Body over mind, part the last: martial arts

And here I arrive at last at the phenomenon that started me into thinking on body over mind.

As some of you may already know, I tested for my yellow belt last week, and I was all sorts of excited and also anxious about it: what if I went to do whatever it was I was supposed to do, and I just froze? It wasn't about worrying about failing the test so much; our venerable teacher is not one to flunk us if we flub up. I think her policy is that she wouldn't let us test if she didn't already know from regular classroom practice that we were able to do what we needed. So if we get a case of the nerves during test, that gets chalked up as just nerves, not incompetence. Even if that's not her exactly policy, it's an interesting teaching point that I'll have to carry over if I ever manage to make it back into the classroom again....

Anyway. The anxiety was mostly self-generated; I had a standard (i.e., perfection) that I wanted to perform to, and worried I'd fall short. Lordie.

So before the test, I did a little last-minute practice. Then some sun salutations to find my calm. I like to think it worked. There were two moments in particular where the body-over-mind thing kicked in, and I'm mighty glad it did, both because it saved me from freezing up and it also just felt pretty cool, too.

For whatever belt one is at, there's a form - a connected series of movements - that you learn. You know, a white belt form, yellow belt form, red belt form, etc. And for belt testing, you perform solo the form for the belt you're currently at. So for me, that meant doing the white belt form, for which there are 6 parts. Easy enough to understand the schematics. But I am somewhere around 98% positive that I >completely< left a part out. Either that, or I started one part and finished it with the end of a different part.

What was interesting was that by the time the thought triggered in my head "you left something out!" I was already bodily past it. I was instead wrapped up in the flow of movement that, even if it wasn't exactly right, was connected and worked together to keep my body in a place that the head job that could have threatened to trip me up didn't have a place to gain traction and I slipped right past it. That was pretty awesome.

The second place that body-over-mind was pretty amazing was when I got to break my very first board. This came at the end of testing, and from what I perceived from people higher in rank than I, it is apparently one of the coolest things of all to do. I couldn't tell; I've never broken a board before so I had no clear expectations at all as to what it would be like.

Kris was so patient in getting me set up - helping me focus, helping me aim, and interestingly (to me; I wouldn't have thought of it but it makes complete sense) to not imagine my target being the board, but beyond the board. Have it be as though I'm doing a regular palm strike, like toward her chest, and a board just happens to be in the way. It was like a "there is no spoon" sort of moment. Because when it came time to do it, I didn't think about the board, I didn't think much about anything; just chi-ed up, turned and struck and - the really weird part - is that it felt and sounded to my ear like I was already completely through the palm strike before I heard the sound of the board breaking. It was as though it really was just about being in the movement, and the board being there and cracking in two was like an afterthought.

If I gave it much thought at all before, I imagined the excitement about breaking boards was just that - a weird thrill about simply breaking stuff. And maybe for some it is. But for my first experience, for where I am now at least, it meant something else. It meant being presented with a physical obstacle, and then managing to put myself in a place where I can move through it as though it isn't even there.

Body over mind, part the second: yoga.

In a different sort of way I'm coming to find ... approach? ... realize? a similar kind of letting-the-mind-idle while the body does its thing with yoga.

I'd be tempted to say that yoga is more introspective and less interactive than playing music with a group, but actually, I'm not sure that's quite right. Because doing practice at home is one thing, and it's all good. But there is a special kind of vibe that comes from practicing yoga with a group that I enjoy a lot, so that as with practicing guitar, I'm more motivated and inspired to pursue it alone at home because of how much I appreciate practicing with others. It like since I wish to make that group practice as fine as possible, then >I< want to be at the best I can at that time, and to make that happen I need to practice more at home. And as group practice rocks, the more I'm inspired to practice on my own. And so on.

