“Experts have predicted that the reign of the tablet and the mobile phone may be over — with 2013 set to be the year of the ‘phablet’.”

According to the latest scientific proof in the form of a magazine list feature, San Francisco is the nation’s healthiest city. Women’s Health surveyed a hundred American cities and ranked them according to life expectancy, obesity, access to health care, incidence of cancer, nutrition, and probably how much money everybody has. How did a wealthy and beautiful city with its own universal health care plan and a population of attractive people who walk everywhere end up at the top of the list? (SELF magazine put out a similar list last month, with San Jose at No. 1 and San Francisco in third place.)

Also, why did Men’s Health put out nearly the same list, but with San Francisco in second place to Boise? More importantly, why is New York nowhere to be found in the Top Ten? Because of winter, probably? Those four or five months when people spend most days inside under blankets with a box of donuts and a case of “winter ale,” that might be taking a toll.

At the very tragic bottom of the list, there’s the usual Deep South town — in this year’s list, it’s Birmingham, Alabama, but it could just as easily be Jackson, Mississippi, which is at 94th place on this list. And the grim poverty and crushed hope of rust belt cities like Detroit (#90), Toledo (#98) and Cleveland (#96) is definitely not making people any healthier, it turns out! The good news is that we will all eventually die, except for Ray Kurzweil, who moved to the Bay Area just to rub it in.

Photo by Eric Molina.

“Earning more money tends to make people happier, at least up to a point. But new research suggests the reverse may also be true: happier people actually make more money.”

Okay, well, after a weird couple of weeks where the natural order of things was forced to contend with the grave disturbance of front-loaded holiday time, we have returned to what is more or less the first real week of the year. How does it feel? Yeah, I know, me too. Let’s ease back into things as casually as possible, by which I mean funny animal stories (I think we’ve got an otter post coming up for you at some point this morning) and bear videos. If you are expecting the dulcet tones of Choire Sicha in this space alerting you about events around town, I am sorry to tell you that this immensely popular feature will not resume until next week. If you’re still trying to make plans, look around: I’m sure there’s something going on somewhere. There usually is. While we settle back in to a new year of drudgery and despair (although it has got to be better than the last one, right? I mean, it has got to) why not avoid work by catching up with our series on advice. We will get through this together, I promise. Anyway, would you like to tell us about the New Year’s resolutions you have already broken? Take it to Twitter. That’s what it’s for.

Photo by Alexander Kuzmuk, via Shutterstock

Better Boundaries, With Muriel Spark

by Maud Newton

Though I am no longer by any metric young, this year I’ve taken to heart a lot of Choire’s advice to young people on the subject of “operators, divas, drama queens, vampires, bitter underminers and soulless careerists.” To those categories one of my other favorite advice-givers, Nancy Hawkins, would propose an addition, or at least a subset: the pisseur de copie.

Mrs. Hawkins, the young widow narrator of Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington is probably best known for her diet tips: “It’s easy to get thin. You eat and drink the same as always, only half. If you are handed a plate of food, leave half; if you have to help yourself, take half. After a while, if you are a perfectionist you can consume half of that again. … I offer this advice without fee; it is included in the price of this book.”

She has plenty of other suggestions, too. “It is my advice to any woman getting married to start, not as you mean to go on, but worse, tougher, than you mean to go on.” “My advice to any woman who earns the reputation of being capable, is not to demonstrate her ability too much. You give advice; you say, do this, do that, I think I’ve got you a job, don’t worry, leave it to me. All that, and in the end you feel spooky, empty, haunted. And if you then want to wriggle out of so much responsibility, the people around you are outraged. You have stepped out of your role. It makes them furious.”* “When you have to refuse any request that admits of no argument, you should never give reasons or set out your objections; to do so leads to counter-reasons and counter-objections.” “If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat.”

Googling around on the subject of Mrs. Hawkins and her advice, I came upon a post by T.D. Whittle, a fellow fan I’d already discovered on Pinterest, who cites this great bit on sleepless nights: “Insomnia is not bad in itself. You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of. Can you decide to think? — Yes you can. You can put your mind to anything most of the time. Who lives without problems every day? Why waste the nights on them?” And this, on looking for work: “When you are looking for a job the best thing to do is to tell everyone, high and humble, and keep reminding them please to look out for you. This advice is not guaranteed to find you a job, but it is remarkable how suitable jobs can be found through the most unlikely people.” And more and more and more.

People mistake Mrs. Hawkins’ interest and diligence for warmth. She can be engaged, and occasionally compassionate, but mostly she’s a listener, an observer prone to judging — sometimes cruelly, always entertainingly, often secretly. “It is my happy element to judge between right and wrong, regardless of what I might actually do,” she says. “At the same time, the wreaking of vengeance and imposing of justice on others and myself are not at all in my line. It is enough for me to discriminate mentally and leave the rest to God.”

On the subject of the pisseur de copie, though, Mrs. Hawkins can’t keep her opinion to herself. Said to be based on an old lover of Spark’s who gossiped about her private life, sold her letters, criticized her novels, and never wrote anything memorable or good, the character Hector Bartlett “knew the titles of all the right books, and the names of the authors, but it amounted to nothing; he had read very little.” Bartlett fancies himself a writer. He’s cultivated Emma Loy, a bestselling novelist, who champions him. And he sees Mrs. Hawkins, an assistant at a small but prestigious publishing house, as his entry to her bosses. Mrs. Hawkins has other ideas. “I had once, some years before, put him in the way of a job that would have suited him very well: door-to-door encyclopaedia-pushing in the suburbs. He would have been able to blab and enthuse about the encyclopedias, and impress the housewives.”

His writings, she says, “writhed and ached with twists and turns and tergiversations, inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words. … Hector Bartlett, it seemed to me, vomited literary matter, he urinated and sweated, he excreted it.” “Pisseur de copie,” she hisses at him one morning in the park where he faux-casually lies in wait for her.

“’Won’t you call me Hector,’” he says, after pretending not to hear and cajoling her for a while, when she dismisses him with a “Mr. Bartlett.”

“’No,’” she says, “’I call you Pisseur de copie,” and takes her leave. And though it costs her two jobs, she insists on continuing to call him this, not only to Hector himself but to everyone else, just about every time his name is mentioned. It’s almost involuntary, she says, “like preaching the gospel.”

I can’t decide whether it’s more narcissistic or more fair-mindedly self-critical to compare oneself to cretinous novel characters, but I do it all the time, and the negative example of Hector Bartlett is something I increasingly reflect on now when I’m thinking of posting my opinion on some subject or considering whether to take an assignment. I think: Is this something I really care about? Am I actually informed about this, or do I have enough time and interest to become genuinely informed about it? Do I have, if not yet a clear picture of exactly what I want to say, a conviction that I have something to say? I’ve used roughly the same metrics in the past, but they’re stricter now. While I adore and have benefitted greatly from being alive in a time when anything I want to say can be published online immediately, the instant gratification machine that is the Internet also has a high potential to encourage indiscriminate urination of prose. Also, life is short, I am still not finished with my book, and there is more than enough tergiversating to go around.

