The estimable John Scalzi, having started a firestorm by mentioning, some time back, that teenage writing, or most of it, sucks, has written a thoughtful expansion and explanation on the subject. So I read it, and started thinking about myself as a teen and a writer. I wrote, but I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I wanted to act, see (just like my current household teenager). Art was my father’s thing, and my brother’s; writing was my mother’s. Theatre was mine. But I wrote, pretty much to have something to read when the library and the spinner racks at the drugstore failed me.

I knew I sucked. I don’t think it bothered me particularly–the only person who ever saw any of my stories was the daughter of family friends, who would come with her family for dinner or a party and barricade herself in my room with my latest ouevre and read furiously. But Karen Beecher not withstanding, I was pretty clear on the fact that I sucked as a writer (as I suspected I sucked at doing any number of things–confidence wasn’t my o’erweening flaw). Since I didn’t intend to be a writer when I grew up, I didn’t worry about it much; the fact that words came easily to me was helpful when I wanted to make extra money editing my peers’ papers in college, and that was pretty much it.

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(Green Curry With Fish Balls)

I recently got a new cookbook. Okay, not that recently, more like Christmas. Bob got it for me and it’s full of Thai recipes. Real Thai recipes.

I imagine that somewhere people are finding all these cool ingredients in their very cool cities. Things like galangal (thai ginger) and cilantro roots. I picture these people, not in groceries, but in some Asian part of their city, picking through market stalls. This is absurd, I know. I lived in New York. Chinatown was picturesque, but picturesque involved plastic buckets full of eels. Still, I can find cool ingredients. I live in a cool city (Austin) which has a large Asian population and a huge Asian grocery that looks large and gleaming, if full of unrecognizable labels, and smells like all good Asian groceries do, like it is full of something that doesn’t smell quite right to Western noses.

I look at the recipes. I want to try the recipes. I have a secret conviction that right now there is some incredible food experience that I am not having. I can’t afford to eat in all the places I want to eat, like Indonesia. The best I can do is make food that I haven’t yet eaten. But it feels like a terrible waste to spend a couple of hours making something exotic and to then eat it by myself. Untold hours of shopping. Four hours of cooking. Ten minutes of eating.

I need to find people willing to come to my house to eat.

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