Like most people with a healthy sense of curiosity, fascination with social conventions, and/or micro bangs, I’ve tried on a myriad of identities over the course of my life. Some I liked a lot and still routinely wear; others were borne from insecurity and abandoned as I developed the ability to express myself more naturally. Either way, vestiges of all the selves I have worn before trail behind me, like a bridal train composed of memories that I recognize as mine, but feel strangely disconnected from. For example, was I actually that self-righteous as a teenager? Did I really use to get my nails done every single month? What frame of mind was I in when I considered taking an insurance salesperson job based out of Houston, Texas? When did I become someone who runs for fun?
I am sometimes jarred by the circumstances of my life. For example, I am currently sitting opposite a Cartier Christmas tree in Taipei 101 and typing this on my phone, which is strange because I am from California and don’t know a single person in Taiwan. Even though I have lived abroad for over a year, I occasionally catch a glimpse of indecipherable script on a street sign and have to remind myself, oh yeah, I’m not in America right now. I’m reminded of “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros, the ineluctable Common Core short story that begins, “What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.”
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I have the incorrect perception that almost everyone is confident. It’s probably because of my input channels.
For one, the vast majority of the people I interact with come to me via the internet, where everyone who makes original content has accepted, or failed to consider, that they are opening themselves to judgment from millions of people. Our collective willingness to be seen -- perhaps, our demand to be seen -- speaks to a brazen confidence that either we will be liked, or that it simply doesn’t matter if we aren’t. Second, I occupy a niche subpopulation of Japan: international teachers on JET, a program that vets for the capability to blab well-enunciated English in front of 30-40 very sleepy children, plus navigate a foreign country without succumbing to various mental illness-induced dysfunctions in the process. Thinking you can do this, or more precisely, that it is a service to those forced to observe it, requires a certain varietal of confidence. Foreigners in Japan are a very special group of people. More so than ex-pats in other places, we are noteworthy for our simultaneous reverence and distaste for the country, and our self-superiority for being able to both love and hate it so. “Gaijins are the worst,” we moan. “Except for me. I'm the exception.” Once a week, in the name of meal prep, I fill almost every container I own with brightly-colored, neatly-arranged, ready-to-go foods. I do this primarily for healthy, productive reasons: to nourish my body, to make efficient use of my time, to keep my spending in check. I do this secondarily so I can post a pretty flat lay on Twitter and impress three to four strangers.
Meal prep, in its broadest definition, is any active planning and preparation of food to eat in the future. This can be chopping fruits and vegetables ahead of time, cooking a massive quantity of food to freeze for later consumption, or making whole meals ahead of schedule. In this blog, I focus on the particular style of meal prep that I practice: preparing several individually-portioned meals in advance. Among first-time meal preppers, the biggest mistake in approach is misunderstanding what meal prep entails. Learning how to meal prep is not simply learning how to make one week’s worth of food in a single go. It’s learning how to make one week’s worth of food in a single go every single week, in perpetuity, and actually eating it. This is a very different challenge. Ultimately, meal prep is an exercise in forecasting. What will you, four days from now, desire to eat? What will you -- given the constraints of time, the temptations of the modern world, and the unforeseeable circumstances of life -- realistically prepare and consume? As expected, meal prep will give you essential kitchen skills and easy access to high-vibrational domestic bliss. Both are a pleasure to possess. But more valuably, it will teach you how to apply self-knowledge to follow through on your decisions. If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for life. If you give someone a one-week meal prep plan, they will eat well for a week. If you teach someone how to meal prep, they will eat well for life. As such, this blog post is not a step-by-step guide on how to make a specific menu of meals. If you want that, I can make you a custom plan, complete with a store-specific grocery shopping list, for a very reasonable price. But that would be selling you a product, and I want you to learn a skill. This blog post is a series of helpful framings and advice to help you tackle meal prep in a wise, minimally onerous way. Section 1 presents the three dimensions of “good” meal prep -- healthy, yummy, varied -- and includes exercises to help you achieve all three. Section 2 provides handy tips to apply at different stages of the meal prep process, all the way from planning to plating. Rather than repeating common-sense advice, I tried to include original information and insights wherever possible. Section 3 acknowledges that meal prep can be hard, offers strategies to make it easier, and concludes with tough love about how you should do it anyway. Section 4 is a breakdown of my meal prep routine, complete with my actual thought process, to give you a more concrete idea of what meal prep looks like. Section 5 answers questions I didn’t address in the main text. Section 6 provides some reasons why one might want to meal prep, as well as details my own motivations. Overall, the blog aims to lessen the struggles associated with meal prep and to guide you towards a stress-free, individually-tailored, and maximally beneficial meal prep practice. Before we begin, take a second to remember that you have spent a lifetime living and eating. You know what your life is like. You know what you like to eat. You know what you don’t like to eat. You know yourself. All of these qualities make you exceptionally capable of meal prepping, and meal prepping well. Mom and I wake up at 8 am. Her, naturally. Me, by alarm. There’s a chill in the air, a fresh and promising one. I put on a sweater. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror and practice my smile. I look older, it scares me, I keep looking. Mom lets me comb through her jewelry box. Shiny things from Dad, Grandma, exes. I pick out small silver hoops. She tells me they look nice on me. Dainty.
Downstairs, Dad is watching TV - the news. This just in, a murder, a burglary, five fantastic new Bay Area cookbooks. Skipper sleeps beside him, tuckered from his morning walk. We’re going shopping soon, I announce. Nordstrom’s. I ask Dad if he wants to come, even though I already know the answer. Not me, he says, scooping Skipper into his lap. He wags the dog’s paw up and down in a goodbye motion. Have fun. Use the VISA Card for points. These days, I spend all my free time being manic on the internet. I’m scribbling notes on machine learning, I’m pretending that lovingkindness meditation is changing my life, I’m discovering hellishly esoteric Twitter accounts that thrive on the false interpretation of buzzwords for comedy, then letting said Twitter accounts make me feel hopelessly unlearned, out-of-touch, and excluded. It is great fun for my synapses and terrible news for my self-esteem.
On the advice of Sasha Chapin, the author of my favorite Substack newsletter, I am also trying to reconcile with the parts of myself that I detest through a process called shadow work. If you run in spiritual circles, you are likely familiar with this practice. Simply, it involves confronting and making peace with your “shadow self”, the hidden parts of you that cause discomfort and inspire icky feelings. To do this, Sasha recommends a book by Carolyn Elliott called Existential Kink, an offbeat self-help guide that theorizes that many of the painful circumstances we find ourselves in are self-generated. Though we claim that we don’t want to be in difficult situations, we unconsciously act in ways that keep old patterns of behavior alive and functional even when they cause us suffering. By bringing those patterns into conscious awareness - or even better, loving awareness - we begin to reclaim agency over our feelings, allowing us to derive pleasure from unpleasant sensations, or recognize the illogic of our actions and change them. In sexier language, we can cum to our problems until they are no longer problems. My ikebana class is taught by an enthusiastic woman whose name I asked for once but never learned. I call her Sensei, and that summates our relationship well enough that there hasn’t been a need to inquire again. On days when we have class, Sensei sends a morning message to our LINE group chat to confirm who is coming so that she can purchase the correct amount of materials. The chat has a built-in feature that sends a follow-up message in whichever language you didn’t type in - English is regurgitated into Japanese and vice versa. Translated literally by the AI, Sensei’s reminder that class is happening is delivered stiltedly, “It's a flower tonight."
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