I have something to tell you about, and I realize this will be a little surprising—but I am taking country line-dancing classes. It is entirely due to my new friend Morgan (she of the Citywide Marshmallow Egg Quest) and her peculiar interest in Going Places and Doing Things. I am not myself someone who would normally seek out a new activity and try it (pottery classes were a startling exception), but Morgan has a persuasively direct way of talking me into things. “I think you should come to country line-dancing classes with me,” she says over coffee. “I will tell you my reasons why. First:”—and so on. Before I know it I am doing a step-ball-change and wondering if cowgirl boots would let me do a better step-turn.

I mentioned something about New Friend Morgan on Twitter, and Superjules asked if I would be sure to post about How To Make a New Friend. I will tell you my secret: get noticed by an extrovert.

Tangent: I first typed “extravert” above, and spell-checker didn’t like it. So I looked it up, because I have been thinking it was introvert/extravert. And I found source after source that said the original words WERE introvert/extravert, but now the common usage is introvert/extrovert. Well, okay. I am a reluctant descriptivist, so I will go along with that if that’s what we’re all doing. It’s more satisfyingly parallel anyway. But I didn’t want those of you familiar with introvert/extravert (probably the same group of you who know it’s “I was graduated from” rather than “I graduated from”) to think I didn’t know. /tangent

As I was saying: if you want friends, put yourself straggling-antelope-style into the sights of an extrovert. They are usually looking to make new friends, sometimes because they have worn out all their old friends, and they seem to be good at doing the hard part of initiating things. If you can just make yourself RESPOND (“Yes, I’d like to see that movie too! How about Tuesday?” “Okay, I guess I will try country line-dancing but I warn you I tend to fall over while walking”) instead of getting tangled up in a ball of uncertainty (“Does she REALLY want me to go with her?” “What if she’s just being nice?” “What if it’s not fun?” “What if after this she decides she doesn’t like me and she’s sorry she invited me?” “What if after this I decide I don’t like her and then I don’t know how to get out of future invitations?”), you’re IN. Before long you will be leaving your house ON A REGULAR BASIS!

As with pottery, I HATED country line-dancing at first. I was trying not to cry in front of my new friend, and also trying not to radiate the kind of palpable misery that might make her feel bad, but it was AWFUL. I couldn’t get it AT ALL. I felt as if everyone was looking at me. (This impression was enforced by the fact that other people kept saying “Here, just do it like this! It’s just a simple shuffle-step!” at me, showing they Really Had Been looking at me.) However, I was bolstered by my recent pottery experience: I hated THAT to the point of tears at first TOO, but I kept at it and soon I really liked it! I think I just pretty much always hate new things, that’s all, but the only way for them not to be New Things is to keep doing them until the newness wears off, and that’s just pretty much always going to involve a certain degree of suffering.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing: wearing the newness off of country line-dancing. I’ve had five classes so far. Every class, they teach one new dance, and I can’t do it at all, and I steep in utter misery. Then they review the new dance they taught the previous week, and my misery starts to dissipate a little because I kind of know parts of this one—but I am still mentally counting how many classes I still have to suffer through, and planning to quit after that. Then we review the previous-previous and previous-previous-previous weeks’ dances, and oh I can mostly do these! This is fun! I like this except for just that one tricky part! Let’s do it again and maybe I’ll get the hang of it! And then we review the one from the very first week, which I can totally do as long as I don’t get distracted, and it’s fun, and such a good way to trick oneself into exercising, and I start mentally planning to sign up for the next batch of classes. …Is this making you feel a little sorry for Morgan and what she’s gotten herself into with this friendship?