But the connection with body over mind? Well, as my good friend Tenley put it so well the other evening, yoga is like meditating with the body. And working with that idea, the more I manage to get my hyperactive self-conscious mind to pipe down - and stop thinking about what we're going to cook for dinner, or whether I should have done X instead of Y earlier, or whether I've got my alignment in triangle or whatever right, or fret in anticipation of a a hip-opener pose that I just know I'm gonna blow - well, then the body just does whatever it's able to do for that time and all the other awesome benefits of yoga can come through. I think that's why I glommed on so quickly to the warm-room yoga class I take sometimes in the Castro. It's not 100+ (or whatever) degrees like with Bikram, but it is definitely warm enough to break a considerable sweat. And that difference in felt experience seems to work for me, somehow, to really shake me out of worrying about thinking about dinner or being less than confident about my level of flexibility and I'm just >there<.

As with the guitar, it doesn't always work. I don't know whether one can really make or force the mind to shut off; you know? It's like, to focus on shutting the mind down is itself an act of the kind of consciousness you're trying to avoid, and sometimes the monkey chatter in the brain just won't let up. I hope that with practice, that gets easier to do. But when I can achieve it even in my beginning phases, it too is really awesome.

Body over mind, part the first: music

Just some more ramblings from my wandering mind, and given how I can go on I've divided this exploratory exposition into parts...

If you know me then you may already know that I spent (probably) entirely too many years studying philosophy (and if you don't, you can check my info since I'm not in the mood for tooting that academic horn now). And in the western-anglo-analytic tradition that I spent most of my studying time, the focus was ever, in some form, of disembody-ishly finding - or arguing for a failure to find - truth. The body factored in when you needed to articulate things or your fingers in writing or typing them out, but these sorts of factors were relatively incidental.

That's all I have to say about that for the time being, as a backdrop for how peculiar it is in this current phase of my life to be working more on embodied knowing. I know it's not the right words, but I don't know any better: it's a hard thing for me to wrap my mind around. I mean: it's quite cool and rocking, but it's like my brain keeps wanting to consciously jump in and play a cognitive part, and I'm in the midst of now a process of training it to pipe down, sit back, and enjoy the ride.

So, whassat mean? Well, to put it in more everyday terms, I think of guitar playing with the NASA bluegrass group. Sometimes, someone will introduce a song without any sheet music, but by explaining that it's in the key of A, or G, or C (or whatever), and that it's got the usual 1-4-5 chord structure (so that if you're playing in A, for instance, the chords for the song are A, D and E). And then, off you go, and when - for me - it's like the body over mind is working, then when I feel a chord change coming up, it's as though my fingers feel and reach for where they need to be on the fretboard. That's as opposed to >thinking< as I anticipate a chord change for this new song, that we're moving up a fourth or a fifth and so I need to play a D or an E. Yanno?

I've posted before in note that I don't really know beans about music theory (maybe I will someday, but I don't know it now), so thinking it through in terms of intervals like fourths and fifths or thirds or whatever just isn't part of my mental architecture. It doesn't always work! Sometimes a song doesn't change chords the way one might expect or maybe my fingers just guess wrong sometimes. But sometimes, when the planets are lined up right or something, the body just knows it's supposed to play a D and before I have a chance to think about it, there it goes. It's quite cool, really. And when the whole group seems to be feeling it and jams it out all impromptu-like, well, I don't know what words really work to describe what it feels like to me outside of "awesome."

Entitlement: you're doing it wrong.

I was reading Jon Carroll's column the other morning and came across the following:

But now here's a real quote, from Siim Kallas, the European Union's transport commissioner: "It is clear that this is not sustainable. We cannot just wait until this ash cloud disappears."

It's about the air travel situation over across the pond, and like Mr. Carroll, I just have to scratch my head and ask: WTF? The concept that's suggested boggles my mind.

Big atmospheric phenomenon that will kill a plane's engines and bring you down, and there's people with a self-image inflated to the extent that they would say "hey, we've got time tables here, can't wait - let's get up in the air already!" D'ya really think that's going to change the laws of physics to suddenly work in your favor?

