bread and better

Today is not the seventeenth, which I learned promptly after arriving at work for the bogus Sell Food! Have Fun! class needed to earn a raise. Gutting, given I woke at ten for it and now have far too much time to kill on a frigid afternoon. There is really only one thing to do when you're walking down Detroit St. with a stuffy nose on the day December relented and bloodily surrendered to winter, and that is seek shelter immediately in the drafty nostalgia of the People's Food Co-op. There's hot squeezed ginger root juice to drink, Community High students to annoy you, and the most attractively pierced people in town. If you get hungry, you can eat a block of tofu, or a muffin made out of vegetables. I love it here.

I was kept up til two last night by the sourdough I insisted upon starting at seven pm. My parents were frustrated and said it was only bread and should not control my sleeping schedule (??) but they never experienced the delight of watching starter bubble in anticipation of feeding. It turned into a wonderful dough- the starter is fermented and active, and when you knead it all you can feel the internal energy. That sounds kinda kitschy, but it's true.

I talked to a friend during the last rising before the actual proofing (the dough's been relaxing in the fridge all night- this evening I'll wake it up and bake it. If it's been proofed properly the crumb will be airy and moist with a bright and not overpoweringly sour flavor, and a crust that's hard but not too chewy. Bread is so fucking cool.) It was not a very light conversation, and felt kinda like an intervention of sorts, trying to get her to finally leave a damaging person behind. There are many levels of knowing that something is wrong or hurtful. You can repeat what everyone's telling you so that you know the words, or you can know with your body, without any real need for words. The whole conversation she kept repeating I know I know I know but it was hard to tell exactly how much she knew, whether she knew what he was doing to her only because I and everyone else keep telling her, or because she- alone and for herself- was demanding something better.

A guy I know told me the best thing anyone has told me this year, which is that self harm (of any sort- I think what my friend was talking about qualifies as self harm at this point too) is like any other addiction. It's not like you just decide one day to be better and that's that. You make a choice not to do something, and then every day you keep on making that choice again and again. This whole semester has been filled with addict rhetoric- the whole grant me the serenity to expect the things I cannot change thing, and admitting you were powerless against something, and getting to some point where you respect yourself enough to see that there's something wrong about making a cutting board of yourself. I left Oberlin with someone's voice in my ear saying be better- I think about that all the time, as if his saying it was my motivation to do it. It wasn't, and then it kind of was. Hurt and comfort too often come wrapped together, and so it is uncomfortable to walk away. Better is what you walk away towards. But you have to want it more than all the shit and all the ease of what you kinda knew was shitty but ultimately stayed in because it was easy. There's a reason you miss what you miss.