Deer in Headlights I've always, always yearned for a really nice set of cookware. I never wasted time/money buying mid-level cookware: all or nothing, baby. I've gone all this time using nothing, just the handmedowns abandoned by roomates (sometimes even abandoned by PRIOR tenants.)
Sunday, I got my Really Nice Set.
(There are still a couple more pieces I'd like to add - wok for sure, maybe a saucier if I'm feeling, well, you know.)
Really Nice Set. HUGE. Heavy. (
Red, too, but that's neither here nor there. FOXY, though. Excuse me.)So here I am, about to box up (
throw out? never) all the old aluminum pots and misfit covers and burned saucepans and warped skillets. Here I am, finally able to really COOK again (if your equipment sucks, the dish is never as good as it can be) - and I've gone all weird.
I've gone into frozen panic.
I'm scared of my pots.
I don't know where to start. I have, since unboxing the pots (that took 2 days, too - I had to work up to it) - avoided them. Decided to wash them. Did so. Half of them wouldn't fit in the dishwasher. I'm overwhelmed.
I have, in my panic, forgotten how to cook anything but ramen and fried eggs.
I've been eating nothing but pizza for days. No pots or pans necessary. Today I finished the pizza and now... fuck! I have to cook!
To avoid cooking, I'm shopping around for the matching wok. Considering utensils. Eyeing Pyrex.
I like used stuff. I like handmedowns. You can wreck them without getting too upset about it.
Eek.
Okay, looks like I'm doing German for dinner. Schnit and noods, as we say 'round these parts. We are idiots, I know. Drop it.
Now, all I need is an oven that goes past 180 degrees, and a mouseless range, and I'm all set.
Who thinks I'm kidding?
Oh, updates:
Eike went into heat on spay-day, so that didn't happen. I sat around with her for three weeks, dealing with psycho bitch in heat. Then she got spayed, and I sat around with her for a week, dealing with psycho dog confined so as not to dump her guts onto the couch.
My grandmom, Irene Darling O'Neill, passed away last Wednesday. The wake was Friday. She loved Jeff Gordon, so her casket had a Jeff Gordon sticker on it, courtesy of my dad. The funeral was Saturday morning, and it was sad. But, all is good.
Dale Jarrett won the Bud Shootout Sunday, due to the fact that I was shrieking at the TV with joy every time he gained a position. FINALLY. All this "race the truck" crap they've been doing for the past couple of years has really been distracting him. Race the CAR, Dale. The CAR. Yessir, just like that. Thank you.
Must prepare for the shopping trip. Here we go a'spaetzle-ing...
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 5:17 PM
EyeyeyeI'm blind as dick, and wear contacts.
(When I had white hair, I tried colored lenses - lavender ones. Looked like I had bulletholes for eyes. I'll stick with my algae-green eyeballs, thanks.)
At any given moment, some fucking painful thing is in my eye. Cat hair, dog hair, bird feather fluff; mascara, eyelash, shard of Bel-hair split off overdyed ends; mohair, rabbit fur, angora, raccoon, fibers from fake leopard; rage, scorn, hatred.
Day job is making me very, very angry.
This is my own fault, I guess, this getting angry at the malfeasance and idiocy. Everyone else just Lets It Go (or engages in it.) Oddly, they are also the ones that consider their day jobs Their Careers. To me, working here is no different than working at the gas station (no hazard pay, though) - and yet, I'm the one that goes ballistic. Often.
This has been a neverending problem for me. When I knew Jeff, he tried to teach me the Zen of Fuck It. The best I could do, rather than breezily say "fuck it," was sort of collapse upon myself and burn quietly, ember-like. Some days, that really was better than being in full conflagration. Most days, it just made me more dangerous, because one prod with the poker would make me shatter easily into a hundred very, very hot red chunks.
Fuck Zen, anyway.
I can't watch/read The News or attend in any way to Politics. Both send me into a vortex of fury:
1. Idiocies abound, fury ensues
2. ... but I try to quell it, because the "news" is just not real, ain't the truth (and nothing a politician SAYS is worth hearing, and the things he does to screw us, we never learn until it's too late)
3. ... but since the "news" isn't real, isn't true, the only way for me to really know Real and True is to be ON HAND when whatever event happened, and to intimately know all the players and their motivations and, well, be a damn god, basically,
4. ... which won't happen, so the best I can go on, if I care, is the "news," which isn't real, so I worry my little head over a manufactured reality -
5. ... which, isn't it, is a definition of psychosis? Mass fucking psychosis, here, all thanks to CNN.
(I do watch/read the news, and I do attend to politics, and I do get fucking nosebleed furious - but I'm just saying that I shouldn't.)
This morning, I come in to work and am getting my coffee with one of the construction supervisors. We say our howdys and mine is "How are you," and he says, "I'm fantastic. Can't complain about a thing," and I half-envy him, half-agree*, and either way, plan to gut him because he's so peppy - but he continues, "No sense in complaining, got to live your life by your own terms, and my terms are: enjoy it."
I blink and tell him he may have just changed the course of my day.
He also may not have.
*Agree: I'm not much for complaining. Or bitching. Or moaning. And I'm vehemently opposed to whining. Nothing like a whine to make me want to slap the tongue out of the whiner's head. At least a complainer can be easily shut down with, "You did this to yourself. Fix it." Now and then, though, I leak. No details. "Job sucks, my fault for staying" is about as bad as it's going to get.
On the writing front: I have four short-story deadlines and am supposed to be writing the novel, according to my Secret Pact. (Plus, it's just time to do it.) Two of the stories will be relatively easy, in that there aren't any guidelines. One will be a challenge, in that there are extremely strict guidelines. And one SHOULD be a piece of damn cake, but isn't.
Why should it be a piece of cake? There's only one rule: has to be about a subculture, or fringe culture. The rest of it is so wide-open that even genre isn't an issue.
And here I am, hung up on it. Can't pinpoint the subculture I want to do.
I can do punks all the time - I can do nothing BUT punks. I can do oldschool punks, fashion punks of yore and of nowe, gutterpunks, crusties, original riot grrls, newschool punks, cyberpunks (remember them? they hate you), suburban punks, squatters, poseurs, anarchists, drunks, oi boys, zine kids, trainhoppers a la Aaron, art-school punks, dropout punks, and the non-punk groupies that like their boys dirty. (Rarely do non-punk boys like punk girls. They'll like punkISH girls. Whatever, tangent, done.)
But I'm saving them up for something else. So, punks are out.
Won't do goths. Said all I have to say about them in a scene in "Growing Out of It." Heheh.
Could do indie-rockers, but I'm sure someone else has claimed "story about a band," so won't bother.
Could do horror writers, but would be promptly ostracised from all horror writerdom.
Kidding.
I do have one thing that keeps coming to mind, one thing that's been chewing an ever-deepening wormhole in my brain for a few months now, but it's so odd that I'm not sure how to tackle it.
Which, of course, means that one is THE one to do.
Sometimes I write like I play pool: there are a ducks on the table, some straight shots, some easy rails, and one shot where I'd have to bank backwards, brush the side of the target ball, and rail it in, past the 8, which is sitting duck at that pocket so tight that I had to finger a dead ball into the space to be positive that the target ball would go.
I lose more often than I should, because of this. I'd win all the damn time if I'd take the sure shots.
Fuck. There's a lesson. Maybe I ought to stop looking for the hardest route and take a damn duck now and then, even in fiction.
Crap.
posted by Mehitobel Wilson at 11:58 AM 
