Bodily Container
On the confusion of caring, containing, cooking.
Have you eaten lunch today?
It’s two o’clock. I’m hungry but if I can just get this one last thing, I’ll go and eat.
Before coming to college, I never skipped a meal. Everyday, I would scarf down peanut butter toast before morning practice, then another slice afterwards on the way to school. Lunch would usually be leftovers from the night before, steamed and stuffed into a thermos. After school, a fistful of apple slices and cheddar cheeze-its before practice again. And when I came home, I knew I would hear the rice cooker chiming and the wok crackling. Just in time for dinner.
Food was a ritual, one that I performed no differently than showering, doing homework, or folding laundry. I didn’t think about it. I never needed to worry where my next meal would come from, or if I would have time to eat dinner. The mind in the body I carried, was contained and content.
When was the last time you ate?
I think I had an apple. Maybe yesterday.
Last semester, I started school on the meal plan with the smallest number of meals per week. My parents wouldn’t let me completely forgo the campus dining halls because they were convinced that I wouldn’t be able to cook consistently for myself. And they were right. Even before the semester started, I would come home from teaching assistant training, exhausted. It was just so easy to not cook. If you press your phone in the right places, you can sink yourself into a falafel pocket from East Side in less than ten minutes. Or a warm mess of bagel, eggs, and cream cheese from BGO. Or anything else readily available on Thayer Street.
But sometime after my eleventh pocket (got to get that free hummus!) and before I figured out the bus route to my local grocer, I became sick of eating out. Though falafel pockets did sustain me, they were always consumed in a rush. I would text friends if they wanted to “quick pockets?!” with me, and we would catch up and eat a pocket, all in the break I had between section and TA hours on Thursdays, or maybe in the half hour they had after their shift before they really really needed to start on that essay.
— -
Sometimes, when I’m in the Sunlab, with a soundtrack pulsing through my headphones and my feet tucked underneath me, I feel infinite. My mind is everywhere — toggling code manual pages, recompiling, “oh wait this code could be so much shorter.” The experience of coding is incredibly cerebral. Unlike calculus, or say Spanish, where you need to be equipped with the integral-solving techniques or vocabulary before you begin solving problems, in computer science, you only ever need your mind. There’s nothing you can’t learn on your own (or with the help of Stack Overflow). It always feels like if you simply think about a problem or function or loop for enough time, you can find the solution. It’s hard to stop when there’s always the possibility of your entire project falling into place if you just try one last thing. Let’s hit that recompile button. Okay, one more time.
That’s why it seems like time stands still in the Sunlab. Swaths of hours and minutes can pass, and I may have written three lines of code or hundreds. But no matter what happens, sooner or later, I will get hungry.
Did you eat today?
Wait, actually, have you eaten today?
When I was working, it felt frustrating to attend to my body. When my life was no longer bound by the steady rhythm of breakfast, practice, school, dinner, repeat, I became aware of how much attention my bodily container required. It needed eight hours of sleep, a hearty breakfast before classes. A few hours later, it needed lunch apparently. Then, before I knew it, the body now also demanded dinner. Don’t forget to sometimes give it vegetables. Oh, also copious amounts of water. Historically, the body is finite. It has limits, and when those limits are breached, pain sets in. The mind, however, feels infinite. Sometimes, if I took away the clock on my desktop workspace, or if I gave this problem one more try, I could forget that I was hungry. The mind is powerful enough to override cravings, powerful enough to convince the body that it could keep going, powerful enough to break the body’s rules.
I was frustrated by how needy my bodily container was, but also couldn’t just ignore it. Detest it as I might, it was clear that the body and mind were a system. During a round of “quick pockets” with my friend Catie, as I apologized for being a bad friend, one I seemed to give over and over, increasingly so during the semester, she raised a hand, motioning for me to stop. “It’s okay,” she said. “But, you do know that your apartment can only get so big right?” At first, I was a little hurt that she thought I was in computer science for the money. It was true that I did want a profession so I could support me and my family under one roof. But that’s not why I like programming. Then, I realized what she meant. There’s only so much that work can do for you. It’s a threshold that once reached, you realize is empty. Grades can only be only so good. Apartments can be only so big. But all for what? Why do I sacrifice so much for these things? When I took a step back and looked at myself, I knew Catie was right. My jeans no longer fit me and I couldn’t remember the last time I hung out with friends outside of “quick pockets.” Not only was I losing an interminable amount of bodily mass, but also sight of what mattered. I needed to ground myself, to find joy once again in the physical realm.
As I discovered over the course of the next few months, a healthy bodily container also meant a mind that solved problems faster, better, more happily than one running on protein bars and Kung Fu Tea. As much as I wanted my mind to never stop, I realized that we’re not just brains in jars. The mind and body are connected, and I needed to (re)build that connection.
Cooking became my solution. It wasn’t the obvious answer, or one that my mind’s productivity desires appreciated immediately (so much time crying while chopping onions when I could be finishing that problem set!). I approached the problem like a new computer science student: I Googled the shit out of it. I knew my parameters: I was a beginning cook with limited time and materials. I wanted to fill in the rest of the student-cooking algorithm, one that would let me cook dinner and make it to TA hours. There had to be a time-and-space optimal solution that produced delicious results.
At first, everything seemed hard. Grocery shopping always took longer than I expected. I didn’t know where to begin, and nothing came to mind when I stared at the cast iron skillet I had bought with my mom at Bed, Bath, & Beyond. So I sent pictures of eggplants to my mom (so many kinds, which one actually goes into stir-fry?) and Facetimed my dad as I pan-fried salmon (how many minutes before it’s done?). Often, I was tempted to skip dinner and go to bed hungry because I was ‘just so close.’ Every Sunday night, when I was too tired from holding hours and too tired to argue, my friend Evan would swipe us into Josiah’s. Sometimes, I would forget to salt my green beans, and instead ate them with a generous sprinkling of Everything Bagel Seasoning to make up for the taste. I accidentally set off the fire alarm in Perkins when I forgot to open the window before searing a filet.
When my sister and I were first assigned chores as kids, we couldn’t help but complain about how unnecessary it was. But why do we have to fold our clothes? Aren’t piles more efficient? It’s the same since we’re going to wear them anyways, right? But my mother was relentless. Yes, you have to make your bed and do laundry and do the dishes. She told us that if we did these things now, over and over, when we were adults, they would no longer feel like chores. They would not feel hard. She was right — I don’t blink twice now when given a pile of dirty dishes. But I did scratch my head as I looked at my Google calendar and wondered where I’d find a place for homework, let alone for planning and cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But, slowly, each week as I made the trek to Eastside Market, bookmarked recipes for dinner, made tomato and eggs on rice over and over, I finally understand what she meant.
Cooking doesn’t take less time as you learn how to do it. Grocery shopping is still annoying. But I never think about either task as mutable variables anymore. They are constants in an equation to keep my bodily container happy and healthy. Cooking has become a ritual, one with time, space, and intention. After a day of banging my head against a persistent bug, sometimes the last thing I want to do is to stop thinking about it. But, now, I know to hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and walk out of the CIT. I need to cook dinner. There are onions to be caramelized and brussels sprouts to be trimmed. From chopping to simmering, cooking relies on the ritual of unchallenging but repeated actions. Sometimes, I watch lecture capture as I stir something at the stove. Sometimes, I’ll think about that bug. Sometimes, I just stir. No matter what I do, I know that in twenty minutes, dinner will be served.
Have you eaten?
No, I haven’t. But I’m going to cook. Care to join?
