Quodlibets

Lazy lazy

Last night I cooked dinner, an actual dinner, not one of our standard weeknight exercises in eating.  Every once in a while I just get so sick of the same old same old, and this week felt like this.  We need to eat in more (eating out = money we don't have), but have been failing badly at this task, because we're just sick of the same stuff, and figuring out a quick meal that we'll both like is nearly impossible.  I get sick of cooking for just me (and anyway, I'm always cooking the same thing for just me).  So anyway, I thought I'd try to make a breaded chicken piccata-esque meal, knowing all the while that Sam probably wouldn't eat the piccata part of the meal.  Which he didn't.  The piccata part was fine, though I think chicken stock and not white wine next time, but the breaded chicken always poses a problem, and the problem is this:  how do you get the breading to adhere to the chicken?  For this batch, I lightly floured, dipped in an egg wash (egg and water), and then re-dipped in seasoned flour.  But by the end of the cooking, the breading was just coming off in big chunks.  Sliding right off the chicken.  Don't get me wrong, it all tasted just fine (delicious, in fact), but that whole breading thing has been a problem any time I've tried to cook breaded chicken.  I think next week I'm going to (cross your fingers for me) try to make some sort of baked chicken that involves cornflakes.  It seems easy.

What else?  I feel like I've had things to say on various days this week, but then I just get too lazy to blog.  I'm not intentionally taking a break from the blog; I'm just lazy.  Seriously.  I also keep meaning to post my cross-stitch progress report, but right now I'm moving quickly, and I'm loathe to take it out of the hoop to photograph it, as the hoop is getting kind of....aged and rather useless.  I think if I post a picture, it'll have to be hoop on.  Which will obscure the progress, but you know, better that than nothing.

I swear I had more random things to post here, but now I can't think of them.  I'm going to make a renewed effort to be less lazy with the blogging, and post when I actually have something to say.

Which 50% is true?

So, one of the things that was going on this past weekend was a situation with my grandmother.  Not the one getting the cross-stitch (that's my maternal grandparents), but my paternal grandmother.  I say that there was a situation going on, and there was, but I don't want to deceive you, because it wasn't as if I had to deal with it, per se.  The people doing the heavy lifting in this situation were her children and children-in-law.  Nonetheless, due to a family party last Saturday, which fell during the time this situation was unfolding, the majority of the family is very aware of what's going on.

Anyway, my grandmother's grasp on reality seems to be tenuous, at best, as it has been for a couple of years, at least.  Even as far back as 10 years ago, I was warning people that 50% of what she said was just not true.  She's always been prone to exaggeration.  Intense exaggeration.  But in the past few years, she's lost her grasp on some names--newer members of the family, such as babies (sometimes she knows who they all belong to, and sometimes not) and new spouses--and seems to be functioning without an adequate sense of time.  She no longer understands money, it seems, and while her bills are getting paid (presumably) and she is smoking and drinking coffee, there isn't much certainty that she's eating.  She's whip thin, and looks frail.

But this is not a woman who is easy to budge.  She's quite mean-spirited, or at least has been in the past, and getting her out of her house (because she still does live alone, and quite scarily, still drives) is the problem of all problems.  I do not envy my aunts, uncles, and father for having to tackle the problem.  It can't be easy.  Nevertheless, after this weekend, it seems fairly clear to me (and probably most of us) that she simply can't continue living alone. 

A week ago, she fell.  She fell in a parking lot, and she broke her leg.  No one is sure how it happened, because she's told at least 5 different stories about it (and I heard one of those yesterday afternoon when I visited her), but suffice it to say, the break was bad enough (I believe it was in the femur) that she needed surgery on Friday.  She's fine; as fine as a woman with some stage of dementia going can possibly be.  But she couldn't go home upon release (as there really is no one to take care of her), so she's now in a nursing home. 

As I said, I visited her there yesterday (although, good heavens, not alone.  My mom was going, so I was basically just tagging along), and the visit was....interesting.  G-ma (how I often abbreviate grandma for IM conversations) was frankly, as cheerful as I have seen her in the past couple years, and seemed to ping-pong between wanting desperately to go home (not a surprise) and seeming to understand that there was a reason she couldn't go home (quel surprise!).  She seemed to live in reality, and then...not so much in reality.  I was thinking about it this morning, and I can honestly say that of all the things she said, I'm not quite sure how much was true.  I believe that when she said the food was bad, that was the truth.  She said her roommate was quiet, and that seemed to be true.  But other than that....well, it's hard to say.  At one point, she told us that her sister-in-law (my late grandfather's sister) had visited her, which was....interesting, as that side of the family has been feuding with us for years and years and years.  At least 15, I'd guess.  As to whether Tootsie and John did actually visit (and dude, it's totally not an alias.  I really have a Great-Aunt Tootsie), well, who can say?  I'd love to believe that they did.  But I can't be certain. 