Carroll draws a comparison to the kind of people who, even though a road they want to take is flooded out and a team of volunteers is directing them to an alternate route, will say "oh no, I'm to big to fail" and plow through. Sure enough when the water gets up to their door handles, they need rescuing. Of course, with a big plane and hundreds of people possibly on board the need for caution takes a more severe tone. And you know what, for the sake of your safety and that of others, even if you don't value it, you're just gonna have to suck it up and wait.

I can understand the frustration and I thank the stars I'm not abroad right now. I know, I've been on extended travel and found myself caught in the throes of delays and whatnot and thought, with the lightning flashing/blizzard falling outside the airport windows "dear god, I don't care, just get me up in the air and back home already." But I think that with my quiet, inside-my-head voice.

But it sounds like people need to think critically about their attitudes. Last week I was listening to an interview on NPR with the president of Iceland about this whole volcano thing. And the interviewer asked as a final question what the president had to say about people who were blaming Iceland for all this trouble.

What I imagine went on in his head was "Are you effing KIDDING me? What the hell kind of stupid-assed question is that?!!!" But b\less him, the president answered very diplomatically.

Are there out there people who are seriously mad at >Iceland< for messing up their travel?

I mean, okay, in the sense of being the >cause< of an ash cloud that do planes terminal damage, Iceland and its volcano are responsible. But that's not the kind of responsibility I think people have in mind as they wag a finger of guilt in Iceland's direction.

There are bona fide things to be annoyed at, toward which one should rightly shake the finger of blame: not being reimbursed for their air travel. Hotels jacking up their prices, taking advantage of the travelers stranded through no fault of their own. Employers who would say "too bad your travel is being screwed up for reasons outside your control: you're ."

But one thing's for sure: It's not a volcano's fault that it blows. It's not an appropriate candidate for praise or blame; it just does what it does. By extension, it's not the fault of the citizens of Iceland that their volcano blew. People are appropriate candidates for praise and blame, but it's not as though they deliberately caused the event to happen.


Here's the rest of Jon Carroll's article, by the way:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2010%2F04%2F22%2FDDGE1D1LLT.DTL#ixzz0lqHaD2T5

Cool things about growing up

That it was before the era of "play-dates" and hyper-vigilence, so my brothers and I could wander pretty much wherever in the neighborhood or ride our bikes out in the woods and pretend we were intrepid explorers to our hearts' content. Yet no matter how far away we were, it always seemed we were within range of mom's suppertime call of time to go home.

That we told stories and played lots of games as a family when we were growing up - Yahtzee, checkers, Parcheesi, Uno. They're not as flashy as video games, but I think there's something more social and interactive about them, so that I'm glad we had that as quality family time.

That my mom indulged my reluctance to swallow pills when I was a kid, and when she'd give me an aspirin, she'd crush it up in between two spoons, then add a little sugar and water to the powder so that I could swallow it as a kind of liquidey concoction. I think I tended toward hypochondria diva-ness when I was a kid, and for some reason I'll never forget one time when I was absolutely convinced I was in the throes of some sickness, and mom sat me at the kitchen table and proceeded to tell me a story; I don't remember what it was anymore, but that wasn't what was important. What was a take-to-heart lesson was that after 10 minutes or so of listening to her, I stopped coughing and blowing my nose and moaning about how sick I was, and little while after that she paused her story and asked, "so, how are you feeling?" It was a bona fide epiphany to suddenly realize I felt quite fine! I hadn't been coughing or blowing my nose or feeling terrible for a while! And then we talked about the difference between really suffering from something, and suffering from something a person can work herself up to believe just in her head, and how the power of distraction can be put to work to help with both.

