Last year I worked on the complete Tessar cookbook, which is going to have Tessar cooking, Tessar recipe book, and Tomato Blessings all in one book. So you'll have a chance again to get most of Tomato Blessings. It's about, out of the original 45 stories, I think there were, it has 38 of them or something. And then it has the recipes from that book. So it's kind of strange, but it's so disempowering if you think there are recipes that you could be doing that are masterpieces. And it's sort of like, I can teach you how to make masterpieces if you do what I tell you. You can make a masterpiece. And it's sort of like, other than that, why bother to cook? So this is so strange. You know, like, what, can't we just have an ordinary life rather than making masterpieces

[01:04]

all the time? I mean, you just can't do it. You can't make masterpieces. And one of my favorite stories about that is about the poet William Stafford. You know William Stafford? He lived the latter part of his life in Oregon, you know. He was a conscientious objector in World War II, which was fairly unusual. And the conscientious objectors were in camps. That's where he started writing poetry. And I'll tell you one of his poems. It's a simple little poem. You can see it says, it's called, Yes. It could happen any time, earthquake, tornado, Armageddon. It could happen for sunshine, salvation, love. It could, you know.

[02:07]

That's why we get up and look out in the morning. That's why we get up in the morning and look out. There are no guarantees in this life. But there are some bonuses. Like morning. Like right now. Like noon. Like evening. It's kind of a Zen poem, you know. That's kind of like, let's have something to eat and let's, you know, we don't need to make it, it's not going to be all magnificent. So we don't know what's going to happen until we can. There's another poem of his which is called The Thread. Or The Way It Is, The Way Things Are, The Way It Is. There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change, but it doesn't change. People wonder about what you're pursuing, you have to tell them about the thread. Tragedies happen, people suffer and grow old.

[03:12]

You get sick, and, no, I think it's, people get sick and die, you suffer and grow old. So you suffer and grow old. Nothing you do can stop times unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread. So anyway, one of the things he did as a poet, he would practice writing a poem every day. It's like, you know, are we going to eat every day? It's just a practice. And so, once a woman was interviewing him and she said, you know, I hear from Robert Bly, you know, another poet, and he says, you write a poem every day. And he says, yeah, I get up in the morning and I start on my poem and then I have a little

[04:18]

shelf where I keep it during the day. I have to get the kids up, I get them breakfast, I get them off to school, sometimes during the day I can work on it. And if I don't finish it any sooner than at night when everybody's in bed, I get up my poem and finish it up. And she says, well, how can you do that day in and day out, day after day? You can't be creative like that every day. You can't be inspired every day. And he said, I lower my standards. So, you know, over the years I've done a lot of, you know, and then it turns out a few years later, he makes them even lower. Anyway. So, all right, so I want to talk to you today about some sort of where I started with cooking and here at Tassajara and before that, when I started cooking, I was about 19 or 20.

[05:40]

I mean, I cooked before that some. And I started, I was living in San Francisco on a little alleyway, which is now the middle of a Safeway parking lot. And I rented an apartment that had two rooms, two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, $39 a month. We had three people. I and my girlfriend lived in one bedroom and then we rented the other bedroom. So, three of us, we each paid $13 a month for rent. You know, it's a whole different era because, you know, the real estate market, like a lot of things, it's not set up for benefiting people or providing housing. It's set up for people to make money. And the difference now, when you, now to get in, you know, my daughter a few years back

[06:43]

was looking for a house and she said, they're renting closets for $300, you know, it's $500, $600. And it's not just the difference in the, you know, with inflation, it's more than that. But anyway, I started cooking and I was just amazed, you know, cutting a pepper. Today, we'll cut open a cabbage, you know, you cut open a cabbage and it's like, oh my. And you start looking at things and experiencing things and think, where did this come from? I mean, isn't it amazing that this is here? And right away, things seem to have a kind of, it's not, magic is not a good word probably, but it's a kind of presence that you can receive and notice and I found it awesome, you know, when I first started cooking, to actually sense and look at something and smell things and see the colors and then cut things up and try out different shapes.

[07:45]

And to me, it was all interesting. Then I had a set of, I'd been to the Goodwill or a thrift shop and I'd gotten a little set of little wooden bowls, like little wooden soup bowls and then I also found a little set of enameled metal bowls and it was, you know, candy apple red and emerald green, deep forest green and silver, metallic silver and then, you know, this magnificent lavender purple and they're all shiny and so then I would experiment with, do these orange pieces go in the metallic silver, do they go in the lavender purple, do they look good in orange on brown in the wooden bowls and so I was studying, you know, what goes with what.

