Gittles Grows Up

Vintage Gittles circa THE NINETIES

For the better part of the last several months, these little musings have managed to come together in a relatively cohesive fashion, with something resembling an overarching subject or motif. No such thematic glue will be found herein, at least none that I can easily identify. I blame the schizophrenic weather, which my previously name-checked harem of goofy-humored meteorologists love to rib about in a maddening "if you like unpredictable zaniness, you'll LOVE April!" sort of way. Get your shit together, Spring! She said, whilst three inches of snow accumulated on the daffodil shoots outside.

Last weekend my friends Bianca and Susannah and Jim came up from the Nueva York to buy all of Vermont's craft beer and also hang out with me for a hot minute. It was glorious. Bianca is one of the baddest bitches in all of the land, as the one-woman army behind Uncouth Vermouth. Not only is she a brilliantly savvy business woman and a tireless worker, she's a genuine nerd with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for knowledge and a beautifully child-like sense of wonder about the universe. She's one of a very few people that seems to be universally loved by even the prickliest of booze industry curmudgeons, a notoriously asshole-ish lot to be sure. She is searingly smart and tender hearted and a genuine true blue weirdo who seems wholly and unapologetically herself, and thus confident enough to be truly kind and generous.

Her visit was the kick in the proverbial pants I needed to really start to think in a more detailed way about my business aspirations. She was genuinely encouraging, while also asking me super important questions, like "How many goats do you want to have?" and "what sort of a business are you going to declare yourself?" and "do you have a phone-a-friend-style confidante to vent to when things get super fucking real and you feel like giving up?" Seemingly basic inquiries but ones I have not even begun to grapple with.



I've been focused for the last several months on simply acquiring basic competency with regard to my daily tasks and also not dying of a) car crash b) hypothermia c) weather-related melancholia.  And so much of the time I feel so unsure of whether or not I'm doing a wholly shitty job. As stated elsewhere, Laini isn't all that forthcoming about feedback, so I only hear about it if I'm doing something wrong, and sometimes not even then. It's made me realize how deeply important it is for me to feel that I am good, or improving, at the thing I spend most of my time doing. In the past, I've been quick to give up on something that didn't come easily to me, that I didn't get immediate returns on. So sticking with this enterprise despite feeling like a bumbling idiot 95% of the time has been a bit out of my comfort zone. I recognize that it's important to my character development, so I'm trying my best to stifle my desperate craving for a literal or figurative thumbs up.

It's an important lesson for me to learn sooner than later, because if I'm truly serious about striking out on my own at some future point, it will be a long and hard road and small victories and affirmations will be few and far between. There will not be someone there to hold my hand and tell me I'm doing ok, so I might as well get used to that now and try to locate and tap the inner well of emotional resilience. If everyone who ever started a business or invented something waited for a pat on the head there would be no innovation and definitely no delicious cheese. Laini spent years toiling in obscurity before she began to be recognized for her hard work, and there are plenty of people who spend their entire lives giving something their all with no acknowledgement whatsoever. You gotta do it for the love.

I still feel the love, most of the time. There's no way I would have been willing or able to apply myself to this work to the level that I have if I didn't. I admire people who work their asses of unconditionally, just because it's ingrained or part of their value system, and wish I was more that way, but for me, there needs to be passion driving that work, and passion, as we all know, is a fickle thing that's difficult to sustain. Now that some of the novelty of my new life has worn off, I need to find a new way to stoke the fire. I don't want to lose grasp of this new, devoted, reliable, hard-working iteration of myself because it's the self that will be necessary for me to embark on my future aspirations, and it's the self I have the most respect for.

For better or worse, this blog is both all about cheese and nothing about cheese. This whole endeavor has, as anticipated, taught me as much or more about my own identity as it has about dairy science and animal husbandry. Being flung far from the comfortable trappings of my New York life, I've started to see myself in, quite literally, a new light. I look older, for one thing. Maybe it's the snow's reflective capacity or the mountain shadows  and how they fall on my notably less vibrant and elastic cheeks. Maybe it's the minerals in the water that's made my hair less bouncy and ever grayer. But I feel OLD. Sometimes, like when I am congratulating myself for flossing for the third time in a week and putting money in my savings account instead of buying perfume(!) it's a good feeling. But other times it's panic-inducing. I have this fantasy that if I return to New York it will somehow be like time travel - I'll automatically go back to being a carefree unencumbered childwoman with a lineless face and the metabolism of a hummingbird. It makes this current, alarmingly aged feeling I have seem, like my current life, fleeting and conditional and not totally real.

The plus side of being old, as any OLD PERSON will tell you, is that you start to be a better, more self-aware person. The obstacles I have faced since moving here have not been relegated to goat or weather related hardships. Perhaps the largest challenge has been attempting to straddle the line between being my own advocate and letting things go. I feel I have historically stood up for myself in scenarios in which I've felt slighted or disrespected, which on its face is a good thing. However upon consideration I've some suspicions as to how well-founded these feelings of indignation were/are. I think part of me is always super wary of being mowed down or taken advantage of because I feel it's my duty as a feminist to be vigilant lest I unwittingly become a doormat or punching bag.  But sometimes my tendency to take umbrage works to my detriment. Swallowing one's pride doesn't have to mean that you're a milquetoast. Sometimes it's a matter of rising above and keeping an eye on the bigger picture. At least that's what I tell myself when my temper boils and I risk saying or doing things that could jeopardize my current situation. Relationships here feel much less expendable than in New York, where you could up and leave any situation in pursuit of something better. Here, you have to make it work or you're a little bit fucked. And I'm beginning to see that there is a power in not letting things get to you. It's not a weakness at all. 

In conclusion, I have literally everything figure out. So holler at me for life advice.

P.S. According to my meteorologist friends, there is something called corn snow. It is all around me, it is the bane of my existence and it is not even half as delicious as the name implies. 

P.P.S. Did you know about frost heaves? You do now! There are actual road signs warning of this strange phenomenon all over this fair state. BEWARE OF THE FROST HEAVES.