The Drain: Pasta Water to Spare
My additional research, thoughts, pictures and reading to big to fit into my recent post for the APA.
Good Morning!
Last week, I put together a small essay for the blog of the American Philosophical Association, as a example in everyday philosophy. This piece, To Salt or Not to Salt the Pasta Water: A Reflection on “Useless” Human Rituals, continues my practice of never settling on any singular tone, style, subject, or form, and you can find it here.
I am proud of it and I hope you give it a look, especially if you’ve already since the preview I released for paid subscribers and want that extra dose of behind-the-scenes goodness. Although it is the case that it is done and I will move on to other projects, I was tickled by the opportunity to capture and share additional aspects of the process, for your benefit and mine, for the cost of nothing except making our lives be just a little bit more pasta oriented.
Now that we have the content friendly intro out of the way, what is there to say? First and foremost, I had to remove all of the evidence for my extended diatribe about eating only gluten-free pasta! I’ve had a lifetime of experience gathering this research, but I also took the time to photograph a handful of the varieties available to me to communicate just how different each one can be in terms of cooking directions and ingredients:
I felt tempted to add even more personal flair to it. Cutting up the video I took of my friends and I making dinner? Should I be even more honest in articulating my lack of experience both in cooking and living vibrantly? Should I share the family anecdotes and humor about food that swim in my brain: My Dad’s mother trying to maintain the perfect ratio of sauce to pasta in the dish, adding more of each as she continues to eat eternally, the damnation of being alive. Not being able to finish your plate, hearing the dreaded words: “What, You don’t love me?” from your Mother-in-Law.
The silly, culturally insensitive parody song by Weird Al that was present in my childhood. How that song developed in me a feeling of imposter syndrome, that I can relate more strongly to a song making fun of the people that came before me than I ever could connect with them.
The discussion I have had with people close to me about the route and future for jokes about Italian/Italian-American culture, and whether future generations will see them as just as hurtful, cringy or weird as off-color jokes and impressions my parents and grandparents have made about Chinese, Polish, or Irish people.
The connection to gangster films and tv and the Super Mario franchise. Shutting down my urge to talk about the Mario movie as not an example of Italian-American erasure (given that Mario has always been a literal cartoon), but as an unhelpful ignorance of ethnic differences that can be identified with a not-at-all ridiculous comparison to the Sopranos. Then suppressing my urge to talk about the beautiful and scary minutia present in that show that hit me in waves as I watched it, more impressive even then its careful consideration of marginalized groups and peoples, making their experiences understandable and sympathetic to the kinds of people that would typically cause them harm. The realization that I am not an imposter, and I do have a heritage, and that it exists entirely in ways that are almost impossible to put into words. It’s in all of the toxic and beautiful ways the people around me know how to talk to each other, and exist within themselves. Asking myself what I do with that information.
Including the meta-commentary I had with another group of friends about the potential for a post-racial future, wherein systemic issues are addressed with systemic methods and we then need to look for other language that has less baggage, and how that most likely means forming groups with ethnicity as our identifier. I’ll need to make peace with my feelings of inauthenticity to exist in an equitable, livable world, and resist the compulsion to call myself the Gluten free pasta as an analogy.
…And then if I took this roadmap and wrote it all up to this point, I would honestly contemplate whether this <2500 word blog post that is now 6500 words long is the appropriate place to try to make my case for the comparison between race and gender as harmful social constructs that should ultimately be removed and replaced in an ideal world. Seriously.
What was this all about? Pasta? Right, of course. If I was to summarize, I would say this is a warning to myself that while it may seem impossible, I am at risk of being someone who simultaneously has nothing to say, feeling like I have nothing worth saying, feeling ‘at least I know what I want to write’ for my own sake, feeling like I’m worrying too much about what audience I am writing to and for, feeling like I’m definitely writing too much, etc… so I just need to 1: choose to be satisfied with my work and be done with it at a completely random time relative to my feelings about it, and 2: connect with others so I do not, in fact, only write for myself and a hypothetical audience that also exists in my head.
Hope this helps!