[08:46]

And I was doing this study because, you know, it's like, oh my god, this is interesting, this is like art, this is like, and it's like, and nobody gets to see it and nobody takes pictures of it and nobody cares, but, you know, I find it, I find it enjoyable, that's something that fascinates me, you know, and, you know, that obviously is not just about getting something done, it's about like what, and many people have said this, but it's like, what gives you pleasure and pleasure isn't just the activity, you know, it's like your capacity to have the events of your life arouse, awaken pleasure in you and that's something that we're either, you know, you can actually study how to do that and sometimes you find something like this that gives you a little doorway. I mean, now that I look back, I found something, you

[09:52]

know, I found food, I could actually relate to food and I could actually study that and be with those things and it's kind of like remedial relationship course. I mean, I couldn't talk to anybody, I couldn't smile at anybody, I didn't know how to work with anybody, I did have a girlfriend, but, you know, and I can't remember much about the relationship that I had except that it was, in a lot of ways, really sweet. And, you know, I have friends who are like this too, you know, you have a, depending on your childhood, you know, I have one friend who, you know, she said her father left when she was one and just came back, you know, occasionally to amuse them. And her mother was an alcoholic and she'd race home from school on the days that they got the report card to see if she could

[10:53]

get her mother to sign the piece, but she was too drunk to be able to use her hand to sign the report card. And when she went to college, she didn't know anything about social skills or meals or eating together or food or, and she went to college, she found that she could sit under the table with the stoners who were sitting at the table and they didn't mind her sitting there. And that was the level of her capacity for, you know, to interact with others. And I wasn't quite that bad, but, you know, pretty far down there as far as, but, you know, food, oh, how are you? Oh, this is good for you to be here. Would you like to be there? So I spent years, it's sort of like food as a transitional object within psychotherapy, you know, they call it a transitional object. I mean, and then, and then later I graduated, you know, to stuffed animals and then to, and eventually to people,

[11:58]

you know. But different things provide a kind of gateway, you know, where you can study something and then you can start to extend it. And sometimes, you know, hopefully your, you know, a primary relationship is like that. You start to be able to relate to one person and then you can relate to other people. And this is something that, I mean, you know, people who study psychology, it's, it's, you know, your original, originally babies, you know, fixate on mom's face. And if you have a good relationship with mom's face and a good connection with mom's face, then you can go out in the world and you come back to mom's face and everything is an extension of mom's face. And, and then, you know, the, ideally when you then grow and you start to move away, just in small ways, when you come back, mom say, oh, you look sad or how was it or what happened out there? And you have

[13:00]

a place to come back to, which is, which is, you know, mom and family and, you know, you have a safe place to home. So, um, uh, all of us, you know, each of us to some degree or another, we have home and then there's other ways in which we don't have a home and it's psychological. It's not just, you know, and one of the ways that, uh, for me I've created home for myself is to cook. You know, it's not, it's something you can work on. And then I found a home at Zen Center and I found a home with Suzuki Rishi. And I found a, so I found a home here. Um, years later, you know, about 19, I came here in 66. About 1988, I went to the Insight Meditation Society in Berry, Massachusetts for a three month meditation course there. The second day I was there, I was walking around outside and there's a

[14:02]

garden and there's this brick building. And, and then I realized like, oh my God, I'm back at the orphanage. I was in an orphanage for four years. So, um, and Zen Centers are kind of like orphanages. We take in the people who are lost and haven't had enough family. And if you have enough family, mostly you don't get to, you know, Zen Centers. Something has to have happened, you know, to be at a Zen Center. Um, so anyway, I found a home here and I found like a spiritual father with Suzuki Rishi, you know, and it's, and then, um, but we also create this with our activity. You know, this morning we did Qigong and it's

[15:02]

a way to move back into your body. You move back into your body by extending your consciousness into your hands and into movements. And then your awareness is, you're, you have to have your awareness in your body to do those movements. So you're moving back home. You're re-inhabiting yourself by the practice. And we also then can re-inhabit ourselves with cooking. We move back into the body, into our senses. We see things, we smell things, we taste things. We use our hands to do things. So, you know, it's not just, and cooking, I don't know what it is, but why would, why would cooking be about, you know, making masterpieces? It's about coming home. It's about being at home. It's about nourishing yourself and nourishing other people and, you know, sharing and providing and benefiting. And I don't, you know, I don't