I had a post mentally ready to go, I don’t remember how it went now, something about how I’ve been watching the Veronica Mars movie (takes place after the end of the TV series) and having a few surprisingly Team Logan dreams—and then I found out that one of my high school friends died this week, of a routine illness. We weren’t close anymore and I had mixed feelings about him, so I feel weird telling you about this because then some of you are going to feel like you should say “Sorry about your friend” and it feels wrong to accept even that degree of sympathy. But we were close back then, and it’s startling to think someone can just DIE like that. Not heart attack, not stroke, not cancer, not old age, but just, like, a virus. It makes it harder to do that human thing humans do, where they self-soothe their Death Fears by victim-blaming: “It’s fine, I’m okay, that can’t happen to ME because I [take care of myself / eat right and exercise / am not fat / get medical care when I need it].” He died because he got sick from a virus and the treatments were not effective and the virus took him down, and that sometimes happens to mortal beings no matter how many magical kale and yoga spells they cast.

The reason my friend and I stopped being close is that he wouldn’t stop pursuing me romantically. At first it was awkward (I didn’t feel that way about him at all) but also cute and flattering: I’d just had a bad break-up with my high school boyfriend, and it was nice to feel as if other guys might like me. And he was a nice, smart, funny guy, and fun to be around, and a great part of that friend group. But then it got distressing when I turned him down and it didn’t stop. He was the stereotypical Nice Guy, who thought I was dating jerks and I should just realize the perfect guy was waiting for me all along—and I was 17-18 years old when this all started, so I was theoretically on board with that narrative and couldn’t figure out why it seemed so icky in practice (answer: because that kind of thing only works when two people like EACH OTHER, not when it’s one-sided). He kept inviting me to go places, implying it was with the group, and then it would turn out to be just him. He would invite me to see a movie just as friends, and then put his arm around me. He’d bring me presents, not MEANING anything by it. I’d get mad and he’d back off, but then when I was like “Whew, now we understand each other and everything’s okay!” and be friendly again, he’d take it as an encouraging sign that this time I was starting to LIKE-like him.

It seems so clear that I should have broken off the friendship entirely over this, but I was young, and I DID like him as a friend, and he was part of a friend group I absolutely didn’t want to leave. Even now it makes me angry and upset to think that in order to get away from HIS inappropriate behavior, I would have had to give up that whole friend group. Meanwhile our friends were saying I should give him a chance: he’s such a great guy! you guys would be so good together! But there was NOTHING THERE except warm, fond, friendship feelings. I knew he was great! But he wasn’t FOR ME.

I was so glad when he finally seemed to hear me on the subject and he moved on and started dating someone else and she was really great for him and they seemed to be getting serious. This was a few years later, when I was in college and dating someone myself. Then when I was home on a break he took me out to lunch and told me that he still had feelings for me and would dump his girlfriend if I said the word. You might think that would be heady stuff, but it made me feel sick, and my heart sank, and I was angry, and it made me think very poorly of him that he would do this to his girlfriend. Also, it didn’t feel as if he really DID like me. It was as if he had some sort of Ideal Girl in mind, and he’d put my face on it, and it wasn’t me at all.

We had another talk in which I tried to explain that it was Never Going To Happen and that I wanted him to stop all this, and he became angry and accused me of “using him.” I couldn’t think of how to explain how wildly that assessment missed the mark, and I thought maybe it would finally end his stupid crush if he believed that about me. We parted on very dicey terms. Then one of his parents died suddenly, and I found out about it from the newspaper and sent him a condolence note, and he responded petulantly that he hadn’t told me about it because he didn’t think I wanted to be that kind of friends. That led to an I-give-up silence of a number of years, and then we became Facebook friends but never interacted directly, and it’s been that way for many years. You can see why you don’t need to say “Sorry about your friend.”

I think what’s hard to work out is that he really did seem like a great guy. It doesn’t seem as if that can be true based on the stories I’m telling about him, but he REALLY DID or else I wouldn’t have kept trying to be friends with him. It seemed as if he just had this ONE glitch and if I could just EXPLAIN things well enough to him… Well. I was happy for him when he finally did get married. I have a lot of good memories of him as a friend from the days before he became problematic. But the fact is that this friendship ended because when I didn’t like him the way he liked me, he first blamed my judgement (she just dates jerks; she can’t see the great guy right in front of her) and then my character (she’s “using me”; she’s not a good friend), and then he used it against me (if she doesn’t like me romantically, she doesn’t get to hear about important things that happen in my life). He was manipulative and petulant and unfair and unreasonable, and he managed to spin that into a narrative where he was doing it out of love for me and I was not appropriately appreciative.