That my dad was really big on being self-reliant, so he taught me a lot of stuff. He was a sub-contractor, and worked on prettying up people's houses, and he'd take me to work with him in the summers where I learned how to paint and wallpaper. I learned about all kinds of tools and the importance of keeping an orderly workspace and for goodness sake to put things back where you found them. I never got to the point of monkeying up on a ladder and hanging on with one hand and foot while painting the trim on a third story home exterior like he could. But it did instill in me, as I went about it my own cautious way, the motto I carry to today: that I can do whatever a grown man can, just maybe not as fast. I also worked on my old '67 Chevy Impala with him and learned how to change a tire, change the oil, take apart, fix and reassemble a carburetor, replace a U-joint, fix brakes, replace a head gasket, change spark plugs, that sugar + Dawn dishwashing detergent gets the grease off your hands real good, etc. etc. Even though some of those skills have gone the way of the dinosaur (like fixing a carburetor), I still maintain the general attitude that if a situation arises that requires the use of tools or a ladder or taking things apart and putting them back together again, I can do it. My goal one day is to get a 1960s-era Camaro to rebuild.

That, even though I didn't glom onto them quite like I did to the use of power-tools, I grew up in a home where my mom did all these great things that at the time I thought were a product of living on the cheap, but today are all about living wholesomely. We hung our laundry out to dry. We often kept a vegetable garden. We'd shop at the local farmers market, and mom would buy a whole bunch of whatever and take it home and can it or preserve it (I'll never forget the times of shredding all that cabbage and then having containers around of it fermenting its way down into sauerkraut!). She baked her own bread. We bought our milk from a local dairy farmer, and used the cream to churn our own butter (but we never figured out how to extract all the milk, so it was always a little, um, leaky). She sewed. She ironed - EVERYTHING, it seemed. And she tried - though I was usually a uncooperative student (I liked being a grease monkey better) - to teach me all about the same. But as I've matured and the appeal of her sorts of activities is greater, I'm able to embrace them more readily than I might have had I never been in contact with them in the first place.

Thanks, mom and dad!

On singing

I was once one of those people who would say, "oh, I can't sing." Even though in my heart of hearts I >think< more like Will Farrell's character in "Elf": it's just like talking, except longer and louder, and you move your voice up and down. But I was so convinced that I was vocally tone-deaf, that on the occasions that mom and dad could drag me to church, I'd silently mouth the words when the congregation would sing, rather than make a bunch of noise. I know, I could be rather ridiculously sensitive in my youth, but there you have it.

After I got my guitar for Christmas some years ago, I took a few guitar classes at Gryphon (an excellent stringed instrument store in Palo Alto). I liked the teacher's style so much, that even though I knew I needed to practice to get down what I had been taught before taking another guitar class, I drew up my courage and signed up for one of her "intro singing" classes. What the hell? I couldn't possibly be worse off after, and I just might get better, with a little instruction.

That was a rather awesome experience. It was reassuring to hear that for most of us mortals, with all the variables that go into hitting proper pitch, it's no surprise that one finds one's self off-note. I learned that practicing scales isn't only good for a warm-up, but it also helps instill a kind of muscle memory in the voicebox for where notes are relative to one another, so that it makes it easier to move vocally around. And, miraculously almost, it is possible that with a little practice and gentle instruction for the shy, to improve dramatically. I learned the right way to position one's hand around the ear (hint: it's not about using a finger to close the ear off) so that you can hear yourself better - especially useful when you're next to someone with whom you're harmonizing (or who is singing or playing off-key!).

I still remember in that intro class when we had a brief introduction to harmony singing - to "Michael Row the Boat" - simple, yes, but it was my first time to sing something in harmony and it was totally exhilarating. Who knew us bunch of noobs could make that kind of beautiful sound?

Emboldened by my newfound ability to sing fairly reliably on-key, I took 1 or 2 more singing classes to beef myself up before striking out into new territory: harmony singing. I've always thought that sounded like the most awesome thing to be able to do, and it's always been something of a mystery to me how, when there are so >many< other notes outside the one being done by the melody, a person can find the right one to complement it. Within the nuts and bolts of music theory I understand there's an explanation that lies within chord structure and intervals and majors and minors and the kind of mood you're trying to communicate. That's all way over my head.

