I am having the kind of week where each evening before bed I have to write out a careful schedule for the next day so I don’t forget to send in something or pick up someone or go somewhere. And meanwhile I am cooking for six using a toaster oven and a two-burner hotplate. I would like to tell you that story, and also inform you that “liquor store” is on today’s to-do list.

1. I authorized Paul to make a decision and order a new stove, since he did so well with that last time. [Last time = A very risky move on his part that, luckily for him, worked out: long ago, when I was still covered in babies and toddlers, he got tired of waiting for me to research which stove I wanted to replace our failing one, so he just picked one and ordered it without consulting or telling me. If that stove hadn’t happened to be Exactly Right, things could have ended…very differently. One does not make major-appliance decisions without consulting the primary user of such appliances.] I thought he was remembering the bare essentials of what I consider to be The Right Stove, because we have discussed them repeatedly over the years when admiring the stove he chose; those essentials are: (1) white, (2) coils, (3) no flat tops. That’s what I like, don’t @ me. [Edited to add: For me saying “don’t @ me,” there has been a lot of @ing me on this. Would it help if I said “This is what I like, but for the purposes of this story it doesn’t matter what I like, only that what we got was something completely different?” Like, just imagine what YOU prefer in a stove, and then imagine getting something OPPOSITE TO THAT, and then it doesn’t matter what you do prefer or why you prefer it: the problem is the DIFFERENCE, not what the reasons are for the preference.]

2. Paul ordered the new stove. The happy day arrived. The delivery window was verified by automated phone call at TWO O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING so at first I thought someone was hospitalized/dead, but whatever, new stove! The stove was delivered. The old stove was taken away.

3. Paul read the manual and discovered that the stove he had ordered, which was black/stainless with a flat top and no coils, was an induction stove that also required SPECIAL POTS AND PANS. None of our pans would work with it, except his grody cast-iron skillets which I will never use or eat out of, at least not until several layers of gunk, oh sorry “seasoning,” are removed from them; also, while you can USE a cast-iron pan on this kind of stove, you can’t MOVE it on the stove or it will scratch it. We would need to get all new pans. This all happened one week ago today.

4. (Yes, I absolutely do already know that “seasoning” is an actual thing with cast-iron skillets. This is not seasoning. This is Gross Crust.)

5. I spent a queasy, spiraling afternoon estimating that we would actually come out ahead financially if we donated the new induction stove to charity, purchased a $400 white coil stove, and did not have to buy all new special pans including all the extra-large pans that don’t come in standard sets but are needed when cooking for 6-7 people. I mourned my old pans and planned to store them in the basement. I panicked on Twitter.

6. Twitter said, “OH GOD RETURN THAT THING AT ANY COST!!” Actually, that’s what Twitter-I-listened-to said. Twitter-I-didn’t-listen-to said, “Oh, that kind of stove is great! We love ours!” MY PANS THO

7. I told Paul very gently and carefully that either the stove was leaving OR he and the stove were leaving, but that either way I and the pans were staying. (Is it necessary to clarify that I did not say anything of the sort? What I actually said was something like “I know this would be a terrible hassle and might not even be possible, and if it IS possible it might cost significant money and also mean we’d be without a stove for awhile and have to figure THAT out, and maybe we don’t even want to do this because maybe this stove is great and I just need to get used to it and maybe we should be switching to stainless steel pans anyway. But is there a possibility that we should consider finding out if it’s possible to…return the stove?”)

8. Paul called and arranged to return the stove, with us agreeing ahead of time that we did not really care if we had to pay for return shipping, re-stocking, whatever. So far there does not seem to have been a cost, but we are still ready for it if it happens. The customer service representative was awesome: she wanted the reason for the return, and Paul told her about the pans, and she said, “That is just CRAZY!!”—and put the return right through. (Or rather, that’s what he said that he said. He might very well have instead said “My wife is scaring me.”) She said they could come get it Tuesday. The replacement stove (white, coils) would come Friday. For one solid week we would have no oven and no stovetop. I am on a diet that saps the fun and excitement from eating out, and anyway it gets HELLA EXPENSIVE for six people to eat out every night.

9. I drove to the store and bought a two-burner hotplate. We draped the new oven in towels to protect it from cats, children, etc., but I continued to be intensely anxious about something happening to it. Meanwhile, the two-burner hotplate has been possible to cook on, but not with any of our big pans; also, it is verrrrrrry slow: I started with hot tap water and it still took over 20 minutes for a saucepan of water to boil. I have been making dinners in batches, using the hotplate, the toaster oven, and an attitude that it doesn’t really matter if we have to eat in shifts.

