i drank an entire bottle of champagne by myself

update.md

@@ -1,13 +1,15 @@
 ## prose
-I didn't learn how to chop up a whole chicken, despite my mother telling me "and then, Saj, you cut here," her voice followed by the sound of bone cracking. Instead I'm contemplating the skin and structure of the carcass. The pink hues, the rippled texture, the similiarity in makeup to myself. Ribs. Neck. Breasts. Muscle. I help make our dinner by sautéing the ginger, onions, and tomatoes; turning down the heat, adding in the bloody chicken meat; watching the sizzling turn to steam, watching the pink skin turn speckled golden brown; drowning the ingredients in tap water; turning the exhaust fan to its highest setting.
+Two thousand and seventeen years since some event happened and humanity decided to track all following events based on how long after this event they occured. Humans are weird. Humans are fucking weird. I think that's the ultimate theme of 2017. My upstairs neighbors (I live in a basement) are blasting a pretty okay mix of music. My cat keeps tilting his head to look up and twitching his ears trying to enjoy the music. My husband is laying on the floor in our blue sleeping bag, getting over throwing up all night. I am typing on my laptop that I haven't touched for a week, sipping brut rosé from a red champagne flute my BFF gifted me for Christmas. I'm messaging another BFF on Facebook Messenger and also sending her videos via SnapChat. I'm just stating things-the current state of my world-but for some reason this feels profound.
 
-I used to dislike cooking. I used to think it was a waste of time: nearly an hour cutting up food, cooking it in a pot, letting it cool before ever getting to consume anything, then consuming it in less than half the amount of time it took to create it. Not worth it. Not worth spending the energy stored in my brown flesh, pink tinged palms, bored muscles. But there was something else driving my dislike: I didn't know what I was doing. 
+Maybe because I moved into this apartment in September, made a mess of it in the past few months, and finally had the time and energy this past week to do a thorough orgranization and cleaning. I bought another shelf from Ikea; I sorted my exposed pantry so it's a little bit more pleasant to look at. I started a craft: a space divider of CDs cut up into rain drops. I FINALLY sorted through mail sitting on my table since September. This space, loud upstairs neighbors included, is my own. Having a space that echoes you, that reflects you back if you wake up a little lost, a little disoriented is so. damn. nice. This reflection, this flavor of expression, is something I've compromised on before. This is something I won't compromise on again.
 
-I asked my mom if she learned how to do this (take a bird apart with a knife) from Lola. She said no. Eventually, she remembered how she learned: a cooking show starring a Chinese man. She watched it when she first moved to the states.
+Maybe it's because I've learned so many lessons around these things: personal space, love, relationships, friendship. At the intersection of all those things: living with someone is hard. I guess doing anything with another human-a super unpredicatable, unknowable, unfathomable factor-has its challenges. In relationships (those ones laced with the loaded l-word), we... I compromise myself. I want to do x,y,z with our shared living space, but my husband's opinion differs from mine, so I seek an in between, or worse, completely discard my idea, my desire. He does it, too. He wants to go out or do something, and my opinion is now the one that inhibits us from doing whatever he thought of. We're good at holding each other back like that. There is a lot unspoken here. Because I'm not yet drunk enough to write and publish the challenges and troubles my husband and I have dealt with this year. I wish I could say we came out on top. That we held hands through it all, respectful, loving, kind-hearted, understanding spirits with skeletons. I wish I could say that all our troubles and challenges are behind us. But they aren't: they are within us. And they'll be there until we embrace them, welcome them, accept them, and then finally maybe when we throw them a loving, thoughtful, surprise anniversary party, they'll say goodbye to our hearts.
 
-I didn't learn how to chop up a whole chicken, despite my mother telling me. I did learn why people cook together. It's the process of creating, just like creating art or music or whatever, but condensed into a short time and intensified by the proximity to ingredients that tease the senses. The sight of a fleshy body being separated by shiny, sharp silver. The sound of body breaking. The feeling of heat from the stove. The billowing steam. The visual transformation from full, red tomato flesh to orange transluscentness.
+Maybe because of the lesson I learned about taking care of your relationships. That they need to be taken care of in the first place. That it takes effort and energy to keep friends and family involved in your life, and that it is very much worth it. About how gratitude, and humor, and humility are central to keeping your relationships happy and healthy. That your relationships are their own entities. That your relationships need boundaries. That your relationship with yourself deserves the same: gratittude, humor, humility, respect, time, boundaries.
 
-Cooking is sometimes solely for the nourishment of our desperate-for-energy-body-parts. Other times, cooking is for providing energy and refreshment to our tired souls.
+Maybe because I've been reflecting on and off for the past week about my relationship with my laptop and technology. For the past few years, I've grown more and more entangled with my laptop. It's how I do my work. It's how I keep in touch with friends across the country. It's how I entertain myself, distract myself, educate myself. It was surprisingly easy to not use it for a week. I still used my phone (but didn't spend my time on there that much). Mostly it was easy because there was plenty of things I wanted to do around my apartment, a small pile of books I wanted to spend time with, food to cook, family and friends to talk with on the phone, and the occasional binge of Rick and Morty faciliated by my husband. I kept coming back to the following thought. Your computer is a tool; put it away when your work is done. I think its something I want to follow for the rest of my life. There's a lot a computer allows us to do as humans, but ultimately it's a tool that serves a purpose. If your current focus doesn't align with that purpose, or if your overall life focus doesn't align with that purpose, then don't use the tool.
+
+Or maybe it's the champagne.
 
 ## miscellaneous
 A cardboard box filled with gifts wrapped in red and gold, giant bows and ribbons raining glitter onto the floor. Swooning over the sounds of an alto saxaphone. A twenty dollar glass of Japanese whiskey. Spinning inside a tunnel of rainbow Christmas lights. A fizzy pink drink accidentally alcohol free. A shitty poem written in code. A growing collection of cropped sweaters. The sun, bright but cool, on your face as you cross the river each morning for a week.