Repair Reflections: PRF’s Molly Simas considers pizza, innovation, and different languages of value.
Here is an anecdote:
I learned to cook pizza when I was 23, taught by someone two years my junior, who’d made pizza since age 15. She could assemble dissociated ingredients into a cheese pizza in under 45 seconds, beginning by spinning a lump of sticky dough into an airborne disc with a 3-foot radius. Next to her I felt old, slow, and stupid. She explained that, to spin, each pizza dough needed to be a uniform thickness, no lumps or crust. The dough stuck to my hands and between my fingers.
The training cook wasn’t concerned. She casually tossed a giant pizza dough that rippled like an airborne jellyfish as she told me, “You’ll eventually be able to tell by feel where it’s strong or not, where it needs more stretch or where it might rip.”
I thought with complete certainty, I will literally never be able to tell that. I tried to stretch my doughball and promptly ripped a giant hole in it.
The cook shrugged. “I rip holes in dough all the time.” She laid out an 18-inch perfect pizza skin. “You’ll figure out the best way to fix them.”
I didn’t understand where her confidence in me came from. And I certainly didn’t share it.
Now, by profession, I am a pizza cook. I have been paid to cook pizza, on and off, for almost seven years. Though I’ve taken stabs at moving on, career-wise, I’ve relied on this skillset again and again to patch the economic potholes endemic to millennial existence.
Years after my first moments in a pizza kitchen, I enrolled in a Master’s Degree in creative writing. During one of my graduate courses, over three class periods, the professor discussed in intricate detail what did and did not constitute as an anecdote. And yet: before using the word “anecdote” earlier, I Googled it, just to be sure. I would not feel comfortable explaining to someone with 100% certainty its meaning, even still.
But turns out, I can stretch out a giant ball of pizza dough with perfect distribution in 15 seconds or less. I can toss it in the air and spin it on my hand without ripping a single hole. I can touch a lump of dough on the table and instantly know where to direct my attention, where it needs pressure, where it needs tension, where it needs to be left alone. My body has learned to make pizza experientially, through trial and feedback, over and over. It’s not a fact I remember each time or a thing I need to look up and reference. It’s knowledge that’s just felt and there, like speaking a second language.
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Here is another anecdote:
At age six, I was in a blended first/second grade classroom. On the first day of class, the second graders read books out loud to the rest of us. I came home crying, devastated that they had access to this magical world of reading that I felt locked out of.
Motivated by this experience, I learned to read fast and did it incessantly, which earned me the label of “smart.” In truth, I was average in math and science and had no mind for the memorization required by history, but I was curious and liked learning new things. And so I was encouraged into academic rigor, advanced classes, college track.
No one ever suggested that a knack for problem solving would be at home in classes like electrical, auto, or wood shop.
Which is really interesting.
I don’t mention this here to shift the responsibilty for my career trajectory onto a faceless adult from my youth who could have steered me differently. Rather, I mention it in order to highlight how society at large categorizes certain traits and tendencies, and thus categorizes the children who demonstrate them. There are different sets of career options we frame as possible or desirable for different sets of strengths. These options come with their own hierarchies, expectations, and social capital.
I was lucky to attend a high school with wood, metal, and auto shops, even if I never set foot in any of them. For many teenagers, even those who are actively interested in such classes, the option to take them is dwindling as funding is squeezed and priorities are re-evaluated. It’s true that the option of trades is declining for everyone. An invisible casualty of this decline is the parallel decline of accompanying repair skillsets. If you don’t know how a thing works in the first place, how are you supposed to know how to fix it?
The closest I’ve ever come to a trade is my aforementioned pizza career. Hot take: making pizza and working in the repair trades are not the same thing. I’m sure they are different in more ways than I have the tools to articulate. But at their hearts they are both about skill and maintenance. I have a strong suspicion that they are languages with the same roots, the learning through touch and response, a knowing that lives in the hands.
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Here is less of an anecdote and more of an opinion on a cultural concept: writer’s block is sanctioned procrastination, born of the unspoken but universally acknowledged fear that one has nothing interesting to say. Assuming that any creative person experiences this feeling to one degree or another, I’ve universalized “writer’s block” one step further by thinking of it as “creation anxiety.” It is a common thing among my writer friends to extoll the virtues of working a job that isn’t writing – a job that relies on labor of the body and not of the mind. It’s so nice, we tell each other, to have a job you “just show up to.”