A pisseur de copie on the level of Hector Bartlett sounds like a rare breed — a subset, perhaps, of what Choire calls a soulless careerist, with more than a bit of vampire mixed in. More than a few critics have dismissed him as broad caricature.

In a mixed 1988 review of A Far Cry from Kensington for the London Review of Books, Susannah Clapp accuses Spark of snobbery and score-settling. It’s a tricky thing to conflate an author and her characters the way Clapp does in the piece, but while I adore the novel and wouldn’t change a word of it I can see her perspective. Her theories about the characters are worth transcribing here, insofar as they have bearing on the dangers of appeasing a pisseur. Spark, Clapp says: “has talked about this novel in connection with her early days and associates in literary London. Some of these associates were bad writers: ‘I could see that not all of them were good … but they were my friends, charming people, and I didn’t do anything about it. Perhaps I’m doing something about it now.’ Perhaps. Not everyone will feel that something has to be done about friends who don’t write well. But it is difficult to resist the idea that something needed to be done about the pisseur, whose pollutions extend beyond his prose, and who sets out first to use and then to harm two women: the fat Mrs Hawkins, and the striking, successful (and presumably slim) novelist, Emma Loy. These two women may seem to make one Muriel Spark.”

On the subject of the novel as autobiography, Spark told The New York Times in 1988 that ‘’’The first-person story is difficult to start,’ … ‘since the aim is getting the right tone and the right style. I had to write as I felt Mrs. Hawkins would write — it’s her story. Good plain English prose, but not artistic, not over-literary. It’s not my style, it’s her style. But of course it’s mine.’’ Also: ‘’I did work with several publishers. I was an editor, I was a dogsbody, a secretary, almost everything in the houses I worked for. And I worked for the Falcon Press, whose owner really was rather mad, and who really did go to prison for forging checks. But I don’t describe any publishers to the life.” And finally: ‘’There have been a number of men in my life like Hector Bartlett … but Hector Bartlett is not based on any one of them; there again, it’s a conglomerate picture. But authentic. There are plenty of them still around.’’

Whether or not Mrs. Hawkins and Emma Loy are both in some way stand-ins for Spark herself, it is in Hector Bartlett’s relationship with his champion, the bestselling novelist Loy, that he is especially dangerous, and especially cautionary. For it is Loy who works to further the pisseur’s career, Loy who gets Mrs. Hawkins fired from her jobs for insulting him, and Loy who (spoiler alert) ultimately is surprised when the pisseur turns on her. Far from being grateful for Loy’s efforts on his behalf, the pisseur ultimately uses their relationship to publish “his accounts of Emma Loy when he knew her, the falsities and the vaunted sensational revelations and the pathetic inventions.” Loy, Mrs. Hawkins tells us, knew all along that Bartlett was a talentless striver but perversely tried to “promote and appease him… with the idea of getting rid of him easier by making him out to be some sort of equal.”

Had Loy turned to Mrs. Hawkins for advice, I like to think she would have offered some combination of Choire’s instructions for dealing with vampires and soulless careerists. I recommend reviewing those so you’ll be prepared in the unlikely event you should ever be hounded and barraged by a pisseur de copie. My favorite part of his advice reads like something out of Proverbs. “Let them have no traction,” he says.

* This is a great corollary to Joan Didion, another great boundary-preserver, on self-respect and the specter of the unanswered letter.

Previously in series: On Advice To Kids

Also by this author: Remembering Harry Crews

Maud Newton is a writer and critic living in Brooklyn.

On Advice To Kids

When my friends started having children, as much as I thought about what role I’d play in their kids’ lives, it was as the sort of friend of the family who, when you’re teetering through teenagerdom and your early 20s, takes you out to lunch or dinner (often arriving, fortuitously, when you’re most off course and down-at-heel), gives you Rilke and Asimov and the Brontes at the junctures when they can do their most good, takes your ambitions seriously, lets you be yourself while providing some calibrating sense of what the world at large will eventually expect from your conversation, etc. I had a couple such ‘aunts’ myself, my mom’s best friends; they were essential to me. Not that I considered any of this too closely (I spent as much concentrated time guessing at the number of jelly beans in the jar during the baby showers); there was only a hazy assumption of future lunches and dinners, future me, breezy and perfumed and self-contained, like an older Colette character, the future kid at some gawky, giraffed stage of impending adulthood. If I had turned out prosperous, I would get to say extravagant things like: “Here’s plane fare for Andalusia!” And if I had not: “Here is a copy of Steppenwolf. When you’re older the memory of how much you loved this book will make you cackle but never mind that now.”

How would we arrive at these meals on terms of familiarity and confidence? I didn’t think about it.

At age 3, Sofia, my friend Angela’s daughter, was sitting next to me at a party when, after a half-hour of steadily downing crackers, she began choking. First she turned red, then she turned purple. One adult swept her up; another adult hooked a finger down her throat and scraped up the approximately nine pounds of cracker paste stuck there. I was, it seems important to note, neither of those helpful adults. I remember having absolutely no idea what to do.

***

There’s a scene in Experience where Martin Amis describes the little ritual that would conclude Philip Larkin’s visits to see his father Kingsley when he (Martin) was a child. Before departure, Larkin would stack coins for him and his brother on the kitchen table. This was called “tipping the boys” (marvelous Larkin/Amis Elder-ism). The two kids, after some urging, would shyly rush forward and nab the money as Larkin looked on “mournful and priestly.” The older brother (Larkin’s godson) received fourpence, Martin, three. The amount increased as they got older, but never by much — Larkin was miserly.

For some reason I’ve always pictured Larkin as wearing a mackintosh during these proceedings. (Above the coat, his face “an egg sculpted in lard, wearing goggles.”) Maybe in addition to the mack, he was also sometimes juggling a bottle of wine and standing around awkwardly as the family thrummed around him in its post-dinner routine and he hoped the kids would be sent off to bed soon because he’d just remembered a great piece of gossip and wanted to tell Kingsley privately; maybe he stared into the kids’ faces and felt genuine affection but could think of nothing to say and consoled himself with “wait till you are older and I can tell you where all the great restaurants in Andalusia are”; maybe he sometimes heard himself asking “how’s school?” and thought, “Sweet Jesus, kid, sorry about that.” Or maybe he was only sorry to be shaved of the 7d. I don’t know.

Larkin, of course, famously disliked children. In a footnote to the tipping anecdote, Amis writes: “As a child himself, he has said, he thought he hated everybody: ‘but when I grew up I realized it was only children I didn’t like.’” Then Amis adds: “I take this to be self-stylization.”

