I woke up at four o’clock this morning and couldn’t fall back to sleep. After some stern self-talk (and some unadvised scrolling), I finally managed to Get Up and Start the Day, which I find very difficult to do when I could be sleeping. When I go to bed at eleven, I want to sleep until six. Well. It seems that I am not the only one of us who is struggling with sleep these days, and I hold up a sleepy yawn-covering hand in solidarity.
Gift Giving Give Up: Thank you for your ideas about what to get my niece! I ended up… totally giving up on getting her something special. Carla and I instead went to Target, where Carla picked out something she was sure her cousin would like. We added a little souvenir we’d picked out for her in Paris and then I threw in a gift card for good measure. Is it the big, special, milestone-marking You Are Ten! gift of my dreams? No. But some days I just have to acknowledge that a) I am a mediocre gift giver and b) I got a gift in the mail, so that she will (hopefully) feel loved and celebrated. Some other soothing thoughts I am focusing on: 1. We got my niece’s parent a super special gift for a milestone birthday and to this day I’m still unsure if the gift made it. 2. No one got Carla anything extra special for her tenth birthday, and none of us felt slighted. 3. The gift is IN THE MAIL. (Buying gifts for my niece has got me thinking about Carla’s upcoming birthday, and what to get her. Ugh. She has expressed interest in roller blades. Is that something I can just… buy? Or does she need to try them on? Is it better to go to A Sporting Goods Store to find them or does it matter??)
Will Not Give Up, Will Not Give In: You know who isn’t giving up? The grocery store tulips I bought last weekend. They are in the sunniest place in the entire house, and yet there has been very little sunshine of late. But have they withered and died? No, they have not. They have instead stretched as far as their stems will allow them, to eke out every last morsel of sunlight they can get from our sun-starved spring skies.
Is It Time? My holiday cards are still up in my kitchen. More and more, recently, I have been looking at them and wondering, is it time to take them down? I continue to conclude that no, it is not time; I still enjoy wandering around looking at the happy faces and joyful messages. My mother keeps holiday cards on her fridge all year round; a friend I haven’t seen in too long used to keep holiday cards up on the picture rail in her kitchen all year. I have never once thought, “Hoo boy, those are long past due to come down.” Clearly I have a bias. Anybody else still have their holiday cards on display?
The Last of Us. Psych – this is not about the hit HBO series. (I am loving season 2, by the way.) This is about the last X that never seems to get eaten. Right now, we have a well-past-its-prime banana and a couple of crusty, near-stale pieces of sourdough that have not yet been – and, I hazard to guess, will never be – eaten. I sort of understand this phenomenon when it happens at, say, a work event where no one feels comfortable taking the last appetizer off the tray. But when it is your house? And when you are the only person in the house who eats bananas? JUST EAT THE BANANA. Possibly I am enabling the situation by buying new bananas and sourdough before every last crumb (what is the banana equivalent of “crumb”? weird sticky string?) of the previous purchase has been eliminated. I am not going to make banana bread or banana muffins with the lone overripe banana; I have learned from hard-earned experience that those will simply languish uneaten as well.
Today’s Tasks: Now that I am awake, I can turn my attention to the things on my to-do list. My priorities include: Grocery shopping; I am hosting Mother’s Day brunch and am planning on making this frittata (except with sausage instead of prosciutto). An editing/revising task for my volunteer role that I have been putting off for unknown reasons. A series of phone calls I have been dreading; I need to find someone to address the possible rotting issue with some of siding. This is the worst kind of phone call, in my opinion, because I have very little idea what the problem is or what I need, plus I think this is a situation where it’s prudent to get estimates from multiple sources which means I have to research and then call multiple places, feeling stupid each time. And then I have to deal with the inevitable call-backs and juggling of schedules and ick. The level of resistance I feel toward completing this task is astronomically high. In positive to-do list news, I have managed to sign Carla up for every camp she expressed interest in. I think her summer is going to be very fun but not overfull.
Hey, look at that! I managed to end what somehow turned out to be a list of whines on a positive note! Now it’s time to go wake up Carla, which – thanks to a friend’s suggestion that we start the day watching cat videos on Instagram – is one of my favorite times of day, when it used to feel like walking unshielded into a hardcore dodgeball game.