10. On Tuesday the guys came and picked up the induction stove. I was very worried they would refuse to take it because Paul had removed all the wrappers and crinkled them up and put them deep in the trash can and then put raw-meat wrappers and cream droplets all over them. But there was no issue, other than that the guys were supposed to come between 3:00 and 6:00, and instead they arrived at 2:45, in the 15 minutes between the time I had to leave with William to have his x-ray done (his knee is bothering him) and the time Paul arrived home early from work to be sure to be home by 3:00, and Elizabeth was home alone and she had to handle it. Which she did, by calling me so that I had to answer my cell phone during registration at the x-ray place, under several signs prohibiting the use of cell phones. Anyway. The delivery guys waited out in the driveway, Paul arrived shortly afterward, and the Bad New Stove was removed without incident.

11. Today Good New Stove arrives! At least, we hope. We were supposed to get a delivery-window-confirmation call (we hoped not at 2:00 in the morning), but did not. This worries me.

[Update!:

It works with MY PANS]

I wrote that cheerful post and then crashed into Post-Fun-Time Blues. There will never be anything fun ever again. Or if there will be, it’s too far away to have any possible impact on the present.

Also my newish jeans feel both too tight and too loose: they’re constricting me but also falling down. I take this to mean I need to switch brands. I am normally of the pearish persuasion (I take approximately one size bigger in pants than tops), relatively long-torsoed and small-waisted, and when I gain weight I gain it mostly in the Jeans Regions. But before I started this diet that I am not going to keep constantly referring to, I had started gaining higher up on my stomach and also in the Bustular Region (THAT was a novelty). I was really happy with the way Roaman’s bootcut jeans fit that shape. Then I lost weight and ordered a smaller size of the same jeans, and these don’t fit right at all. I think it could be that the design of the jeans changed since my last order, but I think it’s more likely a change in my proportions.

Also, I am annoyed that “bootcut” jeans are now cut like what used to be called “straight.” Bootcut used to MEAN something, you guys. It used to MEAN something. Now bootcut looks like straight. And straight looks silly on me. (Skinny makes me look like a kite.) So not only are these jeans uncomfortably snug AND falling down, they look silly on me and I feel betrayed.

Before switching to Roaman’s I used to wear Lane Bryant, so I’d just go back to those—but they underwent a design change (“Genius Fit”) that made them not fit me right at all anymore. I also tried Torrid, which fit beautifully but had NO (or only tiny) POCKETS. Which I can’t even fathom. JEANS HAVE POCKETS, even if they’re women’s jeans. I looked at Lands’ End because I wore those before Lane Bryant, but they don’t have anything in an actual bootcut (except in a CROPPED bootcut, which no). These are not bootcut:

(image from LandsEnd.com)

Those are straight, heading for slim.

If you wear plus-sizes and are roughly pear in build, have you found any jeans you like that are actual-bootcut jeans WITH POCKETS? And not cut too low in the waist, either: good tum coverage, not perched on the hipbones.

I’m particularly annoyed because less than a year ago I finally got rid of an entire enormous bin of my excellent-but-too-small jeans, thinking it was wasteful (and not realistic) to keep them any longer when someone else could be making use of them. Probably if I still had them, I’d be looking at them now and thinking they were way too out of style to wear anyway. But in my memory they exist as the best jeans ever, classic favorites, so perfect—and now WASTED.

Also the children have been very irritating lately and so has Paul. And the cats are too warm and sheddy. And I have a slight headache and feel just sort of non-specifically prickly and crummy. And I was trying to make a college-visit appointment for William and the college’s website was SO FRUSTRATING that I gave up. And I am having more than the usual number of Food Fantasies. And…*looks at calendar*…oh.

I had such a fun weekend, with so much beer and wine and so many treats—and oh also such a good time with favorite people, not to imply with syntax that those much-loved people came second to the frosted lemon pound cake, even though it was exceptionally good frosted lemon pound cake, moist all the way through so that even the non-frosted parts were delicious.

There was also a very good café mocha.

And then I came home to find one child cleaning the bathroom sink (for money, but whatever) and another child baking cookies (for payment in cookie dough, but whatever). And I was reminded of the days when I couldn’t get away for an overnight like this without accumulating SIGNIFICANT marital debt, and the days when I was buying multi-packs of children’s clearance underwear so that I at least had the OPTION to just throw away a pair when I felt I Really Couldn’t Cope with another terrible potty-training accident without breaking down and possibly leaving forever, or the days when I had to grocery shop in small batches because I had one child in the top of the cart and one child makeshift-strapped with a belt to the inside of the cart and one child fussing in a frontpack, or the days when I had to carry significant diaper-bag luggage with me to leave the house and STILL might end up having to buy replacement clothing for a child who had barfed in the car on the way.