***

I used to work at an ad agency and I’ve stayed friends with many of the people I knew there. One of them was Angela. (It was her job to tapdance back and forth to the clients. Now she’s a nursing assistant on a neurological unit, while getting her nursing degree.) Another was my friend Connie, who was an art director. I was a copywriter. Our other friend was a client. (Oh the famed advertising merchant guilds of the Appalachians! How secret and privileged that sorority!) The four of us like to meet up for wine every couple months, even though only one of us has the same job she used to.

The week after our last date this spring, Connie got a bad case of allergies. Her eyes were bloodshot and she had to wear sunglasses to her daughter’s soccer game because it was so embarrassing, these bloodshot eyes. Then she started getting nosebleeds. She went in for tests and was admitted to the hospital the same morning. She stayed in a hospital in Asheville and then one in New Jersey for the next eight months receiving treatment for leukemia (intense rounds of chemotherapy and then a bone marrow transplant) — that is, she spent most of spring, summer, and fall in a hospital bed, in various levels of pain and discomfort, with the continual sound of footsteps and voices in the hall outside her room, with nurses and techs coming in every hour, and the incessant beeps of IVs and monitors, and the meals on trays, and the recirculated air. (Many of our phone conversations this year have been about weather. “It’s hot today.” “It’s raining a little, it feels nice,” I would report from three miles away.) She is out now and doing well. Let’s draw a superstitious circle around that.

Once this spring, I was visiting her at the hospital and, the hallway being very long, I had time to forget why I was there while I was walking down it, and when I turned the corner to her room and saw her sitting there, very pretty, looking up to say hello like we were back at the agency and I was swinging into her office for afternoon coffee, the hospital bed and the equipment around it seemed so incongruous and surprising, I thought, “What are you doing here?”

Same hallway, another week. I was taking her daughter to get a popsicle from the family room fridge. Ella was wearing Connie’s sheepskin slippers. We picked out treats. When she wanted to pick out a third one I said, “No, two is plenty,” and she nodded (being around kids: it turns out, you get to make up rules!). We headed back for the room. Ella veered off down another hallway at a trot. We did one lap around the floor. She was screeching and marching and swaggering like a demented Sweathog majorette, looking back every now and again to make sure I was following and admiring. She wouldn’t come back but she would modulate the screeching. We did three laps, then four, then a couple more, until, eventually, she decided she was ready to go back to the room and took off at a full run, leaving the slippers in the hallway behind her.

***

Both girls are 8. Ella is an only child. Sofia has two younger siblings. I will tell you briefly about these younger two, although they do not figure into this story much. The five year old, a boy, has recently reached a new age of confidence. On a recent Christmas Eve visit, he was full of declarative statements, although the emphasis of each sentence would leapfrog from place to place: “I am five.” Watching his mom set out a stack of plates: “We are going to have a party.” It was like talking to a very short vineyard proprietor who knows all that is growing in his fields down to the last vine, where all his workers are and at what jobs they are busy with, feels immense satisfaction in all that is produced there, and has also recently mastered how to tie his shoes. To me, after opening his gift: “I knew you were going to give me a book.” “This” — to another guest, motioning to his younger sister in whom he takes great pride — “is Audrey.” Audrey, the three year old, knows herself essentially comic, hilarious, because of the steady observation and admiration of the older two. Feels little need to speak, is more silent movie than that. “We were brushing our teeth,” Sofia told me, “and a piece of candy cane shot out of her nose and into the sink. I thought it was snot at first but it wasn’t. It was a candy cane.”

Sofia has skipped a grade and that sounds meritorious, but she still gets in trouble at school for overriding the teacher’s instructions and “helping George too much with his work.” Poor George, whoever you are! Poor teacher! Sofia has a raspy sister-of-Marge-Simpson voice and a very quick assessing gaze, both with her since infancy and both of which can make you feel when you’re talking to her as if you’re talking to a peer: “I like those earrings,” she might say and you wait for her to add, “Where did you find them, Etsy?” until you remember she’s eight. One night last summer, when she was very anguished and beating her head against a chair and crying, her mom asked her what was wrong, and she wailed, “I don’t knoooowwww.”

Here are two pieces of advice that Angela has given Sofia this year that I’ve found helpful too:

• Do not tell your friend’s secrets even if one day you are extremely mad at her. You will feel terrible later. (This advice would not have been that helpful except it was given preemptively and before any occasion for regret. It’s the one I most wish I had learned at a younger age.)

• When people are mean to you it often has little to do with you and more to do with whatever position on the ladder they are trying to maintain or get to. (This was said in reference to a sixth-grade friend who’s rude and aloof when friends her own age are around. It also will, I imagine, someday explain a lot of what happens in the professional world to Sofia.)

Angela told me that Sofia took in both bits of advice with a very serious face. She seemed to understand.

And here is the third piece of advice, not given to Sofia but related to her. It happened at a party to celebrate the end of the school year. For that party, Angela, against the counsel of friends and every parent you could ever ask, had invited ten girls over for a sleepover. She had ceded the master bedroom to the group so they could watch movies. (Her husband was out of town.) It was now maybe 11 at night. She was lying on Sofia’s bed, and we were talking on the phone. Five year old pops up, wants to be with the girls. Three year old follows, crying. Are returned to their beds. Outbreak of upset and fighting from the girls in the bedroom. Quelled. Five year old reappears, hopeful, is returned to his bed. Second outbreak of fighting at the sleepover, this time louder. Argument rumbles at high volume down the hallway toward Angela for adjudicating. Loud knock at the door from disputants requesting audience. I heard my friend breathe in and out. I could picture her lying on that undersized kid bed. She whispered into the phone — and it has been the only time in nearly a dozen years of acquaintance I have ever heard her admit anything remotely like this — “I do not know what to do.”

And then she put down the phone and got up and went into the hallway. And her voice as it came back to me was a mom’s voice, an adult’s voice: Controlled, calm, Decider-y. If I had been a kid I would have had no idea that Sofia’s mom had just been holed up in that room wondering if she could escape out the window.

Now, probably, I should not have been so astounded by this incident, but that phone call felt like it contained the most important advice I received in 2012: That sometimes not only you, but every other single person you might look to, has absolutely no idea what to do. No one. If you’re past a certain age, there is no authority to whom you can go caterwauling when things go wrong. I would have anticipated this would frighten me, but it doesn’t; I find it reassuring. It makes you feel gentler about the world, about other people’s imperfections, about the degree to which a hurt may or may not have been intended. (This realization is similar to what was being written about here and here.) None of us knows what to do! We are all only doing our best! It would probably do us well to be kind to each other about that. I had thought, as I got older, some better, more perfect self would emerge. Someone who would write great books and take friends’ kids to lunch and know all the good places to go in Andalusia, and be a brave, swashbuckling Joan of Arc in the face of any adversity. And instead there is just this self; confused, misapprehending, wearing a sad gob face and sad mackintosh, asking kids how school is (Christ!) and making dumb small talk about the weather and… that is just the best I can do some days. And if that is the best you can do, that is fine. Come here and stand beside me. Take my grubby coin.

Previously in series: Advice Is Futile

Photo by Kathy Mackey.

