Category Archives: food

qui-noape

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I started writing out the whole story of why I have so much leftover quinoa in my fridge but honestly, you don’t need to know that. All you need to know is that I have roughly two cups of cooked quinoa in my fridge that I need to finish, and a sudden, borderline violent, aversion to eating it.

With that context in mind, I present to you:

Things I Would Rather Do Than Eat This Leftover Quinoa (in no particular order, and not an exhaustive list)

– climb a mountain…wearing flip-flops

– catch up on the corporate compliance busywork assignments I have been avoiding at work for the last six months

– sniff week old roadkill

– put on wool socks and then scuff my feet all over the carpets in my house where the relative humidity hasn’t topped 35% in months, and then touch a lightswitch

– enter a space where two pounds of bacon has just been cooked to cripsy perfection and not be allowed to actually have any of said bacon

– go outside and roll in the snow (actually considering this one, as it would at least wake me up)

– have Joe Rogan show up and do running commentary while I walk on the treadmill for ten minutes

– cut the dog’s nails

– listen to 90 minutes of Yacht Rock on XM Radio

– try to explain the concept of corporate personhood to a gaggle of six year olds

– eat literally any other combination of things in this house to make up the equivalent of the nutrition my meatsuit would glean from that two cups of quinoa

I’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll be able to face it then.

things I re-learn every time my husband goes away

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An incomplete list, in no specific order.

1. The correct order in which the Morning Things and Bedtime Things must be done in order to satisfy the dog. Mark usually handles the Keppo stuff when we first get up and when we’re getting ready for bed. There’s a certain order to these routines and Keppo knows it. If I make the mistake of trying to make myself a cup of tea before we go out for walkies, for instance, I’ll hear about it. And gods forbid I take too long in the bathroom before bed, because the whole valley will hear about it. Keppo should just about have me re-trained by the time Mark gets back to resume these duties.

2. It doesn’t matter that I’m off work and don’t have to wake up early, don’t eat chocolate or sugary ice cream in the evening. Just because I don’t HAVE to get up early doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to get myself jacked on sugar or chocolate and then be unable to sleep for half the night. Also, my body is programmed to wake up at 6:30am regardless of whether I’ve fallen asleep at 10pm or 2:30am. Fighting it does no good. Going back to bed after waking up at 6:30 does no good.

3. If I buy a box of cereal and a carton of milk, that’s 3 meals a day for 3 days, at least, that I don’t need to cook. And if I get the puffed oatmeal squares that have a bunch of fiber in them, I don’t even need to worry about not eating vegetables! I’m not proud of that, but I’m nothing if not pragmatic.

4. The dehumidifier tank is heavier than I give it credit for when it’s full.

4a. I am perfectly capable of schlepping said heavy dehumidifier tank up the basement stairs to empty it. Is it fun? No. But I can do it.

5. It’s nice to have extra room in the bed, but it’s nicer to have company. Specific company, I should say. As in, my husband. I’m not interested in fighting just anyone for the blankets, thank you.

6. I will get bored after two days off by myself, and rather than converting that boredom into useful activities like cleaning the house, I will instead become a toad who only wants to read books, play video games, and eat cereal (and chocolate). All the to-do lists in the world can’t help me after day 2 home alone. If I’m not getting everything crossed off that list by sundown on day 2, it’s likely not getting done any time soon because I’ll be way too busy in Mediocre Supernatural Fantasy Romance Novel Land or Shoot Colorful Bubbles To Help A Cat Get To Space Land. I might switch it up a little and sit at my desk to try and struggle-bus through writing a blog post (ahem), but that’s about it.