I have a bunch of tiny inconsequential things to discuss this weekend.
1. This Headline Made Me Mad: I recognize that not everyone cares about Mother’s Day, and that it is a perfectly fine and/or pleasant holiday for many, that it is a non-event for some – and that it is, for reasons of loss or estrangement or jerkfacery, horrible for others. That’s why I am building up quite a froth about this headline, and about all the other “last minute Mother’s Day” emails in my inbox. Because it is clearly accepted that some people will wait until the very last second, and that’s a shitty take. It is YOUR MOTHER, or the mother of YOUR CHILD. It is not hard to remember to do literally anything to celebrate the mother in your life! LITERALLY ANYTHING! That is the bar! For me, Mother’s Day has typically been a day of ambiguous expectations, complicated feelings, and subsequent guilt. For no reason other than that Mother’s Day is a day built on very high expectations that really have no way of being met while simultaneously feeling that I should nonetheless have no expectations at all. Gigi noted on Elisabeth’s post the other day that she tries to think of Mother’s Day as about others, not about herself; it is not a day for her but a day she gives her loved ones the chance to honor her. The Lazy Genius posted something similar on Instagram today, and both of these arguments resonated with me. So I am trying to reframe Mother’s Day for myself. (This does not work, of course, if your family choose not to honor you, which is fortunately not my situation. But if it is your situation, I see you and I am furious on your behalf.) I am also thinking about Sarah’sbeautiful article (which she linked to recently in a related post) about reframing the often tedious and resentment-building tasks of motherhood as acts of love, because it seems topically appropriate.
2. Indoor Outdoor: Guess who wore her indoors only shoes outside? And only figured it out halfway through the walk? Turns out you can wash sneakers in the washing machine, which is good to know.
3. Speaking of Shoes: I have FINALLY found a new pair of walking shoes. Mine were really in a state of disrepair. I don’t know WHAT I do to shoes, but the heel part of each shoe has a giant hole in it. It took me three tries, but I finally settled on a pair of Brooks Ghost 14s. It took me so long because my typical size felt very small, and then so did the next size up. So I am wearing size 9.5 instead of 8. They are very comfy and I only got blisters the first day I wore them, which speaks more to the state of my heels than to the shoes themselves. Now I am working on finding CUTE sandals that won’t make my feet ache.
4. I’ve Never Bean So Surprised: I went to roast some chickpeas the other day, and my can of chickpeas had a bunch of kidney beans in it! I was a little weirded out. It seemed highly likely that the beans were perfectly fine to eat, and that I should just move on with my day… but the catastrophizer portion of my brain very helpfully started coming up with all these Danger Scenarios: If the bean segregation system was down, wouldn’t that mean that other important systems could be down, too? Cleaning systems? Packaging systems that allow the beans to be safely canned? Perhaps the quality assurance had taken a nosedive at Hanover, and if they weren’t monitoring this aspect of quality, maybe there were other areas that were failing as well. If there is contamination of bean types, could there be other kinds of contamination? What if the bean containment unit hadn’t been cleaned properly, and the kidney beans were left behind and were all old and gross? So I poured the beans down the sink and opened a new can. Same issue! Kidney beans in the garbanzos! I poured that one out too and submitted a comment on the Hanover website. Then I opened a third can. Seemed fine. I rinsed the chickpeas and poured them onto a sheet pan. Where I spotted one lone kidney bean. I tossed it and roasted the chickpeas.
5. Memory Failure: My husband picked up his acoustic guitar the other day and I asked him if he was going to serenade me. No. He instead gave me a mini lecture on… chords, I think? Not really sure. I am not nor do I suspect I will ever be interested in playing the guitar and I tuned out a little, remembering this guy in high school who DID serenade me with his acoustic guitar. He was a lovely boy, so sweet and smart and very talented at both playing the guitar and singing. He used to sing me James Taylor and Eric Clapton songs, and I remember very distinctly how cool it was (a boy was serenading me! and he was legit good at it!) and yet how uncomfortable it was (did he… expect Something? I was not interested in him romantically) (and also it is a little weird to just sit in a room while someone sings at you). (I do think I may have kissed him once? Despite not being romantically interested in him? Which felt like a reasonable concession on my part for all the lovely serenades, but also probably confused the issue for him. Ugh. How do I prevent Carla from feeling like she ever owes a person kisses?) Anyway. I was sitting there, not listening to my poor darling husband as he earnestly explained how to use one’s finger as a capo??? to make power chords???? and thinking about this boy from high school and how I could NOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME REMEMBER HIS LAST NAME. I could remember his first name. I could remember the first and last name of the woman he married. (I wonder if he won her over by serenading her? and, if so, whether he sang her the same exact songs?) (And does he serenade her to this day?) But I CANNOT remember his last name. I remember his first name. Although the more I try to locate his last name in my memory, the shakier I feel about the accuracy of his first name. There are people I could ask, of course. And maybe I have a yearbook floating around somewhere that features him and his entire name. But instead, I keep picturing his very pleasant face and being unable to come up with the name. Memory is weird.