But so much of that could have been chalked up to being really young and stupid and inexperienced and immature. And so many genuinely good guys DO fall for the Nice Guy theory of why a woman doesn’t like them, before they’ve realized they can use mirror-empathy to find another solution (i.e.: “Sometimes a woman likes me but I don’t like her—not because she’s a Nice Girl and guys don’t like Nice Girls, or because I’m an idiot who can’t see true love right in front of my face, or because she needs to work harder or wait longer to make me love her, but because she and I just don’t click; maybe it’s the same way sometimes when I like a woman and she doesn’t like me that way”). So I was kind of hoping that one day I’d get an email from him saying that now that he was older and was in a real relationship and had a good life, he saw the situation more clearly and realized what an idiot he’d been, and was sorry for acting like he thought we were actors in a dumb teen movie. His death means this is never going to happen and I am always going to remember him this way.

I am on a tear this morning, and I am sure it has nothing to do with two days of eating Easter candy until I was sick, then waiting until I didn’t feel sick anymore, then eating more Easter candy. But this morning I nearly damaged my precious shower radio in my eagerness to make a song stop. It was YET ANOTHER song talking about how perfect a woman is and how she should never change. And I do understand the intended sentiment, I do, and that it’s intended as a nice thing to say, and that we are not supposed to be getting the icky feeling that he seems to be appointing himself the decider of what she should and should not change, and/or that he seems to be assuming that he is 100% of the audience for her appearance and personality: like, if HE’S satisfied, that should be the end of the issue for her. Perhaps he means only that in his loving eyes she’s perfect as she is, meaning “perfect” only in the reasonable/colloquial sense of “really a good fit for what I like in a person, but with the understanding that I am talking about an imperfect human like myself and not some non-human creature held to supernatural standards,” and that she shouldn’t try to change for him, and that she’s great and shouldn’t tear herself down. And some people are not very smart and/or not very good communicators, and we ought to cut them some slack and hear their intention rather than trying to dive four layers deep into a one-layer message. BUT. It is hard to do that when he goes on to describe PHYSICAL attributes. These PHYSICAL FEATURES are perfect and should not be changed. That is not a good thing to hear, when ageing comes for us all and the changes are dramatic and inevitable.

Or here is another song on a similar theme, but maybe this time when he mentions perfection he is describing her personality rather than her body, or at least maybe there is room for that interpretation, not that anyone wants to have to live up on that kind of pedestal or worry about what will happen on the day he realizes she isn’t perfect. Oh wait, no: he says she LOOKS perfect. And then he goes on to say that he doesn’t deserve it, which at first could come across as humble but unfortunately indicates that he thinks a person CAN deserve physical perfection in a partner—that a physically attractive woman is something a man could be said to deserve. Maybe the singer doesn’t feel he himself deserves it, but he is indicating that a more deserving man would or could deserve it. Plus, he evidently DOES deserve it, since he has received it; he just doesn’t like to point that out himself. Humble.

Oh, here’s a nice song about how he is in love with her. No, never mind: he is in love with her BODY. I see. I guess the upside is that this singer REALIZES that’s the situation, instead of making himself look like an idiot by writing a whole “love song” and then having the contextual vocabulary-usage evidence (“deep in your love,” “love you all night long,” “just one taste of your love,” “pull me down hard and drown me in love”) show vividly and embarrassingly that he is talking about an entirely different sort of feeling, and that he may not in fact be aware of the difference. Sex songs are good too! Let’s have those! But let’s not act as if they’re love songs, and let’s show that we do know the difference, and let’s not make it seem as if we think the word “love” is the button you have to push to get sex.

Another song seems at first as if it’s talking about how wonderful the woman is, but then the man humbly asks himself an important question: “What did I do to deserve this?” There was definitely something. He did something amazing, or he is just so amazing himself, that he has been given the gift of a woman of his very own. That is his reward for being incredible. He doesn’t know which of his many wonderful acts or attributes resulted in this, but definitely there was something, because look: woman!