But I think that, with practice and continued classes, I've come to have a better feel for where a harmonizing interval is. Before, when I would sing along with music in the car, I could of course hear that the singers were harmonizing, but where those other notes were located was all really just a hazy muddle. But with increased training, I can hear better what the harmony is doing and where it's moving relative to the melody, and that makes it easier to practice singing harmony along in the car.

Yet that's still akin to singing in the shower. Perhaps equally importantly, with practice I've gained the confidence when singing with other people, to strike out from the melody and hit a different note and stick it. Even if it doesn't end up being a good note, well that's something to work from anyway: "okay, that was a wreck! I need to be higher or lower; let's sing it again and I'll try something different." Sometimes it comes really easy; it's as though I can hear the harmony in my mind as though it is the melody, and singing it isn't any trouble at all. Other times, it's a total crap shoot. I don't know why.

But at bottom, singing is just SO much fun. I still get all kinds of excitedly flustered when I do it in public. It's an instrument we all have that we carry with us at all times. And for any of you who might like I once did think "Oh, I'm not able to do that," I'd say, give yourself more credit. Give yourself more practice. Give yourself an intro singing class like I did and get some pointers. And give yourself some of that joy, and make some music love with your friends.

Is it so wrong to laugh at my friend's misfortunes?

I've got a most fantastic friend (who I'll leave nameless - well, no, that gets too awkward. I'll call her "Sunny"); she is awesomely and unrelenting funny, smart, loving, gorgeous. And she tells me these stories about crazy, sometimes potentially harmful, sometimes actually harmful, situations she's gotten herself into. Like her first encounter with wax as a depilatory. With just a vague idea of how it was supposed to work, in a home environment, she puts the wax into a pan on the stove, heated it up to something like near the boiling point, and decided to work on her pubes. I'm betting you're imagining it even before I type another word. Of course the first reaction was something like, "AAAAGHHHH!!!" But that shock was soon replaced with the dawning, dreadful realization that that wax was gonna have to come back off, somehow.

And what did I do when she told me this story? I was weeping from laughing so hard.

I was remembering that conversation, sort of out of the blue, recently, and I thought: was I a bad person to have laughed at her pain? Honestly, what kind of person does that?

Admittedly, the story wasn't introduced by something like, "this was one of the worst moments of my life that I'm still having difficulty emotionally healing from," or anything like that. And although my memory isn't crystal clear on all the details, I can well imagine that she was laughing while she was describing her discomfort in all its insanity.

But still. The good ex-Catholic that I am, I felt a gool ol' wave of guilt wash over me, so I called her up to apologize for this thing that happened, like, 12 years ago. You know, just in case my laughing hurt her feelings but she was too nice to say anything about it.

So the conversation went something like this:
Me: Hey, Sunny, remember that time you told me the story about using wax for the first time?
Sunny: Oh my god, I boiled the fuckin' wax on the stove and (proceeds to recount the story)
Me: HAAAA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
Sunny: So what about it?
Me: Oh, well, you know, I was just thinking that it would be a poor person to laugh at a friend's pain, and, yanno, I just wanted to say I hope it didn't hurt your feelings that I laughed at you. Um. ... again.
Sunny: You are seriously weird.

A quick quasi-yogic pick-me-up

1. Rub your hands together really, really fast and hard. Get it to where you can feel the heat, and if you're inclined to think that way, the energy build-up.
2. With intention, place your hands on your body where you feel like you need help and support.

If nothing else, I like to use this in a moment of personal affirmation or focus. For instance, to put my hands to my heart center and think, "today, I will keep my heart open," or at my throat and think "today, I will speak with greater sensitivity," or even my ears and think "today, I will listen more attentively."

Maybe it sounds kind of weird, but it's interesting, and it sure doesn't hurt!

What's on your refrigerator?

Jon Carroll's column in this morning's Chronicle was about refrigerators, especially the things that end up on them.