Compounding creation anxiety is the element of excess that permeates our society. We live in a world that is crammed with content – material, digital, psychological. We are overflowing with more than enough, with too much – and yet, for creatives, still there is the pressure of making something new.
As a writer, sometimes it feels like adding any more words to the world, in any capacity, is cranking up the volume on the white noise. I don’t know if industrial designers have a similar feeling, but I see the parallel component in the sheer amount of stuff for sale in every store, everywhere.
Inventing something novel and new is weighted with import and pressure in our collective cultural consciousness – but how much do we value learning the language of things in existence already?
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In October 2018, the Economist ran an article titled, “Repair is as important as innovation,” as if that very statement was news, or something that needed to be justified.
“Maintenance lacks the glamour of innovation,” the article declared. “It is mostly noticed in its absence [and] dismissed as mere drudgery, but repairing things is often trickier than making them.”
This hierarchy was so simple and obvious I felt embarrassed to have never consciously questioned it. The structures it discussed were familiar, assumptions I had felt in messaging all around me since forever: Inventing and designing, the article was saying, are Careers with Import. They are the Real Work. Whereas maintenance is a job with a punch card. Considered, perhaps, to be a job you just show up to.
Although this revelation was new to me, I’m far from the first person to feel its truth, and the Economist was far from the first to lay it bare. In April 2016, Aeon.co’s article “Hail the Maintainers” went one step beyond shining a light on this implicit valuation ranking, questioning the very presumption at its root: that innovation is unambiguously positive.
The article illuminates the neutrality of the word itself, and then the meaning we’ve come to assign it: “In formal economic terms, ‘innovation’ involves the diffusion of new things and practices. The term is completely agnostic about whether these things and practices are good. …Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end?”
“Hail the Maintainers” points out that the vast amount of technological labor in the world is in the realm of upkeep: sustaining and maintaining things already “innovated.” It nods to our inherent attraction to newness and freshness, but suggests that perhaps a shift in focus to the work of maintenance can bring a different conversation forward – one rooted in value over novelty. A conversation that perhaps first considers the integrity in keeping everything going, rather than focusing on what else can be invented and heaped atop the pile of our lives.
Early in my pizza days, over an after-close beer, I once tried to describe to a coworker the peace I’d found in the cycle of our restaurant, how cleaning at night’s end fed into setting up in the morning, which fed into the mayhem of lunch and dinner, and on and on. A circle rolling endlessly forward. He looked at me like I was crazy. “I don’t think the dish pit perpetuates peace.”
He wasn’t wrong. It is true that pizza kitchen work can be broken down to sweeping and mopping and rolling up mats and scraping flour muck from the floor at the end of the night. It isn’t naturally romantic. It’s true that I often demean myself automatically when I run into old friends from my MFA and they ask what I’m up to – I roll my eyes and say “just working pizza,” and in this way I reinforce the hierarchies about labor and “real work” that I’m trying, here, to call into question. This response comes more from a complicated shame, from societal perceptions about my work, than the way, at my core, it makes me feel about my own value. (It is worthwhile to consider how my response would change if pizza making skills were economically validated – if they came with the financial benefits of a desk. If, then, I would feel less of a need to disclaimer it as “just a pizza job.”)
And while it’s true that I hope to one day live off my writing – to one day toss my last on-the-clock doughball and walk out of the kitchen for the last time – it is also true that, in my way, I belong to the massive collective of workers whose job it is to maintain parts of a community ecosystem. Parts whose functions are entirely concerned with existing and thriving in place, pushing back against the general entropy of the universe with the simple goal of just keeping it together. It’s true that I have found genuine pride in setting up and taking down my kitchen, shift after shift, to support the work of feeding people – literally sustaining biological existence – itself a task no one is ever done with. During my cooking shifts, I don’t have creation anxiety about doing something new or different. I don’t experience “pizza-making block.” I do what I do, to the best of my ability, and I do it in a way that will support everyone’s ability to come back tomorrow and do it again.
And for these reasons, I wasn’t wrong either. Because I think there’s peace in that.
PRF’s “Repair Reflections” series offers contemplations, ideas, and story to generate thought and conversation around repair-related concepts in our everyday lives.