Whispering Reeds

Some of the things I am scared about:

2011-06-19T17:04:00.000-07:00

1. I am scared that I won't get a job. I haven't had a full-time job in two years now. I haven't had a decent-paying job in two years. I'm surviving on savings, government help that I'm only getting because my kids are both under 18, and the help of family (and not very nice family, not family that I want to be beholden to). I'm old. Age discrimination is technically illegal in this country, but it's obvious, it happens all the time. And the government doesn't give a rat's ass about it. Hey, the government doesn't give a rat's ass about any unemployed people. -- About any people in need for that matter, except if they can get donors to give them more by protecting them. -- Why would they single out the old unemployed to care about, when they don't care about any of the others. So yeah, I am very, very scared that I'll never get another decent job again.

2. I am scared that I'll get the wrong job. I'm applying all over, right? Because that's what you're supposed to do. In America, it doesn't make sense to pick and choose about where you would like to work. You've got to go where the jobs are, and right now, that isn't Fresno. But now I'm starting to get a few interviews outside the area, and it's making me seriously consider: What if I get the wrong job? What if I get a job that doesn't pay enough to live on? What if I get one that's far away, and we have to move, and ...Well, and we have to move someplace where I can't afford to live on what they're paying me, so I guess it still comes down to the same problem: Going where the jobs are is great and all, but only if you can afford to live there.

3. I am scared that I'm not the kind of person people hire. I know it doesn't fit with the other things I said, but it's true. I can dress up to look like I'm going to an interview, I can practice saying all the things a person is supposed to say at one, but somehow I never feel like it quite works. I don't know exactly, maybe I feel like I'm giving off the wrong vibes, or like I look wrong. Maybe it's just me, I usually feel like I'm not satisfying my employers either, even when I'm doing the level best I can at a job.

4. I'm scared about the future. I don't see any chance that I'll find a job in Fresno, but now that we've been here almost 10 years, my kids have set down roots here. They will hate it if we have to move. They'll be unhappy. Plus it will be hard to pack up all our crap. Plus how much money can I take away from the house, when the real estate market is in the toilet, and my dad is the real owner of it anyway?

Speaking of my dad, I really effin' want to kill him now, for some things he said to my sister. But I'm not going to talk about that here. Maybe in another blog post, provided I want to talk about that stuff at all.

HyperSmash

Foodblogging -- 3

2011-06-08T15:45:00.000-07:00

My mom lived in Mexico when she was a teenager, not because of any Mexican heritage, but because her parents were wealthy enough that they just moved there to live for a few years. My mom's family lived in Alamos, in the state of Sonora. There was quite an expatriate community there back in the 1950's from what I understand, and my grandfather, who was kind of a show-offy guy, was right in the middle of it. This picture shows him surrounded by all the movers and shakers from the American expatriate community. He's second from the right in the front row, the tall one who looks kind of like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

My Grandpa was like that. He was the kind of guy who liked to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. -- I've heard he once threw a tantrum while visiting my grandmother in the hospital, because she was getting more attention than he was. -- and nothing pleased him more than when he could adopt a new identity. Later after he'd brought the family back to the United States, he and my grandmother moved to Prescott Arizona, where he took to calling coyotes ky-yotes, and wearing a bola tie every chance he got.

That was my grandfather. Because of him, my family had very much of an expatriate-feel to it while I was growing up, even though we were living in Southern California. Mexico always felt like a second home to us, but not the way it does for people who are really of Mexican heritage. There was always a feel of consumerism about the way we looked at Mexico. It was a place we went for vacations, a place to have fun, not to live regular lives, and work, and raise kids and make a future for ourselves. Our future was in the U.S., and we knew it. But we felt ourselves superior, at once to the American tourists we saw, who didn't know the "right" places to go, the "authentic" ones that were "off the beaten track", and to the native Mexicans themselves. ...Not that we would ever have admitted it.

At home, we ate "real" Mexican food, not the Taco Bell stuff all the other white families in town ate -- Not even the tamale pies my Grandma from the other side of the family, the Texas side, used to make when we'd visit. My mom's having lived in Mexico gave her, we felt, the right to speak authoritatively on what real Mexicans did or did not eat.