Another song has such a pretty tune but seems to have been written by someone who does not know any actual women, and has not yet found out that women are the same species as men. What does a woman taste like? He has no idea, but he’s guessing…sunshine, and strawberry bubble gum? The more times I hear the song, the more times I think he wrote it for his favorite page of the Victoria’s Secret catalog. He thinks women are ever-beautiful, ever-willing, strawberry-flavored.

In another song, a man sees a woman out with her boyfriend and tries to persuade her that she should be with him instead. He notices that she’s drinking wine instead of whiskey, and makes the assumption that this drink was what her boyfriend wanted her to drink; his point is that this shows her boyfriend doesn’t like her the way she is, but HE (the singer) does. How is “You should drink whiskey instead of wine” any better than “You should drink wine instead of whiskey,” and why is he assuming ANYONE is having ANY say over what she is choosing to drink??

In another song, a man gives the woman credit for “saving” him. (1) That sounds like a non-insignificant amount of work for the woman. (2) What is it she gets out of it, again? (3) If he goes back to his old ways, now we know it’s not really his fault: it means she failed to really save him.

There are so many songs! So many songs where “love” is used as a euphemism for a very different verb or noun or feeling. So many songs in which a woman is called “perfect” or an “angel” by a man who wants to “love” her. So many songs about how a man can live in such a way that he could be rewarded with a Woman Prize. So many songs praising a woman for staying with a man who has behaved badly. So many songs in which all/most of a woman’s cataloged positive qualities are appearance-based. So many songs in which the woman is the passenger in the man’s truck. Of course there are counter-examples, of COURSE there are, but still: courtship songs give the courted group a good overall picture of what the courters value and prefer; the resulting relentless stream of lyrics can be disheartening.

I have happy news on the Brach’s Marshmallow Easter Hunt Eggs story: thanks to you, I am in possession of two bags. Cara, Jaida, Bess, and Rachel all mentioned Walgreens, and I had CHECKED Walgreens, but this morning my friend Morgan and I went to the OTHER Walgreens and THERE THEY WERE! I bought two bags when normally I would only buy one, because my Quest Mode had been activated, which means it was all I could do not to buy every bag on the shelf. Buying two seemed to be the absolute minimum I could do—like, what if I lost a bag on the way home? what if one bag was stale? what if this was all a dream? I also bought a bag of Brach’s Jelly Bean Nougats, which look likely to involve a similar magical combination of revolting and compelling.

(image from Brachs.com)

This Sunday/Monday I am taking two days off of my diet to eat Easter candy (also pizza) (also bread dipped in soup) (also brownies), and I am counting the hours until Sunday. I am going to have a Reese’s Peanut Butter Egg with my morning coffee, bet on it. But this reminds me that in the comments section on the Keto grocery list post there were a non-zero number of people asking for keto meal ideas, so let’s do that here, keeping in mind that I don’t enjoy cooking and I don’t mind eating the same things over and over, so this menu might not be very helpful to someone looking for Keto Recipes. My menu is kind of like Taco Bell’s menu: the same handful of ingredients combined in a bunch of different shapes.

Meals:

• Scrambled/fried eggs with a side of fried cubed ham. (Note: all scrambled/fried eggs in this list are cooked in butter.)

• Scrambled eggs with cut-up breakfast sausages and mozzarella cheese.

• Two fried eggs, put inside half of a Joseph’s reduced-carbohydrate pita (lightly toasted and then buttered on the inside), sometimes with bacon in there too.

• Half of a Joseph’s reduced-carbohydrate pita filled with a whole bunch of deli meat (like 4-5 slices crammed in there), plus a slice of cheese, plus mustard and mayonnaise and salt and pepper, plus either dill pickles slices or else a spoonful of Splenda-sweetened sweet relish, plus Romaine lettuce.

• Half of a Joseph’s reduced-carbohydrate pita filled with a whole bunch of tuna salad.

• A taco made with a low-carb wrap/tortilla, ground meat, cheese, salsa, Tostitos Queso Blanco dip, and a little iceberg lettuce or a nice leaf of Romaine.

