Shallots, Facebook Rant, Compost

I've been off the road for about a week, and the road is almost out of my system.  This is no doubt thanks, at least in part, to the hourly pictures of the interstate out west that pop up in my facebook feed and remind me of where I've been.  I should hide that person from my facebook feed.  I should hide everyone from my feed.  Facebook is an entirely unnatural mode of socialization, which is something that anyone born before 1990 should know, and I find it terribly boring.  I don't care which couch your puppy jumped onto nor which television show you are currently watching to the point of guilt.  I do not mean to suggest that your life is as tedious as your status updates, only that, once the charm of facebook wears off, it really wears off.  And yet, I have not cancelled my account.  I habitually log into facebook between tasks.  If I learned one thing in New Mexico, I learned that I am personally much happier without the overload of stimulation that comes with our daily, 21st century, industrialized lives.  There are studies out there, too, that suggest our brains are healthier when we don't multi-task ad nauseum, i.e. act as ordinary middle-class Americans with internet connections and smart phones.  "Smart Phones."  Now there's a manipulative piece of corporate language.  It's smart to have a smart phone, dumb, apparently, to have anything else.  With a smart phone you can take a picture of Mt. Rushmore and immediately share it to your favorite social network with one push of a "button," but even buttons are no longer buttons on smart phones, only button icons.  These shallots, however, are shallots, not shallot icons.  I need to go check on my rice.

  
My rice is perfect.  There are people out there who cannot cook rice without a rice cooker.  And yet, cooking rice is probably one of the easiest things you can do in the kitchen.  Now, let's say I am one of those people who cannot cook rice in a pot. I attempt and fail repeatedly.  Then one day I do something right, though I don't know what, and my rice comes out perfectly.  Instead of fluffing my rice with a fork, I hop onto my smart phone and immediately announce to the world that I made, oh my god, the most perfect rice.  Rice, however, is not status update worthy, and the crummy camera phone pictures you take of your half-eaten meal are not worthy of an entire album.  Who am I to make these rules?  I am nobody.  I am only talking about my preferences.  I prefer not to see ten million pictures of eggs and toast in bad, yellow light.  I suppose I should stop ranting before I alienate all of facebook.  Please forgive me; I am only taking the piss.

Plant your shallots in the fall, anytime before the ground freezes.  Plant them as you would tulip bulbs.  When you finish planting them, it's not a bad idea to spread some compost.  Compost, my friends, is one of those words that the cyber-brain corporate powers have not yet found a way to turn into a cute, marketable catch-phrase.  It's one of many things in the garden that has not one bell or whistle, not one application or snazzy feature.  Actually, compost is all application.  I take that back. Grow it and apply it liberally to your garden, and do so with your smart phone inside your house, tucked into your sock drawer or left behind the toilet.