Literally Who Cares: In Favor of Inconsistency

Growing up,

there was a kitchen door that we would use to come and go – not the front door, but a sort of secret one, much more convenient. On the inside of the door, we had a poster of George Allen, the 70’s sports coach. It figured his quote: “Consistency is the truest measure of performance.” The poster went on to detail ways that George imagined a person could be consistent, tips like “take work home” and “celebrate after victory.” The poster was orange and white. George tipped his baseball cap.

I have always been a horrible test taker (generally academically inconsistent), I do better working outside my house, and to be honest, I can’t help but celebrate whenever I please.  Hovering in the kitchen, snacking standing up, I would look at the poster and try to decipher why it made me feel so nervous. By high school, it was clear that the world operated on consistency; good grades equated good college, being nice equated being liked, being pretty equated some sort of power. This poster presented the question of consistency as a clear, reliable method for living. It reminded me of a type of success that felt fully inaccessible to me. I exerted myself to keep up, I felt I could not keep up, I stared at the poster, the poster stared at me.

Consistency is defined as 1. Conformity in the application of something, typically that which is necessary for the sake of logic, accuracy, or fairness 2. The way in which a substance, typically a liquid, holds together.

What holds together?

I find myself in a shocking number of

conversations about astrology. I end up talking most with people who don’t believe in it. These chats often turn adversarial, which I welcome. The conversation is usually initiated by something like:

me: “Blah blah blah I like astrology!”

the other person: “Haha, ok! But it’s not real.”

I am always moved that the other person knows that something isn’t real. What makes you know that something doesn’t exist? I have no idea what that feels like – I imagine it’s lovely.

These conversations are somewhat of a boring dance. My usual talking points are:

1.     Astrology is gendered feminine within the binary, so we’re trained to dismiss it.

I say that because it is gendered feminine, we’re more likely to understand it as trivial, or emotional, or imagined, or ungrounded, illogical. Definitively inconsistent in its lack of substance.

2.     I see astrology, like any school of thought, as a lens through which to see the world. You learn just as much about what doesn’t feel applicable to you as what does.

Astrology helps me understand people around me. It is rare to get to categorize with such fluidity. Like the collective unconscious or the notion of panopticon, astrology is a tool for social meaning-making. A language for the familiar invisible.

Sometimes after these conversations, even if I win, I feel ashamed. I have exposed how much time I spend thinking about things that may not be real.  

I can’t consider consistency

Without the question of shadow. Jung defined shadow as the “inherent moral deficiency” in a thing. The shadow of faith, for example, might be delusion. The shadow of consistency, I think, is negotiation of soul.

Here is where I am reminded of definition number 2. Consistency is viscosity, and viscosity is internal friction. Thick, fluid, permeable. One might cut through, but only by swimming hard.

Le Brigade Infini

Contemporary kitchens are most often built off of the French model of Auguste Escoffier’s Brigade de Cuisine; kitchens set up as an army. Hegemonic and hyper-functional, kitchens are structured through dominant leadership and a devotional understanding of collective labor. This makes sense; amazing things happen when a community, led with precision, works tirelessly towards creation. This means that working in a kitchen requires diligence, seriousness, ego loss, and, of course, consistency. In a restaurant, this expectation of reliable sameness is one of the only things that ensures success, both in capital and character. One reason I was drawn to line cooking in the first place was for the sacrifice of my physical self towards a collective project—what an extraordinary practice, thrilling and strange.

If I’m working in a restaurant, or with a team, I do my best to replicate well. Shame has helped. As the language of kitchens, it is the most expedient way to show someone not to make the same mistake twice. I have been yelled at enough to have a rote chorus in my mind around deviation: lazy, disappointing, mediocre. These words (all verbatim, none made up) sit somewhere in my consciousness, lodged in, snug.

As Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay “On Being Ill”, “the body smashes itself to smithereens and the soul, it is said, escapes.”

Alone, I can’t help myself. When I have my way, I never do the same thing twice. I don’t use recipes unless I am baking. Even then, I try to avoid hand mixers because I would rather whip cream myself and work dough with my hands. Nothing is planned, everything arises as I go. When I serve food after a few hours of cooking, it takes a moment to verbalize what I have made – I’ve usually been speaking some weird food language in my mind. I trust myself, I trust my palate. I was never that rebellious as a kid, I had neither the interest nor the gumption. Making food is where I do what I want.

And through the chaotic ether, I find myself reliable. I even find that I am good. My quality comes in charged corners of what I make. Clean edges. Taste and texture. Aesthetic beauty, quickness, neatness. Acid and salt balance, a chime in the back of the mouth.

The Great Conjunction

Of all of this gentle chaos — of kitchens and consistency, of shadow and impossibility, of astrology and gravity and faith — is this: all of these are areas in which I am told that something is not so, but through living, I find that it is. Too often consistency is weighted with the question of success, propelled by the potential of shame. My best food has arrived when no one has yelled at me, but instead let me serve what seemed right.

In attempting to make peace with finding fixed traditional expectations inaccessible, I often find myself untethered, floating, deeply scared. The world has opened up. It has given me permission towards failure and the extraordinary.

And as usual, my thoughts evolve. And as usual, skirting sheepishness, I move to a new one that fits better. My problem with consistency is actually a problem with fixed expectation. It possesses an insecurity, sure, and also a defiance. It is the great admiration for the beauty of emptying one’s hands, and giving it all away.