6.Non Dairy Update (as Opposed to a Dairy Non Update, or a Non Dairy Non Update): I have been dairy free for two and a half weeks now. It’s going fine. I don’t LOVE dairy products, so I don’t really miss them. The only place I need dairy is in my morning tea, and Nicole recommended cashew milk, so I am using that and it’s very creamy. It tastes like cashews though, which shouldn’t be a surprise based on the fact that it is cashew milk. But I found it surprising, and each time I drink my tea now I have to remind myself, This will taste mildly of cashews. I like cashews, and eat them as a snack quite frequently, so it’s not that I dislike the taste in any way. It’s just… not a flavor I experience often outside of the actual nut. The biggest issue I’m having is that I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get as much protein as I was able to squeeze in before. I have been counting calories since January (with very little luck, but I haven’t braved another option), and yogurt, skim milk, and cottage cheese have been KEY to me getting enough protein while sticking within my calorie limit. I will admit that I don’t really know what I’m doing in terms of protein, but from the resources I’ve consulted, it seems like the goal is at least 30 grams of protein per meal, with a secondary goal of 130 grams per day (some sources say as many grams of protein as your weight in pounds). I was pretty good at getting at least 100 grams per day with my regimen of yogurt-plus-skim-milk-smoothie with protein-fortified bread and almond butter for breakfast, cottage cheese for lunch or snack, and lean meat for dinner, with sometimes a little boost of yogurt for dessert. But now I am lucky if I can get to 70 grams of protein a day. Probably this is because I hate eggs (although I do eat them) and cannot eat soy (not that I could stomach the texture of tofu even if I could eat soy). Anyway. If you have Hot Tips about meeting protein goals I am keen to hear them.
7. Bee Mug: It is very grey and yucky outside today with occasional spurts of rain, which means that half of my Mother’s Day request will go unmet, at least for the near future. (I wanted to go to a local attraction we’ve never visited, because my child and husband have no interest in it; they agreed to go with me as a Mother’s Day gift. We can’t go tomorrow because my daughter has An Event; not sure if the event schedulers are geniuses or jerks.) So I am blogging, reading, and drinking green tea from my bee mug, which was a birthday gift from Gigi and which makes me deeply pleased every time I drink from it.
What are you up to this weekend? Any email headlines really grating your cheese today? From what vehicle are you drinking your morning beverage of choice these days? Any suggestions for CUTE feet friendly sandals I should look into? Have you ever been serenaded?
I keep encountering things that seem like they would be perfect for discussing with you. And then I promptly forget them. Perhaps I should keep a list on my phone, alongside my Target List and my Books to Look Into List and my Excellent Words List and my Grocery List.
The one topic I did remember – the ongoing stress of figuring out how best to interact with our neighbors and their dogs – is one I have posted about before. Lucky for us all, I read the previous post before sitting down to type up my angst. Not only did I discover that things have not improved AT ALL, which is quite discouraging, but I also prevented myself from writing (and saved you from reading) pretty much the exact same post, just three years later. So now I am out of a post topic, which is also discouraging.
But I am feeling chatty despite not having anything to talk about.
These are the lovely flowers I informed my husband I required for Mother’s Day. While I am not particularly pleased by having to ask for them, I am pleased by the end result. Very cheery, especially in light of the dreary weather.