Advice Is Futile

After editing an advice column for two years, I’ve decided that there is no such thing as advice. There are only problems and the ways people handle them. Advice, on the other hand, is when you hear a description of someone else’s problem and then tell the person something about yourself. Hopefully whatever you say is funny or interesting, but it has little to do with actually helping anyone. It may seem or feel like it does, but there are always more variables than we’ll ever be able to see or understand, and best case scenario you’re pressing on the problem a little bit in a way that engages the problem-haver.

But even though there is no such thing as advice, advice is still a word that means something, so I guess it’s less that advice doesn’t exist and more that it’s a flawed or impossible concept.

Because either the asker doesn’t take the advice, since everyone just does what they want or are otherwise going to do anyway, especially if it’s cheat on their boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, or wives (oh my god, you should see the inbox; at first it was sad but now it’s actually kind of comforting that everyone’s the same), which can create a rift between the advice-giver and the advice not-taker. Or they take the advice, except that’s not particularly helpful, either, since it strips them of the opportunity to learn the lesson first-hand (presuming there is one), which you already have (again, presumably). And telling someone to trust you blindly can come off as condescending. Or like wrapping a finish-line ribbon around someone’s chest instead of encouraging them to run the race. Kind of. Maybe? I don’t know. More on how little I know in a moment.

And advice columns are like one person handing another an oversized check while giving a thumbs-up for the cameras, but then walking away after the flashbulbs stop, and then it turns out the check is just another piece of unredeemable cardboard. But those photo-op pictures! Everyone loves those pictures. And I don’t think I set this up quite right, but those pictures are like advice columns, because people like to hear about other people’s problems (appreciate a good photo-op), and then hear what a stranger has to say about them, and then either say something about the problems themselves (i.e. say something about themselves) or move on to the next thing. So ultimately it’s a lot of swarming around other people’s problems that’s been dressed up as well meaning, but is really driven by voyeuristic hunger for reassurance that other people’s lives suck, too. Usually, at least. At first I wanted The Hairpin’s “Ask a ___” column to be a place for anonymously asking one another answerable questions — why do you sit so weird on the subway, etc. — sort of like passing notes through a wall, but then it became more traditionally advice-oriented, and I’m not sure how I feel about that, although maybe things will shift in the coming year, and I should finish this sentence inside my own head.

I could also just be reeling from the advice I took a few months ago to do this somewhat dramatic thing over text, which I did, and which did not work out so hot, to put it mildly, and which I now think about almost every day. A friend encouraged me to tell someone exactly what I felt about a situation, which seems like maybe the only piece of incontrovertibly useful advice, except texting isn’t really my thing, and what I felt about the situation wasn’t totally nice, and it came to the recipient out of the blue, so it turned into this insane, raw back-and-forth in which all pretenses were dropped and it unexpectedly felt like I was communicating the most nakedly with someone than I maybe have in my entire life. So maybe that’s its own lesson and the advice worked sideways, and in any case I’m grateful for it. Although who knows. Who knows anything? How can anyone even think they know anything? How can anyone think they know enough about anything to tell anyone else what to do? We’re all idiots who know nothing, especially whether other people might actually know something and that it might just be us (me) who’s an idiot, because there doesn’t seem to be a meaningful way to tell, or such a thing as truly right or truly wrong, or good or evil, or objective truth, maybe, probably, I actually have no idea, but maybe if I keep freaking out I’ll levitate upward on this funnel of flustered apology! Also please submit questions to advice@thehairpin.com!

Also by this author: Letters to the Editors of Women’s Magazines (the very first one!)

Edith Zimmerman edits The Hairpin.

Hello, Animal

by Lili Loofbourow

I am an oblivious person. I don’t notice things that bother me.

That doesn’t mean I live a happy, contented life, or that I’m never bothered. I am bothered, I just don’t realize it. If my kitchen is messy, for example, which is often, I do not prepare food in it. That may sound like perfectly logical behavior, but logic plays no part in what is actually a series of competing impulses. The way I experience not-cooking as a function of kitchen messiness is as a Thing That Happens Over and Over Until I Start To Wonder If There’s a Correlation. It’s not a decision I’ve made; rather, it’s a behavior I have observed, as if I were my own lab rat. Never have I said to myself, “This kitchen strikes me as unhygienic. I don’t want any food that’s prepared in here. Maybe I should clean up.” Instead, I get up in the morning and blearily imagine making breakfast. Somehow it doesn’t seem appealing, so I don’t. Later I think about breakfast again, and it seems just as unappetizing. Then it’s 2:00 in the afternoon and I have a migraine from not eating. Am I conscious of how this came to pass? I am not.

Luckily, I live with someone who brings these things to my attention, and the best advice I received this year was from him. Weary of finding me an insomniac mess in the morning — often because I’d been cold all night because I went to bed with wet hair, for example — my boyfriend has made me a list of questions I need to ask myself at regular intervals. It’s a simple list and has proven very effective. My life is better because of it. Here is the list:

1. Am I cold?
2. Am I wet?
3. Am I hungry?

Humbling, eh?

(Incidentally, while typing those questions out, I realized the answer to #1 was Yes, so I have relocated to the closet where I do most of my work and have turned on the space heater.)

It’s a good list, but my need for it makes it hard not to feel like a defective animal. I’ve thought about this a lot, about how I lost my body’s ability to signal to itself (assuming I ever had it). I have guesses, of course. I think a cultivated unconsciousness is a way of getting myself to do things I don’t want to do. (Because the fact is I don’t do things I don’t want to do. I’m lazy and willful. Therefore, the best solution for people like me is to trick ourselves, to not notice that we don’t want to do the things that need doing.)

I don’t notice, for example, that being in front of people takes a lot out of me. If I did, I might be forced to reevaluate my profession (I teach), or to find some real coping mechanisms, like exercise. Instead I teach, enjoy it immensely, and nurse the migraine that blooms by the time I get home. Is this repression? Some sort of complex? It feels more muscular, less tormented. I like teaching. I find it risky and enriching and — when done right — incredibly rewarding. That’s probably why I also unconsciously dread it. One of the truths my generation seems to miss is that anxiety can coexist with — and even intensify — enjoyment. Instead, we turn the volume down. We medicate, psychiatrically or psychologically. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s the uncritical pathologizing that seems problematic; anxiety, like stress and pain, does have positive value.) I do, too. The upshot is that I don’t realize I’m tired unless my eyes are closing, or that I’ve been stressed until a migraine retroactively tells me so. Historically, I’ve been fine with this. It’s frankly maladaptive to notice when you’re tired or stressed — you have to get the thing done, so what use it is to notice that you’re sleepy? Push that out of your conscious awareness until it goes away!

That’s the universalizing explanation I’ve come up with; that’s my sense of how I participate in The Way We Live Now. And yet, I’m not convinced that mindfulness — my generation’s answer to the generic version of this problem, this disconnect from the body — is the perfect panacea. It’s a step. A valuable step. But it can have pitfalls.