And really, overall, I would say that despite my occasional tender sentimental feelings about the baby days and the region I used to call my waistline, life is vastly preferable now. Like, if right now you are more in the stage of not getting anywhere near enough sleep and then spending your days standing in line with those many children, that enormous diaper bag, those clearance underpants, the emergency replacement clothing—and, while you are holding on to your last exhausted nerve and trying hard not to snap or cry, if you have older ladies in line behind you telling you to enjoy every moment, and you are wondering if that means everything ahead of you must be bleak and sad in comparison to this time when you are barely keeping your head above water: No. It’s a memory problem they’re having, and they don’t mean to be implying that next up for you is a downward spiral into a meaningless future where you would actually tell a struggling young mother that it’s all downhill from there.

Your babies just look sooooooooooooo delectable and sweet to the people who don’t have to sustain them with their bodies, get up with them in the middle of the night, clean their barf out of the car upholstery and the unremovable car-seat cover, figure out how to get those revolting soiled onesies off (pull them DOWN the baby’s body, not up over the face), monitor them every waking moment to make sure they don’t die, etc. etc. etc. You have to admit you DO HAVE very cute babies. It blows older ladies’ circuits temporarily, that’s all. They remember the feel of a warm satisfying little baby settled comfortably on a hip.

But do not be dismayed by the baby-drunk onlookers and how much they seem to miss that time. It’s really great to be able to get only your own self into the car and have all the kids get into the car on their own and close the car doors and buckle their own seat belts. It’s really great to be able to say, “Hey, take a shower” and have a kid do the entire thing themselves. It’s really great when a sick kid barfs into the toilet and you only know about it after it’s over. It’s really great to be able to eat and drink things without thinking of the impact it will have on fertility or a fetus or a nurser. It’s really great to go to the store by yourself, packing just your own purse and your reusable shopping bags. It’s really great to be able to go away for an overnight with friends without having to do a huge I.O.U. to the other parent. It’s really great to have “cleaning up someone else’s barf” be an EXCEEDINGLY RARE thing. It’s really great to say to the kids, “Okay, I’m going to [get a haircut / go to my appointment / have lunch with a friend / have dinner with Daddy], I’ll be back in a couple of hours, be good, be nice, don’t fight, don’t use the stove, my phone number is on the counter”—and then LEAVE THEM THERE WHILE YOU GO ELSEWHERE, NO SITTER REQUIRED. It’s really great to remember the weight of those little footie-sleepered babies in our arms, without remembering the spit-up trailing down the back of our shirt and the milk-circles forming on the front.

(image from Amazon.com)

I have just finished extended-audible-sobbing my way through the credits of the movie Pride, and if you haven’t seen it I think you might like to. I will tell you why:

1. The last year or two has felt to me like a constant mental tug-of-war between “WE NEED TO STAND TOGETHER AND HELP EACH OTHER AND MARCH FOR EACH OTHER AND PREVENT CRUEL AND HEARTLESS THINGS FROM HAPPENING TO EACH OTHER!” and “This is exhausting and futile and everything is just going to be an unavoidable relentless descent into chaos and cruelty for the limited time we have left before we use up all the oxygen and fall into the sweet release of human extinction.” This movie, about a gay and lesbian group in the 1980s that somewhat impulsively decides to help the cause of the striking Welsh miners because the group feels empathy from being on the receiving end of the type of bullying/persecution the miners are facing, takes a day like the latter and turns it into a day like the former, complete with rousing music.  And it is based on a true story, and during the credits you get little updates on some of the characters.

2. Dominic West (Jimmy McNulty from The Wire) is in it, and his hair is bleached, and he wears ’80s clothing, and he dances. WITH THRUSTS.

3. I mean, the 1980s styles alone are worth it.

4. Bill Nighy is in it, and I may have mentioned once or twice before that I would watch an entire movie of nothing but him walking around, talking wryly, and periodically quirking his face. In this movie he has a scene with a full-on close-up on-fleek eyebrow quirking. Like they KNOW we are just waiting for that eyebrow shot.