They didn't eat flour tortillas, I remember, although Mother used to buy them for her gringo husband and kids. Or burritos; although you could get things that looked like burritos, called burros, in restaurants in Mexico, they did not taste like the burritos served at Taco Bell or our school cafeteria. They didn't put cheese on top of everything, or load every recipe in the world down with tons of meat.

The foods real Mexicans ate, could be found in two cookbooks by a woman named Elena Zelayeta: An expatriate herself, Elena got stuck in California where she'd been vacationing, when the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910. She made the best of her new life in San Francisco, running a successful restaurant, and starting her own frozen food company. She also wrote two cookbooks that were veritable bibles in the 50's and 60's, for any American who wanted to cook "real" Mexican food, Elena's Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes, and Elena's Secrets of Mexican Cooking.

My mom had both of them, of course (I think her parents gave them to her). She used to cook delicious, "authentically Mexican" dishes out of them, such as flan, tortilla soup, albondigas soup, and my favorite, sopa de fideos. Later on when my sisters and I grew up, my younger sister Robin was on-the-ball, and asked my mom if she could have Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes, which was the better of the two books, and had all the best recipes. Being more awkward about asking for stuff, it never even occurred to me to ask for either of the books (although my mom later gave me Secrets of Mexican Cooking just to be generous).

I don't know if I would have used the other book much even if I'd had it. My sister and I are very different in a lot of ways, and one of those is in how we feed our families. Her approach is still a lot like my mother's: She makes casseroles a lot, anchors most meals around meat, and loves to prepare the recipes she enjoyed herself as a child. Me, I am lazier, or more casual maybe. I serve a lot more frozen meals than she does, a lot more vegetarian meals. And when I do cook from scratch, I rarely make anything that requires a recipe. Most of my best dishes are made by dumping in a little of this, and a sprinkle of that, then glaring at the kids until they at least taste to see if it's any good before rejecting it.

But now that I am aggregating the recipes I loved most as a child into one place, the sopa de fideos recipe had to go with the rest of them, and so I wrote to Robin and asked her for it. Here it is, along with her notes about how she modifies it for modern tastes:

SOPA DE FIDEOS

1/2 package coiled vermicelli
1/2 cup oil [I just use a heavy coating of cooking spray]
1/2 onion minced
2 fresh tomatoes [I use 1 can of diced tomatoes]
2 cups chicken broth
salt and pepper to taste

Fry vermicelli in oil until golden brown. Remove from oil. In same oil saute onion. When onion is browned add the tomatoes, chicken broth, salt and pepper. When broth is boiling add the vermicelli. Cook covered until dry (23-30 minutes). Serve sprinkled with cheese.
[I usually use Mexican cheese (queso fresco or something like that).]

The best thing about this dish is the texture of the vermicelli noodles. They're basically the same as spaghetti noodles in terms of ingredients, but for some reason they have a better, a more satisfying feel to them. It is a feel that is almost like a taste. Back when I was young and had never tried them prepared any way besides this one, I thought it was the preparation that gave them that nice texture. I got this recipe from my mother so I could enjoy it again. But then I never made any, because I was intimidated by the fat-content.

It never occurred to me to try cutting back on the fat like my sister has done. I was kind of worried that would spoil what had made the vermicellis taste so good. But then I tried serving vermicellis with marinara sauce instead of spaghettis once, and I discovered that they always taste good like that. Vermicellis are just a nicer than average type of pasta.

So nowadays I am still never going to make my mom's old recipe for sopa de fideos, because I no longer need to. I have learned ways to satisfy my vermicelli-cravings without it. But go ahead and try it, if you are curious. It's light and tasty, and because of the vermicellis, it has a complete-meal feel about it. And it's authentic of course. An entire generation of expatriates can vouch for that.

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Foodblogging -- 2

2011-06-05T18:05:00.000-07:00

My mom had two recipes for macaroni and cheese. One of them, the healthier one, I have no use for. It had eggs, it had milk. It had some cooked macaronis, and some cubed cheddar cheese. The long cook-time made the macaronis too soft in my opinion, and there was never enough cheese to disguise the creepy taste of the unsweetened custard that bound the dish together.