I don't know precisely why I'm telling this story, because I'm not one of those girls who has ever been super-attached to the g-parents.  I have some great g-parent memories (of all 4, really) from my childhood, but as I grew up, that attachment was never maintained.  So unlike some kids, kids who really KNOW their grandparents, and feel extremely close, I don't have that.  Don't get me wrong, what's going on with my gma is sad.  It's sad and it's very hard to rationally deal with.  It's hard for me to think about how confused she must be, and how that feels.  But at the same time, there is some detachment there. 

Maybe I'm telling this story because right now, I've got stress-related eczema on my fingers (it's not gross, don't worry!) and there are other signs that my body is cracking under the strain.  Under the strain of what, I'm not necessarily sure.  Except that in the background, amongst all the other things, there is this grandma thing, and this situation?  Not even close to resolved.   So there it is, taking up space in my head, and possibly this was an attempt to get rid of some of that.  To exist more peacefully with it. 

My face, my face

I'm not dead.  I wasn't blogging because Sam was out of town, and I was afraid that a) I would run on and on about how weird it was or how lonely I was (which I actually wasn't incredibly lonely; not to say I didn't miss him, because I did, dreadfully) or b) I'd be broadcasting my aloneness, those opening up an opportunity for the rapist to come get me.  (Yes, THE rapist.)  So I abstained.  I haven't forgotten about the Monday cross stitch updates, but I hadn't been sewing much, so I just wasn't posting.  I will probably post an update tomorrow, as I did end up sewing a ton while Sam was gone, and the progress is crazy and scary all at the same time.

Also, I did have other things I could post about, such as the harm a wax did to my face.  It's really quite awful.  I went to a new waxer (my sister's), which was exciting because it's more convenient (being in the city and all).  Unfortunately, this person, while nice, seemed to have no clue how to handle skin with a condition such as mine, and so I ended up with a really, really nasty looking few areas of skin.  It's bumpy, and it was red for two days.  I must add that the bumps are very different from the bumps I was getting from the waxing before.  They're more tenacious, they're not soft, and they just look....bad.  So after this miserable experience (and let me say, if you saw me walking down Lincoln on Friday evening and were scared, I'm very, very sorry.  I scared myself when I got home.)  I've sort of decided that if I can't be waxed anymore.  I'm going to talk to my original waxer, the person who's been doing my face for probably....six years.  At least.  And I'm going to see if we can't work something out for my upper lip (tining it nonexistent, hopefully), and if she might agree to periodically pluck my brows.  I know that sounds silly, because I can of course pluck my own brows (and do, periodically), but the thing I can't seem to do is keep them shaped correctly if I'm just plucking on my own.  So I think if she plucked them every 8 weeks, I could keep them neat in between pluckings.  So I'm going to see what the deal is. 

Frankly, if you're wondering just how bad my face could be, let me tell you that I wore make-up to work yesterday.  Uh, yeah.  I haven't worn make-up to work once in the two and a half years I've been here, and my face was so yucky yesterday that I had to.  I'm not today, but it's merely a time thing, and not a lack of necessity on the part of my face.  The area underneath my left nostril is still disgusting.  (It sort of looks like I've got toxic snot running down my face and hurting my skin.  It's awful.) 

Lots of other stuff happened while Sam was gone, but it's not necessarily stuff I want to talk about in any great depth.  (No, that's just my face.)  And now Sam is home, and things are back to a delightful state of equilibrium. 

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Isn't that the most cliched post title ever?  I think it is.  But I'm actually talking about changes, here, changes in my listening habits. 

I'm not sure if it's a product of age, or just changing tastes, but I am nearly unable to listen to music.  I'm uninterested in listening to it at my desk for 8 hours a day, and I'm utterly opposed to having it on in the house while I'm doing most things (cleaning being a very rare exception to that rule), including but not limited to: crossword puzzles, reading, sewing, relaxing, cuddling.  I've been off music in the car for ages, since I started the commute, so that's not really new, although I did used to listen to music some afternoons on the way home.  Part of me thinks it's because some of my music is very stale; when you listen to music 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, things get old fast, I guess.  But otherwise, I'm clueless as to why.

The thing is, I still hear music in my head.  That is to say, songs still get stuck in there and rattle around and annoy me.  And I'm still loving Rock Band like crazy, so it's really not a dislike of music, per se.  It's just...something I can't describe.

