Tag Archives: personal feelings

The Nightmare During Christmas

09 Saturday Jan 2021

Posted by in Cooking

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‘Twas lunchtime on Christmas when all through the kitchen two creatures were cooking, both on a mission. The turkey was robed in bright foil with care in hopes the 20-pounder would not be too rare. The pies they were resting all snug on their racks, their pumpkin-y glory worth two sore backs. With squash in the oven and dressing to make, we looked towards the sink to find a small lake. When in the disposer there was predictable clatter, I went into the pipes to find what was the matter.

But first we tried dumping white wine vinegar and baking soda down the pipes to see if that would help and I’m not figuring out how to put that in this rhyme scheme.

So as I implied above, things went wrong in the plumbing department while making Christmas dinner this year. It was ground to a halt around the time we were both putting the fixings for dressing together and cleaning up behind ourselves. Suddenly, it became clear the sink was not draining as intended. This brought the proceedings to a screeching halt during a period of time that we traditionally use to relax before finishing all the prep for dinner. There would be no such indulgence that afternoon.

The first lucky break came when I remembered we had a vacuum capable of sucking up water. This only came after I spent time googling how to fix a clogged sink and the internet recommended one so I can’t credit it as an original thought. It was also the internet that gave a variety of home remedies for clogged pipes. I went with what seemed a reasonable combo of vinegar and baking soda. I did this… several times.

After about the third trial of experimenting with the concoction, hitting it with warm water that failed to drain, and Mom’s increasing dismay at the notion of hiring a plumber on Christmas, the creeping little voice in the back of my head that had grown louder over the past hour finally reached a decibel I couldn’t ignore.

“You need to open the P-trap.”

“Okay,” I said to the voice as I vacuumed out the sink yet again, “but I don’t know what that is.”

“You’re about to find out.”

Armed with a towel for my knees, a bucket for whatever was about to fall out of the pipes, and about every tool I thought might be relevant to the task, I went under the sink. Mom was on the phone with my aunt behind me so she had the opportunity to narrate the excitement to a third party whose Christmas was going in a considerably more sanguine direction.

Technically, the second lucky break was how easy to was to twist the pipes loose and pull the offending piece away for cleaning. I just have difficulty describing it that way. You see, when I managed to negotiate the P-trap away from the pipe attached to the wall, I immediately beheld a nest of green slime peeking its little head out of the pipe’s opening. I remember my face creasing at the sight, pulling down and back, as though every loose inch of skin was trying to crawl away from what I’d brought onto myself.

Using the scrub brush that’d been left beneath our sink by some either prescient or diabolical individual, I began to wiggle the sludge out of the pipe. It plopped into the bucket with thick, moist slaps, and my accompanying groans.

Eventually, it had to be said. “Being a strong, independent woman sucks.”

And you know what happened, reader? My own mother laughed at me. Laughed. On Christmas. The cruelty exceeds all bounds.

Still, I persevered. I washed the pipe as clean as I could, made sure water was running through it unimpeded, and put all the pieces back together nice and snug. At last, I pulled myself out from under the sink and watched in triumph as water poured down from the faucet with no obstruction. People talk about the Grand Canyon but sometimes it’s the simple things in life that are the real wonders.

Mom declared me the savior of Christmas so I graciously forgave her laughter. You know, like Jesus would. That’s two things Jesus and I have in common – forgiveness and miracles.

We got to take a very short break during our preparations after all, which I used to peel off a layer of skin in the shower. Once I was as red as the nose of that other guy who saved Christmas, we got back on schedule and still managed to have dinner right on time! We even almost had enough energy left at that point to eat it.

Happy Belated Holidays, everyone!

It Made Sense in My Head

10 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by in Cooking, Reflections

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Ever since March and the commencement of the quarantine that never ends, I’ve been getting a lot more invested in cooking. I mean this both literally and figuratively. My covetous little eyes are stalking a potato ricer on the regular these days.

I decided that if I was going to have a lot of time on my hands then I should start trying all the dishes I had mentally put in the category labeled ‘Wouldn’t that be nice someday?’. Things I assumed were way outside my skill wheelhouse suddenly became realistic expectations. I made a dark roux in under five minutes, I’ve baked a three layer cake for the very first time, and I cooked a deep dish pizza that slid right out of the skillet without issue! (don’t ask what happened to the second pizza. we don’t talk about second pizza). And naturally I’ve been making a lot of bread with the exception of sourdough. I’m not emotionally ready to invest in sourdough. However, I did bone a turkey without making any massive error or cutting myself! No, I had to wait until I was dicing shallots for that. A few days ago I’d just been thinking about how much I’d improved with a knife and wasn’t it nice I was nicking myself anymore? Oh, hubris.

