So really fast post here but throwing a dinner party of sorts for two former coworkers tomorrow night. After debating for a long time as to what my hyper-critical arse will cook, I finally settled on Puero Pibil.
Here’s Robert Rodriguez making it:
To be honest, I had to rewind, if you will the video a few times because I’m awfully distracted by Mr. Rodriguez. The fact that he has like ten children doesn’t dissuade me from wanting his babies.
I love that man.
Anyway, so I’m making this for the first time tomorrow. It has disaster written all over it.
When I was nine, we arrived in NY; my mom didn’t happen by until three years later. She came via Canada on a visitor’s visa pretending to be her sister that looks remarkably like her. I won’t go into the complications that caused only that for those three years we basically had no mother but our aunts and grandmother.
When my mom arrived I remembered how strained our relationship became, not because she wasn’t trying. But because there were new people that had assumed that role in the time she was away from us. I think my sister took this the hardest.
My mom and I have always had the most complicated relationship. Looking back on it, all those years I spent thinking that she hated me there are subtle things that are coming back in my memories. Like the time she ordered a subscription of the Alfred Hitchcock magazines and the Reader’s Digest. I have no idea why she thought I would be interested in either back then but the subscriptions started right around the time I scored really high on the annual state tests. The test said that at 12 I could read past the Wall Street Journal. It was her way of encouraging me.
At 13 for Christmas, she got me a typewriter. It was a Smith Corona and I loved that thing until they followed it up a few Christmas’s later with a computer. God that thing was ancient.
My point is that for as long as I was here, she has been encouraging me and granted I have not done half the things she probably wanted me to do, she has always encouraged. I think that’s why this entire joblessness has been such a depression pit for me: I feel like I’m disappointing her.