And so not only has the music sort of crept away, but the audiobooks too.  Perhaps it's a dearth of good ones; I've had a hell of time even finding things I want to buy.  And then I've started two that I don't like at ALL, which sort of sucks, as well as taking some of the wind out of the sails.  For a few weeks, all I listened to was the archives of the SModcast, which I've been done with for a while.  Searching for something else, I hit upon This American Life, which is working nicely, but will get expensive if I want to get the archives, as the episodes are either .95 or .66 depending on where you get them.  So although I've scoffed at them in the past, I'm now listening to podcasts.  I don't feel all that hypocritical about it, because I've always scoffed at them as being just a different way to listen to the radio, and that's basically what I'm doing, subscribing almost exclusively to podcasts that are from NPR.  (This American Life, Sound Opinions, The Bryant Park Project, and a few foodie ones from NPR, can't remember their names right now.)  I don't have a radio at my desk, and I did search for a cheap one online, but with no luck.  My computer also has speakers, but they've been plugged into my iPod dock for forever, simply for ease of listening to that.  I don't much feel like switching back and forth all the time.  So NPR podcasts it is.  (I admit to some longing still for a desk radio, so I can listen to Cubs' games, which are inaccessible even through the computer.  Radio only.)

So I find myself now listening to what is essentially talk radio, all day, every day.  The past week or so, I've been catching up with a week of Bryant Park Project programs (though after today, I'll be caught up, and end up listening to every day's podcast the next morning at my desk), and then I've got to start finding a few new ones to subscribe to for desk listening.  Any suggestions?  Let me state right off that I'm not interested in comedy, as it won't work at my desk.  Newsy is best, or something special interest that fits my profile.  NPR is preferred.  Does anyone have any ideas?

The most cloying meme in the universe

Via frogblog.  I'm putting this after the jump, because it's pretty sickly sweet.  It's a couples meme, for god's sake.

True Confessions

Though I'm loath to admit this to my golf crazy family, I quite like the Masters.  In fact, I quite like watching all the majors, mainly due to the insane amount of reading I've done about golf as someone who actually doesn't like golf very much.  True story:  One summer I took golf lessons and so on and so forth, and was playing a round with my mom at the country club.  I presume I had a good hole, and in fact I think it was a bogey on a par 3 (a very short par 3 on the front nine, if I remember correctly), because she got very excited and said, "Aren't you so excited?  That was so good!" to which I replied, "No, not really, because now I have to go and do it all again on the next hole."  I'm pretty sure that's when my mom realized that I would never, ever be a golfer, something I'd been saying all along. 

That story aside, it's pretty hard to ignore golf completely in a house that seemed to throb with golf passion all summer long.  My sister and I used to joke we were golf orphans.  Of course, by the time both of my parents were out golfing all weekend every weekend, we were old enough to drive ourselves around, so the claim was incredibly facetious.  If my parents weren't playing golf, they were watching it, and my mom still has golf on all the time when I drop by her house.  It'd be very hard to ingest none of that passion while living amongst it.  So I've done a fair amount of golf reading in my life, and I'm not sure why.  Probably because I've always known a good bit about it, so it seemed marginally interesting.  (I actually just finished a golf book, though I think it was more of a travel book:  Around the World in 80 Rounds.  I wouldn't highly recommend it to anyone, except those people that have an interest in playing golf in odd places.  Very interesting, as such.)  Possibly my favorite golf book ever is called The Majors, and this is probably what stoked my interest in watching them.  I probably won't watch much of them (I don't think Sam could bear it.), but I'd be lying if I told you I didn't have the automatically updating 2008 Masters leaderboard open in a tab in my browser at right this minute.  (Current Leader: Luke Donald.  But take that with a grain of salt, as all of the golfers haven't even gone off yet.  The start of the tournament was delayed for 40 minutes due to fog.)

I don't know if I know 50% of the names on the board, and I'm not planning on counting, but I think 33% would be a good guess.   I think that's more than a good number of the people in this country, and I wouldn't be surprised if 100% of my co-workers didn't even know what the Masters was.  Sam is in a slightly different boat, as am I, being that he too has a golf-mad father.  So you can't count him in that little tabulation.  He certainly knows of the Masters, and probably could name a few golfers.  But he isn't interested in watching it.  Or reading about it.  He probably doesn't even care who wins the Masters, just like he doesn't care who wins the Kentucky Derby (another thing I find intriguing and love to watch).  I consider the two very interesting, because aren't both things better with the potential of a sweep?  A Triple Crown winner, a Grand Slam winner.  Much better that way.  Much more exciting. 

