Thirst

Me as a squirrel

When I was home, I did a lot of Internetting, in between getting into petty fights about sour cream with my mom, taking the dog for a walk and hacking up my right lung (time consuming!). In meandering around the Information Superhighway, I was introduced to the concept of Thirst, as enumerated in a year-end list on Jezebel. It's not such a foreign concept -- basically it's just hella striving, and in this context, it's a particular kind of striving - to be famous and/or relevant. 

Somewhere in the deepest part of my soul there is still a remnant of eight-year old me who is convinced that I will one day be a famous singer and actress, but if growing up is anything, it's the slow and steady abandonment of ludicrous dreams that you have no intention of fulfilling. So my thirst isn't really of the celebrity coveting ilk (not that I'd be mad if I became famous, but at this rate it would probably be for something embarrassing like going to court to legally change my cat's last name or something). 


My thirst is pretty much relegated to this gauzy dream about my future that is, finally, after many years, beginning to come into focus and take shape before my eyes. Its lines and colors and contrast are sharpening every day, and it's totally nutso. I've never been a very detail-oriented person. My writing is a case in point -- I tend to have these big ideas that get glossed over because I lack the determination to explicate them with nuance or specificity. That whole show don't tell thing? Nah. I'm gonna tell and you can fill in the show part at your own discretion. 

What the fuck is my point? I haven't really ever imagined my future, and thus haven't really ever felt compelled to WORK TOWARD something specific. This could be a chicken or egg scenario, but yeah. Like, I never really set goals for myself. I never WANTED anything. I could not get a good picture of my most excellent idealized life. Unlike my knee socks-wearing compatriots, I never imagined what my wedding would be like or doodled renderings of my poufy lacy dress or scrawled my Mrs. [Fill in the Blank] name on the backs of my notebooks. I couldn't really even conjure up anything more than an abstract fantasy when playing M.A.S.H. with my friends in grade school. Did I want to live in Hawaii? Or Paris? Did I want to drive a Corvette? Fuck if I knew, man. When people would ask me, in job interviews or on dates (basically the same thing) where I saw myself in five years, my eyes would mist over and I would stare dumbly at something in the distance and start to drool.

The only time I had any inner visual about what I wanted my life to look like was shortly after I visited New York for the first time, when I imagined that I would be Some Type of Artist and live in a stark, white, wooden floored Soho loft and buy all my clothes in vintage shops and drink a shit ton of coffee and listen to Digable Planets and go dancing at night with my friends that I had. It was more of an atmospheric lifestyle dream than anything resembling a life plan. 

It's hard to remember when the tiny sapling of my current, active dream came into existence but I suspect it was when I found myself firmly installed in a corporate job that, in spite of its cool-ish trappings (getting to go see shows every night of the week and get drunk for free, basically), was beginning to crush my soul a little, as most fluorescent-lit cubicle jobs in sterile high rise buildings in Midtown tend to, no matter how on-paper sweet they seem. Like my peers, I was deeply engaged in peering over to the other side of the lawn with the demonstrably greener grass, convinced that I needed a pastoral escape from my daily grind urban existence (this despite having been desperate to escape something akin to that prior to my departure for New York at age  18). Whenever the slog of subway and coffee-getting and screen-staring and phone-answering started to make my face melt, I'd reach back into the folds of my brain to retrieve this lovely sunbeam of an idea that involved living someplace beautiful with a man I loved and some impossibly adorable babies, keeping goats, making  cheese and writing books in the spare time I magically seemed to have despite all of the aforementioned time-sucking endeavors. 

I've carried this little sapling along with me for eons now, through many more years of urban slogging and failed relationships and professional confusion and now, finally, since abandoning all that confusion to apply myself wholly to one small slice of that previously abstract dream, all the other elements have started to take root. I know what I want now! And since I know what I want, maybe I have a chance in goddamned hell of getting it? Is that how these things work? All I know is that I feel sure that actually being able to PICTURE and/or DESCRIBE these things for which I thirst is a pretty solid first step towards calling them into being.

I'm starting with this little sliver, which is actually really a big fucking slice. I'm learning about cheese, and about goats, and about work and being reliable and accountable and responsible, and trusting myself and believing that I can do it. Can I do it? I really want to do it. I hope that I can do it. Do. It.

Here is a list of things I need to do. 

1) Learn to make cheese. Like one or two. Really well. Thus far I have not even begun this very essential component of Future Life. I am, at this moment, simply Showing Up. Learning to handle the goats. Learning to be self-reliant. Learning to be fastidious. Learning to cut curds and hoop and do affinage. I've yet to do a make (pasturize the milk and add all the cultures and coagulant and, like, record the flocculation and do all that technical stuff that one needs to master). I thought I'd have all this down time to experiment in my test kitchen but LOL I had no time to do anything except for sleep and eat and write in this silly fucking thing. Now that the girls are dry, I have big chunks of my day available, so it's time to fucking bite the bullet and get serious. I need to identify the materials I need to start making shit at home. This will require cracking open the cheesemaking books I hauled all the way from New York and then proceeded to glance at from a distance apologetically while furtively watching another episode of Gilmore Girls. No more excuses, B. THE TIME IS NOW.

2) Write a motherfucking business plan Guess what class I took in grad school? Food Entrepreneurship. Guess what I still have no clue how to write? A GODDAMNED PIECE OF SHIT BUSINESS PLAN.

3) Find some goddamned land Do you have land? Can I use it? In exchange for, I dunno, regular a cappella renditions of Destiny's Child songs and a couple of really finely tuned knock knock jokes?

4) Learn how to build a cheese room and geothermal cave LOLOLOLOL

alternately

5) Secure fundage to employ an expert who knows how to do the aforementioned things

Which is inextricably tethered to 

6) Find some super rad investors with deep pockets and lots of patience See item #4

Seems pretty simple. I figure the finding a person to love and having kids thing will just sort of fall into place naturally in between building a farm from scratch, taking care of a herd of animals and crafting an artisan product that complies with the elaborate health and safety regulations that dairy is subject to and, like, staying in the black (is that a thing people say?). I suppose I should stop despising meeting new people and taking showers somewhere in there if I want to increase the odds of attracting a mate. Baby steps. Lit'rully.

But hey, at least I have a plan now. It's all within my sights! It's going to happen. It has to!*

*I'm so fucked.