The fact is, noticing too much can be bad, particularly if you’re prone to migraine headaches. If you notice what starts them (or think you do — part of being a migraineur is feeling like a deluded hypochondriac) you can very quickly become a sad avoidant thing who relinquishes activity after activity, food after food, never going out, never seeing people, never traveling, until all you have is a darkroom instead of a life. This terrifies me, and I discovered this year that my prophylactic avoidance of avoidance, this willed oblivion, is well documented. Here’s an entry from an old journal I found this year. It’s dated August 12, 2001, long before I knew the things I got were migraines: “Woke up feeling sleepy and anticipatory, the way I probably feel before each of these monster headaches come along, if I bothered to pay attention.” The way I probably feel. My advice to self has always been don’t look too closely for cause and effect, because the real triggers are buried in all the noise. The noise is life, pretty much, and even if you shut everything out, a headache will find you in the silence.

***

So ignoring bodily cues becomes a habit. What’s interesting about migraines, though, is that they ladle you back into the animal self you spend all your energy ignoring. No “virtual” life on the internet or absorption in a book or Jedi mind tricks for not feeling what you’re feeling will let you escape the fact that you’re meat and nerves. You are in a body and you will notice it, by gum, and you won’t be able to notice very much else. When a headache hits, I am bovine.

This is all a preface to the point, which is that migraineurs get advice all the time. The bulk of the advice I’ve received this year (and others) has had to do with headaches. That’s not a complaint; I’m interested, and I really will try anything, but there does come a moment — when you’ve tried acupuncture and yoga and vitamin supplements and drinking lots of water and three different diets and prophylactic medication and meditation — when it all feels a bit like ways to fix the resolution and color cast of a photo that’s irretrievably blurry.

Then there’s the medical advice. Drink water. Exercise. Get on a regular sleep cycle. My doctor, to whom I’d confessed none of the above, said to try — actively — to bring back some of the things I’d unconsciously stopped doing out of fear of headaches. “Oh, I don’t do that,” I said. “Are you sure?” she said. “I know you think you don’t.”

It turns out there are hordes of us migraine people, and many of us go through a familiar cycle.

Step 1. Actively avoid triggers. This is the planning phase. Keep a headache diary. Feel in control for the first time in life. You can beat these headaches with charts and systematic elimination of foods!

Step 2. Realize how imprecise or broad your triggers are and how paralyzing avoiding them might actually turn out to be. Decide you don’t want to live your life preemptively. Actively avoid avoiding things.

Step 3. Get bored of thinking about headaches and not-thinking about headaches. Let go a little.

Step 4. End up passively, through inertia, not going to stuff, not seeing friends, not making plans. You don’t know it yet, but you’re back at Step 1, minus the illusion of control.

That’s the trouble. You thought you’d stopped structuring your life around avoidance, but when you stop and think about your daily patterns, avoidance is everywhere; it’s just gone underground, so much so that you can no longer distinguish a true preference from an avoidant technique. When someone asks me to coffee, my default response is “no.” I like the person in question. I like coffee. I like talking. I don’t know where the “no” is coming from. But out it comes, and I confabulate to make sense of it. I have too much work, I’m tired, etc., but it feels like I’m lying. Why is my default programming “no”? Headaches, of course. Just as your body develops an aversion to whatever you ate prior to getting the stomach flu, even though it had nothing to do with it, mine has decided that social engagements correlate with headaches.
How do you get out of this maze?

I guess there’s a Step 5.

I don’t know what it is, but in the meantime, I’m trying to recover the animal responses I’ve shut down, using the three questions (am I cold? wet? hungry?) to check in periodically and make a habit of what was once an instinct. Same goes for making Yes the default instead of no.

***

I recently had the chance to test this resolve. An opportunity arose to see animals, wild animals, up close and for real, and I said yes. I followed my father to South Africa, home to (among other, more complicated things) some of the biggest nature reserves in the world.

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that when you’re actually surrounded by animals, the kind of advice you give and get is very different. On the whole, there’s less of it. When I met the proprietress of a guesthouse in St. Lucia Estuary, a town actually inside South Africa’s iSimangaliso Wetlands Park, she kept it simple. The town was perfectly safe, she said, but I should stay in after dark. Why? I asked. “Because hippos walk the streets at night,” she said.

(I won’t lie. This thrilled me.)

Hippos can stroll up to 30 km from the water in a single evening. That’s one of those factoids that are repeated to you by pamphlets and guides until it feels like something you too can pass on to newcomers. “Hippos,” one says, nodding sagely. “Great walkers. Like Rousseau.” Another fact, less easy to forget, is that hippos kill more people in Africa than any other animal (man and mosquito excepted). Last July, a man in St. Lucia lost his leg to a hippo attack in his garden. The hippo came into town looking for grass, and trampled his fence. When he heard his dogs barking, Anthony Swatton stepped outside to see what was going on. The hippo charged three times. First it broke three of Swatton’s ribs, then it bit off his left leg, and finally it gored his abdomen with one of his tusks. Swatton’s wife described the foot “hanging on by a sinew.” When she heard screaming and ran outside, the hippo (known to St. Lucia residents as “Vincent”) was calmly grazing in the yard, just a few feet from her bleeding, mangled husband.

Things get weirder. The hippo had only one ear. It had been nicknamed Vincent after Van Gogh. Locals held a “People and Hippos Car Wash” as a fundraiser to help Swatton with his recovery. I don’t know and have been unable to ascertain what part the hippos played in the car wash. It was probably just a gesture of inclusion. Maybe someday there will be a People and Hippos Diner. Swatton is recovering. In interviews, he wished the hippo well; he regretted only that they’d crossed each other’s paths at an inopportune time. As for Vincent, he was caught by the Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife Hluhluwe-Imfolozi game reserve when he returned to the scene of the crime. He had evidently been eyeing Swatton’s grass for some time; he was back three days later and captured while “munching vegetation in the same garden.” Rumor had it Vincent would be sold to a private game reserve. It recently emerged that this plan somehow fell through, and that Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife (an organization for which Anthony Swatton himself worked) decided to shoot Vincent and donate his flesh to Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini, whose royal pots he graced at the annual Reed Dance festival.

The impulse, whenever an encounter between a human and an animal goes badly, is to extract a lesson, but what moral can you draw from an encounter like this? What advice does one give on its basis? This is the sort of thing a community agonizes over after an animal attack, after a mass shooting, after a gang rape. How do you tell the story to strangers?

Well, you do what the guesthouse proprietress I met does. You leave out the details and offer the illusion of control, which is all advice is. She didn’t tell me about Anthony Swatton and Vincent. She told me not to go out after dark.