[16:02]

understand. I mean, I picked up my friend Marjorie at the San Jose airport Saturday and then we stayed at a hotel in Monterey on Saturday night that she'd arranged through Expedia. And, you know, I have my thermos of tea. I have a bottle of wine. But I think most people, you go to the hotel and then you open the jar of Pringles and you have their wine and then it's, you know, you just pay money to not, you know, to not be nourished. Rather than you make yourself at home by bringing your home with you, you pay money for, to somebody else for services that aren't going to make you feel at home. You know, you can, you can have their appetizers. I have, I had some, I had some bread from Green Gulch with some turkey pastrami with some smoked, not smoked, but pepper jack cheese and some cheddar cheese. And I had, you know, it was left over from my lunch. I had that little container.

[17:05]

I had some salad, you know, so then I had some pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds. And then I had my bottle of wine. So then we had a little snack while Marjorie got her last fax from her law company, you know, before coming up to Tassajara and being out of Blueberry Contact. But anyway, and now you can't take your thermos on the plane, you know, except now I do anyway. Sometimes I take the empty thermos. I stop by at Starbucks and, or Pete's or someplace and, you know, could you fill this up with your hot water? And then actually they, you know, then they, it's not bad. You pay three bucks for your thermos of tea and then you have it on the plane when you want it. And I take my empty plastic bottles, water bottles into the airport and then I fill them from the faucet now instead of paying three dollars a bottle. Because I'm going to be mom, I'm going to be mom and I'm going to, and it's practice. I've practiced this now for years and nobody else is going to

[18:10]

be able to do this for me. I haven't found anybody who's going to do this. And so anyway, to me it's much more than just cooking and getting the cooking to come out, but it's, we're all studying how to nourish ourselves, nourish others, how to be in our bodies, how to actually be here and then, and find your way through it, you know, and how does that work? So I started with this cooking in San Francisco and I had such a good time and then I started having dinner parties and, you know, I didn't talk to anybody. I'd have six, eight, ten people and they'd sit around and jabber, jabber, jabber and I'd just go, would you like some more of this and have some more sake? And that was the level of my capacity to socialize. And I didn't know

[19:12]

what people were talking about or how do you, you know, and I still don't know certain conversations to know how to participate. Various conversations I don't know how to participate, but somehow here at Tessera it's fairly easy. Maybe I'm just in the right group to socialize with. You know, politics. I mean, what, who cares what I have to say about politics? And they should do this, and why don't they do that? And like, I know something. The stimulus package. What, am I going to spend my days studying the stimulus package? You know, is this a good idea? Is this a bad idea? Is this just a bailout for the banks? And, you know, I don't know. Anyway, so I got down here, so I came down to Tessera. I have to keep track of the time because

[20:19]

we're going to start cutting things pretty soon. But I got down here because my friend, a friend of mine from college had gone to Antioch College for a year. Do you know Antioch College? It's now out of business. It was in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and you'd go to school for 11 weeks, and then you'd have like 10 days off, and then you go to work someplace for three months. I went to work in New York City for three months at a music distributor's. Ideally, you know, eventually you're having jobs in your field. But to start with, you just have kind of jobs that somebody will take you. So, then you're supposed to write a paper about, you know, how much you used your, you know, learning from school in your work. So, I wrote in my paper, I put to good use my knowledge of the alphabet and my ability to count because my job is to fill orders for sheet music, you know, and I needed to know the alphabet and to count. I was studying

[21:22]

psychology and social psychology and sociology and various things. I don't remember, but anyway, I dropped out. This could take days to tell you all this stuff. But anyway, my friend, Alan from Antioch, went on a Cincinnati ski trip with, and it was I think the last Cincinnati ski trip in 1966, 5, 66. And he met somebody on the ski trip named Dick Baker, who later, you know, became the abbot of Cincinnati after Suzuki Roshi and was a rather flamboyant, in some ways charismatic leader, which is a whole other story. Shoes outside the door if you want to read the book. Then in America, there's, you know. But anyway, Dick said to my friend, why don't you go down to Tassajara and get a job there? We're thinking about buying some land near there. So, my friend came down and got a job here as a handyman. He