7. I am braver when he’s here. I’m also funnier, smarter, less prone to bouts of extreme weirdness, and more responsible. I spent a large portion of the first half of my life alone. Not just unpartnered, but pretty literally alone. I don’t want to make this sound like I shouldn’t or can’t be alone, or that I think there’s anything wrong with being a solitary person, because that’s not it at all. I was often a very functional  person whilst living alone, and there are still plenty of times when I really enjoy my own company. It’s just that I got quite used to existing mostly just inside my own head, and even after almost 14 years of cohabitation with another actual human being, it’s still SUPER easy for me to slip right back into that space, that rut of believing that I’m basically a ghost just flitting through everyone else’s lives instead of a tangible human being living my own tangible life. Mark grounds me. He’s the weight at the end of my balloon string that keeps me from floating off into the atmosphere, eventually landing in the ocean, and choking some poor unsuspecting turtle. Or something.

This is what I wake up to most mornings when Mark is away. I like to anthropomorphize and say that he’s laying in Mark’s spot to keep me company, but in reality I know that he’s probably been hotboxed out from under the covers by my constant flatulence because I’ve been living on Oatmeal Squares for the past three days.

lemon aid

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Life with ADHD provides endless opportunities for self-inquiry and self-discovery. Every day I find new things that make me wonder about myself and how my brain works. For example:

What is this semi-desiccated half of a lemon doing on my kitchen counter at 11 in the morning, when the last time I used lemon for anything was while making salad dressing at dinner last night? Nothing else from the dinner-making process is still on the counter. Why did this half of a lemon, in particular, get left out? It’s not even the squeezed half. I could have put this in a container, stashed it in the fridge, and gotten another salad’s worth of dressing out of it. If there were any part of this lemon that it might make SENSE to have left on the counter, surely it would be the squeezed half. But, no. I wasted a perfectly good half of a lemon by inexplicably deciding to not put it away last night.

The really funny part is, I made breakfast this morning right next to this lemon half. I made my husband’s lunch right next to the lemon half. I stood at the counter taking my vitamins and the lemon half didn’t register. I went back to the counter an hour later to make a cup of coffee, which involves standing around waiting for the kettle to boil, which is certifiably the most boring thing ever and I had plenty of time to become aware of my surroundings in that two minutes that I stared off into space probably thinking about bears doing an interpretive dance to Billie Eilish’s song, ‘Bad Guy’, or some shit…and I DID NOT NOTICE THAT LEMON. The lemon did not reenter my realm of consciousness until just now when I went to the kitchen again for a handful of crackers. And why did getting some crackers trigger the realization that the lemon existed, you might ask? Good question! I have no fucking idea. The crackers were nowhere near the lemon. I could have just as easily gotten a handful of crackers and wandered right back to my desk again without ever clocking the lemon. But for some reason, some scientific mystery that will forever be unsolved because who the fuck would ever want to look that deeply into the percolating pile of rot that is my brain, 11:00 AM was apparently Counter Lemons Exist Again time.

Oh my god.

What if we really ARE all just brains in jars lined up on a shelf somewhere, and whatever entity that’s keeping the collection decided that my brain-in-a-jar needed some freshening up so it dropped a lemon into the jar? Maybe the lemon is meant to be enrichment for my enclosure. Maybe it’s an experiment to see if something as benign as half a random lemon could make a brain short-circuit and self-destruct.

I need to make some calls…

…OR DO I?

adventures in ADHD baking, chapter 716: muffin problems

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I’ve had it in my head for at least a week now that I wanted to make some muffins. Specific muffins: they’re pumpkin muffins with spices and nuts and dried cranberries and maple syrup in them and they’re delicious. They’re the kind of thing that I’ve made so many times that I eventually got sick of having to bring the recipe up on my phone and almost dropping my phone in the bowl of muffin batter while trying to read and measure at the same time, so I scribbled the recipe down on a scrap of paper and now it lives on the side of my fridge.

This morning was perhaps not the best morning to embark on my muffin-baking fantasy, in retrospect. Last night was rough. I was up and down several times in the night, as was my husband, with our various respective bathroom-related issues. My FitBit practically asked me if I was OK this morning when I brought up my sleep data…or lack there-of. Suffice to say, I have not been firing on all cylinders today.

