ocean

This Thanksgiving we had the usual American Thanksgiving foods (turkey stuffed with apples, plum sauce because I’m allergic to cranberries, and stuffing, recently introduced by my magnificent and magnificently American boyfriend/partner Cory). We also had radish salad made from radishes I grew in our garden and sharlotka, an apple sponge cake.

Radishes

First I will tell you about the radishes. I grew them myself, planted as a bit of an afterthought in the pumpkin patch because they do well in the shade and therefore do well with pumpkins. Under my grandmother’s advisement I left the hose out in the sun for a bit and watered them with warm water. They did shockingly well; we are now enjoying my second round of picked radishes and there are still plenty left for a third. The exact seed mixes I used are here and here (referral links, so I get a small commission).

I grew regular pink radishes, purple radishes, daikon radishes, watermelon radishes, and black radishes. All the exotic radishes had less intense flavor than I was expecting: the daikon radishes were a bit like watered down regular radishes, the black radishes were a bit like turnips with a radish flavor, and the purple radishes had a bit of an onion-like flavor—nonetheless all radishes, maybe more tolerable than the usual radishes (I like the usual radishes, I just can’t eat too many at once). I dragged the radishes from Boston to a friend’s wedding in LA and then to South Carolina to my family (my bag/”personal item” was mostly radishes, my laptop, and a pair of heels). Here’s more or less what the radishes looked like, minus a few radishes because we’d already started to eat them.

My mom made some of the black and purple radishes into a gorgeous, delicious salad (left) and the daikon radishes into another gorgeous, delicious salad (right):

We all thought the salad was very special and delicious especially because the radishes were fresh and also because we could probably taste that I remembered to water them every day (amazing).

Sharlotka

My mom also made sharlotka (шарлотка), Russian/Eastern European/former Soviet Union apple sponge cake distantly descended from the English charlotte (sharlotka translates to little Charlotte). It’s a really cozy comfort food kind of cake, light and moist with a sweet crunchy crust and with apples inside baked just so they’re soft but barely still crunchy.

Here’s our family’s recipe, for my own reference and maybe for yours too—

apples
4 eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1 big cup flour (“big cup” meaning 250 ml—mom says “technically a cup is 200 ml”)

Chop up unpeeled apples and put them on the bottom of your baking dish. In the mixer, add the eggs first and beat until they are white. Then add the sugar, then add the flour. Bake at 375 F for about 35 minutes, though it’s hard to tell for sure how long. You’ll know it’s done by the color of the crust. You can also touch the crust: it shouldn’t give too much.

Here’s the process:

Here’s how it turns out:

Doing my best

The radishes were particularly special to me because they were a very proud and successful accomplishment requiring months of sustained effort.

One of the lessons/epiphanies I learned (or just drilled into myself with some but not a lot of success) this year is about doing my best. My whole childhood my parents encouraged me to do my best, and especially as it applied to school whatever my grades were was fine with them as long as the grades actually reflected my best. Clearly that worked out but this year, when I was practicing for my driver’s license, aka driving, I decided that actually doing my best is not usually such a good approach.

When a person is driving, for example, they probably shouldn’t be doing their best. Ideally, a person should have such a reserve of skill and experience and muscle memory that their best is completely unnecessary, to such an extent that they could even be a bit distracted or upset and still be a decent driver. (They might even be thinking about the concept of doing their best, and they should have enough buffer to not run a red light or a stop sign. Should.)

And then I thought that probably this applies to most of the rest of the things I do. If I’m coding, for example, I can put on a movie and my code will be just as bug-free as it is usually, because I’ve been coding for 18 years and because I learned in undergrad how to add safeguards to make my code as bug-free as possible. Sometimes I work a lot harder—when I’m implementing a new algorithm or when I need to solve a particularly challenging problem or when I’m chasing one of those dumb four-hour bugs. But even then it’s something I’ve done a lot, and I’m comfortable with it.