There apparently are, by his report, refrigerators these days that magnets won't stick to - and like him, I'm a bit appalled.

The entirety of the kitchen, to my mind, is a special emotionally and physically supportive space; I think that helps explain why there's always some gravitation toward that room when there's a home party on. And the refrigerator, besides holding many of the goods for that support, also carries on its outside the capacity to symbolize the heartbeat of the household. A refrigerator that won't attract magnets - which themselves may symbolize emotive content in addition to affixing other tokens - strikes me as a device that would be sterile, merely a functional cold box. I guess that could work well in a sleek modern minimalist uncluttered kitchen. It wouldn't work well for >my< kitchen, though!

He continued to discuss some of what was on his refrigerator at home, and speculation about a unifying theme (I'll leave it to interested readers to find out for themselves, if they're curious, what that is: http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/ ). And he ended with the query: what is your refrigerator about? I thought that was a great question - is there a theme to the the relics that have kind of randomly ended up on my refrigerator? This give me a neat thing to puzzle about in my morning writing warm-up.

So here's a list:
An ancient clipped cartoon of one frame: a man standing outside a bar in whose window is the sign: "Jarkko's Finnish Pub: sadness hour 5:00-7:00". That still cracks me up.

Multiple reminders that my kitty is due for her annual visit to the vet.

A picture of some Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass, that when I finally get the money and time both together I'd like to recreate.

A little painting from Molly. She had told me one day that when she dreams or imagines she can visualize a really special, beautiful place. I thought that sounded so wonderful, and asked if she could make me a picture of what she sees, so she did. She gave it to me the day I left from my visit to Chicago in February, and she explained she had made it small so that it would be easy to take on travel. How considerate!

My "Are you Ready to Test for Your Yellow Belt?" form.

A picture of Göran that I took in the first year of our knowing each other; we were on a little mini-hike out in West Virginia.

An Mac-Apple sticker.

A magnetized bottle opener, there at the ready!

Magnetized spice holders, a gift from Tenley. I use them more for refrigerator art than anything; since the tops are transparent, I put interesting-looking spices in them and let them be.

Various magnets holding interesting memories. Two of my favorites: the Elvis magnets from a trip to Tennessee (that was a blast), and a wooden carved crucifix which used to belong to my mom that she really liked. She's passed on now, and it's something that reminds me of her.

So there you have it. And after thinking just a little, I came up pretty quickly of a unifying theme: these are a few of my favorite things. How about you: does your refrigerator have a story?

Things books did not adequately prepare me for:

I've been an avid reader for as long, I think, as I've been able to read. But I've also learned there's only so much that one can take from books and put to real life, also from a young age. I don't know why some of these (now humorous) past moments came to mind the other day, but I thought I'd share.

1. Using spit to test if an iron is hot. I think I read about this from "Little House on the Prairie" (or one of its relations). I was old enough to be using an iron, and thought I'd be smart and use the spit test. But I >also< thought that since the mouth contained so much spit already, why not just use my tongue. Tongue on hot iron=pain! Like Hume's example of a child learning from very minor experience not to put one's hand on something hot, I quickly came to the conclusion that I'd just trust the iron's having been on for a while was a sufficient indicator of its heat index.

2. Also from the "Little House on the Prairie" stories: one can make a snow angel by falling down in the snow and moving one's arms and legs about. Mind, in the "Little House" scenario, they were probably dealing with something like 3 feet of snow. I read these books when I was growing up along the Gulf coast in Texas, where >any< amount of snow meant SNOW! So we were visiting relations up in Pennsylvania one winter, and I remember the day we left when there was maybe 2 inches of accumulated snow on the ground, I was seized with the inspiration to make a snow angel. I got up on a tree stump, and did a big-assed belly flop on what turned out, to my injured surprise, to feel like totally solid ground. What the hell? That really sucked. (On the up side, one winter when I was living in Chicago and we had something like a 2-foot accumulation, I had a moment when I revisited my unsuccessful throwing-myself-into-the-snow desire. I put aside my age-old fear of hurting myself, took a big running start from the sidewalk outside my building, and hurling myself into a drift alongside the front door. That was positively glorious! So glorious, that after I dug myself out, I went back to the sidewalk and did it again. And again. And again. Any neighbors watching must have thought I lost my mind. But it was like falling into a gigantic feather bed. Sweet!)