But those muffins. Those sweet, sweet pumpkin nuggets of joy with the walnuts and the cranberries. I had been thinking about them for days. I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. Because if there’s one thing I DEFINITELY want to do when I’m tragically overtired, it’s eat baked goods. I mean, I want to eat baked goods 24/7, basically, let’s be honest. But my decision-making barometer goes especially askew when there’s a lack of sleep and sugar involved.

Once I saw my husband off to work and got the dishwasher going, I had roughly 35 minutes to get the muffins going before I had to log into work and start pretending to give a shit about non-muffin subjects. No problem, plenty of time. I measured my drys in one bowl, my wets in the other, then I combined the two. Mix mix mix, taste to make sure it wasn’t poison, and bingo! Ready to bake! I got out my trusty scoop and started portioning muffin batter into the wells of the pan. Everything was going splendidly…

…until I got to the end of the batter after 11 muffins rather than 12.

Hmmm, I thought. That’s not right. This recipe definitely makes 12 muffins. It always has! And I didn’t even do extra rigorous poison-tests this time like I tend to do with cookie dough, so it’s not even like I could blame myself for having eaten too much of the uncooked batter (yes, I know, raw flour and raw egg, clearly I don’t value my life. If I get salmonella I won’t come crying to you, I promise). I stood there looking back and forth between the scraped-clean bowl and the empty muffin cup for what probably would have felt like an embarassingly long time had I been operating on enough sleep to feel shame. Or anything other than muffin-lust.

I grabbed the recipe and started going down the list, mentally checking things off:

Pumpkin? Yes.

Brown sugar? Yes.

Oatmeal? Yes.

Maple syrup? Two eggs? Flour? Baking soda? Salt? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

100 grams of oil.

Uhhh…

100 grams…of…oil.

I looked at the measuring cup I had been using. Dry as a bone. Definitely hadn’t held oil since the last time it was washed.

Well, balls. That was a no on the oil, then.

I looked at the portioned-out batter again. It looked fine. It had definitely seemed slightly thicker than usual even before I realized I was a muffin-cup short, but it certainly wasn’t thick enough to make me think something was very out of whack. LIKE THAT I HAD FORGOTTEN THE OIL, FOR INSTANCE. I poked at it. I tested for poison again. It was a good batch. The spices were really nice, it wasn’t overly sweet. I REALLY wanted these muffins to happen. And I REALLY didn’t want to try to scoop batter out of 11 portioned out muffin cups so that I could mix oil in and then portion them all out again.

I checked the time. 8:55. I needed to punch in by 9. With a lack of time as my final justification for not fixing my mistake, I muttered a resigned “YOLO, I guess” and slid the pan into the waiting oven.

20 minutes later I came back to survey the damage. The muffins certainly smelled nice and they didn’t look too shabby either, aside from not having puffed up much. I tested them with a toothpick and they seemed done so I pulled them out to cool a bit while I made a cup of coffee.

Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore and I tore into one. The muffin wrapper was…reluctant to come off. That’s putting it nicely. Probably close to a third of the muffin hung on to the paper like cement. The part that did come off was basically fine, though. The texture was a little weird but the flavors were good and the muffins were certainly edible. I stood there picking stuck crumbs off the muffin paper like some kind of kitchen gargoyle after I finished the main event, so that should be a testament to the flavor. Or at least my level of commitment to muffin consumption. And possibly my addiction to carbs in general.

So, in summation, I would offer you these points:

– you can totally bake muffins without oil in them. Would I recommend it? No. But will they be at least vaguely edible if you skip the oil? Probably.

– maybe double-check your ingredient list BEFORE you portion out your muffin batter, if you don’t want to live life on the bleeding edge of culinary experimentation like some of us.

– weird muffins are better than no muffins. I think this is probably a good metaphor for some kind of deep life observation or something, but I’m too fucking tired to go there right now.