***

A ranger in Kruger Park had different advice as we walked with him through “the bush” (a phrase I can never say without feeling like an asshole — same applies to going “on safari”). He had a Winchester with him and, while tracking zebras, showed us some fairly fresh hippo tracks. Sometimes, he said, a male hippo will settle in a muddy water hole after it rains. He will decide it is his, and will indicate this by spraying his poop everywhere, using his tail as a sort of propeller. Sometimes, especially lately, those muddy water holes dry out, but the hippo won’t leave, because it’s his. So if you should encounter a male hippo in such a spot, know that his skin is cracking from exposure to the sun, that he is not sweating because he’s the only mammal that can’t, and that he has committed to defending what once was a wallow and is now just a dry hole. Know that you are in mortal danger, but do not run.

The ranger’s account is comforting because we understand it: imagine a hippo bull, irritated and drying out in the baked earth that was once his wallow. We are wrong to anthropomorphize, but we do: he has lost something he had. His investments, so to speak, have gone sour. There is cause and effect (which is every migraineur, control freak, scientist, and mystery lover’s dream).

People used this reasoning to defend Vincent, of course. He felt trapped, some said, invoking his animal nature. Others said one should never stand between a hippo and the water, though Swatton had no water in his garden. This should sound familiar to us too, this second-order level of explanation — we love to apply motive, to supply cause. But the explanations in St. Lucia eventually ran dry; Vincent was finally put down because he was designated — by the head of Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife — a “problem animal.” He had lost his fear of humans. No rehabilitation possible. He had grown oblivious to the threat we represent.

That’s just another story, of course, and it doesn’t hold water, not for a minute. South Africans objected to Vincent’s treatment and questioned Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife’s decision to put him down. If Vincent had become truly oblivious to humans, he wouldn’t have gored Swatton. He would have been as indifferent to Swatton as he was to Swatton’s barking dogs. What really happened was much more complex: Vincent got used to humans in the environment and started seeing us as creatures with whom he could interact. The language of Vincent’s story becomes strangely legal in the arguments that follow his death: articles speculated as to whether the attack was “provoked” or “unprovoked.” If Vincent was provoked, then he was acting in accordance with what we understand animal behavior to be. If he was not, then Vincent was classified a problem animal. The case hinged, then, on whether Swatton going out to his barking dogs in the yard constituted a “provocation.” Did an oblivious Swatton go out to meet an equally oblivious Vincent and surprise him unawares? If everyone is surprised, then everyone is innocent.

You know how this story ends. Only it happened in the most artificial way imaginable.

There is a dam, one of many in Kruger Park. The map says I should drive across it. Or rather, my father says this is what the map says. I don’t believe either the map or my father at first — there’s a substantial pool of water in the middle of this “road,” really just a narrow shelf, less than a lane, between the cement wall retaining the water at a higher level on the left and the water below to the right. My dad points and explains until I’m forced to acknowledge that he’s right, and we start across.

Driving from the right side of the car has scrambled our spatial affiliations. We have no instinct for where the left side of the car — usually right next to us — might actually be. My father (formerly liberal, now a conservative) drifts happily left when he drives. Frequently we’re actually on the shoulder; once we drive into a curb. Less oblivious than is my wont, I find myself noticing and saying what bothers me, loudly and often: “Move right. Right!” Meanwhile I (a conservative-cum-leftist) compensate by driving so far to the right that I get honked at, repeatedly, by oncoming traffic. During this trip I wonder if our politics, like our driving, are compensatory. We’re close, my dad and I, but when you stop living together, you miss the steps of each other’s journeys. (Not just the journeys, the destinations, too. Where’d you land, dad? Where’d you go, kid? What values do we still share?) The best thing about this trip turns out to be the quiet ways our worst fears about each other are assuaged. I don’t hate men. He doesn’t think the poor should die. We’re not particularly expressive people, but I sometimes think of our behavior in traffic — him left, me right — as a sublimated gesture of goodwill, a conciliatory tending toward the other. (Then again, we both keep accidentally turning on the windshield wipers. There are limits to how much interpretive weight our bad driving will bear.)

This particular dam is built such that the cement wall retaining the water on the left comes three-quarters of the way up the car. I’m driving slowly, nervously. I’m eyeing the right edge of the shelf, it feels too narrow, like we might slip off, when I realize (unprompted!) that I’m cold. I open the windows and flood the car with warm humid air. It’s a small victory for my animal self, and the drive across the dam suddenly seems less harrowing. My dad is typically unconcerned about the crossing: a diabetic, he is testing his blood sugar, which he suspects is a little on the low side. (It is.) We’re halfway across the dam when I stop to take a photo of some water lilies in the water at shoulder-level on our left. I’m excited about the angle; it’s like a frog’s-eye view of a lily-pad. I say this to my father, who, unimpressed, starts to unwrap a Lunch Bar.

That’s when the hippo surfaces. It’s next to the lily-pad, close enough to make me slam hard on the brakes. We’re in a dry sports utility vehicle; the hippo is fully submerged in water except for its eyes and ears, and yet we are — in what will strike me later as an incredibly strange configuration — nose to nose and eye to eye. Its ears start wiggling. (In South Africa, instead of saying “that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” you say, “That’s just the ears of the hippopotamus.”) Our windows are open. Our windows are open! I freeze, sure we are safe — we are safe, right? We’re enclosed in a metal case. The hippo would have to throw itself across the ledge to get to us, stick its head in through the car window. Impossible.

It disappears under water. When it resurfaces, it’s closer — so close I can’t get the telephoto lens I have on my camera to focus properly.

It doesn’t jump, of course. We stare at each other for a few long seconds, and then we go our separate ways, but there is this — an image, slightly blurry, of the time three oblivious animals (one of them wet, one of them cold, one of them hungry) noticed each other across the bizarre equalizing plane that brought them together and kept them, thankfully, apart.

Previously in series: The Question

Also by this author: The Livestream Ended: How I Got Off My Computer And Onto The Street At Occupy Oakland

Lili Loofbourow is a writer in Oakland. She writes at Dear Television and over here.

The Question

Anybody who supposes himself wise is already demonstrating the reverse. Therefore the cleverest, most beneficial advice must always come disguised as something else. Because who can ever really believe that he knows better? I didn’t even recognize the best advice I ever got for what it was until many years after it was given to me, and I don’t flatter myself that I get it, even yet.

In the mists of antiquity I embarked on what would prove to be a mortifyingly checkered academic career at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was a very idealistic, very deluded kid. Ambitious, too. There was no such thing as Indiana Jones in those days but had there been, he is exactly what I would have told you I aspired to become. Conversant in all mysteries, all languages, all books; a chameleon who would crisscross the vintage-looking globe in animated arrows, long and flowing. I would be as easy and elegant in a Moroccan dive bar as in a lecture hall, expounding on Greek antiquities, or giving evidence at a Congressional hearing.

At St. John’s on Mondays and Thursdays a bell would ring at 8 p.m., calling the faithful to seminar. I had no idea what preciousness even was, and so would not yet have dreamed of characterizing the many British conventions of St. John’s in that way. Two tutors, a junior one and a senior one, would preside over this ceremony. We were to address one another as “Mr.” and “Miss,” a formality many of us enjoyed, sometimes mockingly but more often in secret earnestness, desperate as we really were for any kind of order, for signs of respect and comity. For love of the civilization that had really brought us into those well-appointed rooms in the first place.