No, the one I liked was the other one, which had a salty, intense flavor, and a brownish, almost meaty color. I liked that one so much that after I left home and got my own place, I wrote back and asked my mother to send the recipe.

And when I saw how it was made, I almost went into shock.

Understand as you read it, that we used to eat differently back in those days. My favorite recipe for Sloppy Joes, came out of my Betty Crocker's New Boys' and Girls' Cookbook. The main ingredients were canned tomato soup and ground beef. I knew that, and I was okay with it, because back when I was growing up, either ground beef or canned soup, if not both of them, went into practically everything we had for dinner. But when I went back as an adult to make my old favorite Sloppy Joe's for my husband and family, I found that I couldn't remember the secret ingredient that gave the Joes their "special" taste, that is, that kept them from tasting just like canned tomato soup mixed with ground beef. So I tracked down my old cookbook and looked up the recipe to check:

It was a teaspoon of French's-style mustard. That was all that was in there, besides the soup and the meat. To me, that says all you need to know about how we ate in the 1970's right there: Not only was a teaspoon of mustard enough to give something a "special" taste, but I couldn't recognize the mustard in the dish when I tasted it.

Bear that in mind when you read the following recipe for:

LUMBERJACK MACARONI

Hot Boiled Macaroni (8 oz uncooked)
2 Cups Grated Cheddar Cheese
5 Tbsp. Worcestershire Sauce
1/4 C. Chili Sauce [My mom used catsup]
Salt and Pepper
3/4 C. Piping Hot Melted Butter [My mom used margarine]

Spread Macaroni out on large hot platter. Sprinkle with cheese, Worcestershire sauce, chili sauce, salt and pepper. Pour hot meleted butter over all. Mix with two forks until sauce is creamy. Serve at once on hot plates. Serves 6.

I have never dared try making this recipe. It is over-salted, and full of processed ingredients (and some that I never even keep around the house any more; just out of curiosity, when was the last time you used Worcestershire sauce?), but I'm sure you'll understand, it's the butter content that puts me off. 3/4 cups, is 12 tablespoons. That's 1,200 calories, just for the butter!

I am reconciled to a lifetime without Lumberjack Macaroni. But you know, I remain curious. Because as with the mustard in the Sloppy Joes, my memory does not fit with my sense now of what the dish would be like. I think about it, and I picture pools of grease lying around the macaronis on the plate, but when I look back at my childhood image of it, I just remember the noodles, and a brownish, cheesy sauce. Was I so used to the grease that I didn't even notice? Or did the butter perhaps emulsify with the catsup better than I'm imagining?

Please don't get me wrong, the last thing I want to do at this late date, when I am desperately protecting what's left of my health so it will last me into my old age, is start in making recipes that have 1,200 calories worth of butter in them. But if any of you should make it, I wish you would write back and tell me if the sauce emulsifies, or if the cheese and noodles just sit in grainy lumps, on top of the puddle of grease that is the melted butter.

HyperSmash

Foodblogging -- 1

2011-06-05T17:06:00.000-07:00

One egg, one slice of bread, and one cup of milk: I spent most of my childhood dieting (or if you want to be more accurate, alternately dieting, and cheating up a storm whenever my mother's back was turned) according to the Diet Watchers system, and that, or a facsimile, was my breakfast every single morning. I won't even talk about the animal fat content. These days when I want a light breakfast, I'll go for some beans and brown rice with salsa on top, or a handful each of peanuts and dried fruit. But on the Diet Watchers plan, dried beans, nuts, and dried fruit were all verboten. This was the 1970's, and vegetable proteins hadn't been heard of yet. And so we learned to be creative with our eggs, our bread, and our skim milk.

One of my favorite strategies was to mix 1/2 a bottle of blue food coloring into my single scrambled egg, and then eat it on top of the bread, toasted. You get rather a nice shade of teal-colored eggs that way, and I don't think the food coloring I used has been declared carcinogenic yet.

Another strategy was to mix 2 ounces of grated cheese into the egg and spread them thin on a hot pan, so the cheese came out way past melty, and the whole thing was a little stiff and chewy. But that was a lunch meal; at breakfast, we weren't allowed so much protein.