They could have been way worse.

cannot unsee

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Me this morning, cutting strawberries: You ever notice how strawberries really look like human tongues?

Mark: What? No.

Me: They do! Look! (holds out strawberry)

Mark, shaking head, moving in the other direction: No. No, I don’t want to see. Once you see you cannot unsee.

Me: I know, right? But seriously, look…it looks just like a very red human tongue. (wiggles berry)

Mark, still refusing to look: Noooo! I don’t want to think about it! (shields his eyes as he leaves the kitchen)

I don’t know what he’s got against delicious disembodied tongues, frankly.

I’m sure that yellowing at the tip would not be a good sign if this was actually a tongue but since it’s not we can all just laugh about it and not spend any time obsessing about our actual tongues in the mirror today, right? Right.

stupid human tricks

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Sometimes it seems like my life is just a series of things I do to amuse myself that end up backfiring and causing me extra work or costing me more money.

Case in point: today’s vegetable peeler incident.

I have Fridays off for a while – I won’t bore you with why (it involves needing to use up a bunch of vacation time at work because I can’t roll it over). Just know for the sake of this story that for the last six-ish Fridays I have been largely home alone, with only the dog for supervision. Which, being an only child, a latch-key kid, and a social pariah for most of the 90’s, you’d think I’d be used to functioning under those conditions.

It’s not that I can’t function when I’m home alone, so much as that I have a harder time filtering the near-constant stream of questionable ideas that my brain produces. Especially the ones that I think are funny. This isn’t even a case of ‘doing it for the ‘Gram’ or making TikToks or whatever…this is literally me just indulging the stupid shit that pops into my head because I know no one is around to judge me for it (not that my husband would judge me for most of the stuff I do…not out loud, anyway. He IS British, after all).

Today I was making a batch of soup ahead for tonight’s dinner. I had my dance mix going and was grooving along to Jamiroquai (I know that guy is problematic – I assuage my guilt by reminding myself that he’s probably only getting like half a penny from Spotify whenever I listen to one of his tracks. And yes, I know Spotify is problematic, too. I assuage THAT guilt by reminding myself that I get to pay the student rate rather than the full monthly subscription rate because I take one measly college course per semester. Also, good luck finding someone / something that ISN’T problematic these days, mmkay?), as I peeled some carrots. I peel the carrots over the garbage can because I hate cleaning up carrot peels off the counter, but my garbage can is also across the room from the counter where I chop stuff and there’s no flat surface around the garbage to put anything down on, so I was taking one carrot at a time over to the garbage can to peel it, then bringing it back to the counter and grabbing the next one.

That makes it sound like my kitchen is huge. My whole house is like 1100 square feet. The kitchen is like three paces across, max.

Anyway.

So, carrot peeling got tedious very quickly. As I finished the last carrot and was half-dancing back to the counter, the song I was jamming to reached a funky breakdown part. Carrot in one hand, vegetable peeler in the other, I did a little twirl, then flipped the vegetable peeler up in the air with every intention of catching it.

Now, it’s worth noting here that I’m actually pretty good at doing this. Flipping things up in the air and catching them, I mean. It’s a random stupid human trick that I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember, with basically anything that has a handle. I’ve done it with screwdrivers, hammers, paint brushes, all manner of kitchen utensils, pans, a curling iron twice (once it was on…had to up the stakes, apparently. While home alone. I am very stupid)…you get the picture. There is literally nothing else physical that I’m good at, so I’ve really honed this one craft, trust me. As a result, I almost always catch whatever I flip.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

The vegetable peeler flipped end over end, almost up to the ceiling. I reached out with perfect timing, right on the apex beat of the song’s crescendo…and missed the handle by a hair’s breadth. I watched the bastarding thing hit the floor and, in seemingly slow motion, the blade popped out of the handle and skittered directly under the stove. I got down on the floor to try and fish it out with a wooden spoon, but the thing was so far in that I couldn’t even see it. It is officially lost to the Beneath.