My Mother’s Day was fairly lovely this year. Sunday is our normal cleaning day, which we moved to the day before Mother’s Day. But I was the only one who did any cleaning, so my house remains un-vacuumed, which is irritating and sneezy. (To be fair, my husband did fold the laundry.) For the day itself, I asked specifically for what I wanted (flowers, a book, Mexican takeout) and I got those things, plus my husband got me a couple of other goodies. Carla made me a coaster in school, which made me tear up at the thought of her teacher instructing all the children to make coasters for their parents. I lounged around and read all day. The only hiccup was dinner. Somehow I was the one who went to pickup the takeout, which annoyed me in retrospect. And apparently EVERYONE IN THE MIDWEST had decided to take their mothers to this specific Mexican restaurant for Mother’s Day, so it was very busy. None of the staff would look at me or address the long line of people waiting for takeout unless specifically asked (even though bags of takeout kept appearing on a long table near the cash register). And, worst of all, I did not get the margarita I had been looking forward to. They were listed as “sold out” online, so I hoped to order one in person. When I finally got a staff member to speak to me, she said I could order one at the bar. But after sitting at the bar for ten minutes, the bartender informed me I had to order the margaritas at the cash register. And it just wasn’t worth it after that. I waited for forty minutes for my food, and then only when I got home did I realize that they had forgotten the guacamole. OH WELL. It was still a nice, relaxing day. I know Mother’s Day can be fraught for SO MANY REASONS for SO MANY PEOPLE, and if yours was crummy, please know I understand just how crummy it can feel, and I hope that you have better days ahead.
Oh! Here’s something: I got my first haircut since February 2020! It is… barely distinguishable from what it looked like before the haircut. Although it FEELS 10,000 times better. My hair had grown quite long – nearly to my belly button – and I like the length. But it was at the point where, every time I brushed it, I would pull out huge brambles of tangled hair. The bottom edge was all raggedy looking and the whole mop was so lank and heavy. Now, I have some new layers and new movement to the whole thing. I wish I had been brave enough to ask her to whack more of it off. A friend of mine had similarly long hair and chopped it to chin length and it looks great on her. I could never do something that drastic – for one thing, my hair does not do chin length, it does triangle – but I was thinking about shoulder length, which would have gotten rid of a good eight inches. Oh well. It took all my courage to go INTO the hair salon during a pandemic; I didn’t have any left over for significant style changes.
Being A Good Blogger, I had Carla take a picture of my Before Hair as we were leaving for school. But we were already late and I didn’t think about how posing in front of a tree with leaves a surprisingly similar shade to my hair would make it difficult to see. (The leaves are a very dark reddish color, not green.)
I don’t consider my hair to be this color, but it looks virtually identical in the photo. Perhaps the Madison Reed folks should consider naming one of their hair dyes Crimson King Maple in light of this coincidence.
The other problem with the photo was how startlingly large I am in it. Listen, I am under no illusions about my current size. But it’s one thing to regard yourself in the mirror every day and another thing entirely to see yourself from behind, in a photograph. Well. I am working hard on Accepting Myself, because – as I mentioned in a previous post – I just cannot fathom engaging in another 1,200-calories-per-day diet, and the mere thought of trying keto again exhausts me. I do not want to think about food every second of every day, which is what happens when I diet.
We seem to finally be getting some sunshine in these parts. I tend to turn to the topic of weather when I need to transition away from topics that make me uncomfortable. I do this in person, too, just in case you thought I reserved this particular quirk for blogging. Weather. The great conversational neutralizer! It has been cool and springy, which I appreciate. I do not like when the weather goes from winter straight into blazing heat. But we’ve had so much rain (and snow on Mother’s Day!) that I am feeling extra delighted by the sun’s appearance.
Carla and I went to the garden center last week to pick up some plants. I have a couple of planters in the front of the house and a few in the backyard, and it was pleasant to fill them with flowers last summer (instead of with vegetables that are eaten by vermin the second they appear on the stems), so we filled them with flowers again this year. Carla really, REALLY wanted us to buy some variety of flower that said it would attract hummingbirds. I don’t think we get hummingbirds in this part of the country, and the flower was $17 which is too much for me to pay just to SEE if we could attract hummingbirds to our yard from wherever they normally live. But we did pick up some supposedly deer resistant varieties of flowers, the names of which I have promptly forgotten. We planted them, and then, of course, we got snow. And have had two separate frost advisories since, so I’m hoping they will survive.
