In hindsight, it is unsurprising that someone who teaches printmaking would see the value of preserving skills many would consider obsolete. The real question is why, as a student of printmaking, I didn’t instinctively feel the same way. The truth is, that in a lot of ways, i do. Take cooking for instance. Almost all the cooking I do, practically speaking, is obsolete. I could just as easily buy everything premade and packaged, ready to be microwaved. But I choose to preserve my cooking abilities because I find it enriching. And my teacher was absolutely correct about the effects of our reliance on search engines. Since getting a smart phone and consequently always having googling capabilities at my fingertips, my memory, which has served me well in the past, is suffering. I used to be able to ace exams that I crammed for the night before, vocab and grammar rules used to come easily to me when learning new language. Now, those memory feats seem entirely unattainable. One summer shy of thirty, I’m certainly not old enough to blame my age for my forgetfulness. By always taking the easy way out: constantly checking wikipedia for facts, bookmarking information instead of retaining it, I have forfeited, i.e. actively surrendered my memorizing abilities.
So what’s my point? I’m not saying that I want to go live under a rock, eating termites, so I don’t lose my poking-sticks-in-logs-to catch-bugs skills. Clearly no one person can be highly skilled at everything. My point is that I need to be more aware of the payoff, or cost of convenience. The decision of which skills I want to maintain, and which I am willing to relinquish must be made consciously and deliberately.
In considering what other abilities I have put in danger of forfeit, it is clear to me that technology is not the only culprit. Any voluntary relinquishment of a responsibility can effect a forfeiture. Ken and I almost always cook together and the division of labor naturally gravitates towards our respective strengths. I realized that over the years my comfort level with the tasks he usually assumes has fallen although I was perfect adept at them before we started seeing each other. I would never give up cooking together. Our ability to cook so well together (despite the fact that I am a recovering kitchen bully* with occasional relapses) is one of my favorite things about our relationship. But I have decided that every so often I should cook an entire meal from conception through execution alone, just to maintain those skills which I would be loath to lose.
* years ago the nytimes published an article on kitchen bullies and my first thought on reading it, unhappily, was that it described me to a T.
Usually we are so enamoured with ramps when they finally show themselves after a long winter, that we do as little as possible to them, opting for just a basic saute. While I certainly enjoy them that way, I find two faults with our usual preparation. First, the greens on top tend to cook much faster than the pink bulbs at the root-end, leaving either overcooked greens, or too crunchy bulbs. Second, I find that merely sauteing the greens tend to leave them a little too fibrous and difficult to eat. For this meal, I chose to separate the two parts, and prepare each differently.
