it is banality that interests me

My new (old, hey $2.90 at the thrift-e-store) favorite flannel shirt smells faintly of waffles. I am content.


Yesterday someone asked me how my life was and since I don't enjoy that strain of conversation I made some jokes about parking tickets. Today I realized that through voiceless gchat it must have sounded sad but I am not sad. I don't know how to tell you in seriousness the things I am enjoying right now because I don't know how to sell quotidian. I don't have my own words for this, I only have the words of others.





Over Christmas visits at previous haunts someone told me my life is passing me by. My silent cry is But it is not passing me by! I am living it. Maybe I am slow at it, but I am slow and we have always known that I am slow.


I took tommyrot down because that wasn't quite right. I feel more like this: 
(which is hanging on my wall, written on a scrap of paper in the scrawl of a friend, and which came by post)

Remember to retire into this little territory of thy own, and above all do not distract or strain thyself, but be free, and look at things as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal. But among the things readiest to thy hand to which thou shalt turn, let there be these, which are two. One is that things do not touch the soul, for they are external and remain immoveable; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within. The other is that all these things, which thou seest, change immediately and will no longer be and constantly bear in mind how many of these changes thou hast already witnessed. The universe is transformation: life is opinion.Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book 4, no. 3

I'm toying around with a lot of decisions about what to do later this year and a conversation keeps coming unbidden to me and it kind of makes me chuckle.


My sister's father-in-law: Are you going to school for a career or to have an education (before/in process of getting married)?
Me: (this is a question?) A career.


Is there anything more strange than a relationship? They happen unbidden or they remain illusive. Can you hunt one down, make one happen? Sometimes I feel I could really dig in here but there are two things missing and I am fairly certain neither are to be found here. One could keep me wandering the globe yet you must stay in one place because you, too, need to be found. The second is easy, I know where to go to find people who enjoy food like I do.


I do not know how this has escaped my journal, whose silent private pages I've been turning to. I think I just wanted to tell you how my pretty flannel smelled of the waffles I made this morning.

blueberry rosemary waffles with balsamic syrup

Yesterday I woke up early, the house was quiet, so I made up a new waffle feast. Note that an important step in waffle making is that the waffle iron is good and hot hot hot before you start cooking the waffs up.

BLUEBERRY ROSEMARY WAFFLES

dry:

1 3/4 c flour

1 TBsp sugar

1/4 tsp (or more?) salt

1Tbsp baking powder

whatever looks like a good amount of ground up rosemary

wet:

1cup milk

1/2 c plain yogurt

3 eggs

8 Tbsp (1 stick) melted butter

last:

an indeterminate amount of blueberries (I'm not much for measuring)

mix dry ingredients, mix wet ingredients, mix them together. fold in the blueberries. pour about 1/4 cup batter for each waffle depending on waffler size.

BALSAMIC VINEGAR SYRUP

balsamic vinegar

brown sugar

boil balsamic vinegar down in sauce pan on stove. when it starts to thicken add some brown sugar. I don't know how much, how sweet do you want it to be? I might have added a quarter of a cup to a cup or so of vinegar.

i write the things in my brain? dicey and boring and why?

Well. It's been looking like spring here and I've relishing it while steeling myself against the eventuality that winter will jump back down our throats and the tops of our boots, soaking our socks. In the midst of all this melting I've been coooooking. You see, I've discovered the truth in the proverb "He who eats alone grows bigger outside and colder inside." Yup, what wisdom. Meaning, I corral people into joining me for meals. "Hey Alicia, come over and we'll do yoga....then we'll eat edamame while I bake banana bread and zappetizer." "Hey Grace, wanna eat 30 Rock while I eat dinner?" "Can I make you waffles?"

I love food. It's great. And food should be homemade with natural ingredients, this I firmly believe. But here's the reverse. Maybe you've heard, I have some type of acid problems with my stomach. I take a prescription pill every day (and occasionally a weird concoction of apple cider vinegar) and I'm only supposed to eat small amounts when I'm hungry. Lot's of yogurt and vegetables. Let me point out where I have a problem: when I'm hungry. I'd like to get something off my chest and if I'm lucky maybe someone can provide me with some of their own proverbs. Rewind ten years and you'd find a Marge struggling with –ahem, I can get this out– well, some eating disorder stuff. Did you know that completely confuses your understanding of when you're hungry/full? I still haven't quite relearned it all. I've struggled to come to a place where I'm mostly delighted by eating healthily and taking care of my body and suddenly in one year it's become terribly complicated and discouraging again. It's important for me that I don't backslide into a quagmire of crying over meal times. What to do? People delight me, take my mind off things, remind me of the many ways food is nourishing.... So can I make you waffles?

I've also received MY DIPLOMA!!!! Which means I'm going through accordian files stacking 90% of old tests in the recycle pile (so much weight from my shoulders!) and a few things in the "to scan" pile. And setting letters in another pile entirely. They keep their paper form until they relinquish their lines to decay. I can't shred Seven-page-letter-S with his Norwegian fisherman who remind him of me. And there's an old C moving into my letter box with his too-much-coffee-scrawl. I can't lose a single page of Jbottoms or Karonius or Dad or post-it notes on newspaper articles from my Mom. You know, I'm certain, my family could win awards for our multi-media, strange correspondence.

Email is lovely and speedy. But I wish email were more like a page of paper, ready to be manipulated by photocopies, the quirks of handwriting, and creases of an envelope. And I wish email showed up in the mail box outside my front door. That never loses its romance. Nor do waffles.