3. Cookbooks. One weekend I was feeling all grown-up and decided to make scrambled eggs. Not knowing how to intuitively, I got down the cookbook, looked up the recipe, and went at it. Of course, the recipe was one to make scrambled eggs for like, 6 people. But I didn't know to look for that kind of information and divide down appropriately. I probably didn't even know how to divide at the age I was at. So I went to town, and was having a great time at it until mom came in and saw what I was doing, and had a minor fit. Mind, in my youth our family had to count pennies like crazy, so the eggs we had on-hand (all of which I probably used) were scheduled to last 2 weeks or something and there I was blowing it all away on one breakfast for me. Lesson in reading the cookbook carefully!

Do you have any similar stories you'd like to share?

Finnish food: it's well known...in Finland!

And they have fish - in bread! Here's links to a couple of short cartoons that even if you don't know the first thing about Finland, I think you'd find pretty funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgE9G5QGs54&feature=related

And their water, it's pure, wholesome and fresh. Just like their favorite cook: mother nature. And it doesn't contain elephant poop!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhhqYx6mYrg

Ahh, Finnish food. Unlike most of you I'm friended with who might read this post (excepting the ones in Finland, of course), you probably haven't had the joy. But here it is in a nutshell: if you like meat and potatoes, or fish and potatoes, then Finland is your kind of place. Oh, and the fresh berries in the summer are to die for. And cucumbers. And cheese. And bread. And crackers; lordie, there are shelves upon shelves of different kinds of crackers there! It IS good, but it is also pretty basic, and low on the levels of spice and imagination - hence prompting me to come close to drawing swords when a Finn asserted to me lately that Finnish food was better than the food in California. I'm not the fastest person to pull my California snob-card, but I'll bet money that odds are that if you walk into a random restaurant here in the bay area, you'll find something unique and tastey, which is something I can't say for my wanderings in Finland.

Which is fine! It's just a matter of putting one's expectations in the right place. I know I'm an odd bird, even here on this side of the pond, for not being keen on crackers, or bread, or potatoes, or even cheese much. So when I go to Finland I just have to do a kind of psycho-gastronomical readjustment, and it's all good. I just happen to have a palate that likes spice, and the unexpected, but it's not as though I get bent out of shape when I can't have it that way. One just takes it as it comes, and keeps a good sense of humor about it when it's not, maybe, what one would prefer.

Well, I can't say unimaginative and predictable entirely sums up Finnish cuisine. The most interesting experience I've had in the country of ten thousand lakes was at this truly lovely little restaurant along the shores of one of those lakes. Göran and I were eating with a couple - Lisbeth and Sverker. Lisbeth is the head of one of the companies in Finland that makes yachts, and she had recently had a company party at that same restaurant and the restaurant crew remembered her. I was looking at the menu and saw that under "appetizers" they had herring parfait. That bears repeating: herring parfait. What kind of concoction was that? So of course I had to order it. The folks there at the restaurant were happy to have Lisbeth back and I guess grateful for her having her big party there, that they brought us, on the house, double servings of everything, including the parfait.

Wherever your imagination might go for what that was like, just let it wander there freely. I'll just say this: Göran's a Finn, and when I mentioned that famous herring parfait to him this morning (after watching the food cartoon) and he said the cat food he could still smell on his fingers smelled just like it, so he was probably feeding the kitty something like it - any implied judgment call there did not come from me! But bless him, I recall that he ate both servings of the parfait that day at the restaurant. It would have been impolite to push the staff's good will off to the side.