After having recently lost some skin off my left middle finger, it made me reflect on mishaps that I’ve had in the kitchen in the past. I’ve mentioned burning my hand twice on the same pan in a ten minute time-span on this blog but I have yet to talk about the towel incident. It’s these little embarrassments that keep things in perspective. I may not be a master chef these days but the me from the towel incident absolutely couldn’t have made brioche. We grow, we improve, we get seen doing a colossally stupid thing and so the shame lives inside us to prevent a recurrence.

Right, I should probably actually talk about the towel incident now. Can’t get out of it.

On the evening of a Christmas Day oh so many years ago –

(I was in college but let’s not quibble over dates)

– oh so many, many years ago, we had guests over for dinner and Mom had gotten drained the drippings off the turkey so she could start making gravy. The bread rolls were sitting on the counter, raising contentedly under a towel. Now that the oven was empty of its avian occupant, there was plenty of room to pop the rolls in and essentially finish the last step of Christmas dinner. We were all talking and enjoying ourselves, guests happily stationed at the kitchen table, Mom at the stove, and me standing between the oven and the counter where the rolls innocently dwelled. Once the oven had been adjusted to the correct temperature, Mom asked me to put the rolls in the oven. And so, I did.

With perfect confidence I pulled down the oven door and scooted the rolls across the grate to sit in the middle of the heat. Then I shut the door, returning to the conversation as I leaned against the counter with nary a care.

A savvy reader may have already spotted the problem. Well, you were ahead of my brain in that instant. Actually, you were more than just ahead, your wits were functioning correctly. See, when I had looked down at the rolls covered by that towel I had only the slightest niggling thought about it being there which went along the lines, “Yeah, that’s supposed to be on top of the bread. Always is.”

This was incorrect.

It took a distressing amount of time for this realization to occur. I will always remember standing there, basically lounging in the perfect confidence that what I had done was correct. Obviously bread rolls bake with a towel on top of them. Obviously.

Then, like the one intrepid scientist in a disaster movie who saw it all coming but no one would listen, the thought manifested. It raced through the empty corridors of my head, feet slapping desperately against the floor as it sucked in ragged breaths. Finally, it propelled itself through the doors of HQ, startling all the other thoughts that had been mainly occupied with relaxation and the warm anticipation of a good dinner.

It pointed at them all, shrieking at the top of its lungs, “YOU DON’T PUT FABRIC IN AN OVEN!”

Suddenly there’s a panicked crowd in my head, all understanding the same thing at once. There was a towel in the oven and that oven was on and that oven was HOT. I immediately fell on the oven door, pulled it down, and whipped out the towel that had thankfully not started smoking. It did, however, have faint brown marks across the top where the oven had, probably with a great deal of confusion, begun its work.

I was then stared at by my mother and our guests as everyone figured out what I had done. There was a mix of disbelief and laughter. Not any among them were in quite as stark disbelief as I was. After all, none of them had lived the moments where they were completely and wholeheartedly convinced that putting a towel in the oven was the right thing to do.

In the long run no damage was done. The rolls were delicious, dinner was served, and even the brown marks faded away with a few washings. But I’ll never forget. It took me damn near three minutes to realize towels weren’t magically fireproof and some poor fool had actually given me a high school diploma.

So yeah, these are the things I think about when I have a little oops in the kitchen these days. It could always be worse.

It could have been a towel.

Vampires and Horses

08 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in My Books

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Some of you might remember a few weeks back I mentioned editing work I’d started when I was sixteen years old.  Well, here’s the result.

Animal_Instinct_eBook_preview

That’s right, folks!  The very first book I ever wrote is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

I started Animal Instinct when I was a wee sixteen year old high school student and finished it my freshman year in college under the eye of professors who knew far more about writing than I did.  I didn’t come back to it again until my last semester in grad school.  After blowing the dust off and wincing at the old bad writing habits, the real editing began.

It’s taken a decade for this book to see the light of day but I’m actually glad about that.  If I’d released it to the world as it was all that time ago, today it would only serve as a time capsule.  All the parts of me that I’d outgrown, lessons I hadn’t had the maturity to learn, would be immortalized.  And I’d rather not have one of my novels serve as a specter of past flaws, writing and personal.

