it's lsat season again folks, i'm rounding third...

i love finishing things. earlier in my life i hardly ever got to the point that i finished anything, a book, a race, even a bag of cheetos. . . but i think i believe in time as a commodity more than i did before and so the "process", the "in media res", is more aesthetic and meaningful.

i've been cooking more for the last few months. i started as more of an attempt to be fewer degrees away from the human experience. but now that i've been going for a little while, this idea of finishing and of the legitimacy of time has become overwhelmingly satiating. i crumble up empty packages of walnuts with more gusto, swirl water around an empty can of coconut milk with more moxie, dust my hands off with great fortitude after using the last quarter cup of amaranth flour. there's just something so cathartic about it. and i do love catharsis, in more than one way. the process of cooking is not hard to reconcile; while knee-deep in julienned carrots, i've never found myself wanting to quit. but paying a more intimate deference to time has changed the taste of food.

i'm certainly not a seasoned cook, i would call myself a level 2 novice. but i've always been far too impatient to let the lamb shank broil for 2 hours. i've been too short on attention to fold egg whites for 3 minutes. or let beans soak overnight. so what i generally ended up with was something that resembled the intended dish, but not quite.

i think i got tired of "not quite" cooking a little after i got tired of "not quite" business and "not quite" relationships and "note quite" life. and i believe in time more than blessing or serendipity or hard work. i believe in time because it's not based on knowledge or technology or money. it's the same seconds, minutes and hours that everyone has to deal with. and things get tangled and untangled, born and dead, broken and redeemed, started and finished, on the clock of the universe and nothing else. it is the great legitimizer, the divine healer, the one big way that i see an enduring, gracious and unchanging God on earth.

today i made roasted kale, it tastes like potato chips. i shared them with bradley. i told him they were lays, he believed me.