Only fools Russian….
I’m going to be 25 this June. I’m still single with no prospects and no dependents. I’m renting a room in an overpriced Bay Area apartment. My mom and stepdad are within “I’m crying on the phone because there’s a spider in my bathtub” range. My mother was 25 years old when she had me. My mother was married; my mother owned a house and she lived further than 45 minutes away from her parents. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that part of me gets overwhelmed when I think about how far behind I feel in relation to this. When I was half my age I would have told you I planned to be having my first child by now too. At 20 I would have told you I should be getting married at least around now with plans to have a child in two years or so. Now standing here at the precipice of being halfway through my twenties I feel like marriage, kids, the picket fence…they are years away—if ever.
Despite the fact that the only thing I know I can plan is for life to upset my plans, I still have all these guidelines for the love and marriage thing. The underlying strategy to these guidelines follows that old idiom “only fools rush in.” Marriage would follow years of dating—children should be held off until the marriage is at least two years tested. A home should only be bought in a neighborhood that’s been thoroughly vetted for these theoretical children’s future education from K through 12. Definitely can’t have a kid until I’m ready to simultaneously start saving for their college fund! All these well intentioned plans that are meant to keep me safe and secure and probably will ensure I never do any of the above.
At what point does this need for security become an excuse to not do any of it? Is the truth really that I’m just bloody effing terrified of these very permanent life changes? Will I ever be as brave as my mother was at my age?
I mean I say I’m focusing on my career. It’s true but if I really wanted to, if I really wanted to I could set aside the money and raise a kid. I could do it. 
I’m physically at the right stage. I’ve got a real job with real future prospects. I’m just too damn selfish, too damn scared and well I would ideally like to have a life partner to raise a child with so I’m not really equipped but still…I could do it on my own. Is there an opposite phrase for “Only Fools Rush In” something like “and even bigger fools need to be pulled in kicking and screaming?” I know plenty of people who do…well the opposite of what I think should be done and they do it quite well.
Am I just making excuses hidden under the guise of wisdom? What do you think? Do you have similar “rules” for planning your future? Oddly enough this all popped into my head because sometimes when I go for a run at work I find reruns of Roseanne on and I’ll watch them. As far as sitcoms go this show really was something special. It was actually clever, had continuity and managed to be thought provoking at times. It wasn’t just some crass weekly potato about blue collar, white trash in Middle America. The opening is always the family seated around a dinner table, interacting and loving each other. I do have a craving for that in my life.
But until I’m ready to give up these selfish ways of my single youth, I can only supply the family meal and not the family. That’s where this dish comes in—nothing screams Sunday night family dinner more than a classic from my cultural heritage: Beef Stroganoff. The Jewish side of my family comes from the Ukraine/Russia Ashkenazi tribe and despite having never been to the “mother country” I seem to have retained some sort of cultural tastebuds. My passion for fermented vegetable juices, cabbage soups, beets…not exactly American. This main course will appeal to non-Russian Jews though as it’s really just a big pot of pasta, meat and creamy mushroom sauce. In fact it should appeal to everyone BUT jews since as we all know mixing dairy and meat is decidedly not-kosher. Oops. Well like I said…I’m Jewish. I don’t keep Kosher year round…and I’m fairly certain Nana would approve of this meal. “If it’s clean, it’s Kosher”
The flavor is OFF THE CHARTS out of this world amazing. I know it’s far from the healthy food I eat most of the time, but this is exactly the sort of thing I crave when I really want to indulge once in a while. It’s warm and filling in your stomach. A more “Russian” approach might be to spike the sauce with vodka instead of red wine, but I guess the one thing I didn’t inherit in my cultural genetics was a love for that fermented potato juice. It’s just…gross. I think the red wine adds more body to the sauce–some cognac would be nice too. Play with it if you like but just remember this: it’s not stroganoff without the mushrooms. Yes mushrooms. It’s just not stroganoff without them.
“Rush-in” Beef Stroganoff
An Olivia Original – to serve 4 Read more
What makes dancing so cathartic, so therapeutic and just so damn much fun? It’s the release I think. It’s physical, if not always sexual, and requires that you trust in your body rather than letting your mind do all the work. Overthinking means you lose the beat. If you have a partner you need to be able to really let your body win out and react to theirs. If you let your brain worry about where his or her foot is going next, by the time you figure it out they are already two more steps ahead. That’s not to say it involves totally turning off your mind because I certainly feel like mine is still racing but it’s in a reactive mode rather than predictive. That’s a rare thing for me to be able to do and enjoy. As such a Type-A(sshole) I find myself craving the ability to plan and control the majority of the time so finding a situation where I can be comfortable not doing that is rare and worth relishing. In retrospect I wish I had taken ballet lessons when they had been offered as a child.
Going on Saturday didn’t cure all my problems. It didn’t end my celibate streak. The fact that I haven’t even so much as kissed someone since July rather horrified one of my friends. But it did reconnect me a little with the girl I’m supposed to be acting the age of. Plus the nice part about being on the dance floor is that no one is talking. No one is asking me what I do for a living and being impressed, or intimidated or suffering inferiority complex. Instead it’s pretty simple: can you keep up? For some reason people seem to be more up to that challenge on the dance floor than anywhere else with me. Of course that might just be because I’m not a very good dancer…. White girl dancing isn’t exactly that poetic or challenging is it? But I do it with gleeful abandon regardless of how good I am.