• Taco eggs: scrambled eggs to which I add a scoop of the seasoned ground meat everyone else is having in their tacos, a big spoonful of Tostitos Queso Blanco dip, several cut-up black olives, a heap of cheddar (shredded or sliced thin), and salsa; stir it around until it’s all melty and bubbly. If the tomatoes are worth eating, I put some (approximately the equivalent of two cut-up cherry tomatoes) on top. I also like to add chopped-up cooked broccoli to the stirring/melting stage, but I didn’t put it in the list because I’m not sure many other people would like that. I like that it gives the whole dish more substance and texture, but when I said that to Paul he shuddered.

• Taco salad: same stuff as taco eggs (though sans broccoli), but over raw spinach leaves instead of mixed into scrambled eggs.

• Cheeseburger salad: bowl of spinach plus cheeseburger chopped up (or hamburger chopped up, plus shredded cheddar), some extra cheddar cheese, some mustard/mayo mixed together like salad dressing, chopped-up dill pickle, a little cut-up tomato, sometimes some bacon, some sunflower seeds too sometimes.

• Salmon, plus broccoli heavily covered with parmesan cheese. It is so lucky to like salmon in a time when it is considered a Food of Righteousness on almost any diet.

• Leftover salmon added to scrambled eggs along with broccoli and parmesan cheese.

• Leftover salmon on a pile of raw spinach; add shredded cheese and/or parmesan and/or sunflower seeds and/or bacon and/or a few olives and/or a little tomato, plus Caesar or blue cheese dressing.

• Scrambled eggs with broccoli, chicken (I like Perdue Short Cuts for easiness and also flavor), and a spoonful of Tostitos Queso Blanco, maybe a couple slices of mozzarella cheese melted on top.

• Snack lunch/dinner: hard-boiled egg(s) or deviled eggs, rolled up deli ham/turkey, jalapeno cheese stick, colby jack cheese stick, olives, almonds, dill pickle spear.

• Tuna salad eaten with celery sticks. Sounds kind of sad/icky, but I love it and would eat it even if not on a diet. The key is not skimping on the mayo or the salt.

• Rotisserie chicken, eaten hunched over like a predator.

• Hot dogs, cut in circles and dipped in mustard, plus colby jack cheese stick(s).

• Pizza omelet: omelet with a spoonful of pizza sauce, layer of pepperoni, layer of cheddar, layer of mozzarella, a few cut-up black olives.

• Pizza made with a Joseph’s reduced-carbohydrate pita as the crust.

• Jalapeno poppers. Like, I have a whole meal of just those, when the rest of the family is eating pizza; and on the nights I CAN have pizza, I kind of miss my jalapeno poppers.

• Spinach salad with cut-up fried kielbasa and banana peppers.

• Omelet with broccoli and cheese, side of cubed fried ham.

• Omelet with deli ham and cheese, side of broccoli.

• Scrambled eggs with broccoli, cheddar cheese, spoonful of Tostitos Queso Blanco dip, Sriracha sauce.

• Scrambled eggs with Hillshire Farms little beef smokies and creamy mustard (mustard, mayonnaise, and a little bit of horseradish sauce).

• Steak. Like, just a piece of steak. Side of broccoli. I like to dip bites of steak in a mix of mustard/mayo/horseradish/Sriracha, and dip the broccoli in Caesar dressing.

• Piece of chicken or a pork chop, with side dishes of broccoli and bacon, plus mustard/mayo/horseradish/Sriracha for dipping the chicken/pork-chop and Caesar dressing for dipping the broccoli.

• Scrambled eggs with leftover steak/chicken/pork-chop cut up really small.

