Maintenance work
I have a love-hate relationship with cooking at the moment. I really like doing it, but like everyone in the 21st century I don’t have much time for it. This tension is exacerbated by the Mexican meal schedule, in which lunch is the big meal of the day. It’s a schedule that really suits me for the most part: A hearty breakfast (for us around 8 a.m.), then a big lunch at 2 p.m., then a light dinner around 9 p.m. Physically, I’m totally adjusted away from big gringo dinners and find it very difficult to eat them every day when I’m in the U.S. (How can anyone go to sleep while they’re still digesting that much food? Ugh!) But logistically, the Mexican meal schedule does not play well with, you know, having a job.
When I’m feeling at peace with it, I call the Mexican meal schedule anti-capitalist. When I’m feeling frustrated, I call it patriarchal. Either way, it depends on someone in the household spending the best hours of their day cooking—especially if you’re making classic Mexican food, which is incredibly detail-oriented and labor intensive. If I worked in an office, I guess I would have been forced to accept some trade-offs already: go out every day, or always, always cook in advance. (Many people of my economic class and above in Mexico also solve this problem with a full-time or close to it housekeeper. I do have a housekeeper—praised be, thank you Gaby!—but she comes once a week and cooking is not in her schedule or job description.) My problem is that my schedule is flexible enough that I’m constantly tricked into thinking I can cook a nice lunch and also work. I have chicken boiling for tinga right now!
But here’s how it’s going to go: the chicken will take longer than I think, and/or I’ll get wrapped up in writing. I won’t even start shredding it til 2 p.m., so we won’t actually eat til 3, at which point we’ll be starving and cranky. And we can’t just have tinga because what am I, a college student? So I have some brocoli ready to roast, but despite having done it dozens of times AT LEAST I still have no idea how long it will take in our wonky oven. (I couldn’t tell you how long it takes to preheat the thing either!) Eventually we will eat a healthy and tasy meal I made. Instead of feeling proud and comforted, however, I will feel harried and stressed and like I should have spent that time on activities that make money or least might make money eventually. On top of it all, I’m not totally convinced eating at home is actually cheaper than going to our favorite fondita, which is wholesome and delicious and serves you three courses for 65 pesos.
I started reading How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, on the recommendation of some friends and readers of this newsletter (hi Jane!) as well as the entire educated-millennial internet. I’m only a little way in, but I really like her model of “maintenance work.” This is work (and sometimes, in the case of the book, art) that doesn’t really create or change anything. It just keeps what already exists going. It’s the kind of stuff you’ll always have to do again, to my endless, ridiculous frustration: cook lunch, wash the dishes, take out the trash, walk the dog. It’s extremely easy under capitalism to undervalue this work or render it invisible—hello feminized labor! It’s also the most important work anyone can do, in terms of keeping yourself and your fellow humans alive and comfortable and helping a society hum along relatively smoothly.
Doing maintenance work is not “doing nothing” the way most of us would define it. It can be really hard work that takes up a lot of time. It’s only “doing nothing” in a culture that can’t recognize or value anything but constant progress. Thinking of cooking as maintenance work won’t solve all my problems with finding time for it. It does give me a model for valuing it, however, instead of focusing only on everything I didn’t do so I could spend time making a meal. I might have more to say about this very thought-provoking book later, but right now I gotta run. It’s after 2 and I have a tinga to finish.
My writing
I wrote an update about the sexual harassment scandal that continues to roil the Society for American Archaeology for Science. This is the third installment of the saga; here are the first and second.
Holiday cheer
If you would like to donate to a good cause before the year is over, may I recommend giving to The Open Notebook, a wonderful resource for science journalists. I have learned so much from their articles, and they are one of the leaders in helping diversify a profession that has been rather, uh, homogenous. Their Diverse Voice series has published perspectives I haven’t seen anywhere else about any type of journalism, and this year they launched a series of Spanish translations of some of their best resources, an effort that is close to my heart. Donations made through December 31 will be doubled, up to $5,000.