So now I have to shop for a new vegetable peeler. I’ve had that one probably ten years. Have there been exciting new innovations in vegetable peeling technology in the last decade? I’m guess I’m about to find out.

Rest In Peels, Peely. You were a real one. Carrots won’t be the same without you.

shine on

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I made some cupcakes for work this week. They’re Valentines themed. Mostly it was all an excuse to teach myself how to make Swiss buttercream and play around with piping, if I’m honest. There was very little altruism toward my coworkers involved. It was more a case of “I will make these pretty things and give them to people, then enjoy them telling me how pretty they are”. And my therapist would tell me that there’s nothing inherently wrong with that motive, but admitting that was my motivation makes me feel like at least six different flavors of Awful Human Being.

But I digress.

So I made these cupcakes. Aren’t they pretty?

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Delicious emulsified sugar and fat

You can’t see it so well in the picture but the actual cake part is colored – it has swirls of white, pink and red. In order to get a true red cake batter, I had to use A LOT of red food coloring. The pink in the cake is pretty bright so that used a fair amount as well. There was only a little bit in the frosting, but still…all told, definitely a lot of artificial coloring going on.

One of the core tenets of baking is that you should check the finished product for poison by eating some of whatever you made. I mean, you don’t HAVE to, I guess…but then how would you know if your coworkers are actually enjoying the baked goods or just choking them down to be polite? Short of taking Susan aside and asking her if she was really being sincere when she said your buttercream was delicious, you have no way of knowing. So it’s a good idea to test the finished product and KNOW that it’s delicious, no matter what face Susan makes when she bites into it.

Point being, I ran a BUNCH of tests on the finished cupcakes yesterday, which means I consumed rather a large amount of red food dye.

You may be starting to suspect where this is going and you’re right, but stay with me. You might as well, you’ve come this far.

This morning my poop was predictably quite pink. Most food dyes end up turning your dookie green, but red stays pretty red through digestion. This is exactly why, when you prep for a colonoscopy, they tell you not to have anything with red food coloring in it for a few days before the test. The inside of your colon can get stained by the food dye and then the doctors have a hard time figuring out if the redness is due to disease or just somebody being overzealous about, say, eating Valentines cupcakes.

ANYWHO.

I have this one coworker who really likes baked goods. Honestly, she just likes free food in general, but she REALLY likes baked goods and has been known to consume quite a lot of whatever anybody brings in. Which, zero judgement here, but when she and another coworker were in my office and she was motoring through her second cupcake and talking about getting a third, it occurred to me that she probably didn’t realize just how much food dye was in them.

So of course I brought it up. Because that’s a reasonable thing to talk with your coworkers about, right? I mean, she engaged instead of running away or saying anything along the lines of “hey let’s not talk about poop”, so I don’t feel like I can be FULLY blamed. I may have also brought up the fact that you can make your poop sparkle by eating lots of edible food glitter (a theory I have tested and proven). It’s not like it was a completely unrelated subject at that point, after all.

One coworker, the cupcake fiend, thought it was pretty fantastic and vowed to go buy some edible food glitter to impress her kid and husband with in the near future.

The other coworker, who had been not exactly inching away but definitely leaning slowly further and further out the office door toward the hallway for the whole conversation, wore a look somewhere between bemusement and resignation as she examined her now empty cupcake wrapper.

I have a feeling she probably didn’t go back for seconds.

Oh well. Can’t win ’em all.

origins

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I started this blog three years ago today.

cake

OCD brain is annoyed that there are more than three candles in this picture. Calm your tits, OCD brain. We’ll just assume those blurry, far-away candles are for future blogiversaries off in the misty distance. Or past ones from other blogs. Who cares, just make like Elsa and let it go already. Gahd.

