Homo Faciens
Homo faciens is Latin for man the maker
(and it’s
pronounced with a hard k, not an s); it occurs to me that the term
perfectly describes me. Today—while simultaneously performing a
very difficult job—I am doing the following:
- Grinding wheat into flour
- Baking shortbread from that flour
- Making coffee from freshly-ground beans
- Baking pumpernickel bread with that coffee
- Making leek, potato and carrot soup
- Grinding barley
- Brewing porter from that barley
- Juicing bananas
- Making banana leather
And yes, I’m performing that rather complex and troublesome job as well (believe it or not, each of the above tasks only takes a few minutes at a time and can easily be squeezed into my breaks).
This weekend a buddy of mine threw an Ides of March party which encouraged one to wear a toga (in green for St. Patrick’s Day). In the space of six hours I researched and recreated a Roman tunic and toga—including going to the fabric store and finding linen. Yes, that’s right: in under one quarter of a single day I managed to entirely reconstruct an ancient pair of garments about which I had no previous knowledge (in fact, until I did the research I did not realise that a toga is really just a sort of stole-like thing worn around a tunic).
I’m so incredibly, unutterably, ineffably cool.
