Help My Soup To Help Itself

When I first sat down to write this year's annual holiday-time blog posting, I found myself re-visiting the 2009 entry in search of inspiration or at the very least to avoid blatant repetition. Upon re-reading, however, I quickly realized that this would not be a problem.

Not to send myself a Christmas poinsettia, but as perhaps the most avid and certainly most recent reader of my own blog, I feel qualified to call "2K9: The Year That Keeps on Giving" a fairly neat and well-constructed post. It has a thesis (although not asserted until the end of paragraph 7) and a motif. Characters are somewhat developed. There are beginnings… and endings… and beginnings again. Certain readers might say that things are brought full circle. There is even some light symbolism (Barbie Dream House = capitalism, Lindsey's glasses = Christ figure, etc). Yes, while by no means a literary masterwork, it represents a tidy capstone to what at least through the gas perms of hindsight appears to have been a fairly tidy year.

I start out this year's entry by stating that 2010 was not that year. Nor am I currently that blog writer. If 2009 was neat and orderly enough, 2010 has been what we might call “unkempt” as years go. I began the year in search of some new challenges, which I actually managed to find and then quickly remembered why I had not sought them out previously. In short, last January I was offered a new position within my company. I had been seeking a move of this sort, onto an entirely new team and with an entirely different segment of the organization, for almost 12 months. When the offer finally came through, I did what any sensible career-minded adult would do: I became a professional fitness instructor.

Yes, I started teaching a fitness program called the Bar Method. I also accepted the new job with TMP. And so I essentially tossed myself into the deep end of two very different pools at the exact same time, integrating myself into a new team by day while undergoing fairly intensive training in the principles and practices of Bar Method by night (read: 6 am). This combination resulted in rapid drowning and left me seriously questioning my own choices and overall value as a human being.

Don’t get me wrong – it has been an amazing year. I have acquired new skills, encountered new people and places, been faced with adversity, forgotten new skills, gotten hopelessly lost in new places with new people, curled up and whimpered in the face of adversity, and so on. It’s nothing that would make any high school guidance counselor or child actor bat an eye. Really, all I’m trying to say is that at present I have a sleep deficit to rival the state of California and absolutely no clear idea of how to summarize the past 12 months of mine or anyone else's life, much less make any broader observations about 2010 as a whole.

Luckily, I have never really defined any sort of mission statement or rules of engagement around wheresmyrumball. I would say in the absence of formal guidelines, the accepted practice is that I may spew forth whatever ruminations I feel and you all can choose whether or not to engage. Unless you are April Rinder, in which case keep reading. Or if you are one of those rare and marvelously loyal readers who have actually 1) noticed the rumball's absence and 2) experienced displeasure at said absence, you should probably keep reading purely to avoid hypocrisy. Also I heart you.

That said, I have spent that past several days in careful deliberation upon which topic would be fresh and engaging to my readership. I wanted to choose something timely yet dynamic. Something weighty but whimsical. Something with beginnings… and endings… and beginnings again.

I chose soup.

Now, for those of you who I haven't talked to since the onset of winter in Chicago, soup is something I happen to know a thing or two about. It has become my meal of choice this season for several reasons:

1) Soup is warm and delicious
2) My roommate Becky is an excellent and dedicated soup-maker
3) I am a passable soup-maker
4) It is hard to eff up soup
5) Soup is warm and delicious
6) You can make a lot of soup at once
7) Soup is most commonly eaten with a spoon
8) I like eating things with spoons

I could continue, but I've always felt that 8 reasons are enough to justify almost anything. Except clogs. (To those half-hearted readers who are tempted to point out that Reasons 1 and 5 above are the same, I would gently point out that 2010 has been a tough year and I am very tired. Please be quiet.) (To those readers who claim to require more stable close-toed footwear for podiatric reasons or Dutch descent, let’s agree to disagree.)

Why you ask, is soup the "It" food of 2010? Well, it's not. Cupcakes are. My love for soup, in fact, stems in part from its very anti-It nature. Soup has a truly timeless quality to it - sure, there are Soups of the Day or Week or at certain diners off the interstate Month, but soup itself never goes out of style. There is a soup for every taste and mood – minestrone for a hearty fulfilling meal, spicy black bean if one is feeling saucy, chicken noodle for comfort, miso for sodium deficiency.

Perhaps the thing I love most about soup, however, is its forgiving nature. Short a carrot? Not a problem. Need to substitute cannellini beans for kidney beans? Great idea. Added an extra five shakes of red pepper flakes? Serve with milk and Tums. As I said earlier, it is truly hard to eff up soup and there have been several occasions when what I thought were fairly egregious missteps in the cooking process actually resulted in a superior soup product. Or at least did not result in fire and/or bodily harm.

All this soup talk has brought to mind a story my parents used to read to me when I was little – Stone Soup, by Marcia Brown. The story goes something like this: A few soldiers are passing through a village and have nothing to eat. The villagers, miserly pacifists that they are, refuse to give the soldiers any food. The soldiers in their desperation fill a soup pot with water and place a large stone at the bottom, then set the pot up over a fire at a conspicuous spot by the roadside. The inquisitive village folk eventually wander over one by one and are told that the soldiers are making a delicious dish called Stone Soup. At this point they immediately want to try some (seriously, who ARE these people?) but are told the soup isn’t quite ready yet. It needs an onion, or perhaps a potato, or here a bit of parsley. The villagers find it in their insular hearts to chip in some groceries here and there, and so the story goes until the soldiers have transformed their pot of boiling water into a delicious meal (and possibly scored Knicks tickets to boot).

According to Wikipedia, the book by Marcia Brown is actually based on an old French folk tale, which is based on an old Hungarian bedtime story, which is based on a Dutch fable, in which the soldiers are wearing clogs. Which is irrelevant to the meaning of the story but should be judged nonetheless. Regardless of the origins of the story or the item used in the bottom of the pot, however, I think we can all agree that the message is clear and universal: even in the face of great hardship, there is nothing that cannot be accomplished with a bit of cooperation and sharing. Also villagers are arrogant pigs.

If I were to paint a picture of myself over the past year, I think I would look something like those soldiers – ragged, battle-weary girl, possibly in yoga pants, lugging an enormous heavy pot and scrounging for snacks. And you, my village of non-arrogant non-pigs, have really come through in times of need. Now, if there is one unwritten rule of engagement around wheresmyrumball, it is that we don’t talk about feelings. And, because you are my villagers, you all know that the only thing I like less than talking about feelings is feeling feelings. But there is something about the end of this particular year that gives me a certain, as those mischievous soldiers would say, je nous se qua. Clearly, they were drunk by the end of the story. Nonetheless, I do find myself seized by a sudden unnamed and uncharacteristic desire to share and emote and bring things full circle.

Be it food, energy, toothpaste, emotional capacity, clean socks – I am guaranteed to have been lacking it at some point or another during 2010. And you have provided or overlooked or tried not to inhale like true friends should and true family members are obligated to. At the end of such a year, I only wish I had a bombass soup, or possibly some Knicks tickets, to share with each and every one of you. Instead, all you get is this lousy blog post.

Shit.

Go have a cupcake.