Socially Distant Cuisine

I have been on a book buying binge recently. Amazon.com's Amazon Prime is a killer, I tell you! And I am not alone... talking about which book his book club should read next, a friend explained his dilemma: Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler describes the "abundance of a bookstore" this way (I put the categories into list format): 1. Books You Haven't Read 2. The Books You Needn't Read 3. The Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading 4. Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written 5. The Books That if You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read but Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered 6. The Books You Mean to Read but There Are Others You Must Read First 7. The Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait Till They Are Remaindered 8. The Books Ditto When They Come Out in Paperback 9. Books You Can Borrow from Somebody 10. Books That Everybody's Read So It's a

As painful as this particular retreat was for me, it opened my eyes to the extraordinary amount of time my mind spent in monitoring and evaluating my success or failure, and in making reality match my ideal image of myself. With my newfound awareness, I would notice how there seemed to be an endless tape-loop in my mind that evaluated my progress: "Okay, now I've accomplished this, and this, and this. I'm doing alright." This compulsive internal dialogue is quite normal in a culture that rewards achievement, wealth, beauty and success above all things, and especially in a culture that rewards the achievements of the highly individuated, separate "self under its own power." In this milieu, the internal dialogue is actually a form of self-soothing, of reassuring ourselves that we're really okay. When we can stand back from this compulsive internal dialogue just a bit, we can see the intensity of the craving for solidity and security that drives it. .St