It doesn’t feel like that big of a deal to me because I’ve actually had a blog of some sort for close to fourteen years now. My original blog, which technically still exists but is pretty hard to find unless you know what you’re looking for, was started on 1/13/2004. I finally gave up posting there in  2009, then started my half-assed cooking blog in 2010. The half-assed cooking blog also still exists but I haven’t posted on it since July 2015. It was starting to feel like a chore, and it was also making me feel really inadequate in a lot of ways. Like, food blogs are all about good photography, and I had neither the time or the inclination to teach myself how to be a food stylist. I’m also really not good at measuring when I’m cooking, and I don’t always think in a linear fashion, so recipes are pretty hard for me to write…and that’s pretty much what people read food blogs for. There are only so many times someone is going to want to read about how good my meatloaf is before they’re like “OK, prove it. Either feed me meatloaf, give me your recipe so I can try it, or STFU”. In the end, I opted for S’ing the F.U.

I started How Bad Can It Go because a friend drew some casual similarities between my then Facebook-based rants about being a little touched in the head and the way Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess) wrote about her own experiences with mental illness. The comparison was wildly flattering. I immediately started envisioning how I’d blog hilariously (but also earnestly) about my struggles with anxiety, depression, and ADHD for maybe a year or so, then be ‘discovered’ by some publisher. I’d be given a book deal and afforded the opportunity to tell my day job they could shove off.

Let’s just say the offers haven’t exactly been pouring in. Or trickling, even. Nary a drip. Not even the merest hint of moisture in the air. Dry as a 5,000 year old Egyptian’s desiccated, mummified femur buried under 47 feet of sand, in fact.

mummy

Ramses was the worst peek-a-boo partner EVER.

But that’s OK. I’ll keep on keepin’ on, because hey, how bad can it go?

lust for pie

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On Sunday, my lust for pie landed me at Urgent Care.

If you follow me on any other social media platforms, you may already be familiar with this saga. For the benefit of those wise subscribers who don’t follow me elsewhere, and for the sake of posterity, I’m about to re-tell the tale here in long form.  Probably too long.

Anyway. Here goes.

We used to have this neighbor – he moved out a couple years ago. We called him Crazy Gary. I feel pretty OK with labeling him as crazy since I’m sort of crazy too and also he was definitely, obviously a little bit not right in the head. Which is fine, nothing wrong with being crazy if it works for you and you’re not hurting anybody…which I’m relatively sure he wasn’t.

Crazy Gary lived in this little house on a bit of property that’s bordered on two sides by our quiet, dead-end road. The other two sides are bordered by our landlord’s property, which is mostly a woodchuck wonderland of lawn and vegetable patches. Crazy Gary was a hoarder and a tinkerer. He had every kind of engine you could imagine sitting around in his tiny back yard, and could often be found fabricating strange hybridized lawnmower-garden tiller-tree trimmer things out of like, spare bike parts and twine. The guy was clearly some sort of mechanical genius. What he was NOT, however, was a responsible custodian of the house he lived in. The house actually belonged to Crazy Gary’s absentee mother and I guess she eventually got sick of the place being trashed and full of boxes of greasy sprockets whenever anyone went to check on it, so she had him evicted. Technically the house is now for sale as a ‘fixer upper’, but it’s really more of a ‘faller inner’. They cleaned out a lot of Crazy Gary’s hoard (like four huge rolling dumpsters worth, plus I don’t even know how many truck loads. It took them a couple weeks), but there are still piles of junk hanging around. The house has some broken windows. One of the exterior doors came unlatched at some point in the winter and now the woodchucks are using it as a clubhouse. Most mornings when I drive by on my way to work, there’s at least one woodchuck out on the front step sunning itself, giving me side-eye like “yeah, you keep moving, bi-ped. This place is four legger territory now.”

Point being…the property is abandoned.