If nothing else, I think my characters deserve better from me and I’m happy I gave it to them.

For a long time whenever anyone asked what Animal Instinct was about I’d give the shortest answer possible.  “Vampires and horses.”  That summary is still true but it leaves out a lot.

Appropriately enough, Animal Instinct is about learning how to be better.  It’s about people who believe they know the best way to do things only to discover something so much better was waiting just out of sight.  It’s a journey where the characters have to put aside the habits that had worn out their usefulness and take a good, long look at their mistakes.

But hey, there’s still plenty of vampires and horses.  Go check out the summary if you don’t believe me!

 

Animal Instinct is due to be released Oct. 21, 2017.  Go get those pre-orders in, friends.  I’ve got a personal goal of 100 and here’s where we stand so far:  2/100

Mysterious and Strange

28 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by in Reflections, Travel

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Today I was thinking about my Omens of Ill Fortune post and I realized that aside from my freshman year, something always went wrong whenever I was about to head back for undergrad at Sarah Lawrence.  More than that, it was a gradually escalating scale of bad.  You already know what was on the high end of the scale if you read the Omens post but in case you forgot, I have two words for you.

Walking pneumonia.

But my sophomore and junior year were similarly plagued.  Granted, the sophomore year incident wasn’t so bad.  The night before I was going to fly back I was cooking dinner and put my hand on a pan to get it out of the oven.  No glove because I’m a special genius who understands how ovens work.

(Still not as bad as when I put a towel in the oven because my brain told me it was totally normal, we always put the towel in the HEATED oven.)

So I scorched myself but I’d pulled my hand off fast enough that the skin only went a little red.  Thoroughly chastened, I put on oven mitts and and got the pan on the stove.

Where I then proceeded, not five minutes later, to stick my bare hand on the pan handle to adjust its position.

And yes, the handle is metal.

No, it hadn’t cooled.

This time the burn was not mild because I’d gone and wrapped my whole damn hand around the handle.  My palm got a taste of hell’s inferno right then.  The worst part had to be me just yelling out loud at myself as my mother looked on in bewilderment as to how I’d possibly made the same mistake twice in under ten minutes.

So I’d gone and done the cleverest thing possible.  I had a blister on my right hand not twenty-four hours before I’d need to be using it consistently to drag my suitcase around the airport and then later, you know, unpack my dorm room.  Awesome.  Wow.

Junior year a horse stepped on my back.

The story there is that Brego was still young and slight.  These days he’s a muscled-up freight train of elegance and poise (while still being a total dork sometimes) but in his early years he wasn’t the most sturdy.  You wouldn’t be either if you kept having dramatic growth spurts just as you started filling out.

It’s our last ride together and my trainer has us on the lunge line so she can control the pace of what we’re doing.  Everything’s fine, very routine, until something frightens Brego out of his skin.  Now I never saw what it was but according to witnesses a golf cart took a turn a little too quick and appeared.  Horses aren’t fans of things appearing out of nowhere.  To this day Brego does not like it when something loud and dramatic sounding happens behind him.

My experience goes a little something like this:

Brego leaps up and to the side, throwing the both of us off balance.  The lunge line is nowhere near enough to keep him steady and even though I had kept my seat, for sure wasn’t going anywhere, we were still tipping.  My weight at the angle we were leaning was too much for Brego to correct himself.  I had about a split second to figure this out and to then make the executive decision to bail.  I couldn’t think of a single good thing that’d be accomplished if Brego and I hit the ground together so I decided to take the fall alone.

This was both good and bad.  Good because a horse didn’t fall on my leg.  Bad because Brego still hadn’t quite gotten his feet under him and I was in his way.

Now, horses don’t want to step on you.  They flat-out do not want it.  No thank you ma’am that sounds terrible.  So when his hoof landed on my back he was quick to get it the hell off.  But even with just a fraction of his weight, that is a goddamned heavy animal.  My saving graces in that situation were how fast he got off me, the give of the footing I’d landed in and the fact it was my lower back so my spine had a little cushion around it.

So after checking to be sure I could still move my legs and getting levered off the ground, we went to the hospital and made sure nothing was broken.  They gave me a Vicodin pill that sent me on a ride to Loopy Town but no permanent damage to my back was found.  I lived on Advil for about a week to keep my back from screaming.  Weirdly, it never bruised the way I thought it would.  At most there was a sort of shadow whereas I expected a technicolor spectacular.

