The Vine: January 9, 2004
Hi Sars…
I love reading Tomato Nation and The Vine. I often have to explain why I’m just sitting in my office laughing! Great job!
I see that Glark is up as a vegetarian computer tech expert combo. You mentioned chili, and I’ve been on a hunt for a good vegetarian chili recipe for quite some time. Every one I’ve tried is too bland or too bean-y. I can only eat so many beans in one sitting! I would happily take Glark’s chili recipe or any other vegetarian delight he’d like to lay on me.
Sincerely,
Veggin’ at Work
Dear Veggin’,
I will give you the gist of my recipe. I say “gist” because I never make it the same way twice, because it’s a great way of clearing out the cupboard and I don’t enjoy measuring out stuff. I also make a shitload of chili each time and freeze a bunch in little containers, so scale this as needed and to taste:
Glark’s Veggie Chili
1 of those big cans of Heinz tomato juice
2 cups of orange juice
2 cans of diced tomatoes
2 cans of black beans, drained and washed (or 1 if you like it bean-lite)
2 cans of red kidney beans, drained and washed (or 1 if you like it bean-lite)
4 stalks of celery, cleaned and cut up in wee bits
3 cups of baby carrots, cut up in wee bits
1 red onion, cut up into chunky bits
1 cans of peaches and cream corn kernels (or whatever variety you like)
An amount of chili powder that agrees with your tongue
An amount of cayenne powder that works for you
An amount of black pepper that tickles your fancy
An amount of Frank’s Hot Sauce allowed by your mom
Put everything in a soup pot (or two if you make as much as I do) and simmer on lowest setting for an afternoon, stirring the pot every so often. Put in fridge overnight. Simmer again the next day for at least 3 hours before you want to eat, longer if you have time. 20-30 minutes after eating, invite friend or loved one to pull your finger. Continue for next 3-4 hours.
Other stuff I can remember putting in the chili at some point:
Lentils
Diced jalapeno pepper
Vye’s Veggie Ground Round
Cans of Campbell’s tomato soup lying around
Lemon and orange zest
Some soup that was lying around
Love
Optional stuff to serve with it:
Frank’s Hot Sauce (I like the Chili and Lime version)
Chipotle Tabasco (mmmm, smoky!)
Crusty bread
Old or Extra Old light cheddar cheese, shredded
Fat-free sour cream
Sars,
I have a couple of related problems that I hope you can shed some light on.
First and foremost, a little background information. I’m currently starting my fourth year of university, where I’m majoring in Economics and Finance. My degree is a four-year requirement, and as I near the completion of school I’m starting to panic about what the hell I’m going to do when I graduate. Despite the economic downturn, I’m pretty confident in my ability to find a job, I have a decent GPA, extra-curricular involvement, and plenty of volunteer work on my résumé. As well, I’ve been working either part or full-time for various financial institutions since I finished high school.
And that’s the thing. I’ve been working in finance since I turned seventeen, and I don’t really like it. I’ve worked for a few different firms, in a few different areas, and I think I’ve had enough exposure to corporate life to realize that it kind of sucks. I hate working 70 hours a week for an investment bank that couldn’t care less about me, and I hate most of the people in the industry, and I’m just not excited about the work. To be fair, I don’t really hate the job I’m at right now; it’s just emphatically not what I’d like to be doing.
So what do I want to do? Well, I want to be a writer. I realize how stupid and clichéd and like, Dawson’s Creek that is, the whole corporate drone wants escape his life of spreadsheets and hedge funds and live by the pen scenario, but it’s what I want. I understand that this isn’t a binary proposition, that I could continue to work in finance and write in my spare time, but I feel like every year I spend pursuing something I don’t want takes me that much further from what I do. And not to get all Aesop Rock about it, but it gets harder and harder to devote a large number of hours to work and school and to write.
Essentially, my problem is twofold. My first issue is that pursuing a career as a “writer” alternately feels like my life’s ambition and a hippie-ass cop-out, and my second is that I have no real idea how to practically pursue a career as writer. Do I need a portfolio? Should I be taking those workshops? Can I or should I get an agent? Where can I go to get published? I’ve been writing consistently for a while now, whenever I get a chance, but what the hell should I do with it? So, with your vast wisdom and hard-won experience, I was hoping you could help me out with a little advice.
Thanks,
Portrait of the Indecisive as a Young Man
Dear Indecisive,
I won’t tell you whether you should take a finance-related job after graduation, but I will tell you this: writing? It’s a job. It’s work, much of it thankless and unseen, and before you get ahead of yourself thinking about agents and whatnot, you need to understand that — but you won’t really understand it until you’ve tried to do it for a while, pitched endless articles that then got killed or reassigned to someone’s sister, yanked copy out of your ass for a lousy fifty bucks for two thousand words, sent your short stories everywhere on earth and gotten them all back with a fourth-generation photocopy of a rejection slip and a jelly smear on page two, blah blah blah.
