How To Be... a master Chef (and IWSG)

So... you want to learn to cook, do you?

I see you there saying yes.

It's your lifelong dream, but how do you go about it?

Well... let's just talk about that.

First, you need to learn how to boil water. Yeah, you wouldn't think that would be such a big deal, but, evidently, it is. I mean, my brother can't boil water to the extent that my mother banned him from trying to cook anything that didn't involve the microwave oven. I suppose he just burned up too many of her pots. I'm not talking about when he was a kid, either. This was when he was a full grown adult. Seriously, if he had gone to college, he would have starved from lack of being able to make ramen noodle soup.

Boiling water, though, is a basic skill of cooking. After that, boiling eggs. I think I was about nine or so when I started doing the boiled egg thing. I got a recipe for making deviled eggs off of some TV show (I sort of think it was The Electric Company, but I don't remember for sure), and I was really into doing that for a while. I'd make them for my brother (who was about three at the time) and me after school or on Saturdays or, basically, whenever I wanted to, and I was competent enough that my mom let me do it whenever I wanted without any supervision.

Everything I've learned since then, I've learned just from doing it, and, I have to say, I'm a good cooker. That's how I like to say it, "I'm the cooker in the family." The thing is, though, you can get a recipe for anything online. And I mean anything. You want the top secret recipe to make fried chicken just like KFC? It's online. You want the special chocolate sauce recipe from Outback? It's online. You want to make your great grandmother's squirrel dumplings (and squirrel is big in England and France, right now), I'm sure you can find it online. Or, you know, something that's so close you can't tell the difference.

The thing is, if you really want to be a chef, the best way to go about it is to practice cooking. A lot. Constantly try out new recipes and expand what you can do and make. Sure, you can go to school for it; you can even get a degree in it, but, when it comes down to it, when it actually comes time to get a job in a restaurant, that degree is not as helpful as it may seem, because most restaurants still use an apprenticeship system for their chefs, so, no matter how good you are or what kind of degree you have, you're going to get hired at the bottom and have to work your way up. From that standpoint, the guy that's been a cook at Applebee's for five years is going to have just the same kind of chance as someone fresh out of culinary school. The main thing is to do it.

IWSG:
Living Between the Spikes

Being Wednesday, it's also IWSG day.

Sometimes, it can be hard to live between the spikes. The problem, if there is a problem, is that there are spikes. With, well, everything. Personally, I'd prefer a nice smooth incline. Just a gradual trip up the slope without any dips, but that's not how it works. Knowing this doesn't help. I mean, I know that the spikes don't matter as long as there is an overall increase, BUT...

Every time there's one of those dips, I feel a bit of panic. I can't help it. The beginning of each month is... uncomfortable, no matter what I say to myself about it.

But I'm not really talking about the blog here, even if that is a graph of my blog traffic. No, what I'm talking about is "book traffic." As I mentioned here, the release of "The Tree of Light" was my best release so far.

This week's release of "The Angel" was not nearly as inspiring.

(Even though the cover is SO cool! Say a big thank you to Rusty Webb and tell him how cool his work is!)
So another dip... and, even though everything is tending upward, the dips are... well, they're dips. When what you really want is for everything to just keep going up and up and up, the dips are kind of a bummer. But, if the stock market is any example (and I'm not saying it is), the dips are good. You don't want anything to just keep going up and up and up until it breaks. The dips, I'm sure, are healthy, but, man, it sure is difficult to climb back up the other side!

When Everyone's Special...

...no one  is.

The Incredibles is one of my favorite movies, not just one of my favorite Pixar movies. Not that I couldn't say that about a lot of Pixar movies. But that's beside the point.

This is another post I started quite a while ago, but I think it flows pretty well out of my last post. Really, I'll give my soap box back at some point.

There are two themes in The Incredibles that attract me to it. The first of those is being who you are. Not hiding yourself away and pretending to be other than you are, but that's not what this post is about. This post is about the second theme, the one that has to do with society exalting mediocrity so that everyone can be "special."

It's somewhat of a paradox, too, because we are a society that exalts the "popular" while simultaneously trying to devalue everyone else so that we're all the same. The conflict arises because it boils down to "winners" (like Charlie Sheen >heh<) and "losers." If you're the hot commodity, you're a winner. Everyone else is a loser.