[22:28]

said, I could, you could probably get a job there in the kitchen. So, I came down and got a job in the kitchen. I met the Vex, who were the owners of Tassajara, and they said, sure, you can work in the kitchen. And so, I became the dishwasher. The kitchen was above where the pit is now. Do you know the pit? It's probably up, if you walk up, if you walk behind the student union area and towards the creek, you'll see there's a pit down there. There was a kitchen above that at one point. That's all the story. That kitchen was taken down by mistake the winter after we bought Tassajara. I don't know why nobody writes this stuff down, but there was this kitchen there, a wonderful old kitchen. And then we bought Tassajara that winter. We bought Tassajara in December of 66. We had $600 in the bank. We needed to have the $25,000 for the down payment. There was fundraising and bank sales and garage sales. And there was a Zenefit, where the QuickSailor Messenger Service,

[23:31]

the Big Brother and Holding Company, and the Jefferson Airplane played at the Avalon Ballroom, $2 a ticket. We raised $1,800 as the Zenefit in the fall of 1966. The next spring, the Jefferson Airplane came up and stayed in the Pine Rooms for a few days and practiced in what is now the student union area as a kind of compensation for their donation of their services at the Zenefit. But anyway, that winter after we bought Tassajara, there was four people staying up here. It's the 60s. And there's one line, telephone line, through the woods. Sometimes if there's a storm, the line is down, and so they're out of contact. What are they doing up here for the winter? Well, there's the hot tubs, and there's dope. And it's getting stoned. And so after a while, they thought, well, you know, we need to help the Zenefit get started here next year, so we'd better get the

[24:36]

kitchen taken down. Because they'd heard that the county health department, and one of the reasons that VEX had sold Tassajara was the kitchen. They had told the VEX, you need to redo the kitchen before you can open again. So the people living here had somehow heard this, and they thought, well, we need to take the kitchen down so we can redo it before we open again. We'd better get started. So at some point, you know, Richard Baker, whoever comes down here, my God, they've taken down the kitchen. Anyway, the county, you know, under a change of ownership, you get a certain dispensation to do something else for a period of time while you're working on your new kitchen and showing good faith, you know. So anyway, we moved. So then the kitchen was from a bigger kitchen into what had been the crew's dining room, which is where the lower shed is now. And we started working on our new kitchen there, which, you know, with the stone walls, which took two or three years to build. And in those days, we did everything. You know,

[25:43]

the students, we didn't hire people to do stuff. But anyway, so I got a job in the old kitchen, and then, you know, the cooks taught me how to make bread, which I'll talk more about tomorrow. And then halfway through the summer, one of the cooks quit, and the VEX said, why don't you start cooking? And I'd been such a magnificently capable, competent dishwasher and baker together, it took two people to replace me to do the dishes, the pots, and the baking that I had been doing by myself. I am good and capable. But as a cook, you know, I was extremely temperamental, and I just discovered that, you know, when I started cooking, I thought the cooks were like

[26:44]

idiots, you know, to get upset about the things they got upset about. And I'm still getting upset about these things. You know, this morning, I mean, last week, someone was supposed to have sent Tassajara a list of ingredients and baking times for this course. Included on that list is four heads of Chinese cabbage for this morning. We have four heads of regular cabbage. There's a reason why I wanted Chinese cabbage. It's easier to cut. You will have an easier time with the Chinese cabbage than you're going to have with this cabbage. And the salad would come out differently. But, you know, okay, we're going to use something else. But in the meantime, like, you know, there's nothing you can do about it. You know, you make some effort, and somebody says that they're taking care of it, and it's like our thing yesterday. You know, Shika says we can meet

[27:46]

here at five, and we get here, and the dining room says you can't, and then stuff happens. We're all making our, you know, good effort, good-hearted effort. Nobody's purposely trying to not do something. I mean, it does happen, but in this case, no. So anyway, I started cooking. And then because I had two months, I had two and a half months experience cooking with the Becks as a resort here at Tessara Zen Center. I said, why don't you be the head cook next year when we open our monastery? I have so much experience. You're a Zen student. You're a cook. You could be the head cook here. So I said, oh, okay. And, you know, this would never happen now. You know, nobody who's 22 years old, you know, can come and be the head of a Zen Center, head cook for a Zen Center cooking

[28:51]

for, you know, 50 students and 50 guests a day, you know, six meals a day. And, you know, people have no idea about it now. You know, like three summers ago, one of the guest cooks who wasn't even born when I first came to Tessara says, Ed, were you ever a guest cook? Well, yeah. And when I was the guest cook, I was also the, now you have a Tenzo, you have a baker, you have a day-off baker, you have four guest cooks, you have a head of the prep crew, you have a whole prep crew. We had seven or eight people. I was the Tenzo, the head cook. I was one of the two guest cooks. I was the baker. I was the day-off baker. I was the head of the prep crew. And, you know, and there was five people or something in the prep crew. There was not 18 people because we weren't cooking for, now