I’ve noticed this year that ideally, if I have the necessary skills to do my work, and if I have not overextended myself, and if I am working in a healthy, sustainable way, I should not need to do my best. If I find that I am doing my best that is something to investigate. It might be that I am learning a new skill, which happens often and is not a bad thing but requires extra caution to avoid errors. It might be that I have too much on my plate, which means I need to try to find balance, and soon, and probably need to find partners to share my work with, otherwise delegate, or evaluate my priorities. Or it might mean that I am working on a short-term but very important project, in which case I just need to survive until it is over and make sure I am doing at least the minimum to maintain my health. (Our Cell paper, for example, was a time when I absolutely did my best, but it was not sustainable.) That kind of effort, at least for me, is how I’ve usually done everything but it only works in short bursts, and carefully.

When I successfully studied for and got my driver’s license, I did not do my best. First, my dad taught me how to drive stick shift and then I didn’t sign up for a road test and then I went to college and then a decade went by. Then I practiced on my and my partner’s first car, a 2001 Highlander that made sounds I recorded and sent to my dad every week, with my licensed and very brave partner in the passenger seat directing me around very narrow Cambridge streets where side mirrors go to hospice. Then when the Highlander failed its inspection I scheduled lessons, more or less once a week, and I showed up. I took the commuter rail and then the orange line or the red line and I arrived at the designated place at the designated time with the designated amount of cash, somehow never late (though I did forget the cash once and a kind and very smart coworker who unlike me still carries cash lent me the money), and I drove around for 45 minutes with my brave and patient instructor who had and used an instructor brake, and I did that more or less every week. I was terrible at it, then great at it, then terrible again, then more or less okay more or less consistently. I scheduled my road test, did pretty poorly, and somehow passed. This kind of workflow is new to me. I didn’t do my best—I allocated the time, I showed up, and I did the work, a little every week, and then I looked back and I saw that the goal was achieved.

The same thing happened with the radishes. I planted them, I watered them every day, I reluctantly (with Cory’s help and insistence) culled them when I had to, and then some months later I had radishes—and then I had radishes again, and there are still more that might grow even bigger, more radishes than I know what to do with.

What happens when a person does their best

As evidence that doing your best is a bad idea, here is our gingerbread house, which we made in earnest as a family:

The Summer of Shit

Unrelatedly I am reminded all of a sudden that there was one summer recently but pre-pandemic when, no joke, a bird pooped in my eye on two separate occasions (two separate birds, presumably, but I can’t be sure). I wear glasses (all the time, or I’d walk into a pole (with my luck a pole from which a bird is just taking off)), so that means the bird would have needed to aim so precisely between my glasses and my eye, at just the right angle, just slightly closer to my eye than to my glasses. Twice.

I remember one of the incidents was under a stoplight, which is probably why I had trouble noticing them while learning to drive. Something about repressed trauma.

An Early Resolution

Since my driver’s license/radishes revelation I have been trying to apply some kind of sustainable, gradual-progress type of workflow to all my work. It is very different from how I usually or naturally work, which is in short, passionate bursts followed by long periods of burn-out. (Of course, because my work is tangential to public health and the pandemic specifically I don’t always get to work sustainably, but I am trying when I can. (Not trying my best, though—as just established that is not the goal.))

Gradual, sustainable progress requires difficult planning and facing reality, the former of which I enjoy and the latter of which I do not: breaking a goal into small steps, being realistic about how much I can get done and prioritizing my goals accordingly, and doing those steps bit by bit every day or every week, with or without passion, efficiently during the day rather than in happy bursts of hyperfocused all-nighters. I haven’t entirely gotten the hang of it, or figured out how exactly it works for me specifically: do I, for example, work on one project on Mondays and Wednesdays and a different project on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Do I let myself follow my interests, so long as I make a bit of progress on each of my active projects every week? Or do I work on each project a little every day, perhaps optimized by the type of work I do best in the morning, afternoon, or early evening? Maybe, since school worked so well for me, I should break my day into two-hour “class periods,” giving each project a class period and stopping when the time runs out?