But we live in a society (mostly confined to North American at the moment but spreading) that doesn't believe in having "losers." A society that says everyone can be a winner... no, everyone is a winner. A society that tries to protect the feelings of, well, everyone (and saying "it's all subjective" is the ultimate defense against qualitative judgments of any kind). A society that doesn't believe in pointing out that anything is bad or wrong. A society that says "everything is good all the time." [See my post about the book Bright-sided for more on this.]

Let's use a sports analogy, shall we?

Because my daughter was playing softball (you can read that story here), my wife and I have been doing lots if digging and searching around for information about teams and leagues and all of that sort of thing. Meaning, my wife has been doing lots of research and passing the interesting bits on to me. One of the articles I read that really stood out to me is the rise of Little Leagues that do not have winners. Well, that's not true; they don't have losers. Everyone gets to be a winner. There are no outs. There are no scores. Everyone gets to hit the ball and run the bases. Why? Because we, as parents, need to protect our children from being "losers." And having hurt feelings.

But it doesn't fool the kids. And it doesn't help the kids. The kids want there to be winners, and they're willing to accept the prospect of losing, because they want the chance to win. They want the chance to win.

But none of us want our kids to be "losers," so we take that prospect away from them. We want to make them all winners, but the problem is that you can't have winners if you don't also have losers.

In many ways, I feel like this whole self-publishing game is becoming like these little leagues. We're not allowed to say anything negative, because we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. No one is "allowed" to be a loser, and, if there are no losers, everyone gets to be a "winner." Even if that's not true. And we all know it's not true, but, if no one says anything bad, we can keep pretending.

There's this book I want to read, The Fourth Turning, that's all about this stuff from a generational perspective. We own the book, but it's out on loan (because I didn't get to it fast enough after my wife read it). Of course, loaned books can't usually be said to be owned books very often. That's my perspective anyway. Loaning it out is equivalent to giving it away.

At any rate, my generation, in the book, is known as the "unprotected" generation and looking at how I grew up, I tend to agree. We were the generation of latchkey kids (and I started being one by age 7). The current generation, the millennials, the generation my generation is raising, is known as the "protected" generation, and it is a direct response to the self-involvement of our own parents by trying to be over involved in our own kids' lives. It should be the "over protected" generation. [I've been reading a lot about how our aversion to allow our kids to experience risk is not so good for their internal development. Sure, they don't get broken bones, but they never learn how to take risks or, sometimes, even think for themselves.] And there was this other article about the first of the millennials entering the job market and how they need constant supervision and feedback (because they've never really learned how to be independent).

Anyway... I'm straying a bit, and it's getting late, so I need to wrap this up.

The point is this:
There are people in the world like Dash and Mr. Incredible. Not people with super powers, but people that standout above all the rest. We really don't get anywhere by trying to force everyone into a mold of sameness. The problem we have is that we don't want to acknowledge that there are some people that really need to either find something else to do or work harder at whatever it is before they can be good enough.

Like my brother playing basketball in high school. He was a short, white boy. Shorter than me, and I'm only 5'8". But my brother could play and play well, and it's what he wanted most to do. He had to work hard at it. And he did. Hours every day. And I bet you're expecting me to tell you some miracle story about his hard work and perseverance, but I'm not going to. He did make his high school team. He was the only white boy on the team one year. Mostly, he just warmed the bench, though. Why? Because, as good as he was, he wasn't better than the other boys on his team. Mostly because he just wasn't tall enough. And that's a suck thing to be that good but still not to be able to compete. Eventually, he had to come to the conclusion that he wasn't going to be able to do that thing, basketball, and he went to other things.

But he did try. He gave it his all to see if he could make it, but he just couldn't pull it off. But he still plays for fun, so it's not like it was taken away from him.

To bring this back to writing, I'm going to switch movies. There's a quote at the end of Ratatouille that I love, but I'm only going to paraphrase it for you, "Not everyone can be a great writer, but a great writer can come from anyone." I do think everyone should have the opportunity to take their shot at being a great writer. Or a great anything. However, I don't think everyone can do it. I don't think most people can do it. Which is not to say that you shouldn't try. But, if you're going to try, work hard at it. And take the criticism (both bad and good (because to critique something is not just pointing out the bad)) people give you while you are busy working hard, and use it to get better.

Some people won't be tall enough. Some won't be fast enough. Some will just never get the break they need. Some will never get good enough because we don't tell them they need to work on their grammar so as to avoid hurting someone's feelings. And that's really the worst thing that can happen. To not become a winner because no one ever bothered to tell you that you were losing.

Everyone can't be special, because when everyone's special, no one is.