Snacks:

• Smoked almonds
• Salted almonds
• Toasted pecans
• Mixed nuts
• Spoonful of peanut butter
• 1/4 c. whole-milk plain Greek yogurt with half a dozen blackberries and raspberries
• Cheese stick
• Slice of deli ham/turkey
• Cucumber spears dipped in blue cheese dressing
• Hard-boiled egg
• Coffee with cream and unsweetened baking cocoa and artificial sweetener (use whisk to combine cream/cocoa), or that same thing cold, or that same thing put in a blender with ice
• 2/3rds cup of a Premier Protein shake, fill the rest of the glass with ice and leftover coffee

You see what I mean? It’s, like, ten different foods, just combined in different ways. But two days from now, I will be eating NOUGAT combined with JELLY BEANS.

I need to bring your attention to an Easter Candy Emergency. Are you familiar with THIS sweet gentleman?:

(image from Brachs.com)

Some of you are not acquainted with this candy. Some of you are acquainted, and as a result are recoiling in horror. Some of you are acquainted and are not at all recoiling, and are instead thinking “Oh thank goodness I am not alone in my perversity!”

For those who haven’t been introduced. Brach’s Marshmallow Easter Hunt Eggs have dense marshmallow filling, and are coated in the same sugary layer that makes up the outer part of jellybeans. I am not going to try to explain why I eat them. It makes no sense: I don’t much like marshmallows, and I don’t much like jellybeans (except the Mike & Ike jellybeans, which are terrific). But every year I buy a bag of these marshmallow/jellybean hybrids.

EXCEPT THIS YEAR. Because they are nowhere to be found. I didn’t realize the situation until this morning when I was texting with my friend Morgan; she was checking in to make sure I was all set for what we both agree is the best candy holiday of the year. She mentioned those marshmallow eggs, and I suddenly realized I didn’t have any, and since I’d basically bought one of everything at Target I was pretty sure they must not have been there, and anyway one thing led to another and Morgan and I set out separately for opposite ends of town, sending text messages back and forth as we tried store after store and found no marshmallow eggs.

I have an email in to the company asking for more information, but in the meantime: have you seen marshmallow eggs anywhere this year?

Edit: I have an update! But please do continue to leave Marshmallow Egg Sightings in the comments section for the sake of others who are still questing.

I have a boring household-appliance topic to discuss, and on such a pretty day too, oh well. My coffee-maker is gradually perishing, and I’d like to get a replacement BEFORE it suddenly stops working. The one I have is a 12-cup Black and Decker; it was a model only sold at Target. When I bought it, I was replacing my old 4-cup Mr. Coffee, which had given many years of good service but was no longer adequate for my coffee needs.

I am feeling a little irritable that the Black and Decker already needs replacement, because I see I bought it in September 2015. Two and a half years is not a long time for a $40-on-sale appliance to last. I’d had the $10-on-sale-for-$8.99 Mr. Coffee for well over a decade and it was still doing great. In fact, I wrapped it in plastic and stored it in the basement in case I want it back someday.

Here are the things that are going wrong with the current coffee maker:

1. The clock runs too fast to use, and inconsistently: I can’t use the programmable feature anymore or it’ll brew my coffee at some random time during the night.

2. This clock problem also affects the auto-shut-off: it’s supposed to stay on for 2 hours, but is more like an hour and 20 minutes.

3. The heating plate has thickly rusted, so the coffee doesn’t stay very hot anyway: I have to pour a cup and then put it in the microwave for a bit.

4. The coffee pot never brewed the coffee as hot as I’d like it to be, though that was okay before the other things went wrong.

Here are the things I’d like in a replacement:

1. Probably not Black and Decker? Though I’d be willing to believe this was a problem with a particular model and not with the brand overall. I see at the time of purchase I found a bunch of poor reviews, though they were about leaking and taste.

2. Programmable. I lovvvvvvve having the coffee waiting for me in the morning.

3. Brews nice and hot. I don’t want to be able to take a big sip right away and then have to put the mug in the microwave if I don’t drink the whole cupful in a few minutes.

4. Roughly 12-cup size. Not 4-cup. Not one-cup-at-a-time. I typically brew 6-8 cups per day.

5. Not expensive. I would enjoy hearing about a $300 coffee maker, but I’m not going to buy it. I’m going to buy something on sale at Target or on a nice discount at Amazon and we all know it.

