The Ghosts of High School Past

When I think of English classes, I often think it’s a miracle that I still love reading. So many of the stories we read made me wish I could return to a state of illiteracy. But the thing about being literate is that you can’t go back – unless, of course, you crash a sled into a tree.

In elementary school we read inane stories out of reading textbooks and answered comprehension questions at the end (i.e. Why did the animals eat the pineapple?). They were written to educate us without causing us to enjoy ourselves too much. If it weren't for Harry Potter and the American Girls, I probably would have given up on reading and became an ignorant hooligan.

Some of the stories were intended to plant the seed of entrepreneurship in our impressionable young minds. One was a play about a young fellow who realizes that the price of toothpaste is too high, so he makes it from scratch with baking soda and peppermint oil. Other people also agree that toothpaste is too expensive, so they start buying jars of his homemade toothpaste. He turns his passion for cheap toothpaste into a toothpaste dynasty and becomes a millionaire.

I just thought to look up the story and it seems that it was a children’s book that must have been very loosely adapted for our workbooks. They cut out his female business partner, the lessons about gender, racism, and the true meaning of friendship, and the mathematical problems they must solve to become millionaires. It’s like they cut out all the potentially good parts from our textbook to focus on the logistics of making toothpaste.

One Amazon reviewer says this is the most important book he ever read. Well.

In high school, Ethan Frome was on our list of required reading. I feel like Edith Wharton personally ruined my life in a number of ways. She’s a woman writer and I want to like her because of that, but I resent that I had to sit through the mundane details of various miserable lives ending with a botched suicide. The title character and his love interest try to kill themselves by crashing a sled into a tree, but instead they just become horribly, horribly mangled. Sledicide is on par with leaping out a four story window or trying to overdose on children’s aspirin. Oh, Ethan and your half-brained schemes!

I reluctantly finished the book. Then I hurled it against the wall of my bedroom. If I have to pay a fine, so be it, I thought. I hate all these people.

One of the great things about life after school is that no one can make me read anything I don’t want to read. I was starting to get itchy about required reading at the end of college. In my last playwriting class, we were supposed to read plays and take an aspect of that play to write a scene. I mercilessly parodied the plays I didn’t like. As far as I’m concerned, a story that I think is awful only benefits me if I can make fun of it. My professor would ask, What did you think of this play? And I would say, I don’t like it. She would say, I don't care if you liked it, what did you learn?

Nothing! I learned nothing! I refuse to learn anything from this text, I cried indignantly. Then I stood up and flipped my desk.

Sushi

Dave’s Christmas present this year was an ultra-romantic sushi-making press called a Sushezi. If I were shopping for myself, I would have gone for the authentic bamboo mat and happily struggled with it, eating my broken rolls with pride. I probably would have also worn a kimono and had dreamy Travel Channel fantasies set in a rural village on the side of Mt. Kilimanjaro. I was, however, shopping for Dave and the Sushezi was the top rated result on Amazon for the keywords “sushi making kit.”  I put it in my cart.

And then, after much anticipation, we made sushi. We went to an Asian grocery store to pick up spicy pickled radish, cucumbers, and sushi rice. We got some pickled ginger and sesame seeds because details are important. Then we went to work.

Sushi stuffing.

We made a veggie roll for me and a Philadelphia roll for Dave. When I look at sushi at this stage of the process, I think sushi is not unlike a sandwich. Only it is infinitely better than a sandwich. That's why we've grafted it into our own cultural palate. The first American to eat sushi probably felt just like Marco Polo eating his first plate of pasta.

In the end, we had a bunch of very pretty looking rolls, and some awkward end bits that were eaten with fingers. Last week I insisted on making pierogi from scratch as well. I'm working my way through the continents.

The Citi-Kitty Saga Continues

The cats mourn the loss of their litter box as though they lost their one true love. Wherever I go and whatever I do in the apartment, a cat is watching me, sighing, whining. Olive sits upon the dresser, staring down. Penny is on top of the refrigerator sobbing as only a cat can sob. To get our attention, she leaps on the stove and knocks down a pot of broccoli. Then I clean up the spilled broccoli. It is difficult to focus here these days.

We punched the first hole in the center of the litter tray, but it turned out to be too drastic a step for the kitties. I had such high hopes when Penny peed directly into the hole. I thought, Penny knows. Penny understands. We put in an insert that made the hole smaller, but they still seem equally alarmed.

The floor remains clear of soft rugs and things the cats might see as a suitable litter box replacement, but one day the shower door was left open. Olive took the liberty of letting it all out on the drain. I feel guilty being the jerk who stands between two cats and their glorious box of Swheat Scoop. At this point, I would gladly put the litter box back and bring peace to this apartment once more, before my shower is soiled once more.

I am at risk for everything

To sign up for my new health insurance I needed to take a multiple choice-style health evaluation through WebMD. It asked me questions about my diet, exercise regimen, repetitive tasks at work, how much time I spent sitting, and how much time I spent standing. It asked me if I had moved in the past year and if I had changed jobs.

I groaned my way through the diet segment, recording the number of servings I eat from each segment of the food pyramid, knowing full well that not eating meat or very much dairy for that matter would significantly bring down my score. Somewhere, a stern-looking insurance elf would be marking points against me in his policy holder records.

Since when is WebMD a trusted source of health-related information, thought I, and who would find such an exam useful? Surely it would deduce from the thirty or so multiple choice questions that I’m at risk for cholera, trench foot, and tapeworm, and proceed to recommend me a cure in the form of lean meats.