Here is the breakfast recipe I liked best of all though, out of the old Diet Watchers Guide, that was my mom's and my Bible for all things food-related, all those years ago:

APPLE PANCAKES

1 medium-sized apple [Nowadays I'd use a cooking apple, but back then we just used what we had, tart green apples after my dad's trees, supermarket Red Deliciouses or whatever, and the pancakes were still delicious.]
1 egg
1 slice enriched white bread [A coarse-textured brown bread makes, or even better, a homemade white, makes for a better pancake.]
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1/4 cup skim milk
Pinch of cinnamon and liquid non-sugar sweetener mixed to taste [Back then we used saccharin of course, because that's what there was. I'd substitute out for a packet or two of Splenda nowadays.]

Slice peeled apple quite thin and simmer with lemon juice, cinnamon and liquid sweetener until apple is tender [we used the microwave; it took a couple minutes each to get the apples soft, if I remember correctly]. Blend the egg, bread and skim milk in blender, and pour batter into mixing bowl. Add the cooked apple. Heat 10-inch Teflon pan [any frying pan would be a good substitute of course, sprayed with non-stick spray while heating.] and pour in batter to make four-inch cakes. Brown well, flip carefully to brown the other side. Top with No-Cal syrup (cherry, strawberry, orange, etc., as desired).

Notes: Back then either my mom or I used to make this dish at least once every week, not just for ourselves, but for my sisters (who weren't dieting) as well. It was one of the few Diet Watchers recipes that was delicious, and filling, exactly as written, and didn't leave me wishing that I'd could eat something more fattening. Oh, and I never added any topping. Sugar-free syrup, with its fake-maple flavor, that didn't do anything to hide the aftertaste of the saccharin, would have been a sacrilege of course. But you really didn't need a topping. The lemon juice and the cinnamon sweetened the apples nicely. And just the little bit of grease in the nonstick spray was enough to make the pancakes taste crispy.

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Failure Face

2011-06-01T17:06:00.000-07:00

Looking back over my life, I consider myself pretty much of a failure. I'm pretty intelligent, I have a good education -- I wasn't raised to think women could be nothing but homemakers. -- and yet here I am nearing 50, entry-level in a couple of different careers, but with no one from either wanting to hire me on for a permanent job, and making a hand-to-mouth income as a substitute teacher. I don't like telling people how much education I have. It's embarrassing enough to think about it myself: With all the time I was in school, I could be anything. But here I am, not sure I'll be able to afford to live past 65.

And you know, I'd like to blame my parents. I know I grew up without a very clear sense of what, if anything, my abilities were good for. My dad was mostly in favor of jobs where you did something, such as teaching, or library work ...or plumbing for that matter, and against jobs where you were paid more, depending on your brainpower. And my mom was mostly more angered than pleased by what I was best at, which was questioning authority and figuring out my own way to do things. But I can't really blame them, even though they did raise me to think that someone like me wasn't really worth as much as someone with practical skills and a traditional mind. I'm smart enough that I should have been able to see past their training. And I got enough therapy that I should have been able to trust my judgment and do what was best for me.

Only instead, I didn't. I was going along really well doing coursework for an advanced History degree, when I -- I don't know -- ...when I got cold feet I guess, or I was hit with fear of success or something. Anyway, I left that course of study to go off and enter seminary. And when I was there, I made the mistake of supporting a man to his success, instead of actively pursuing my own.

Well, he succeeded. And then he left the ministry. And as for me, I raised our two kids, and looked around vaguely and guiltily, trying to find some kind of a job that I would be decent at, that also wouldn't cost any more than was absolutely necessary to prepare for. And I didn't succeed. Trying to write sermons as a preacher, left me with more questions than answers. And legal secretarying wasn't a bad fit, except that people looked at me with disrespect for settling for a job like that, when I had so much education. And besides, it didn't give benefits. So when my ex lost hir permanent job (and, with it, the kids' benefits), I tried to get into teaching so I could get insurance for my sons.

And I'm really never going to be a success as a teacher. I know that from my time in the classroom. It's not that I don't know the material, because I do know it, passably well, although the part that I know best, which is Social Studies, is also the part that doesn't get any attention these days, until the last month before school lets out. The problem is that I get really uncomfortable in atmospheres of chaos. They hurt my thinking. And in the classroom, you need to be able to regard chaos calmly, and quickly come up with ways of restoring order. This I cannot do. I can learn strategies that usually work, and I can get to where I apply them most of the time, when the chaos is not too chaotic. But I am never going to be really good at it. I'm never going to be one of the really great teachers out there, and these days there's no market for teachers who are merely passable.