If they do, somehow, live through the frost, they will also have to thwart the very brazen rabbits that live in our yard.
A little presumptuous, to just make oneself at home in a pot already occupied by flowers!
Oh! I thought of another thing I wanted to tell you. I read a very good book recently. I don’t think I’ve felt as strongly about a book as I did about The Friend by SigridNunez. That book was, to me, a real masterpiece. But that may have something to do with the subject matter, which was extremely well-suited to my particular personality and situation and career goals. ANYWAY, buy The Friend, the paperback is under $10 right now, but that is not what I want to recommend today. And, in fact, I don’t know why I am even bringing UP The Friend, because this other book is NOTHING LIKE IT IN ANY WAY. I am going to need a new paragraph here, to distance myself from The Friend.
There we go. The book I would like to urge you to read is A Burning by Megha Majumdar. Three things to know before rejecting it: First of all, it’s a fairly short book – 304 pages, but the book itself is somewhat smaller and narrower than a typical hard-bound book – plus, the chapters are very short, so it goes by quickly. Secondly, this book is described as a thriller, but I think that’s a mistake; it implies things about the way the book will unfold that aren’t actually true. I’d call this literary fiction with some elements of suspense. Third of all, if you read the description on the dust jacket, you get one sense of what the book is about… but it is not really about that. (This reinforces my usual practice of not reading the jacket copy before I read something.) Here is what the book is about, according to amazon: “Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan’s fall. Lovely—an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor—has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.”
I mean, that sounds (potentially) appealing, right? And, sure, the book addresses all those things. But it is just so much MORE than that. It’s told from three perspectives – you get chapters in Jivan’s voice, in PT Sir’s voice, and in Lovely’s voice. And there’s the underlying story of Jivan’s arrest and trial. But it’s really about the three characters, who live totally different lives from one another in the middle of contemporary India, and whose lives intersect because of the case against Jivan, and who all share the desire to better themselves and rise above their current stations. Ugh. I don’t even want to say too much about the plot, because I don’t want you to think, “Oh, I don’t want to read about a terrorist.” or “I have no interest in another book about ambition.” It is exquisitely written – beautiful, descriptive writing without being flowery AT ALL, and, in fact, being rather spare and simple. The characters are so different from one another and so distinct in behavior, voice, and morals. The depiction of contemporary India was, to me, utterly fascinating; I have never been to India, and know very little about day-to-day life there. And the commentary on morality and social aspiration was cutting and concise and never preachy or overbearing. It’s not even commentary, which implies that Mujamdar was sitting above her characters and pointing out how what they were doing was amoral or justifiable or whatever. She was masterful at allowing these characters and their actions to speak for themselves. I don’t want to push too hard, because of course we are different people and you may not like it all. But I really really recommend it. I found it simultaneously crushing and deeply hopeful.
Oh, by the way, I have a separate book blog and book Instagram if that sort of thing appeals to you. I feel weird bringing it up but also weird keeping it from you, but I would love to discuss books and writing with you, so there it is.
I am resisting the urge to start discussing the weather again.
My husband and I have a few small projects in mind for the coming weeks/months. One of them is to finally make progress on the gallery wall that I have been putting on my New Year’s aspirations list for YEARS. The other is to install a new mailbox. The snowplow people hit it sometime in mid-winter, and it listed sideways for awhile until the arm holding the mail box sagged away from the main post. The post is half-rotten and the whole thing looked very precarious. The person who came to trim the giant oak in our backyard kindly secured it with a bungee cord. And then during one of the April snowshowers, the snowplow people hit it AGAIN, knocking the entire mail box off the post. I nailed it back into place. But we need a new one. In fact, we HAVE a new one; it’s sitting in our garage, alongside a bag of quick-setting cement, waiting for us to install it. Perhaps we shall tackle the project this weekend!
Carla is done with school the second week of June this year. I keep thinking it’s still so far away, but we have less than a month now! I still feel grateful, every single morning, that she has been able to attend school in-person for the better part of this academic year.
Well, I am going to go pour another cup of tea and work on editing my manuscript, so come by and chat with me. I want to know what projects are in the works, what you’re reading or watching, how your hair is doing, what you’re eating for dinner or right this very minute, or literally anything else you want to tell me.
