hollandaise

I've been thinking about imagination. Specifically, how does our tendency to color things in our minds affect the actual experience?

Let's begin with cooking. A few weekends ago, I became curiously hell-bent on making eggs Benedict with smoked salmon for a Sunday brunch. The idea came early in the week, and I spent the rest of it researching fish markets in the area and scanning recipes on the Internet. I'd made a hollandaise sauce before, and although it is tricky, with the right amount of care it will come out well. I talked it up to the victim, my boyfriend, for days on end. I imagined us sitting on the patio with mimosas, and him tearing up for joy over my perfect creation. Well, the reality was not as sweet as my fantasy. I tried a new hollandaise recipe (stupid!) and forgot the blanc de blanc. We ended up being in a rush to get somewhere and somehow the whole point of doing something like this was missed. Not for him, he loved it, especially the o.j. he squeezed himself from my orange tree. But for me, the fantasy won.

Are the two at odds? Or are they places that should be kept separate, and each valued for their own intrinsic worth?

How about idols? The idea of idolizing people who we don't know is not a foreign one in our culture. In fact, it is encouraged. It keeps the pop-media-machine running smoothly. It sells movies, it sells health and beauty products, it sells lifestyles, it sells politicians; idolatry sells. I remember meeting an idol of mine and it changed my perspective. This was a musician whose music I'd listened to since I was a teenager, and I had held her work in high regard for years. I had held her in very high regard, placing her up there with the Greats. And when, by some chaotic luck, my band got to open for her band, I was in a state of severe mental turmoil. As I listened to the sound check, all of the emotion that her music had stirred in me before was amplified and I was shaken; I am that affected by it. But when I met her, I was disappointed. She seemed bored, listless, vapid. Nothing even closely resembled the passion that her music expressed. I don't know what I expected from the encounter, but I couldn't listen to her music for a while after that. It seemed, well, boring. But now I'm thinking: perhaps the music has a life of it's own and the musician is simply a conduit for something that already existed, only lacked communicable form? And also we should consider the importance of the chemical reaction in our own heart when the music hits it... how much of the musician is there at that moment? Ever since, I've tried not to idolize people whose work I admire, and to recognise that my relationship with their work is not a relationship with them at all. In fact I am frightened to meet those people in anticipation of my relationship with the art changing.

And so, if fantasy wins out when it comes to expectation, where does that leave life? Is this the curse of the optimist, to be constantly disappointed? But, optimism and expectation are not one and the same. Neither pessimism, for that matter. I should let go of a vision that is colored by fantasy at the moment that experience begins, and let life bestow the blessings of suprise and learning. For it is more often than not that I learn the most about myself through my reaction to situations that don't turn out the way I imagined them. And these are the moments that sometimes end up being sweeter than what my imagination has the capacity to convey. Like love.