6. Nothing fancy. I want the kind where I put in a filter and some coffee grounds and some water, and I press a button and it makes the coffee. Well, maybe I could be talked into something a LITTLE fancier: look how I’ve come around to the programmable feature. When I worked at a doughnut shop as a teenager, there was a coffee maker you put whole beans into, and it would grind the beans first and then brew the coffee. That would be neato, but likely takes us out of the price range.

Update 01-12-2019: I put the decision off month after month, until last night I dropped my old coffee pot’s carafe and it shattered, so now I’m using my old 4-cup maker until the new one arrives. I chose the Cuisinart DCC-3200 14-cup Programmable Coffee Maker. The other two I considered were the Hamilton Beach FlexBrew and the Mr. Coffee Optimal Brew Thermal System. I liked that I could brew a single serving or use K-Cups with the Hamilton Beach one, but in the end decided I probably WOULDN’T do that, or at least not often enough to be worth it; I’m still not sure this was the right decision. I liked that the Mr. Coffee was a Mr. Coffee, and also that it’s the same one my brother and sister-in-law have so I’d find it easy to make coffee when I’m at their house; and I know from experience that it keeps the coffee nice and hot; but I don’t like the set-up of it, and I don’t like that I can’t see into the carafe. So Cuisinart it is.

I saw the movie Love, Simon even though I normally don’t like anything young-adult. When other adults say, “You should try this, you will love it, it’s ‘young adult’ but it’s not really just for young adults at all,” I never end up liking the book or movie they’re recommending, and I always end up thinking, “Nope, that was indeed young-adult, and I have learned from repeated experience that anything young-adult is not for me.”

But Love, Simon is a young-adult movie, and I did like it. Part of it was definitely the low expectations: if you think a movie/book is going to be a 1 or 2 on a scale of 10 for you, but then it’s a 6 or 7, that’s a pleasant surprise. Part of it is that I think the movie was really nicely done, and that the actors did a good job. Part of it is that it reminded me of the movies I DID like when I WAS a young adult: Say Anything, Can’t Buy Me Love, The Breakfast Club, Some Kind of Wonderful.

Anyway, I liked it! I wished the main character’s family was not quite so unrealistically treacly: let’s all enjoy dinner together with supportive loving conversation, and then gather around the television for in-jokes and bowls of popcorn, and then tickle each other and run through the house squealing in a spontaneous pillow-fight, and then the parents kiss and the kids pretend to be grossed out but actually observe with happy eyes. So wholesome and loving! So much happy energy! Even adding just one single comment that was less than 100% joyous playful lovefest (e.g., “Come on now, hurry up, get your shoes on, we need to get going,” or “Okay, enough of that now, time for bed”) would have helped with realism. Instead it’s the kind of house where a child cooks delicious meals for fun but no one ever has to do the dishes.

And there was a scene with a teacher that is straight out of pure fantasy land. But! That is the kind of thing I liked in movies when I was a teenager! I WANTED those fantasy scenes: the hot boy finally stops pining for the hot stupid mean girl and notices his female best friend with glasses! the mean unfair teacher gets exposed and humiliated! the sweet nerds win a competition against the bullying jocks! etc.!

While watching it, I was wondering what age child it would be appropriate for, and I’m not sure. None of my kids have yet seemed very interested in teen-romance movies. My guess is that my 7th graders would be okay with it, but a lot of it would go over their heads; and my high-school kid and college-age kid might like it but not want to watch it with their parents.

Paul has indicated periodically/mildly/infrequently over the years that he thinks of me as a complainer, and I’m not going to try to tell you he’s wrong, considering I have been building the case against myself for nearly a dozen years now on this very blog. BUT, I would like to say in my defense that I have the matching attribute from the other end of the spectrum: I may notice lots of little things to complain about, but I also notice lots of little things to feel happy and satisfied about.

For example, it has been over seventeen years since we moved into this house, and I am still FREQUENTLY happy about (1) having our own, unshared driveway, (2) walking/hopping/exercising/etc. without having to worry that our footsteps are too loud for the downstairs neighbors, and (3) having our very own non-coin-operated washer and dryer right within our own living area. FREQUENTLY. Yesterday I mentioned appreciating the non-shared-driveway thing to Paul, and he said yeah as if he agreed, but then said actually he never thinks about that anymore and had forgotten all about it.