On one hand I’ve always been “so serious” about perceived injustice. Even as a child I wanted to save the world. I guess mom shoulda named me Ka-ka-ka-Katie. **TRIVIA TIME: Name that movie and win a cookie! PS: my last trivia winner still needs to email me his info so I can mail out a treat! Hey you, yeah I’m talking to you, send me your info and any allergens to my blog’s email addy: rollingsreliableblog at g mai l dot com** I do think part of it is that I’m experiencing more of life rather than reading about it. There are issues that seem far less important than they did and others that seem to be so ignored by people around me that I want to scream. Sometimes I just want to get out a drum and hold it in someone’s face and yell “WAKE UP!” The apathy and willful ignorance that serve as a constant state of existence for some…I don’t understand it. I never have. Some stupid little voice inside me just won’t shut up and I can’t sit by the sidelines and watch and do nothing. I have to do something—even if it’s just letting the people I want to defend know I’m here. I have to do something.
I noticed that there are people in this world just hellbent upon making it a miserable place for the rest of us and I have no desire to be around them. Thankfully this is a minority of folks and I find that most people are generally decent and well intentioned. Even so these decent people have a tendency to “kid around” to such an extent that I always feel very distant from them. The joking, the kidding, the teasing…I don’t know it just gets old after a while. I’ve always been one to provide a good ribbing and I like to think that I take as well as I give—but I’m more apt to get annoyed when the target is someone other than myself. I’ll go up in arms twice as quickly when the butt of the joke isn’t my own. I’d like to think with all the squats I’ve been doing my own ass is pretty springy and most stuff bounces off of it. Provided I’ve had enough sleep and coffee that day anyway. No coffee = no sense of humor. Word to the wise and future significant others. Take for example this joke which I’ve heard far too many times and which seems particularly relevant after the flurry of rape culture commentary in the past few weeks:
Then of course I realized upon getting home that I hadn’t really thought about what to blog once Passover was well, over. I mean I had such a convenient topic for posts and now pbbbbbblt total brain fart. So you’re getting just a random emotional download today. Sorry guys. There’s just nothing clever going on up here after work, yoga, taking care of my dog, improv class and studying for my clinical trial certification…. I feel like the most boring busy person in the world. But I love every second of it. I know it’s sick and twisted in a masochistic way but I’m just naturally happier when I’m juggling. Stillness outside the yoga room drives me up the wall. I’ve been wondering why.
At one point in my life I would become essentially paralyzed by these problems and that fed into some nasty anxiety and depression. Now I’m at least able to function day to day without falling to pieces. Yet again another thing I attribute to…Bikram yoga. I know I know I promise this post isn’t about that AGAIN. But I do have to say that it’s the one thing that’s helped me learn how to better manage these situations. After all you have to learn how to refocus when you are trying to balance on your tip toes in a room that hot.
My body is healthier, stronger, and leaner than ever. The health aspect really is such a triumph for me. I did succumb to illness finally but I got 
Anyway the book release, and main subject for this week’s scifriday post, is actually an urban fantasy book. The aforementioned “
They also have hyper-religious talking mice. Not the Disney varieties mind you; these mice don’t captain tugboats or sew pretty dresses. Aeslin mice spend their time either worshipping their religious figures (in this case our main character) or form hunting parties with some pretty serious hardware to kill other animals for religious feasts. Obviously you’d want to keep them away from the Gorgons. Despite being rodents, invasive of our main character’s privacy and congregants with a fanaticism that the Catholic Church would lust after, these characters are pretty much the most damnable adorable thing I’ve read about in ages. I totally want my own colony because their love for food and my love for baking would presumably go hand in hand quite nicely.
Part of this is because the time it would take to explain what’s going on would be extensive. Simply spending 15 minutes having to explain the backstory of why something is the way it is, and then answering the subsequent questions, just adds to my anxiety. When I’m up against the wall the thing I usually want most is time and I don’t feel like I have any to waste. Plus the questions are usually extremely frustrating because unless you’ve actually lived through it all, usually there’s just no way to really impart an understanding of why something is upsetting me so much—especially when I’m dealing with messier and complicated problems like family. (To clarify there aren’t any emergencies with mia familia. Just some added stress I don’t need which would, under best circumstances, be annoying but at the moment making me flip the fuck out. I realize I’m over reacting about it and that’s the important thing.)
I really want the world to stop trying to change me. I hear “hey you need to learn to relax and take it easy” way too much. No, not just friends, but from every corner of every media out there. I swear I think there’s a billboard nearby about smelling the roses. Well I love rose, and I will stop to appreciate a flower when I have the time, but I’m not going to turn off this hyperdrive I’ve got. It’s just not in my DNA. I don’t do the standing still thing very well…unless I’m on a yoga mat. And even then, the reason I can handle the slowness of meditation in Bikram is because it’s the punctuation to a very active form of yoga. While I want to learn how to better manage my stress, because hey no one wants to feel like they are on the verge of having an Alice in Wonderland – drown in your own tears – kind of moment, I also don’t feel a need to radically change myself either. Don’t worry, my blood pressure can handle it. Sometimes I think I’m hardwired this way because I physically need it. When my bp is regularly 95/50 I have to think that without any stress in my life I’d wind up dead!