One tutor would open the proceedings by proposing a question on the reading assigned for that meeting. And then the two-hour conversation would begin: very young kids exchanging their views on Aeschylus or Aristotle. A bizarre idea, on the face of it. And, on reflection, a very generous one. It takes a patient adult to agree to discuss Plato (not just give a lecture, but really talk) with a passel of pups still wet behind the ears.

So maybe twenty teenagers, some of whom (I leave you to guess which) were extremely voluble, and some very, very quiet. Some crazy smart, and some far less so. There was one who would invariably attempt to shoehorn Sigmund Freud into every exchange, to the eventual eye-rolling misery of all. Only imagine the dread in which we all trudged through the cold blue-and-gold brilliance of a Santa Fe evening to discuss Sophocles with this character! We planned to ask him (but never did), “Mr. Rosenstein, have you read this book?”

But I shan’t deny that the pleasures of literary discovery, like all other pleasures, are sweeter shared, even against that anarchic backdrop. We smoked a lot of weak pot and listened to Before And After Science as it snowed in a silence unimaginable to a kid from the LBC, silence so deep and plentiful, nourishing. It’s very beautiful in Santa Fe. Very often, people would gather on some balcony or hill specifically to watch the sun set. The sunset was a topic routinely discussed over dinner, as one would the traffic, or a football game.

There was all this reading to do.

Anyway, at the end of this wild episode, which took place in an atmosphere of permissiveness with respect to sex and drugs that would be incomprehensible to the undergraduate of today, I knew that I would have to seek fulfillment elsewhere, that a career the academy was not for me, for reasons too complicated to enter into here. But I loved reading ancient Greek literature, especially Euclid, whose clarity and method would remain an ideal all my life, and Plato. I am still something of a Platonist. The sense of mystery, beauty and faith at the source of Plato made itself felt to me even as a kid, and never left.

Which brings me to the advice I was after telling you about earlier.

At the end of the year even freshmen were to write a paper addressing the year’s coursework, again in the English fashion. My hubris was such that I took on Plato’s Phaedo. This is the dialogue about the death of Socrates, about the soul’s immortality and so on. I can’t remember what kind of hopeless nonsense I spouted, though I do remember that I chose as an epigraph the Thurber cartoon, “Well, I’m Disenchanted, Too. We’re All Disenchanted.”

Your paper would be read and marked by both seminar tutors, and an oral examination conducted. One of my intimate comrades hadn’t spoken in seminar all year, not even once; a lovely boy whom I will call Charles, who would play the guitar for us, sweet songs he’d composed himself, in those golden evenings. He was failed, and very cruelly failed, by our tutors. We loved Charles and had hoped they would go easy on him: his paper was weak, but by no means as ghastly as any number of others I’d seen. There was one so shatteringly awful I remember the title of it to this day: “Is A Christmas Tree Art or Nature?” So it spooked me, what seemed like our tutors’ peremptory, altogether unnecessary harshness toward this shy and worthy boy. I approached my own orals, then, in great fear.

In the event, my senior tutor (my favorite, for his acidulated sense of humor) was very lenient with me, engaging my feeble ideas teasingly, in his lofty East Coast way. The junior one, though, a man by the name of Van Luchene (pron. van LOO shen), was less kind. Unsurprisingly. I had not found him a congenial conversationalist all year. He was sober, austere, Catholic, hopelessly square. No kind of a joker. Tall and slender, ascetic at a time when asceticism was not at all the thing. He seemed, too, something of a milquetoast; he had no truck at all with attempts at éclat, as I now realize.

Van Luchene found my writing facile (it was), though he didn’t put it that way; instead, he gently said that my skill with language was in danger of blinding me to the weakness in my arguments; he illustrated this point with humiliating examples that I can no longer remember. What I do remember is that all he said was so blindingly true as to reduce me to a pulp, more or less. More questions. And then the one, the advice, the thing that I still remember constantly, after an hour’s conversation about Plato, about the Phaedo, the afterlife, the soul, immortality, the ideal, the eidos.

“Why are you doing this? Why are you interested in it?”

The speeding train of my babbling was here forced to make the sudden acquaintance of a brick wall. I realized at once that this was in no way a bullshittable question. Blood pounded in my ears. This guy! Clearly didn’t like me, had never liked me, why would he? Ugh! This cold fish, this Blifil! Okay then think fast, answer the question. Why are you doing this?

You know when you are in a car accident or something and time is moving so very, very slowly, and you have time to think a million thoughts, it was like this; something shifted so deep in my head, a subtle lever barely touched and I realized that this wasn’t an attack, but a most serious question, indeed the only really Platonic question I would ever be asked by a teacher, devoid of performance or convention or ego or cant or anything but itself. Please understand that in my ignorance I flew straight past the significance of this event, even as my opinion of Van Luchene underwent an instantaneous reversal. What I’d thought of all year as coldness I now dimly understood as gravity in the service of a higher purpose. This was a very damn good question, I thought. In fact it was the question.

Stopping the tide of my hoped-for eloquence. A child, wildly overindulged, told far too often that she was so smart, persuaded, sure, that no door was or would ever be closed (thank you, I am very grateful) but encouraged also to suppose that excitement and pleasure in ideas was enough in itself, a child, in love with the sound of her own voice. Books, ideas like a whirl of confetti, purposeless, ornamental, without flavor or sustenance, like plastic fruit.

Supposing herself wise. Or pre-wise, I thought probably. Among those, I believe, who also thought themselves wise. And that is just what Plato is not about; he is about making yourself completely transparent so that the truth has a way in (and out). It’s the least showy person, perhaps, who quite often has the most to say to us. You only have to know to listen.

What the hell was I going to say? This silence had been going on for an alarmingly long time. Many seconds, an eternity. I must speak. And a sudden joy overtook me, for I knew I was about to tell the truth, equally devoid for once of performance, ego or cant, for almost the first time, maybe, in that tiny little life of the mind. A staggering epiphany.

“I don’t know.”

Both tutors then spoke to me, very gently, seriously. It’s because we are involved in it; it is ourselves we are talking about. This is important because these are our questions, too.

So did the speeding vehicle of my ambitions really stop? Not exactly, or just for a moment, like a car chase interrupted in a rain of flying produce and collapsing market stalls. I stopped and thought but really kind of revved up my engines and tore off again. But containing now this realization, or the seeds of it.

The shame of having to tell you how quickly I sped past. I was married by the time I was twenty, I went to other schools, I studied French, started a little business, traveled, looked after my ailing father and my mom. Divorced, and married again. Other things, so many.

But once in a while I would think of that moment and realize again that if there is anything we must try to understand here it is, the unanswerable question that can never bring us anything but humility, patience and quiet: why are we doing this? There’s only one thing that is worth trying to understand, and it is this. Center yourself on this. Bring yourself back to sanity with this. Know that you will never know the answer: but you can get a little closer.

