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| "Andy" |
I live with my boyf, let’s call him “Andy.”
When we decided to move in together there was
a bit of situation in that he is a human person who comes with cat allergies,
and I am a human person that comes with cats, an obsessive devotion to the
same, and presumably a cat-loving brain parasite that, I assume, should go on
this list because all evidence suggests she lives here too. Modern medicine can work miracles, it turns
out, so the situation is resolved. It was resolved thus: I am perfectly content surrounded by so many heartbeats
I love, and he only sneezes and eye-bleeds sometimes, and takes a 24 hour pill
2x a day, and they’ve only
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| Look at these precious monsters!! |
destroyed some of his carpet. So it’s all good! Also his dog lives here, who is sweet and earnest
and doesn’t understand why his whole life got turned upside down and he has to
suffer through demeaning nose swats and he’s not supposed to chase anything
smaller than him, but he’s trying real hard to be a Good Boy. The
cats are fine; they don’t care; they’re cats.
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| This is probably real. Source: the internet. |
I also brought a love of hobbies with me, and recently those
have involved bringing other things to life in the house. Not heartbeats, but alive none the less.
This started with kombucha.
Do you remember, Reader, that my farm-mates
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| Yum!! |
made kombucha, and it
totally blew my mind? I didn’t drink
much of it but hey, seems fun! If you
know anything about making kombucha, you know that it requires a kombucha mother to turn boring old sweet tea into fizzy yum juice. ("Andy": But I like sweet tea...) Theoretically these mothers can spontaneously
occur—I mean, they must, right? Or how did this whole process start?—but you
have to create a whole mood. An ambiance. An environment in which tiny random baby bacterriettes
and yeastlings are more likely to stumble together into the loving arms of the luxurious
pre-kombucha tea mix you have created, set up shop, and grow into a weird
Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast that makes old tea delicious. It’s like putting up a bat box—right box,
right height, right season, then you just hope they find it.
Except, again, the boyf lives here too and since we ostensibly
share our spaces I thought setting up a enticing bacterial lounge club-slash-uterus
might push the envelope a little so being a good live-in-girlfriend, I looked up other options. They go like this:
- Buy one
- Get one from someone who has one
- Nope, we’re back to growing your own, but with a kombucha starter!
I’m too stubborn to do the first one and lack the hook up on
the second one, so I went with the third.
I found some raw unfiltered kombucha and let it sit in its happy jar
uterus, and fed it and loved it and sang it lullabies, and now there’s a slimy
mama living under the sink in the upstairs bathroom where she’s nice and warm
and “Andy” doesn’t have to look at her.
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| Behold the douchey-est t shirt. |
Not that “Andy” doesn’t have plenty else to look at, because
now I am also the proud mother of lactofermenting pickles, a kefir culture, a
yogurt culture, sauerkraut, and (almost) a vinegar mother!
All of those lovely items have their own bacterial yeasty
colonies, that are living and growing and making food into other, tangier
food. The difference, I have learned,
between lactofermented pickles
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| Fun fact: Yeast looks like tiny kiwi fruits! |
and the vinegar brined pickles of my previous life
is that these suckers get yummy because they are
(spoiler alert)
fermenting. That means there’s this
whole process of life happening, where tiny bacterial locusts are swarming over
all the veggies and eating the natural sugars or whatever and I don’t really understand the
whole thing but it’s supposed to be healthier and also, dude, it’s alive. In a jar, on my kitchen counter, just living
its chill, smelly, pre-digestive life. Pre-digestive
both in the sense that this process pre-digests part of the food for you so you’re
kiiiiiind of eating bacterial vomit, and also in the sense that this is the
part of their lives before I eat them alive and digest them myself—making this their
pre-digestive life. Growing things in
your kitchen is awesome.
I am most excited about the vinegar because YOU CAN JUST
MAKE THAT and it blows my mind. A couple
of relevant points on this: You can also
just buy it and it cost about $0.99 a gallon and then you just take it home and
use it. Making it costs whatever apples
cost, and takes like 2 months. Plus it smells
a little vomity right now. Maybe I’m
doing something wrong. Point is, totally
worth it. When it gets going it gets a
mother in it too, but it’s not the same as a kombucha mother—apparently they’re
cousins or something. Idk, google
it. I don’t have a mother yet but,
Reader, you’ll be the first to know.
The kefir is new, I just got the seeds (I had to give in and
order these because if I created the environment in which rotting milk becomes
alive I would have to move out and I really do love “Andy”). I don’t even know if I like Kefir, but I do
know I’m about to start drinking a cup every day and I’m pretty jazzed.
Other life in our house includes the seedlings under the
grow light in the guest room/room where I hide things from the boyf and the cats. Those are pretty contained, though, and they’ll
go outside once this weather decides to quit being moody. Also in the
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| One day Claire will write a memoir about her many brushes with death and none of us will be heroes. |
guest room is a plant that I don’t
know what she is. She was apparently
part of a Valentine’s bouquet that a friend of mine got, and when all the
flowers were done and she went to throw them out, she noticed that this
dramatic, vine-y thing had rooted in the water.
Far be it from her (or me) to murder something trying so hard to live—it’s
in a vase in a window now, and growing leaves, and for all I know it’s invasive
and poisonous but her name is Claire and I hope she lives forever. However, if you are reading Claire, it would
be helpful if you’d sprout enough for me to identify you so that I know where
to put you to give you your best shot. Reader,
I am definitely the hero of this story.
Life around-but-not-in our house includes the asshole dogs
next door, the moths that swarm the back door and I occasionally feed to our
cats, and the family of lizards who live under the door jamb to the patio. They are hilarious, mostly because I swear they
are chill AF as they sun themselves just outside the glass, casually shooting the bird at the cats and dog.
(I am rooting for
you, lizard friends, but the cats are rooting for you taking a left instead of
a right in your door-jamb-house and them showing you a thing or two about the circle of life.)
It’s a full house over here.
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| I give nery one f*ck. |
