This Blog will be about a lot of things, but as evidenced by my pithy reference to Jeff Smith and the Frugal Gourmet, it will often be about food: What have I eaten? Where did I eat it? Was it any good? How did I make it? However, that's not all. I'm interested in writing about the things that, in my mind, make a life worth living, whatever that may be. Frugality, in this regard (and for those of you who were not fortunate enough to see the show) is a kind of lifestyle. It isn't about being cheap, but it is about simplicity. Frugality to me implies good, fresh, simple food, and good friends to eat it with. That can mean everything from cooking at home, to sitting with friends at your favorite local pub.
This can also mean making space in your life to do what you love. For my part, I go to Graduate School, and I love it. I forget all the time that I love it as well, so I'm hoping that this Blog will help me to remind myself (and, perhaps, some of you) how lucky it is to be able to pursue what one wants and loves in a culture that denies that dream to too many people. Inevitably, the Blog will also be about theatre because that's what I study, and that's what I spend my life talking about.
More than anything else, I'd like for this Blog to inspire people to open themselves to sensations. We live in a sense-deprived world, in a culture that typically denigrates fine or beautiful things or experiences. We live in front of computers, separated from each other by cubicles; our own sensory deprivation chambers. We eat poor-tasting food, processed to withstand nuclear holocaust. We live isolated from the world, each other, and the beautiful things the world has to offer us in the tiny time we are allowed the run of it. We have even reached a place where a love of pleasurable experiences make you a snob, and while I don't doubt that there are snobs (and I might, occasionally, be one of them), I believe that this is a belief spread by the few to keep the multitude away from good things, to keep them wanting, to keep them unhappy.
This is Nonsense.
I'm not interested in laying blame at the door of any particular school of thought for this circumstance, but I am interested in doing away with it. Because this is an insane and unnecessary circumstance. I'd like to bring back a love of sensory experiences for their own sake, for (horror of horrors!) their own enjoyment. All people should be able to make good food in sustainable communities, to be supported by a life of the mind and the spirit, and to change what keeps them from their full potential.
I suppose that this all reads like a kind of manifesto. I suppose, in some regard, it is.
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