Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 163: Zach

Prompt: "A song that reminds you of your favorite recipe"

Selected by Zach

"Misery over Dispute"

Waxahatchee

Cerulean Salt, 2013

I used to be really into food. I wanted to be a restaurant critic. I had a notebook filled with restaurant reviews from places I ate with my family. My first (and only) published restaurant review was published in my high school newspaper at the beginning of my senior year. I minored in food studies in college, a very specific field of study at NYU. I interned at Restaurant Business Magazine. I wrote a column on health and diet for the Washington Square News. I applied for food-related writing jobs.

The dream died pretty quickly, though. I ended up getting a job at The Leader-Herald in Gloversville, NY, right out of college. I got to write all the time, but it was about school taxes, deadly fires, musical instrument-playing town supervisors, community fairs. The dream of being a food critic is still dead, but by now, I've killed it myself many times over. I don't want to be a food writer. It feels a little vapid, a little unimportant. I'm kind of against criticism in general. What's the point of hearing what Clara Park thinks about that new restaurant? What does it matter what Michiko Kakutani thinks of a book? Why does Rotten Tomatoes shape my opinion of a movie I liked? I let in the advice of others a little too quickly, sometimes, and it negatively affects me. (RC, by the way, is more an example of friends writing together about music than it is formal criticism, and I love it.)

These days, I eat enough, but what I eat is unexciting. Dinner is often white rice, boiled with whatever vegetable I've bought that's still in the fridge (zucchini, eggplant, onion). I cover it with tahini and that's it. It barely fills me up. I skip lunch all the time. When I do eat lunch, it's often a small container of cottage cheese with peanuts and raisins. I also often skip breakfast. I can go the whole day until dinnertime with a cup of coffee and usually be fine. 

I used to love food and cooking and eating. I used to walk into a bookstore and make a beeline to the cookbook section. I still love to eat—and eat a lot, when I'm hungry and there's lots of food in front of me and I went for a long run that day, à la Thanksgiving dinner—but I can't be bothered to put in effort to eat in a way that really satisfies me.

I think all this is for a few reasons. Moving to another country has sent my body haywire. I've been here for four years, and it's easy to pretend things are normal, but I always feel off here, even though the food here is amazing. I used to love to come to visit and go to the market and just eat, eat, eat. Now that I live here, I just don't care that much. My body has shut down and been in survival mode from the heaviness and stress of living here for the last four years. A stress that I welcome, but it's still stress.

But I also haven't been living in alignment with what I really want. This week, I turned down the job I wrote about on Monday. It was an anxious two weeks of deliberation and back and forth and they just kept making the offer better and better. In the end, though, I went inside my body, and the thought of taking a job that's just like the one I have now filled me with dread. I couldn't do it. It paid well, it gave me flexibility to work remotely, etc. etc. But I said no.

I never say no to things like that. I usually mutely accept my fate. Sure, I'll go on another date with you! Sure, I'll take the job that's in front of me! If you gave me a choice between running a full marathon and calling a long-term girlfriend to tell her I'm breaking up with her, I would choose the marathon, every time. It's so much easier for me. And I don't mean that in a way that's braggy about my running. It's just that running is so familiar and known to me. It's comfortable. And saying no to someone, in contrast—even when it takes less than one minute of my day—tears at my insides, makes my heart beat out of my ribs, and causes me to lose many hours of sleep.

But saying yes to something I don't want to say yes to is so much worse than saying no. It makes me go grey prematurely, it makes me feel dead inside and it makes me lose my appetite. Things like not caring about food become normal. I can't even go for a run like normal when I say yes to those things. I feel weighed down by rocks. And that's the most telling thing.

I was terrified to call the recruiter and tell him I wasn't accepting the job. Once I did it, though, it felt so, so, so, so good. I didn't need to run a marathon. I just had to tell him no.

And today, of course, a different recruiter called me, one who I'd be in touch with at the beginning of the process. She sounded emotional when I picked up, near tears, in fact. "Why didn't you take it??" she asked. "What a shame! This project is so interesting!

"What if I offer you even more money?"

I stayed true and told her the timing wasn't right, that I appreciated her so much, that I'd love to be in touch in the future if it's relevant then. She got it, and she hung up the phone. I can't explain my soul to a job recruiter. I can't even explain my soul to myself.

But the emotion in her voice from the phone call hung in the air. I could take the job. It would be so easy. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't second-guess my decision when I got off the phone with her.

But there's something deeper here. First of all, I don't like the work that job requires. But I also feel like I HAD to say no for myself. Like I had to show myself that I had the ability, for the first time in my life, to say no to a "good" offer, and that I would come out the other end, alive. Even if I felt a little bit like I was cutting off my own arm, I would come out alive.

And I'm still alive, in fact. I'm now at work, at the job I still kind of hate. I'm realizing that the act of saying no to the job has made me less patient and less tolerant of being in a situation that doesn't serve me right now. I could barely handle the bus showing up late, like it does every day. I couldn't sit in a terrible Teams meeting without feeling I was going completely insane. Just a few days ago, I had systems in place that allowed me to tolerate all this. Now that I said no to the other job, I feel like I've given myself license to ask for what I really want, to go for it. Because of that, my current job is a rusty nail sticking out of rotting wood, a harmful object. I won't allow it to pierce me beyond repair.

I had a job interview at a bakery/coffee shop the day before I rejected the offer. They obviously pay significantly less—like a quarter of what I make now. I don't know if I'll do it. It might make no sense. But even going to the interview made me feel so good. It was a totally different world than the one I inhabit now. The guy who interviewed me would not exist in my office. He wouldn't sit all day doing mind-numbing work. But he seems to belong as a bakery manager, and I felt the positive energy. And I'm sure I'm idealizing it more than it deserves, but who cares.

Whether or not I further blow up my life by taking a coffee shop job, going to the interview there made me see that I don't have to confine myself to a very specific subset of work that I've fallen into in this country. Israel has tons of high-tech companies, way more per capita than other countries. The reason for that is because people here are willing to take chances on themselves and on each other in ways that are a little harder to come by in the US. It's one of the things I love about being here. That means that if I take some chances, I can really do some big things.

But it's all on me. No one can help me but myself.

"Misery over Dispute." That's a philosophy I've chosen so many times in my life. Stay in the relationship, stay in the job, stay the course, do the things people expect of you. I'm sick of it. Saying no to the job was a departure from that. 

And it felt amazing.

And now the real work begins.

I know you read all this just waiting to get to the "favorite recipe" part. That means it's also time to make up a reason why this Waxahatchee song on Cerulean Salt (a song I would not have listened to if Joe had not recommended me the album, one I do like more than Tigers Blood) reminds me of my mother's chocolate chip cookies. The cookies I know will always be in the downstairs freezer when I visit my parents' house, the cookies that have been the ultimate constant comfort food throughout my life, showing up at endless big happy meals in our dining room with family and friends everywhere.

Salt is a crucial part of this recipe, even if it's not cerulean. And the song talks about eggshells, which need to be cracked open and then discarded as part of making the cookies. 

I hate walking on eggshells. Let's discard them. Forever.

Mom's Chocolate Chip Cookies

• 1 cup of rolled oats (not quick)
• 1 cup unbleached flour
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt
• ½ cup butter at room temp
• ½ cup oil
• 1 cup brown sugar, tightly packed
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 12 oz semisweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a large mixing bowl, combine oats, flours, baking soda and salt. Set aside. In a separate bowl, beat the butter with oil, brown sugar, vanilla and eggs. Add to flour mixture. Stir in chocolate chips and walnuts. Drop by rounded teaspoonsful onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 8-10 minutes. Yield: 3 dozen.