Darkness

I made my own homemade mayonnaise today, and in case it’s not obvious, I am SO NOT the type of person who usually does such things (see: tonight’s dinner of microwaved kielbasa), and all those people who tell you that homemade mayonnaise beats the pants off of the jarred stuff? THEY ARE TOTALLY RIGHT. And also, it takes like a second to make, seriously. So go forth and mayonnaise, because Jesus, if I wasn’t already five pounds up from moving to Vermont and being perilously close to an ungodly amount of Vermont cheddar and maple syrup, I’d be sitting on the fridge right now with the Tupperware container and a spoon. It’s that good.

I made Orangette‘s recipe, adapted from her column in this month’s Bon Appetit which, by the way, was a gift subscription, because again, I make Shake ‘n Bake and things that are microwaved as a general rule, but I do harbor an immense love for food porn, cookbooks and cooking magazines. If you want to make it, it’s basically the recipe I linked to, sans Meyer lemon zest and the garlic and with whatever oil you want to use. And dude, it’s GOOD. Try not to eat it with a spoon, I dare you.

And hey, speaking of culinary weirdness, I discovered that many Vermonters put high-quality maple syrup on their pizza, particularly during sugar season (now). The higher the grade, the better it is on pizza, so I’m told. And weirdly, I GET this, because maple goes with things it shouldn’t, like turkey and ham and BACON. Yes, bacon. (Although you’ll never get me to eat that bacon chocolate. Ever.) And it beats the pants off of the central New York trend of putting blue cheese dressing on pizza, which is a trick I learned while attending Syracuse University in the late ’90s. It’s good, but it’s not like pizza needs to be any worse for you than it already is, and I always finding myself needing like half a cup on each slice to be satisfying. This and copious amounts of uh, substance-induced munchies were the reason I was convinced my clothes had all shrunk by senior year. Ahem. Yes.

And if you’ll indulge me please, yet again, in a brief discussion about the mystery of hormones and how they can ROIL AND RUIN your life. Yesterday, I was in a Very Dark Place, wherein I knew it was a hormone-induced dark place, and yet I was completely incapable of illuminating the darkness through logic. I KNEW my period was due any second now, and yet I still could not totally convince myself to, you know, let there be light and shit.

And yes, let’s discuss how irrational I was: I got myself VERY WORKED UP about the lack of annoying people in my life since I went full time freelance and no longer work in an actual office, and how this lack of irritating people was going to impact my non-professional writing career and now I’d NEVER FINISH MY NOVEL. EVER. BECAUSE THERE WERE NO ANNOYING PEOPLE TO ANNOY ME.

(I … I don’t get it, either.)

(Yes, like everyone else, I am writing a novel, and it’s just one of those things that I Have To Do Just To Do It regardless of outcome, really, I mean that. ME AND EVERYONE ELSE, I KNOW. And that’s probably the only time I’ll talk about it, because aspiring novelists, we are an annoying dime a dozen. )

Anyway, I was in such a STATE about this, you’d think that I’d just been diagnosed with flesh-eating disease or something a bit more tangibly bad. Plus, as you know, my life is PLENTY FULL of irritating people, and further, why would that be a BAD THING?

The point is, you see how this Dark Place was STUPID. And then, suddenly, no lie, as I’m laying there, the darkness lifted and I was all peaceful and HAPPY and RELAXED. And not to go all TMI, but suddenly I realized that was the VERY SECOND the P abandoned its MS colleagues. THE VERY SECOND. Hormones are NUTS, man. NUUUUTTTS.

And in other things we’re trying not to think about, after the spider in my bed incident the other day, HA HA HA, guess what? I have a MYSTERIOUS BITE OF THE SPIDERY VARIETY ON MY UPPER ARM.

GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

*Peter Gabriel

24 comments April 10th, 2008