Which conveniently relieves me of any qualms I might have had about appropriating the odd armful of stalks from Crazy Gary’s huge, beautiful rhubarb patch. It’s not stealing if it doesn’t belong to anybody in the first place, right? And it’s just going to go to seed and spread further across the lawn if someone DOESN’T harvest it, so really, I’m doing them a favor, right?

Right.

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This patch is easily 6’X8′. Trust me, there’s enough. Also? Someone else had been in it before me, so I feel almost entirely absolved of guilt.

Sunday afternoon was actually the first time I made a rhubarb run this season. It had been ready to make delicious things with for a few weeks but I kept either forgetting or running out of time in the day (you don’t go into woodchuck country at night. They’re like bats but worse. 10 gold Internet doubloons if you get that awkward and unskillful reference), or just plain lacked the ambition to walk the 50 yards out around the corner and pull some. But this past Sunday the weather was glorious, I was in a mood to cook, and the siren song of pie was just too much to ignore…so off I went.

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On the way back home with my only-marginally-ill-gotten gains. You see that knife glinting out from the rose-tinged stalks in my hand there? I sharpened it up real good before this whole endeavor kicked off. Foreshadowing? POSSIBLY.

My bounty and I made a quick stop at the compost pile to get rid of its leaves and stem ends, and then it was back to the kitchen to transmute this bunch of inedible hell-stalks into a toothsome pie.

Rhubarb pie is dead simple to make, especially if you’re a pastry slacker like me and use store bought pie crust (life is too short to fuck with pie crust from scratch. Don’t come at me with your tips and tricks because I’ve tried them all and they work fine, I just completely detest rolling out pie crust and I’m not going to do it. Save the wear on your finger joints. I love you). The majority of the work is in slicing the stalks and mixing them with sugar. Super easy.

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There’s that very sharp knife again. It’s a Henckels, and I’ve had it for nigh on 15 years. I cook A LOT and this knife is essentially an extension of my right hand.

One of the things about my ADHD is that it often takes me on tangents. The beat up jalopy of my mind is always taking turns down sketchy, winding side roads, often on two wheels at a high rate of speed, when it is least convenient. It can get very frustrating because I feel like I’m not the driver but rather, just one of those little smiley-face balls people sometimes stick on the end of their radio antennas. Sometimes I’m just along for the ride and I have very little say in direction or velocity, and that gets exhausting. I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I find helpful in terms of regaining a feeling of control over my brain is to make things. The creative process burns a lot of gas for me (big on the automotive metaphors today, I guess. Crazy Gary would approve), which helps slow things down a little. Making also often involves repetitive motions: the under-and-through under-and-through of knitting, the stab and draw of the needle and thread when embroidering…and of course, the methodical motions of chopping up ingredients for a dish.

Some people are afraid of very sharp knives, but anyone who has spent any time in a professional kitchen will tell you that the sharper the knife the better. Sharp knives are safer to work with, and they’re far more satisfying. There’s a specific swish that a good sharp knife makes when it cuts through veg, a specific feeling when I’m motoring through a stalk of whatever and making nice even cuts. It’s like everything else falls away, including the static in my head, and I’m in a state of flow. It’s just the knife and the veg dancing across the board, with my hands guiding via pure muscle memory. I don’t have to think about anything when I chop. I just have to show up and make the motions. It’s like a tiny glimpse of nirvana.

Another thing about ADHD is that it there are no guarantees. Something that helped you relax and focus one day might not work the next. And that hyper-focus, that Zen-like state of flow where everything seems like it’s happening almost without you, like some beautiful out-of-body experience where you get to just sit back and watch? That can vanish in an instant, in mid-motion, leaving you feeling lost and bemused until you realize, oh yes, I’ve fallen out of The Flow and I’m back on planet Earth.

And the thing about sharp knives is, they’re made of metal and thus very unforgiving. They have ZERO fucks to give about your mental state. They demand constant respect and utmost focus. A sharp knife can do a lot of damage if you’re distracted for even a split second.