…All this was supposed to be setting things up for me to make a little list of current complaints: like, “Look, I ate my vegetables by appreciating the driveway, so now I can have my complainy dessert.” But in the time it took me to write those two paragraphs I have forgotten what I was feeling complainy about. Let’s call that another positive thing about my personality.

Paul recently read Anne of Green Gables to the younger kids, and they liked it, and so next he found a version of it we could watch on TV during dinner. I know there are a whole bunch of different movies and TV series of that book, and so I was pleased to find that the version he got was the same one I remember from childhood. And what is interesting to me, and possibly to me alone, is that I didn’t particularly recognize Anne herself, or Matthew Cuthbert, or Green Gables—but when I saw MARILLA, I knew.

I am aware that when there are multiple versions of things, people tend to like the version they saw first, and it is difficult to argue with that kind of loyalty. And I am sure the Marilla in YOUR favorite version is good TOO. But Colleen Dewhurst is, in my opinion as someone who may have seen only one version, The Best Marilla. I don’t know why we didn’t name our daughter Marilla. If I’d re-watched this show while pregnant, we likely would have. Seeing Colleen Dewhurst playing Marilla taps into the same region of my brain that makes me get a little choked up every time I see Mr. Rogers.

Henry told me that now they are practicing a new drill at school: if the fire alarm goes off, they treat it as a lockdown and they shelter in place, which means they lock the door and pull a shade over the window and keep very quiet and hide. Are you understanding this thing the children are practicing? When a fire alarm goes off, they STAY IN THE BUILDING AND DO NOT LEAVE IT, EVEN THOUGH IT MIGHT BE ON FIRE. Because maybe instead a shooter has pulled the fire alarm to get everyone to come out of their classrooms. Henry told me this is the “Special Challenge Mode!,” which tells me that his teacher is doing some good, good, good, heartbreaking work, and that she is managing to do it without crying, which was more than I was able to do just HEARING about it. Children in this country now have to be taught NOT to leave the building when a fire alarm goes off. Everything is absolutely fine.

I would like to let you know that if you ever sneak into my house while I am gone and, as any sitcom would have warned you was inevitable, I come back unexpectedly early, that you do not need to murder me in order to make good your escape. All you have to do is stay out of my way as I head directly and absolutely predictably for the bathroom. You don’t even need to hide: I will be so single-minded in my purpose, it is unlikely I would see you even if you were sitting comfortably in the living room, legs crossed, sipping from one of my coffee mugs. Right after I’ve closed the door, you can stroll out, unseen and unhurried.

I just spent twelve United States dollars, which is incidentally two dollars more than my highest ever hourly wage, just because I liked this bottle:

I’m not proud, but I am happy. Even the grocery store clerk commented what a pretty bottle it was. I have a shelf of useless things (decorative candle holders, empty whiskey box) all in this color range, and as soon as I drink whatever it is I just bought, the empty bottle is going to look PERFECT there. I told the clerk all about it. “Uh huh,” she said, possibly mentally comparing the price of the bottle against her own hourly wage.

I did my taxes yesterday and I’m so happy to have them done and also ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that I will be audited for my clueless mistakes. Actually, what I am sure of is that every year the IRS finds multiple clueless mistakes, and chooses not to audit me because all the mistakes are against my own interest. Next year I am getting someone else to do this FOR SURE: I am NOT going to spend another year PLANNING to have someone else do it and then put it off and put it off and put it off and end up having to do it myself. Though I am discouraged to hear that even when someone else does your taxes, you still have to do multiple hours of work? Is that so? Because that’s what I am doing when I do my own taxes. I was picturing shoving the big envelope of paper onto someone else’s desk. But I guess there are a fair number of things that someone with a big envelope of paper still wouldn’t know needed to be taken into account. And, the nice thing is, after doing those several hours of work I could think that the taxes were done RIGHT. That would be a novel experience!