Maybe I'm just a nerd, however.  A (slight) golf nerd, as it were.  How could I avoid it?

The recipe that almost broke my cooking spirit

So yes, that doozy of a recipe.  It was definitely an experiment, let me preface by saying that.  So the recipe was for vegan sloppy joe.  I wasn't necessarily interested in the vegan aspect of the recipe, but more the sloppy joe aspect.  I like a sloppy joe; Sam and I make it at least a few times a month with ground beef, and if I do say so, our recipe is very excellent.  And when I was a vegetarian, I always like the boxed sloppy joe mix made with soy proteins.  So I thought that sloppy joe made with lentils might be very delicious.  There was nothing in the recipe that was overtly vegan.  No weird substitutes, no odd ingredients at all.  Most items I had in my own pantry, in fact.

So okay, I thought the maple syrup was odd.  But I figured maple syrup might be just as good as brown sugar for flavoring.  And the yellow mustard seemed a little odd, but I figured that's just a substitute for the vinegar.  My own personal distaste for yellow mustard notwithstanding, I thought it might make sense.  Also, I wondered about the copious, heaping amount of chili powder (3 TBSPS!).  I've never had sloppy joes flavored with that before, but you know, I like chili, and I like tacos, so that didn't strike me as disgusting.  And then oregano, tomato sauce and tomato paste rounded out the recipe.  Oh, and onions and garlic and lentils, of course.

Let me categorically state that the lentils were NOT the problem.  I have half a pound left, and I intend to find some other way to eat them, because I LIKED the lentils.  I don't think the onion or garlic was the problem (they sure smelled good cooking), and even the chili powder itself wasn't the problem.  (Though I cut back on it.)  In fact, I'm pretty sure that the problem wasn't one single ingredient, but the bizarre way all these things smell and taste combined.  And that is:  like CURRY.  Like noxious, nauseating curry.

I, my friends, don't like curry.  I eat Indian food, but only the very mildest curries.  Any hint of a conventionally smelling curry, or a conventionally tasting curry, and I'm holding my hand over my mouth and trying very hard not to barf.  Once, Sam ordered a Thai curry to taste it, and the minute he popped the lid off, I ran to the window and stuck my head out.  The stuff just does NOT agree with me.

So okay, the vegan sloppy joe WASN'T a curry.  And as such, it wasn't quite as noxious.  I tried really, really hard to choke it down.  I had a HUGE pot of it on the stove, and it seemed like such a massive waste to toss it.  So I choked some down, stopped abruptly, and said to Sam desperately, "I can't eat this."  Then I made him throw the stuff away.  And clean the pot.  Because the smell was suddenly THAT bad.  And because he's an excellent boyfriend, he did it, and then he took me to Wiener's Circle for dinner.  I went from noxious fake vegan curry to a gorgeous grilled piece of tubular meat made up of who knows what.  And I was HAPPY.

I'm not saying I'm done experimenting, but I'm never again putting mustard and syrup in the same vicinity.  I'm still interested in a vegan/vegetarian sloppy joe recipe, because I think it could be good.  The lentils were right, I'm telling you.  It was the rest of it that was OH SO WRONG.

F-LOG

For a little while now, I've been reading heavily within the fatosphere.  It started with Shapely Prose, and just branched out exponentially.  Most of the time, I agree very wholeheartedly with what's being said on these blogs.  I believe that food doesn't merit moral judgment.  I believe fat itself doesn't merit moral judgment.  I believe quite strongly that pretty much every fat person is just as fuckable and lovable as pretty much any thin person.  As far as I'm concerned, fat v. thin has nothing to do with that, and personal preference has everything to do with it.  I'm not saying everyone has to love fat people or want to sleep with fat people, but I'm saying that there are enough people who do both of those things to keep the world turning.

But there is one teensy tiny little thing that sometimes bothers me about fat blogs, and that's the strident assertion that it's okay to be fat, it totally is, we swear.  You know, as long as you eat healthy and exercise.  Almost all sites have some sort of wording like this:  Fat isn't inherently bad.  Even if you're not "healthy" you shouldn't be discriminated against for being fat.  And clothing manufacturers should make clothes for all fat people regardless of why they're fat, because everyone deserves to feel good about what they're wearing.  But you know, I'M a healthy fat person.  I don't eat that much at all, and when I do, it's VEGETABLES.  So suck it, fast food eating fatties, because I also EXERCISE EVERY DAY because I believe in HEALTH at any size.  Yes, we all need to be "healthy", so if you're not, you're not the right kind of fattie.