Which, as you may have guessed, is how I ended up crumpled in a kitchen chair with my head between my knees, trying desperately to not pass out while I squeezed a wad of paper towel against the side of my left index finger in an attempt to staunch a rather alarming flow of blood.

The knife was in my finger, completely through my flesh and out the other side before I even registered anything. I tried to give it a quick rinse under cold water but I could immediately tell that it was deep and bad, so I went for paper towel and pressure instead. I’ve cut myself plenty of times in the past and I knew all the things to do – hold firm pressure on the wound, keep my hand above the level of my heart, sit down and stop pacing. I breathed my way through the massive urge to throw up and the torrent  of cold sweat that an adrenaline come-down always leaves me with, then I made my way to the couch so I could put my feet up. Mark wasn’t home and Keppo was pretty sure that he could fix everything by adamantly licking my face, which was as endearing as it was ineffective.

The blood wasn’t seeping through the paper towel, but the wound was getting re-opened every time I moved the paper towel to try and see if the bleeding was stopped. After about 40 minutes or so of repeating that cycle, I finally admitted that I may need stitches. I probably COULD have driven myself one-handed to Urgent Care, which is about 30 min away almost entirely by interstate, but I was still feeling a little wobbly from shock so I called my dad for a ride instead.

About twenty minutes after I went in, I emerged from the Urgent Care facility with a finger held together by superglue and steri-strips, and wrapped with elasticated gauze to roughly the size of the average corn dog.

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The doctor pointed out that it kind of looked like a dick and I couldn’t not see it after that. He used the term ‘winky’ though, which was more charming.

I’m grateful that I didn’t need stitches. I’m even MORE grateful that I didn’t sever an artery or a tendon. I’m still going to keep my knives sharp, but I might not do any serious slicing or chopping while I’m home alone for a while.
And I’m definitely going to steal more of Crazy Gary’s rhubarb.

cookies god damn it

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We had this lunch conference at work today.

Well, I say “we”, but nobody mentioned it to me until I was already warming up my leftovers from home, so I’m filing that under my not being invited and I therefore did not partake.

ANYWAY.

So, the place where the food came from always includes a load of cookies…REALLY GOOD cookies…when they cater a lunch for us. Usually when we have one of these things, it’ll be like an hour of people yakking in the conference room, then they’ll all eat, then they’ll fuck off back to their desks and leave the leftovers for us admin peons. So even though I didn’t partake of the lunch proper, I had a pretty reasonable expectation of being able to scam some of those fantastic cookies after everyone cleared out and went back downstairs.

Except, today, the people putting on the conference hung around.

And hung around.

And hung. The fuck. Around.

Every time they moved around in there I’d perk up and think “ooh, this is it! Cookie time soon!” BUT NO. They would settle back down and talk more. I’ve been waiting for my cookie opportunity for MULTIPLE HOURS while these dicks sit around jawing about who even knows what. Nothing important, that’s for damn sure.

It’s now 3:40pm EST and they are FINALLY starting to pack stuff up in the conference room and move toward getting the hell out. Hooray! COOKIE TIME, YES?

Uhh, no. Because you know what happened? My boss gave the leftovers to the lady who put on the conference.

INCLUDING THE MOTHER FUCKING COOKIES.

ADLKH OIJLKJFS SLKJSF DLKJSLD (insert image of me foaming at the mouth)

Literally all I wanted out of today was some of those cookies. Granted, I didn’t know the cookies were even going to be a thing until 12:30, but still. I looked forward to those damn cookies all afternoon.

You know what he said to the lady?

“Here, why don’t you take these cookies home, no one here will eat them.”

No one! No one will eat them! COOKIES! Are you MAD, sir? Have you taken a turn? DID YOUR MOMMA DROP YOU ON YOUR HEAD AS A BABY?!

Needless to say, I’m very disappointed.

And I’m probably going to buy cookies on the way home from work.