I mean, yes, you need a portfolio, and yes, you should take classes so that you can get into a rhythm of writing regularly and getting some feedback on your work, but there is no single foolproof way to Become A Successful Writer — if there is, I don’t know about it, or I’d have a book deal and a posh teaching gig somewhere by now. But writing isn’t an ambition of mine, or something I aspired to. I just…do it. I’ve always just done it.
I realize that this isn’t much in the way of advice, but I really can’t stress enough, to you and to anyone else contemplating writing as a line of work, that it is work, and that it will probably take years for it to pay off in any meaningful way for you — just like any other career path. But if it’s what you really want to do, you will do it, any way you can, whether anyone reads it or not.
So, try it. Start. Buy a copy of Writer’s Market, take a class, and do your daily pages every day. Put together some work, even if it’s unpublished, and try it. You will get knocked down and discouraged, and either that will put you off it or it won’t, but there’s no way to know until you give it a go. You have other training to fall back on if it doesn’t work out (and while it’s not paying off in the beginning), so you might as well find out whether this is what you want instead of wondering if you made the wrong call.
O Sars the Wise,
Okay, so back in the spring, I had a catastrophic breakup that pretty
much left me unable to do much more than…sit. And stare. And cry. My
good friend, G, had gone through something similar with her ex, T, the
previous fall, so she really helped me through everything and was there
for me like no one else, and it was really good to have someone around
who knew exactly what I was feeling. Also, she took me out and got me
good ‘n’ drunk. Over the summer, she became basically my best friend and
we are still very close.
Her breakup with T was the subject of much analysis/male-bashing, and I
was pretty much on her side about all of it. I’d never really heard T’s
side of the story, because although I’d known him since high school, we’d
never really been close. Until recently.
G and T are more or less
friendly with each other now, and G gave me T’s screen name awhile back,
and we started talking and hanging out. I heard his version of events and
decided that he’s not quite the monster G made him out to be. Last
weekend, on the spur of the moment, I decided to take a drive over to T’s
campus, which is about 30 minutes away, to see a movie with him.
After
the movie, we went back to his room, and ended up talking until about four
in the morning, and as I was sitting there with him, I began to realize
that T is more or less my ideal guy. He’s smart, hilarious, goofy, cute,
a total old-fashioned open-doors-pull-out-chairs gentleman, can quote
Monty Python at the drop of a hat, and has a fridge full of Key Lime
Stewart’s. He suggested that I just stay the night because it was so late
and I was so tired, and I agreed. Nothing major really happened…but
there was definite flirting and massive tension, especially when he
insisted that I take the bed and he take the futon, and I refused ’cause
he has a bad back and I didn’t want him to have to sleep uncomfortably,
and he PICKED ME UP AND THREW ME ON HIS BED. It also didn’t help when his
roommate came home in the morning and was all “Wha…? She slept on the
bed? ALONE?? What’s the matter with you, man??”
The point of all of this
is that I am now seeing T in a way that I didn’t before, and there is a
lot of attraction there that I’m pretty sure he feels, too. I’m usually
pretty blunt about matters like this, and if it were anyone else I would
come right out and say, “Hey, I like you a lot, let’s go have coffee/a
nice shag,” or something to that effect, but I really can’t here, because of G.
They’ve been broken up for over a year, but she still waffles back and
forth between hating him with the fire of a thousand suns and declaring
her eternal, undying love for him, and I really do not think she would be
okay with it if T and I got together, especially after the two of us had
so many “Oh he’s such a bastard I hope he dies/Oh I totally agree”-type
conversations this summer.
I love my friend and I don’t want to lose her,
but I also don’t want to let this opportunity pass by with T, because he
is everything that I have been looking for and I think there is a lot of
potential for amazingness there. So my question to you is this: Should I
go full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes and hope for the best with G, or
should I just…let it go?
Sometimes I think I can actually hear God pointing at me and going
“HAA-haa!” in manner of Nelson Muntz
Dear Actually, He’s Just Shaking His Head Sadly,
You can’t have it both ways. You can keep your friendship with G, or you can pursue things with T, but not both, and you need to decide whether T is a sure enough bet to make killing that friendship worthwhile. And it will kill the friendship. G is going to feel enormously betrayed; she is not going to give you her blessing, and she is not going to forgive you if you go ahead without it.
And maybe T is worth it. Maybe it will turn into a love for the ages between you. But…maybe it won’t. Look at the situation, assess the odds, and go from there, but you will need to choose between these two people, and you will not get to change your mind if you choose T. Proceed with caution.
Oh knowledgable and blatantly forthright Tomato Queen, I have a question that I hope you will deem worthy of answering.
You know how the college campus world seems to have it in for all single women? I mean that every decent guy that comes into your life seems to be either taken or refuses to commit to a relationship or just wants to be friends (notice I used the word “seems,” I’m not giving up hope). Then all you’re left to work with are jocks, frat boys, and other assorted assholes who are just looking to sleep with a freshman girl before Thanksgiving break.