I'm not saying it's universal, really.  I'm just saying that there's a troubling commonality of this sort of implied opinion amongst many fat bloggers.  A few keep Flogs (Food Logs) publicly on their sites, and I'm not making any judgments about that, but I will say that if I myself did that, it'd be to prove something, and that something would be that loook!  I'm a better fattie than you because I eat better things.  Quite a few talk very openly and copiously about exercise, whether it be going to exercise classes or running or biking or whatever (something that I'm intensely guilty of in this space), and spend a lot of time saying that it doesn't mean anything, and that they're still fat.  And that they still believe that it's okay to be fat.  You can be fat too!

I'm absolutely not saying that there's something wrong with doing these things.  Of course in an ideal world we'd all eat healthily every meal every day, and we'd all get our 60 minutes of cardio or whatever in 5 times a week.  We'd all be running along the lakefront or biking along it, or running on a treadmill pumping weights.  Etc.  And in some people's perfect world, this means we'd all be skinny.  Now, in a fat blogger's world, we'd all look different, and be different sizes, and believe you me, that's an entirely better worldview than the former.  I'd much rather live in a world that accepts that humans come in all different shapes, and that encouraged people to love themselves for who they are. 

Except that it's hard to swallow this with the pill of exercise and vegetables.  What I'm getting at is this:  if you're trying to convince the world that being fat isn't so bad, maybe you should just take all qualifications out of it completely.  Maybe you should say, "What you look like doesn't matter.  Point blank."  Instead of saying, "What you look like doesn't matter.  Especially if you eat healthy and exercise."  We're wrapping the fat acceptance movement in another unhealthy mantle when we imply that the only way you will REALLY be accepted as a fat person is if you do everything in your power to change it and whoops!  nothing works.  I've said it here myself.  I'm 100% not exempt from this sort of thinking.  I've completely bought into the idea that it's okay for me to be fat as long as I qualify it with a statement that reasserts that I've tried really hard to be skinny by eating right and exercising and that it doesn't work for me, so that's okay then. 

But what if....what if it's just okay for me to be fat?  What if you found out that I didn't exercise all that often, and that I didn't always eat healthy?   Would you think less of me?  What if I ate the same as always, and exercised the same as always, but stopped congratulating myself for it?  How would I feel about myself?  Worse, that's how.  Because like it or not, we still associate those things with some moral superiority, and if you take away that moral superiority, all you are is fat, and in the United States right now, fat is wrong.  Fat is ugly.  Fat is not worthy. 

Don't get me wrong.  I'm in complete agreement with the idea that we need to radically rethink the way we look at our bodies.  In general terms, this is exactly what the fatosphere wants.  I want this.  But the undertones, the unspoken words, the implications, they bother me.  We're making fat people justify their fat, and that's no better than asking them not to be fat at all.  Nobody should have to justify how much they weigh.  Point blank.  Super skinny girls shouldn't need to go on and on about how much junk food they eat, and fat girls shouldn't need to go on and on about how much vegetable matter they eat.  How much each person eats is really no one else's business, unless the behavior veers into a fatal eating disorder.  (People with eating disorders should be encouraged to seek help.  They need it, and they should get it.  But nobody should be accused of an eating disorder (skinny or fat) on the basis of their appearance.  We just aren't in a position to know who is suffering from what, so we should refrain from commenting on it.  Those closest to the people in danger will hopefully be able to make a difference in that person's life, but otherwise, I'm sick of reading gossip mags with anorexia scare articles.  It's really none of my business, and I wouldn't want them judging me to be a binge eater by looking at me, now would I?)

I don't care anymore.  What I mean to say is, I'm done judging myself to be a better fat person because I work harder at being a worthy fat person.  I don't want to talk about my eating habits, or how much I exercise, because you shouldn't care either.  Maybe I'll talk about a recipe once in a while (and boy oh boy, did I cook a doozy of a loser last night.  Possible details in another post, when I've recovered from the smell.) or a fun restaurant.  I still love food, you see, and I still consider it one of the great pleasures in my life.  But no more of those posts detailing how good I am, asking you to love me the way I am because I tried, I really tried.  This is me, and you either love me, or you don't.  I've got to get on with the task of loving myself, and this whole moral morass of exercise and food wasn't helping me.  It was actively hindering, actually.  And I wonder how many other fat girls are out there, and feeling like I feel?  Finding it hard to live up to the exercise/healthy eating expectation, and thus finding it hard to love their bodies?  It'd be a shame to find out that there's a lot of us.