Then once I got back to school I had to move furniture so, you know, great timing.

Junior year was actually triple special on the bad news front.  First, my grandfather passed away shortly before I had to go back.  Then the last ride I had up where the horses live ended in catastrophe.  And then when I finally got home to pack up, Hurricane Irene canceled my flight.  Talk about a series of unfortunate events.

Then finally there was senior year with the pneumonia.  I actually can’t believe I hadn’t thought of how bad luck would smack me up the side the head every time I went back to school after summer break.  That might be a good thing, though.  I might never have gone on to grad school there if I thought there was some malevolent spirit gradually upping its game every time I flew back for a new year.

Come to think of it, I also always got bumped from at least one of my chosen classes so I had to scramble to pick a new one every year.

You know what?  I’m making a note.

Never do anything important in late August.

Ever.

My Weight

19 Tuesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Health, Social Issues

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Disclaimer: In case anyone isn’t looking to talk about health and weight, feel free to turn back now.  I’m not a professional and this is very much just me working out the thoughts I have about my personal well-being.

Recently I started this new health program type thing.  It’s a thirty day cleanse that’s about resetting the clock on your body, etc.  The factory settings of bodily health, you know?

I feel positive about it for a few reasons.  One of the big ones is that the shakes don’t taste like death.  I actually really like the vanilla, which is odd for me because usually these health shakes need more flavor to not be a miserable slog through breakfast.  But actually I could just dump the vanilla powder into plain water and be perfectly happy with it.

Another positive about this program is some products you can buy from the company that aren’t necessarily tied up in this thirty day thing.  There’s this fizz stick that gives you energy when you toss it in some water.  A 5-hour energy drink except there’s no specific time limit and I don’t feel like I took a shot of fruity chemicals.  Also I’m feeling the effects right now.  It’s pretty great.  A current of energy that isn’t giving me tremors.  I just feel motivated and that is a pretty unnatural state for me.

I don’t know if these things taste as good as they do, or don’t seem to be messing with my body in unpleasant ways, because of the all vegan ingredients and heavy emphasis on keeping these products natural but it’s suiting me pretty well so far.

Another thing I liked about the thirty day cleanse pitch is that it’s not really about weight loss, it’s about overall health.  Not to say they don’t mention you could lose some weight – I think every health program on the planet has to mention you have a shot at losing weight these days.

All this got me thinking about another decision I made for my own health a while back that I don’t regret.

I decided to stop caring about my weight.

This is easier said than done for a lot of people, I know.  It may even sound irresponsible.  If you’re not monitoring your weight, how much can you know about your health?

I did some irresponsible things in grad school.  My first year I really, really did not look after my diet.  My grocery budget was categorized under ‘luxuries’ in my head so it didn’t have a very high priority.  I’d also made a promise to myself to manage all my own expenses while at school so asking for help was out.  It didn’t feel serious to me at the time but I was learning some really bad eating habits.  ‘Eat all you can when there’s food in front of you because who knows, right?’ is not a good mentality.

I lost a good chunk of weight.  Enough that I fit back into dresses that had been a little snug.  And while that kind of made me smile, I couldn’t get my head around the fact that this result society had told me was good came about because I wasn’t treating myself very well.

The bad habits lasted even when food was readily available again so after grad school I put on a little weight.  Nothing huge but enough that I could feel it.  I didn’t have the sensation of comfort in my body that had been standard for me.  So I picked up exercise (a thing I really need to go back to) and started feeling a thousand times better.  I didn’t just get back to being comfortable, I started feeling better than normal.  And I stopped caring what the scale said.

I had energy and increasing muscle definition.  My mood improved by miles.

I realized whatever number the scale might throw at me didn’t matter because I wouldn’t trade how I felt to get it lower.  Feeling good, eating well, treating myself with a little care and compassion…  That was the best diet in the world.

Of course life intervenes.  I got out of the habit of exercising for a million little reasons but I know I’m going back.  I still took care to feed myself.  I’ve started cooking a lot and I find I enjoy it more than I thought possible.  I also started drinking a gallon of water a day.  Never going back to dehydration, no sir.  And now with this thirty day health ‘reset’, I have a positive outlook on this journey I’m starting with my body.

But I’m never going back to the scale.  For me, seeing that number isn’t helpful.  Because I’ve seen that number go low, felt good about it, and realized it was the result of bad practices.  And I’ve seen it go up, stabilize, and feel like my body had become a happy, welcoming place.

