A Day In The Life, And Mind, Of Me

Mariah Loves Earth, What a Day, What a Life, 2025

So I press the up button on the stove timer and set it to nine minutes. It will be nine minutes until my fiorelli will be done and then I will mix it all up with my homemade sun dried tomato pesto where I accidentally initially grated the Pecorino Romano instead of the Parmigiano Reggiano, so it was a bit saltier than expected, but I balanced it out with more Parmigiano Reggiano. I have about a dozen halved cherry tomatoes baking in the oven at a randomly chosen temperature—something like 375 degrees Fahrenheit because that makes the most sense—and I don't have a time set because I figure they will be perfect once I remove my pasta from the pot in nine minutes. 

As I am waiting, I am sipping on my Greenhouse Canada "Gatsby" organic cold-pressed juice. It is a combination of kale, ginger, and gala apple. It is self-described as "zingy and delicious" and I need this zinginess in my day because it's already 3 p.m. and all that I've consumed is a small half-sweet almond milk london fog from Phil & Sebastian and a couple slices of this lentil bread that my Dad made. Oh well, this kind of thing always happens on the weekends when your meals are not organized by a schedule.

I deserve to have a lazy day. For one, I just spent two weeks straight on a work trip where I was visiting rural towns that required several hours worth of driving per day. These towns were small, so small that many of them had less than three hundred people there. But it was so beautiful! I felt as though I was in one of those mid-century prairie landscape paintings. You know the ones, the ones that show the hay bales and snow and...

...Oh look, my pasta is done and the timer is going off. And it turned out beautifully! It's a little past al dente, but I'd say that's the Canadian way. It reminds me of when I took food photos for a while and sold them as stock images through something like Getty or Shutterstock, but I can't find the app on my phone now and I really can't remember what it was so whatever. But anyways, I'm so curious about who bought my photos. There was one, and it wasn't of food. It was actually a close-up of this '70s orange lanky bird marionette. I don't know why someone would purchase the rights to use a photo like that, but they did. 

The marionette originally came from a broadcasting lab in a polytechnic institute that my Dad used to work at. It hung from the ceiling and I remember as a child I absolutely adored this bird. Every time my Dad would take me to work with him, I would just stare up at it starstruck. It was used to test the colour temperature on the broadcast equipment or something like that. Eventually, the department moved onto more advanced technology that no longer required that orange bird marionette and it was passed onto me. I wonder how many people recall that marionette. Hundreds of students must have used it. 

This pasta is so good, every time I take a bite I am so pleased with myself. Growing up, I never knew how to cook. I'd eat steak and pasta with jarred pasta sauce the majority of the time and maybe some macaroni and cheese—nothing special. At one point, in my early 20s I decided that I would be vegetarian and I realized that since I did not know how to cook then I would be eating mostly plain leaves and that did not sound nice. I was gifted a couple of vegetarian cookbooks at Christmas and that set me off on a culinary journey. I am now no longer vegetarian, but I can say that I have cooked about three hundred unique recipes from the few cookbooks that I have completed. If I am perfectly honest, I'm not that fancy. I really had not heard about fiorelli pasta prior to seeing the "upscale" black box on the top shelf at Superstore. (If you can't tell, it is their fancy line). Purchasing the fiorelli made me feel more cultured because of its unfamiliar name and uniquely curved and ribbed for my pleasure shape. 

At the beginning of this piece of prose, I figured that I would come off as more cultured if I just said "fiorelli" instead of "fiorelli pasta" because it would seem as though I was assuming that you knew what fiorelli was and you would ask yourself "Maybe I should know what fiorelli is?" That's the thing about desire and self-image, aren't we all trying to portray to each other how virtuous and cultured we are? We are the ones who like the right stuff, we know the right things, and we wear the right stuff—not you. 