Mr. Van Luchene, I am super old now, man. But yours is the advice I have returned to most in my life, not just this year but every year. Thank you, thank you. Thank you.

Previously in series: The Sunday Night Facebook Cooking Club

Also by this author: Irony Is Wonderful, Terrific, Fantastic

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman. Photo by Steve Terrell.

The Sunday Night Facebook Cooking Club

by Jaime Green

This fall I found myself in a little Sunday night advice ritual. I would leave something half-finished in the kitchen, and then go sit down on the living room couch with my laptop and go to Facebook.

October 7, 6:17pm: “It’s Sunday, so that means a cooking question for facebook. I have cashew chicken going in the crock pot — what’s the best/easiest way to cook broccoli to go with/under it?”

I cook on Sunday evenings because this is the way I can manage to have meals for the week, leftovers for as many lunches as I can manage. It’s a strategy I probably learned from the internet several years ago. I’ve learned a lot from the internet, simple life skills I probably could’ve just called my mom to consult on but for whatever reason didn’t, like how to live on $35 of groceries a week, how to caramelize onions, or how to roast a chicken.

(I roasted a chicken with a recipe from Mark Bittman’s iPhone app once. He said to roast it with butter at 450 F. Butter burns at, like, 12 F, or, really, 350, but I followed the recipe anyway, and the chicken filled my oven with smoke and burning splatterings. My chicken recipe now is something I learned from a friend’s husband. In person, actually — he cooked it for us one night I came over for dinner. But that makes it the exception to the rule of how I learned to cook.)

If you cook from a recipe, you don’t really need advice, unless the advice is, “Wait a second. Think about what you know about butter. How easily does it smoke and burn?” If you’re working from a recipe on the internet, read the comments, but unless it’s Mark Bittman trying to burn down your kitchen, if you using a reliable source, the recipe is what tells you what to do. You just have to do it.

But that isn’t the only way to cook. It is pretty much the only way to bake, unless you are really, really fancy. Cooking — stovetop, crockpot, savory things roasted or baked — leaves room for your experiments and attempts. I bake for the end result; I cook for the act of cooking. And the way I cook, I end up with questions.

I’ve made my fair share of calls to my mom from supermarket aisles — what can I do with X, what do I need for Y — but given that she goes to bed at 9 p.m. and I’m bad at scheduling my time, I find myself with many quandaries that come up too late for a phone call. Also, I suppose, the crowdsource is preferable because it still lets me make a choice. (Crowdsource. That’s an ugly word. Webinar. Mobisode.) It’s rare that I get a unanimous answer. I can wait for a consensus, or I can decide whose advice feels right for the night.

Friend-of-a-friend whom I went on one maybe-date with: It would rip a hole in the fabric of the universe.
Me: Is there a trick to browning other than batches? What pan? What heat? I have never done it without great pain and strife.
Same dude: Just don’t move it around at all. If it moves, it won’t brown.
Friend from college: It’ll be fine. Only 6% less delicious. Throw in some umami-heavy ingredients — tomato paste, Worcestershire sauce — and it’ll almost make up for it.

I started the slow-cooker chili the next morning. I decided to brown the beef anyway — without too much perfectionism, given college friend’s permission to skip the step entirely — mostly because I’d never gotten it right before. Finally, this time, I did.

I don’t always take the proffered answers, but they push me into my own decisions. Alone my instincts are wishy-washy, but advice forces them to resolve, gives me a gut “yes!” or “no!” Suggestions give me something to weigh my own gut instincts against.

Sometimes I go looking for reassurance, or just to have someone to talk to about cooking, this thing that takes up sometimes several hours of my last weekend day. It can be lonely, the cooking, just me and a podcast and maybe a cat sprawled on the kitchen floor.

***

This turned into a back and forth with a grad school professor who is a surprising genius at Facebook. She’s a late-middle-aged biographer of presidents, short-silver-haired denizen of the archives, wearer of blazers and turtlenecks. She is a twinkly-eyed woman, though, and she carries this into Facebook, somehow. She asked, “Is this another one of your science experiments?” because I’ve been writing about science lately. Me: “Hypothesis: I bought too much beef.” And it devolved from there into a back-and-forth parsing of what the hypothesis would be, the proper test for the experiment. (The stew never bubbled over, so the hypothesis was disproven. That doesn’t mean, though, that the experiment wasn’t a success. I still got my answer. And my mediocre stew.)

***

October 28, 9:15pm: “What can I do for a basic stew that’s just kinda blah?”

Lots of answers, but I didn’t follow any of them. I added a little sriracha and then gave up and drowned the thing in ketchup.

***

It’s still the right time of year for the best recipe I came up with this fall through Facebook advising. It was even a little too early the first time around. Too ambitiously autumnal.

20 comments on that one. I heard from college acquaintances, a food blogger, a former fancy-shmancy chef, another guy I went on an awkward semi-date with — why are they all over my Facebook?!!? — and a girl I did theatre with in high school, now so vocally Republican that I think I keep her on my newsfeed just in case I really feel like getting into shit one day. Everyone comes out of the woodwork for this stuff. Their advice was all over the map; my favorite came from the ex-chef, because it included the phrase “a la minute,” and although I did not end up preparing each ingredient separately and then combining them at the last second, “a la minute,” I liked the chance to snoot around with some French.

I roasted the squash, halved, pretty much just like a playwright I used to work with advised. A marine biologist advised me to cook the sausage and add it, sliced, to the pureed soup at the end, and I did that. It was delicious. The chef had advised me against pureed butternut bisque with chunks of sausage, but that’s what I ended up with, and I liked it. (I added some kale, too, because I am determined to get a full meal in one bowl.)

***

A kid from a high school playwriting group I helped run a few years ago liked the post, which I found curious — what was he liking or supporting in there? — but the comments came in. A friend of friends from college said, “At least a few days, probably up to a week.” A young doctor who lives in my neighborhood, whom I met once a few years ago, called it “salmonella roulette.”

And then my mother came on and chimed in. “2 DAYS would be my limit.” She would’ve all-capsed the digit if she could. “You could cook it thoroughly and then it will keep for a bit longer.” A waitress friend named Hope said, “1–3 days. Make sure you cook the shit out of it after.” And my mom added, “Listen to Hope!”

I never got around to cooking the chicken. A week later I tossed it in the trash. But I loved my mom telling me to listen to Hope, someone she’s never met, and the double-meaning that came with my friend’s name. I felt like I could hear my mom’s voice. It’s weird, I could’ve just called her. But I like that she showed up here, unbeckoned, nonetheless.

Previously in series: I Broke Up With Writing (And It Feels OK)

Also by this author: Embrace Your Prairie Looks And Make Some Applesauce

Jaime Green sometimes overfills her slow cooker because she likes to live on the edge. Thumbnail photo by Cheryl.