Against Mediocrity

Good evening Gentle Reader, it is that time again, that lovely little hour or so just following the cozy little nap that follows my cozy little dinner.  It's Blog Time again.  And once again as I have every day or almost every single day since I began this written penance just over two years ago I will try to entertain, amuse, inform and enlighten you.  You likely have noticed dear that I always seem to have something to say, even when I don't.

Speaking of dinner I had a lovely, tasty, simple, filling, nutritious and substantial guisado which is a Spanish word for stew.  It isn't much of a stew.  I simply took six big and I mean huge potatoes from the bottom drawer and back part of the fridge and the surprisingly cheap cauliflower I bought yesterday and went to work.  The potatoes are from a twenty pound bag I bought a couple of months ago.  You should have seen me haul that load onto the bus.  They were incredibly cheap by the way, working out at around twenty cents a pound.  Hey, I'm on a low income, I like to eat, and I have a finely honed instinct for bargains.  This reminds me of one evening when I was dragging a ten pound bag of spuds on the bus around twelve years ago when the Atkins diet was all the rage and potatoes and all things carb were the Eighth Deadly Sin.  The slightly pudgy middle age driver, who looked rather like a potato himself, began promptly to lecture me all about the sins of potatoes and carbs and that I would never lose weight this way.  I was only just beginning to learn healthy assertiveness skills, put up with his tactless little lesson and left the bus feeling like a chewed out little piece of crap.  Nowadays if any tactless or impertinent bus driver or anyone else who seems to have forgotten their place tries to stick his nose into my business I let him know it right away.  If this were to happen again I would have simply replied "Here's the deal: you don't tell me what to eat and I don't tell you how to drive."

So I chopped these six huge potatoes, skins and all into the heating water in my big fat cooking pot, then chopped up half a head of cauliflower (huge, and very cheap at less than three bucks.  This just after the local grocers were confusing the humble vegetable with gold bullion and trying to extort from the gormless consumer up to ten bucks a pop.)  While the spuds and cauliflower were cooking I whipped up a huge batch of made from scratch cocoa and served myself from my beautiful Mexican cocoa pot, getting up from time to time to check the cooking and add two tins of black beans, a generous whack of miso, thyme, chili powder, garlic powder, allspice, nutmeg, soy sauce and red wine vinegar.  Then I added frozen corn and a huge pile of shredded extra old cheddar.  Enough to serve a small army: delicious, filling, simple, nutritious.

I cook everything from scratch or from near scratch.  This morning I made bread, without a bread maker.  As I mentioned to the owner of the café where I sit and draw on Saturday afternoons, even with the rising food prices I still manage to stick within the same budget as I have been maintaining for the last four or five years without any sense that I have skimped or made any sacrifices.  Don't ask me how I do it.  I simply don't know.  Maybe it's enough to say that God provides?  And maybe that having lived modestly on a low income for all of my life that I have simply developed a very good instinct for living frugally but well.

I was having a chat with one of the regular patrons at said café.  We both had trouble coping well in school.  It turns out that we were both diagnosed as gifted children with way higher than average intelligence.  Teachers and parents alike would be screaming at us "Why can't you do
better than this.  You're so intelligent!!!!!"  Or, Gentle Reader, perhaps this is exactly why we did not do well in school.  The school curriculums cater to social conformity and mediocrity.  Gifted children need special attention, care and stimulus if they are to be expected to do well within this stiflingly boring cubicle called the classroom.  While our lives have taken decidedly different directions I think we could both claim that regardless of our problems with the education system we have both lived rich and fulfilling lives.  My income has always been modest but I have been blessed throughout most of my working years with the opportunity to live out my Christian faith through my work: through the housecleaning, personal care and palliative care I was honoured to administer to some of the most vulnerable persons during my twenties and thirties; as a worker in a homeless shelter and a mental health peer support worker through my forties and fifties.  All of this I did on low pay, living paycheque to paycheque, often in unjust and unsafe conditions, and yet feeling honoured throughout that I could so faithfully serve my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.  Instead of destroying me my life of poverty has taught me to be frugal, resourceful, creative and tenacious.  I have also been blessed with subsidized housing for the last thirteen years, making it possible for me to live with dignity in one of the world's most expensive cities.

To quote the Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta (does she have full sainthood yet?):

"We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.  We have done so much, for so long, with so little, that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing."

Words to live by.