5. Dolores Umbridge (actor Imelda Staunton) from Harry Potter, but playing a GOOD character so you can LOVE her!

6. Middle-aged women going to 1980s gay men’s clubs.

(image from Wikipedia.com)

Another movie I recently watched and loved (though no sobbing) was Meet the Patels. Within five minutes I knew I had found EXACTLY my favorite kind of documentary: personal/revealing, some interviews, some animation, some sneaky footage (“Put that camera down!” “Okay….*puts camera delicately down onto seat, where it is still recording*”), interesting information about another culture. It’s about a 30-year-old man who breaks up with his white girlfriend and attempts to find an Indian wife using a combination of traditional and modern methods from his family’s Indian culture: biosheets, parent-arranged blind dates, giant marriage-seeking conference with ice-breaker activities, taking advantage of wedding season, etc. The film-maker is his sister and she does a good job of making him a sympathetic character without failing to lead us to understand what might not be working for him in this endeavor.

I have some pottery back from my second session of classes! During this session I impulsively (that is, it’s not something we covered in class) experimented with drawing on things before they were fired, and I did more messing around with using multiple glazes on a single piece.

These are on the smallish end of bowls, maybe more like candy dishes. The bowl on the far right had a bad crack through the floor of it, but I took a picture before breaking it the rest of the way in the driveway (quite satisfying to do).

For scale, the thingie on the left holds slightly over half a cup of liquid.

Miscellaneous/decorative shapes.

The thing on the left is the largest thing I’ve ever made, and nice and thin too: the clay was jussssst on the verge of collapsing when I stopped messing with it. The thing in the middle is the second-largest, and the largest/straightest up-and-down thing I’ve ever made; it’s about the size of a nice big pencil-holder, or a canister for smallish scrubbie brushes.

These bowls are about right for a sad restricted amount of ice cream, or for a nice amount of M&Ms. The mug is smaller than I wanted it (it’s the size of the small mug of coffee you have late-afternoon when you really shouldn’t have any), and the glaze didn’t come out how I wanted it, but I’m happy with the shape and with the handle.

I am pleased with the things, and pleased with the progress (first batch, for comparison). Some marks of progress you can’t see but they please me: everything is thinner and lighter than before, and the bottoms are much nicer and more even. I’m not sure if I will take another session of classes or not; they’re not offered again until the fall, so I have time to think. Toward the end of this second session I was feeling as if I was making the same things over again, and also feeling a little tired of doing it. I don’t know if that means I’m done, or just that I need a break and some new ideas.

I have perhaps ten times thought of something I want to say, then forgotten what it was, then remembered it when I was elsewhere, then forgotten it again. It wasn’t even very interesting, it was just a good thing to open the conversation with, and now it’s gone again.

*looks around for inspiration* My New Yorker cartoon day-by-day calendar has been less awesome than I expected. The cartoons seem like the ones from the last page of the magazine, where readers submit the captions.

Hm. Pretty mediocre topic.

Let’s see. I could complain for awhile about the new health insurance we have through Paul’s employer, which has allegedly been in effect for nearly a month and WE STILL DO NOT HAVE CARDS OR ANY WAY TO ACCESS COVERAGE. And Edward has an appointment in the next week for his many-thousands-of-dollars-per-dose Remicade infusion, a medication which, understandably, requires an intense level of pre-authorization, for which a person needs to know INFORMATION ABOUT THEIR HEALTH INSURANCE. But I called the Remicade nurse yesterday and she was so relaxed about the whole thing, and she thinks she can get the pre-authorization done with only the information I had so far, and she was similarly relaxed about the possibility of needing to reschedule the appointment, and she has infused me with a fresh calm. What must it be like to go through the world feeling calm about things? I now have a taste of it.

Really, I am wracking my brain for topics. I feel so chatty, but we are down to barrel-scrapings here, apparently. I am so excited to show you pictures of my pottery from the second set of classes!—but I do not yet have it back from the final kilning. I want to do a sort of year-end summary of Rob’s first year of college!—but he is still at college, doing that year. I could give an update on my tooth replacement, but the only thing that’s happened is that I’ve been back to the oral surgeon and I’m cleared to have the fake tooth installed, but that’s not going to be for like another month. Ooo, how about another story about my new friend Morgan?—no, two stories is enough for now, and also one day if she and I remain friends I will tell her about this blog and she will read it, and it would be embarrassing to have her see my severe case of mentionitis. Paul is at the point where I say “Oh! Another thing about Morgan:” and he closes his eyes very briefly and inhales lightly through his nose.

Well, would you like a turn to talk? I can certainly sit and sip coffee and listen for a change. Gripes? Vents? Stories? Fun things going on? New things coming up? Stuff you’re looking forward to or dreading? Learn something new lately? Looking for advice on an upcoming purchase? Just kind of feel like talking about something?

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.