Well, this is where the problem comes in. I’ve met a guy who seems too good to be true. He’s very intelligent, talkative, not to mention he resembles one of those models in a magazine that girls drool over. He’s also one of those really popular guys that would normally have nothing to do with a weirdo like me (and I’m damn proud of my weirdness). We have two classes together and for the most part we only chat after class, and then we usually just talk about assignments or the professor. The thing is that all of a sudden he has become very flirty. It’s like the flirt fairy tapped him with her magic wand and POOF, next thing I know we’re tickling each other in the hallway.
I don’t mind this type of attention. In fact, one side of my brain is saying, “Hey! Cute guy! Go for it!” But then the other side is saying, “Hold up, you’ve been through this before. Is he for real?” I can’t help being suspicious. I was one of those girls in high school that guys would bet each other to date. They found out quickly that I was too smart for them, but this is college…
So I guess what I’m asking is, how do I tell that he is genuinely interested in me? And if I go for it, should I just dive in or keep my guard up?
Thanks for your wisdom,
Blessed by the Flirt Fairy?
Dear Blessed,
Ask him out. If he’s genuinely interested, he’ll accept; if he’s not, he’ll hedge, you’ll cringe, and that’s that.
And if he is interested, I think you have to just dive in. Keeping walls up really doesn’t work, in the end, or it works against you; yeah, he could turn out to be a dicksmack, but you can’t just assume that about people. You have to give them, and yourself, the benefit of hope. Go for it.
Dear Sars,
I have a roommate problem. A little background: I’m an American, living in a
foreign city for about three months. I have two roommates, neither of whom I
knew until we moved in together. We’re all doing the same program, and we get
along fairly well, and it’s easier to get along in a short-term living
situation anyway.
But if everything is gravy, why am I writing to you? Well, one of my
roommates (E) will go out to a club, make out with a guy there, and get his
number. No problems there. But after the three of us come home together, she
will call the guy and invite him over, giving him our address. When he comes,
she’ll buzz him up and sleep with him. I’m no Puritan, Sars, but E is letting
this guy into our flat who she has known for two hours and only met in a
club. She’s done this twice in the two months we’ve lived together.
Last time we went out, E was going to call a guy when we got back to the
flat. I asked her not to, saying I didn’t think it was safe. She couldn’t
understand what I was talking about. She looked at me like I was the world’s
most suspicious person to believe that anyone she had made out with at a club
would be interested in anything more than the kind of sex that she wants. I
tried to explain that he might be a killer, he might be a thief, he might
force her to take it in a way she doesn’t want to, he might be a stalker. Her
response was that you could never really know a guy. But of course you can
know him much better than if the only time you have interacted with him was in
a loud club when you were both half drunk, and I told her so. Finally, I told
her I had had a terrible night and asked her not to call him as a favor to
me. She didn’t invite him over, but clearly this is not a long-term solution.
I talked to her about it again the next day when she was sober, and she still
didn’t see a problem with giving out our address. Now, she’s a big girl and
if she wants to be that dumb, I can’t stop her. But E’s putting me (and our
other roommate, who doesn’t seem to find this dangerous either) in danger, and
that isn’t cool.
How can I convince her that having guys she just met over is a bad idea?
Since we’re only here for another month or so, should I just hope that she
doesn’t meet anyone else rather than raise the issue? Or should I try to make
some sort of house rule? It’s pretty hard to go it alone, and I don’t really
want her going over to the guys’ places since that isn’t exactly a safe
solution either. I’m not asking E to be celibate, I just want her to meet the
guy for coffee or something before giving out our address. Or am I just being
overly careful? I can’t even imagine having a guy in my flat without knowing
his last name, but maybe I’m too cautious.
Commendably Cautious or a Worrywart?
Dear Worrywart,
Do you have some reason not to trust E’s judgment? From what you’ve told me, she hasn’t gotten herself killed, nothing’s gotten stolen from the flat, nobody’s stalking her — yeah, maybe she’s just gotten lucky, but the whole “she’s putting us ALL in danger” thing is a little melodramatic. She hasn’t, so far — and the fact is, for a lot of us, having guys we just met over is called “dating.”
If you really don’t feel comfortable having strangers over to the apartment, then suggest a house rule; it’s perfectly within bounds for you not to want randoms trooping through the house at all hours, and your roommates might not agree to it, but you can certainly bring it up as an option. But if it’s actually E’s decision-making you question…that’s your tough. She’s an adult, presumably she’s assessing these guys and deeming them safe, and she’s done so successfully in the past.
There’s caution, and then there’s assuming that every man who goes to a club is probably a criminal who’s just waiting for the opportunity to strike. E can evidently handle herself. Let her.
Tags: boys (and girls) friendships roommates workplace
