with guilt altogether, because the guilt of not knowing what work I should be doing often paralyzes me to the point of doing nothing (Also known as watching Netflix while reading celebrity gossip/eating Greek yogurt). So starting on Friday I will be posting three times a week (On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays) about the things I did during my 28 days of a guilt-free break from attempting to be successful. I will not expect any of these things to provide me with a road map to a life-long fulfilling career and I will not feel guilty for doing one of these things when I could be doing another thing. Because hard work is great, but I’ve been in school since I was 2 and maybe breaks are underrated. Hopefully.

Zora: expert break-taker.

Why Judge Judy Hates my Toaster Oven

Last week, Matt and I were driving home from the store in my new city of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The backseat was full of all the new things we needed for our apartment, well, his apartment that had now— with the recent addition of all my clothing, kitchen items, and cat—become ours. We’d bought a carload of groceries, various grooming products, cat food and litter, and a brand new toaster oven. I was already feeling a little weepy about the toaster oven, not just because it was the first ever toaster oven I’d owned and toaster ovens are incredibly useful (did you know, according to the owner’s manual, you can bake a whole personal pizza in there?) but because it was our toaster oven. The first appliance we’ve ever bought together.

In the five years that we have dated, Matt and I have shared a lot of things, but we’ve always been careful to keep what was ours separate. The tabby cat is his, the calico cat is mine. His blue 2003 Volkswagon Passat, my black 2003 Volkswagon Passat. (This is purely a coincidence. We had identical cars before we met, but yes, it’s okay if you want to vomit a little.) Even when we lived together two years ago, we had two of everything like Karen from the Babysitter’s Club Little Sister books who owned duplicate items for each house of her divorced parents: two dressers, two woks, two separate bottles of laundry detergent (Mine was normal, his he made in the lab). But as we drove home I looked back at the big cardboard box that contained our new jointly owned toaster oven and couldn’t help but fall in love a little with the appliance all taped up in its blue box. I couldn’t wait to get it home, set it up, and make ourselves some symbolic toast. It was then that Judge Judy came on the radio and said these words: “Newly cohabitating couples should never, ever buy anything together.” Judy snapped me out of my toaster oven delirium. I’d been so happy thinking of all the things we were going to make in that toaster oven (Seriously, you can just put a raw chicken breast in there), but this seemed like a sign that couldn’t be ignored. After so many years of careful separation, were we making the wrong choice? Should I hand Matt over the 13 dollars for my half of the toaster oven? But then I thought about all the other typical “mistakes” Matt and I have made in the last few years. We’ve basically done every single thing they tell you not to do in a relationship. 

Don’t live together with roommates: we lived in a three bedroom, one bathroom house with two other roommates and three cats. Considering the cats’ litterbox was next to the toilet, that was seven living things sharing one bathroom. 

Don’t try making a long-distance relationship work: Matt committed to living in Michigan for five years before I was done with my MFA program in North Carolina. 

Don’t break up and get back together: From November to February of this last year, Matt and I were, for the first time in five years, not together. 

And let’s be honest, there’s a reason you’re not supposed to do these things in a relationship, because they are all awful. Living with roommates is awkward and stressful, even if you really like them, and there is no room for anybody to put things in the fridge. Long distance relationships are categorically the worst; it’s hard to feel the romance when you are staring into each others' eyes via a video chat that keeps freezing your face in weird positions. And breaking up was the worst of all. But we made all those mistakes, and yet, here we were, unloading our joint toaster oven from the car.

Matt is the only person I’ve dated for longer than a few months, so I’m not really a relationship expert, and also I’m only 25 so I will probably laugh heartily at all my silly, naive, beliefs about functional relationships when I remember this blog in my 50s, flying home in my personal hovercraft, but I think it’s not really the mistakes you make that doom or make a good relationship, it’s how you fix them. When Matt and I broke up, it would have been easy to get caught up in all the hundreds of mistakes we have made over the last 5 years, but instead we talked, we listened, we compromised, and we moved on. I mean, we also cried and yelled and occasionally angrily hung up on each other (or angrily signed off Facebook chat, which is a far less satisfying way to end an argument), but in general, we worked hard to make things better. I think it’s because we like each other. And we genuinely care that the other person is happy. And we want to be together. For me, those are the important things, not whether or not we bought a toaster oven together or a coffee table (Matt lived in this apartment for a year without a coffee table and didn't even mind, which I think should be a condition registered in the DSM). I know relationships are more complicated than that, I know we are only 25 and 26 and there are a million other things we will have to deal with that will make our relationship harder as time goes on, but right now here we are: one wok, one car, one bottle of normal laundry detergent. And I’m happy with that. So shut up, Judge Judy. I’m going to make some toast. Or maybe a chicken breast.