culture

Cooking Freak

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It’s no secret I love cooking. I’m charting my own voyages into making Japanese Curry here. I cook for friends and co-workers. I enjoy it.

Now not everyone has to like cooking, though I suggest you give it a shot to see if you can at least make it an enjoyable task. But I’m starting to feel like someone who likes cooking and enjoys cooking is extremely rare. It’s a little odd, truth be told, and a little unsettling.

For instance, right now I’m trying to date. My cooking seems to inevitably come up when people contact me, making me think it must be a rare trait especially in men. In Silicon Valley. In their 40’s.

OK, it probably is, but still.

It’s also remarkable among people I meet. I know people are busy, but between health concerns, the price of food, the fun of cooking and the fact you can make some kickass meals in a short time, I wonder why more people don’t cook. Hell, I lost 23 pounds almost entirely due to diet changes, you’d think people would want a piece of that. Also my curried split pea soup entirely rules.*

It’s to the point where I feel a little WEIRD cooking like I do. And this is when there’s all sorts of food-related reality show like ‘Hell Cupcakes” or “Diner Mud Wrestling” or whatever. I don’t know, most reality TV without Tim Gunn gives me hives.**

I guess what bugs me is that it shouldn’t seem odd. Cooking is one of those skills that’s good for us, that’s part of our history, that’s part of good health, and that’s fun when taught right (or at least fun when you’re done). I’d like to see it more appreciated and applied. Maybe there’s some kind of “Cooking is Cool” thing we could do for kids, or get Hipsters on board “I cook because it’s not mainstream.”***

Also cooking is how we understand our bodies, our environment, and how we live. To cook and understand is to understand what keeps us going in the first place. To not understand that is risky.

Ironically, I don’t think everyone needs to cook all the time. I think that it would probably be more resource efficient to create more restaurant, store, and delivery services doing same-day-prepared healthy meals. But cooking at least gives you some knowledge of what to look for.

It just feels weird to like it, do it, and have it be regarded as noteworthy.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

* Really, it does.
** Tim Gunn just makes me think “Damn I wish I looked that good.”
*** OK maybe not.

Transhumanism: Building a Better Reincarnation

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In this blog I’ve expressed skepticism about transhumanism despite being something of a transhumanist myself. I’ve been skeptical about ideas of immortality, about the risks, and that some transhumanism is really just a hope for a kind of techno-secular heaven.

My concern roughly is that transhumanism too often becomes a race to preserve a limited sense of identity, when that limited sense of identity may actually be what we need to transcend. I take this inspiration both from observation, and my studies of oft-referred-to, little-understood thinking by Buddhists and Taoists.

Or to be blunt, a lot of deep thought about human identity is that the human identity, that is identifying with a transitory mind and ego, is the core of most of our problems, and maybe we ought to seek to deal with that first. Uploading our brains to computers and such can kind of wait because this “us” we want to preserve is part of the problem.

The ultimate question of transhumanism is one of identity – and how we deal with that.

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A Lack Of Purpose Is The Point

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Not everything you do has to have A Purpose.

You know about A Purpose. The one with capital letters. The one that’s so important. The one that we think we’re supposed to have since everyone else asks about it.

Whats the Purpose to your cosplay?

What’s the Purpose for playing video games?

What’s the Purpose for your Sherlock/MLP crossover fanfic*?

We’re expected to have A Purpose for everything it seems. People will ask about it and some of them will look down their noses if we don’t have A Purpose.

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