So I’m going to be a Millennial about this and prioritize my special ‘feelings’.  When I feel bad, I’ll make changes.  If I feel good, keep going.

This isn’t going to be useful to everyone.  Some people want that number.  It can be encouraging!

I just wanted to say to the people out there who don’t have a positive relationship with that scale in your bathroom, you don’t have to stay.  You could tell say to it, “I need some space from you.”  Or, “It’s not you, it’s me.”  Or, “I’m trying to focus on my career right now.”  You can always go back if you change your mind.

I guess at the end of the day I think you should feed yourself something more substantial than a number that might not be an entirely realistic representation of your health.

So take care, darlings!  And be kind to yourselves.  You’re listening.

Salutations

14 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by in Writing

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I’ve been doing a lot of editing recently.  Turns out when a good half of a novel got written when you were sixteen, you want to change more than a few things after graduating with a masters in writing fiction.  Although, oddly enough, the sex scenes needed very little adjustment.

So during this editing process it can be easy to stare into the void a little too deep and end up questioning every decision you ever made in your life because you used the wrong kind of there there.  It’s times like these you need to remember that you aren’t a terrible writer, mistakes happen, and Fifty Shades of Grey exists.  If after remembering that you don’t hurl yourself off a cliff because oh god that book got published then you’re doing okay.

It’s important to have standards, really.  You want to try your best to present a coherent narrative that won’t inadvertently scar and horrify the masses.

Funnily enough, I’m not referencing 50 Shades again there.  I’m talking about a book that came out a while ago that floated in, briefly shook my faith in the written word, and then floated away again.

Does anyone remember List of the Lost by Morrissey?  I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.  I’d put it out of my mind.  It helps that I haven’t read it.  Never will, either.

So then how, you ask, could I know it was a terrible, terrible thing to inflict on the reading public?

Because all you really need to know about that book is probably its most famous paragraph.  Just to warn you, he won a bad sex award for its absolute awfulness.  So before you go venturing off to google to find this abomination, be prepared.

Me, I’m not going to retype the whole thing for you.  I’d need to boil my fingers after.

But!  I will talk about certain phrases that come back to me in my nightmares.

“Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled”

I tried a few times to picture this.  Aside from the obvious horror of picturing a woman’s breasts becoming mobile in a way that would enable a barrel-roll to happen, I speculate as to the positioning required to think that would be a good descriptor.  In the scene they’re barrel-rolling over some dude’s ‘howling’ mouth – possibly howling in terror at what he’s witnessing – so I picture her sort of bodily rolling over him and just happening to scrape his mouth with her boobs as they go flying overhead.

That’s still not the worst part.

He uses the phrase ‘bulbous salutation’ to describe his erection.

Revolting?  Yes, of course.  Still not the worst part, though.

No, the worst part is him describing what that erection is doing.

“smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body”

So again, either it detaches – another possible explanation for him ‘howling’ – or he gets up and starts prodding this woman all over her body with his erection.  It does specify every muscle.  So he’s slapping around her calves at some point before awkwardly angling himself to ‘smack’ the back of her knees.  At this point the barrel-rolling almost makes sense as a move, since poor Eliza is probably fighting him to get into a position where sex could happen.

He’s busy acquainting his ‘bulbous salutation’ with her shoulder blades and she goes barrel-rolling around to beg for some actual erotic touching.

Now wait a minute, you might be thinking.

Actually you’re probably thinking ‘I never needed to know this, please stop, I beg you’.

Anyway!  You might be thinking I can’t be speculating about how none of this is leading to a satisfying sexual encounter.  After all, ‘every muscle’ includes the obvious one, right?  I have some bad news.

“smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone”.

Yeah, that’s going to make the sex a touch difficult.  Although maybe Eliza’s dodging a bullet there because I’m not sure anyone wants to get smacked in their ‘otherwise central zone’.  Their O.C.Z., if you will.

I really hope you won’t because that’s terrible.

It’s at this point I really want to go back in time to my sixteen year old self as she’s writing surprisingly tasteful sex scenes, pat her on the shoulder and say, “Don’t worry, kid.  Turns out people who’ve presumably had sex don’t know how to write it, either.”

No matter what mistakes you make while writing, remember to assure yourself that at least you don’t have breasts and erections departing their owners’ bodies.

Unless you’re into that.

What?  There’s a genre for everything.