It makes me think of Patti Smith's book Just Kids. I'll give you the rundown, it is about this poet/musician Patti Smith and her deep and personal connection with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Most of the book takes place during the 60s/70s. I took an art history course in university so I learned about Robert Mapplethorpe and then around the same time like a decade ago this local guy who did marketing for JW Anderson told me he wanted to take photos of me with the essence of Patti Smith. He used a film camera and I really liked how they turned out and a lot of them turned out with motion blur, but I think that was an accident. Anyways, this book by Patti Smith is really beautiful, but super name-droppy and she drones on about dead French poets like it's supposed to mean something. It's like one of those books where you see all the trendy rich girls that are your weak social ties that you have on Goodreads gushing about it because it makes them feel cultured. Honestly, they probably don't know who 90% of the people are in the book are so a lot of it becomes meaningless to them. I actually liked it a bit, but it is because in junior high I became obsessed with the 60s and especially the music. I love it all—the Chelsea Hotel lore, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and the rest of the 27 Club. I remember going on a website to find my hippie name and I feel like it was something like "Rainbow Dove." To get back to the point, I was speaking on the phone with one of my best friends who has never been a fan of the 60s or psychedelic rock music and she told me that she felt this pressure to finish the book so that she could say that she had read it. It's like one of those things where people would say, "Oh, so you haven't heard of blank blank? That's interesting," in a totally condescending voice. So she finished it and it was like whoop-dee-doo. 

Getting back to the point, I am a huge fan of Pierre Bourdieu's theories of Cultural Capital. Oh, so you haven't heard of him? He's just a renowned French sociologist and intellectual. Well, if I can sum it up, pretty much he discussed how class distinction in society is maintained through tastes and cultural practices. With high culture, think: ballets, opera, Van Cleef & Arpels, Loro Piana, Ivy League schools, expensive wines. With low culture, think: Shein hauls, Aldo costume jewelry, fast food, sitcoms, and cheap vodka. High and low culture are theoretical concepts that are not based in reality, but are emphasized and encouraged through narratives created in the media by the dominant class. (This is my own reading of things, think: Gramsci). Objectively, high culture is not better than low culture—the belief is arbitrary but socially enforced. We are led to believe it to be true through media framing—think advertisements, TV shows, and music. But the interesting part, we dominated ones are not even consciously aware that we accept the dominant class's worldview as legitimate! Structurally the media and social institutions are built in a way where elites unconsciously legitimize their power by encouraging social narratives that consistently re-legitimize their choices as better or superior—think Gossip Girl. Of course, these same wealthy elites own the companies that produce these expensive material goods that are just out of reach for us plebs. Through marketing, we keep the whole cycle spinning when we spend our hard-earned cash to buy into this cultural narrative. What we like, own, and how we spend our time is considered to be forms of cultural capital. It acts as a symbolic currency that we use when we go through everyday life. 

From my initial paragraph, you can see that I name drop a couple things like: Parmigiano Reggiano, Greenhouse Canada, and Phil & Sebastian. You likely would have read me a bit differently if I said parmesan, Tropicana, and Tim Hortons instead—clearly either way, I'm quite Canadian. (You'd only get why if you are Canadian). But anyways, what we like, own, and how we spend our time is our habitus. Google's AI Overview defines habitus as "[a] set of ingrained dispositions or ways of thinking, acting, and perceiving that are shaped by an individual's social environment and class. This 'practical sense' influences people's actions and tastes, often without conscious awareness." To throw in a bit of Marx's lingo, the bourgeois institutions enact symbolic violence through gatekeeping certain social circles, employment, and opportunities by which they justify shunting the proletariat out because they do not have the proper form of cultural capital to access them. Quite interesting, hey? 

But anyways, today started out great because I went to the thrift store to go purchase these beautiful 80s champagne flutes with black glass stems—which I had seen yesterday—that I had recognized as being the exact ones that my Uncle had donated to the thrift store from my Grandma's estate. At the same time I happened to pick up these gorgeous vintage white Prada shield sunglasses. What a day! I love life.