[29:54]

we're cooking for more like 130 or something or 150. In those days, it was 100. So, you know, we are cooking for more people. But I just did it anyway, not knowing any better. And so that year, when I started cooking, well, one of the first things that happened, I got down here in May, and some people had been here, this was the following winter, or no, they'd been, this was that winter where the kitchen had been torn down. And I got down here, and then by that point, there was like 25 people here or something by the time I got here. And they told me, when I went to work in the kitchen, they said, well, we don't use salt. I said, you don't use salt? They said, no, salt is bad for you. Oh, I didn't know. And, well, what do you mean

[31:00]

bad? It's bad for you. People can be very articulate with their, usually not very articulate. I've been to more than one doctor who says, what are you going to do about your cholesterol? Let's get you on some Lipitor, and somehow they don't seem to have read The Great Cholesterol Con. And they've bought into the billions of dollars, you know, in the pharmaceutical companies, best-selling, best profit-making drugs ever, the statin drugs, so lower your cholesterol fictitiously for no good reason. And you will have fewer heart attacks, but you will have a higher death rate for everything else. Oh, that sounds good to me. Let's get you on some Lipitor. Jesus, get some chig on. But nobody, you know, it's much more challenging to talk to you about lifestyle changes than to talk about, you know, drugs. And just sell somebody some drugs, go on living your life the way you always have, that made you sick, and we'll, you know, we'll take care of you. Anyway, so I had to go ask

[32:06]

Mrs. Agurishi, excuse me, but in the kitchen, they said that I can't use salt because it's bad for you. Is it okay if I use salt? I'm kind of a, you know, originally, you know, a low-status person. And he said, you are the head cook. You can use salt if you want. I needed to get this, like, spiritual backing, you know, to stand up for use of salt in the kitchen. So we started using salt. And then I said, well, do you have some other advice for me working in the kitchen? And this is when he said, when you, when you wash the rice, wash the rice. When you cut the carrots, cut the carrots. When you stir the soup, stir the soup. So, oh, okay, simple enough. So I went back to the kitchen, and then I'm doing this. And then other people have been, well,

[33:16]

don't let me tell me about my dream last night. And, you know, and I don't know why we have to work here in the kitchen. We should be doing something spiritual. And why aren't we able to sit in the Zendo? And those other people get to sit in the Zendo. We don't get to sit in the Zendo. We have to work here, and, you know, whatever, and on and on. And, you know, we don't get enough sleep here. And, you know, there's blah, blah, blah, you know. Like, I'm cutting the carrots. When I cut the carrots, I'm not talking. And I'm studying this. You know, when you cut the carrots, cut the carrots. And one side of that is, get it done, but it's actually the Japanese, the way the Japanese talk about what in Buddhism is called mindfulness. But it's also, it's like, give your attention to something, give your attention to what you're doing, how you use your hands, how you use your body. You know, how do you do this? And study, study doing it. So, for instance, my friend Gil Fonsdale, who, I went to Barre, Massachusetts that year to do the Vipassana

[34:28]

retreat. And he had been a student here at Zen Center in Tassajara. And he came sometime in the early 70s, I think. And then later on, he studied Vipassana a lot. Now, he teaches Vipassana on the peninsula, mid-peninsula Vipassana Center, south of San Francisco. And so, Gil studied Zen in Japan. And he said, in Japan, you know, everybody likes to rake. So, in Japan, they say, when you rake, just rake. And in Southeast Asia, they say, when you rake, watch your mind. So, you know, people are trying different instructions. So, he says, in Japan, sometimes they're vigorously raking, because when you rake, just rake. And there's clouds of dust, and then everybody, and then you have to rake with everybody else. You don't go off by yourself and rake someplace. You rake with everybody else. Because it's a group, Zen is a group, Japanese group thing you do with others. You don't sort of, anyway. And in Southeast Asia, he said, sometimes, often, they're just standing there. So, I'm not much of a fan of this, when you rake, watch your mind stuff.