But I've been working for schools for so long now, that I can't seem to get anyone to take me seriously for anything but school jobs. And I'm too old to be looked at as credible any more, in entry-level positions. ...And at my age, really, shouldn't I be past the entry level? Which brings me back to my original point: I'm a failure. And someday, not as long as I'd like from now, I will probably run out of the money I need to live on. And when I do, I will have to either mooch off a family member, or find a non-painful, non-stressing for my family, way of ending my life. It is not a happy prospect to think about.

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Leaving my Long-Term Job

2011-05-29T10:01:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been there since November of last year. These days when I look at the pictures of students on the website, I know most of them. I know the teachers and I like them, and I like some of the administrators as well. And my last day is coming up this Tuesday, after the Memorial Day long weekend.

I felt really bad, when the Principal called me in to tell me my job was coming to an end. The other tutors and I had talked about when we would be leaving. We knew our jobs were funded on a month-to-month basis, and every month it grew less and less likely that the school would find funding to keep us. I'd kind of expected to leave at the end of May, but I'd thought it would be all of us leaving. Instead, she told me, it would be just me.

It felt like a rejection, like I'd been weighed in the balance and found wanting, judged and rejected as not being good enough, not being able to pull my weight at the school. And it didn't help that the Principal (who is, shall we say, not noted for her sensitivity or her employer-employee skills) told me I'd been selected to leave because I was the last one hired. I wasn't. I was one of the first hired.

I felt hurt, and I felt sad, and I felt scared. Leaving that job, I would be going back to working as a regular substitute teacher. At the end of the year? How likely was it that I would find work? I think I must have real rejection-issues, because things like this always hit me really hard. Every time someone else is chosen over me, it feels painful and scary, like I'm a little bird being pushed out of the mama bird's nest. I went through all last week kind of stewing inside, and ready to cry at the least little thing, such as when I told the kids I would be leaving, and when I packed my coffee maker into the trunk of my car to take it home.

But you know, it wasn't really such a good job. I was hired on to do one job (tutoring kids who were struggling with Math or Language Arts), but if there was a need anyplace else, no one hesitated to take me away from what I was supposed to be doing to fill it. I have stood on a playground for two hours straight when one of the yard duty aides didn't show up. I have covered classes that needed coverage, during class and during lunch break on rainy days. I have filed, and served mashed potatoes, and hefted boxes of cookie dough for a fundraiser. There have been times when I've dreaded going into work because I didn't know what kind of thing I'd be given to do. And I haven't received very many thank you's. And no one's taken the time to tell me I did a good job.

And you know, I did do a good job to the best of my abilities. I never hid the fact that I was looking for a permanent job, and I missed a couple of days going to interviews. But every day that I was there, I was there on-time. I was always right where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do. I did what I was told without question, and followed whatever directions I was given to the very best of my abilities.

I have no regrets about the job I did while I was there. And now that I've had time to do some research, and have lined up two sub jobs for next week, plus an interview (for a permanent position at a school way closer to home) on Wednesday, I'm feeling a lot more comfortable about leaving. Am I sorry I worked there all the past year? No. I worked with some really nice people on staff. And most of the kids were sweetie-pies. Would I take the job if I had it to do over again though? I'm not so sure about that. The $10.00 more it paid per day was nice, but I don't know if it was enough to make up for the persistent low-level depression I felt the whole time I was doing it, or the damage that it did to my sense of self-worth.

My takeaway as I leave, is the job was a learning experience. I learned that I didn't know before about managing a classroom, and how to communicate to kids that I care about them. I learned about giving kids incentives for learning without them becoming a distraction, and how to be clear about my expectations. And I learned a lot about myself, including the fact that if I have to do contract-work at a low rate of pay, I'd rather keep some control over what I'm doing when and for whom, than to sign on for another year of being told to go anyplace, anytime, with no notice at all, and then frowned on a little bit if I don't do the unexpected task I was given perfectly.

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