(So far, it’s looked like working on whichever of my active projects I’m most excited about at the moment, switching when I get stuck, and getting unstuck during the semi-rest/not thinking about it of working on the other project, like epiphanies showing up in the shower but instead more like epiphanies showing up while I’m working on something that is at the moment more fun.)

Figuring out a productive, happy, sustainable workflow is one of my goals for the remainder of the year and for the year to come—or in other words, to do the work I care about in a productive, happy, sustainable way and learn how to do that as I go.

Reaching

This is my favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. She’s reaching for something in the water—reaching quickly, judging by her hair. She’s definitely not going to get whatever she is reaching for, because she is a statue, and every time I see her she is still reaching. I like the motion captured in her body and her hair and I like that the water is also a part of the sculpture, and that the reflection of her hand is also part of the sculpture.

The Fates

This is my grandmother’s favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. The three fates: one spinning the thread of life, one directing it, and one cutting it.

Lights

Brookgreen Gardens is a magical place to spend Thanksgiving, because it is when they are in the midst of decorating for Christmas and you get to see their progress from day to day. They put up every conceivable kind of light in every color, including lights in glass bubbles floating in fountains. It’s an enormous, unimaginable effort by many volunteers. My favorites are these string lights hanging from a small forest of oaks and a few other trees at the edges:

Butterflies

I was talking with a volunteer who told me that the paths in the gardens were originally shaped like a butterfly, proboscis and antennae and all, and butterflies are special in the gardens. Then he pointed out to me that the ceiling was covered in butterflies glowing gold in the lights. He had put them all up the previous day. Apparently there were monarchs before but they switched them out. My photos absolutely do not capture the overwhelmingness of the quantity of butterflies, but this is what they look like:

New Fruits

We didn’t get to spend Rosh Hashanah together so we marked one of our family traditions for the new year (which we do sometimes on Rosh Hashanah, sometimes on the calendar new year, and sometimes both) both late and early over Thanksgiving: trying some new fruit.

This year’s new fruit was a kiwano melon. We spent a few days admiring its exterior (we didn’t google it so as not to spoil the surprise). We were very surprised when we cut it open that it was bright green. It was like a sweet-sour cucumber:

I dragged it along with a bunch of mangos, avocados, a papaya, dragon fruit, and four varieties of persimmon in a trash bag together with my radishes as a carry-on when I realized in LA that I had a carry-on for my flight to South Carolina, that I wanted to use that free space for fruit, and California had more exciting fruit than the non-Florida East Coast.

Here is a kiwano melon and a dragon fruit:

And here is the ocean on the beach, and a bird flying over the ocean on the beach.

Gratitude

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for:

sharlotka
an excellent crop of radishes
a garden for my radishes, and for our other crops, and all the crops that grew
my mom, who made the radish salads and the sharlotka
my grandmother, who taught my mom how to make sharlotka
my dad and my brother, who in addition to being wonderful also give the sharlotka and the radishes and the radish salad their whole purpose (my dad loves radishes, and my brother loves food)
my family abroad
my partner Cory
our housemate
Cory’s family
all our friends
and our health and survival
the covid vaccines
modern medicine—oh, especially modern medicine
that I get to do work I’m passionate about, and that I get to choose what I work on, and that I get to chase ideas down rabbit holes, and that, though I would of course prefer it be more money, I get paid money to fuck around and find out, irrespective of whether or not I actually end up finding out anything of value
my dissertation committee
my mentors and coworkers
the people who made my career and my life possible, at various stages
my growing ability to apply sustained, sustainable effort towards a goal and achieve it
and my progress in no longer doing my best, when possible
our Cell paper (omg!)
my driver’s license (yay!)
new fruits and new experiences
no bird poop in my eye yet this year