[35:39]

But when you cut the carrots, watch your mind. No, could you please, when you cut the carrots, cut the carrots. You know, study how to do what you're doing, in a way that makes it happen, and that, you know, you, you know, how do you use your body, how do you use your intelligence, your consciousness to manifest something in the world? How do you do that? And, you know, to have food. And, one more story, and we're going to switch over our place here to a cooking class, a cutting class. So, after a while there, I went to Suzuki Roshi, and I said, you know, you said, when you wash the rice, wash the rice. When you cut the carrots, cut the carrots. When you stir the soup, stir the soup. And I've really been practicing this and studying this, but it seems like the other people in the kitchen are doing something else. They often don't get to work on time. Sometimes they go to the bathroom, and it seems like they're gone for a half hour, 45 minutes. And they, they want to talk, and when they talk, their hands stop moving, and they're not, you know, working anymore.

[37:01]

And I don't know what to do. You know, how do I get them to, to, you know, study more carefully and to practice? Suzuki Roshi is very unusual, you know, because he seemed to be listening like, yeah, I know what you mean, you just can't get good help anymore, can you? He's nodding, and like, yeah, you have to challenge it. And then he paused for a minute when I was done, and he said, if you want to see virtue, you'll have to have a calm mind. And the first thing I thought was, that's not what I asked you. I asked you how to make these people behave. And, and he says, you know, and he switched it. And this is a very interesting point, because, you know, now I have a little book, you know, it'll be at my bookstore, you know, Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline. And this is a book about your kids. How do you, you know, how do you raise your kids?

[38:08]

And one of her basic maxims is, what you look for, you'll get more of. So if you spend all your time noticing what people are doing wrong, you will spot those things that people are doing wrong. If that's where you're, if that's how you're using your intelligence, that's what you'll see. If that's what you're looking for, you'll see it. If you're looking for virtue, you'll see virtue. But you have to be looking for virtue. So Becky Bailey, who wrote the book on, you know, on your kids, is, you know, says, why don't you first, you know, look for, she doesn't call it virtue, she says, look for positive intention. You know, it's so different if you, if you've come into the room, and your kids are playing, and it's a mess, and you say, what a mess in here, you need to clean this up, rather than, it looks like you've been having a great time, it looks like you've been really having fun, now it's going to be, you know, let's start thinking about cleaning up now. And you want to first, she says, acknowledge, you know, the positive, what's positive about the situation, before you just find fault with something. And, um, so I started studying this.

[39:24]

How to see virtue, and it was true, I needed to have, you know, your mind, your mind has to change. And I started not having, you know, you need to have a calm mind, but, okay, if I can see virtue, maybe that will help me have a calm mind. But anyway, I started, you know, to look for people's sincerity, people's effort, people's, you know, the things that people were doing, as opposed to, so I'm still working on this. So, um, and this still comes up in these classes. You know, well, my first response would, you know, I'm going to, again, you know, as usual, I'm going to be endeavoring to see virtue. And your good heartedness, and, you know, your intention, and your efforts, and I might always, it may not always feel that way to you. You might feel like I'm being critical.

[40:31]

And it's so hard to say anything, as a teacher, you know, because I know, and I'm a guy, you know. I think, you know, we're all like this. But, um, again, I was talking about this with Marjorie on the way down here, and she says, yeah, I know what you mean. And, you know, my husband, when we were first married, and they've been married 18 or 20 years or something, or longer. And she said, well, when we were, you know, he'd be loading the dishwasher, and he just would not be putting the dishes right, so that they would get clean. And I would explain that to him, and he would be pissed. And it's kind of like, yeah, I get it. It's like, honey, I'm doing the dishes. Do you get it? I'm making an effort here. I'm offering my services to benefit us. I'm taking care of something. And I don't want to hear about what I'm not doing, you know, right, according to your standards. I just like to, you know, I'm, I thought, and I thought I was doing something to help. And now you're, right away, you're just criticizing me.

[41:35]

And you, and then you, you hear it as, no, I'm not, I'm not criticizing. And then you try to explain, no, I'm not criticizing that you're doing this, and I really thank you for having, doing this. But, you know, if you change this, then it will work a little bit better, you know. It's so hard to go through all that, and at some point, you just say, thank you for doing the dishes. But, you know, I'm not quite in that situation of, thank you for cutting up vegetables. I sort of want to keep showing you things. So, should we get set up here? Okay, and then I have another story or two to tell you. Thank you. We'll go on and get this set up. So, we're going to take the tablecloths out, right, and we need to put our paper, or do we put the cutting boards on top of the tablecloths? Okay, we're going to put the cutting boards right on top of the tablecloths. Okay, I'll cut, [...] cut

[43:15]

That's somebody else's. Mine is in my pocket.

[43:23]

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