My actual test results were not so far off. The level of health risk was displayed, to convey a high level of urgency, with a red bar graph that nearly reached the highest level (representing death, I presume?). Were this evaluation a strongman game at the local county fair, I would have been mere inches away from ringing the bell and winning an enormous stuffed lobster for my bombshell girlfriend. Beneath this graph I was declared to be at high risk for a musculoskeletal condition.

My level of stress was also in the red. I didn’t expect stress to put me in the “massive coronary” range, but then I reviewed my answers and I remembered that I had moved twice and rolled through a series of five new jobs in one year. When I factor in student loan conundrums and chronic leaky ceilings and public transportation woes, it’s no wonder I can’t stop sleeping.

I don’t always recognize stress when it’s actually happening – sometimes it manifests itself as a cookie binge, other times a temporary coma. Recently I also had bouts of uncharacteristic crabbiness and blotchy, peely skin. It was like the skin cells on my face were trying to abandon ship.

WebMD proceeded to recommend a series of stress management techniques like meditation, yoga, and journaling. There was not one technique listed that I don’t already do. What can I do to alleviate stress that I’m not already doing? I asked myself. I certainly can’t stop the ceilings from leaking and stop the job markets from sucking and stop people from being absurd.

Then I reminded myself that this was a very general evaluation from the same website that had lead me to believe on more than one occasion that I had bone cancer and that skin condition that made Michael Jackson white. I was probably, for the most part, fine. I certainly couldn't give the insurance elves the satisfaction of divining my stress-related death. I, for one, intend to live. With leaky ceilings and all the rest of it. Forever, if necessary.

Mexican Chocolate

After dinner tonight, I drank a cup of guahillo chili Mexican hot chocolate. There is nothing quite so fulfilling in cold weather as a spicy hot chocolate that singes your uvula just slightly.

I’ve wanted to try Mexican hot chocolate since I saw the movie Chocolat. (Thus begins a truly pathological paean). It reminds me of the scene where the Victorian explorer drinks pure cacao and realizes his true desires, which involve a voluptuous Mayan lass.

As a supermarket cashier, one of my personal goals was to try all of the chocolate in the organic and natural section of the supermarket. Goals such as these got me where I am today. Thus, I was introduced lavender chocolate and chocolate with hunks of raspberry and chocolate with chili peppers and anise seed chocolate and the highly addictive Green and Black’s 70%. I have since expanded to vegan chocolate and raw chocolate, but I could never find Mexican chocolate anywhere.

Luckily the chocolate gods finally decided to smile down upon me and by means of a Twitter contest, Taza Chocolate, and the Culinary Guild of New England, a sampling of Mexican chocolate was literally dropped upon my doorstep as if by angels. My package of chocolate disks contains a variety pack of salt and pepper, guahillo chili, coffee, and a few other exciting flavors. Using this recipe from Taza’s website, Dave and I turned the disks into Mexican hot chocolate.

First, kill the chocolate.

The recipe says to grate the disks, but lacking a grater, Dave simply chopped them up into slivers. I warmed the milk on the stove and stirred in the chocolate slivers. The result was delightful. I've been drinking a great deal of European sipping chocolate recently and it is quite a different experience.

European sipping chocolate is sweet and thick. It makes you feel like a young, wealthy Victorian woman in a swanky café having clandestine affairs with poor abstract artists. In short, European sipping chocolate makes me feel like Peggy Guggenheim. Mexican hot chocolate is deep and earthy and a little salty. It makes you feel like a swashbuckling adventurer who travels the world and eats guinea pigs beside campfires. In short, Mexican hot chocolate makes me feel like Jack Sparrow.

The CitiKitty Experiment

When my boss asked me what my New Year’s resolution is, I just laughed and said I have too many to count. That was merely a cover up for the fact that my New Year’s resolution is to toilet train my cats.

I present to you The CitiKitty.

Dave purchased a cat toilet training kit called the CitiKitty. It is a shallow, plastic tray that fits over your toilet bowl that you fill with litter. It comes with more pictures of cats crouching on toilets than I have ever seen in my life. Once the cats get used to this disorienting new routine, you punch increasingly larger holes into the tray to transition the cats into using nothing but the naked toilet. If the CitiKitty doesn’t work out as planned, I can perhaps fashion the litter box into a makeshift game of Skee-Ball.

Initially, I had mixed feelings about it. Before we bought the kit, I was afraid that we would be wasting time and money on a system that my little rebels would stubbornly refuse to conform to. I imagined Olive urinating freely on the bathmat and Penny pouting and wondering why there was a tray of litter obscuring her perceived water bowl. But the possibility of never having to scoop the clumps from another litter box was far too seductive.

We set up the CitiKitty on the toilet and filled it with Swheat Scoop cat litter. The packaging instructions suggested that we remove anything the cat might find enticing to urinate on instead of the toilet, such as rugs or towels. We know from experience that Olive finds bathmats irresistible, so we hid them all. The instructions also said to sprinkle a bit of catnip onto the top of the litter to entice the cats onto the toilet seat.

SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATIONS:

1. Olive and Penny smell the toilet seat. Olive digs in the litter. Penny smells Olive’s butt.

2. After Dave sprinkles the catnip, Penny proceeds to eat mouthfuls of spiked Swheat Scoop.

3. Penny’s behavior becomes irrational. She appears frozen in a voluptuous pose on the carpet. Then, she stomps away with a wild, paranoid glint in her eye. Penny overexerts herself chasing a feather on a stick and nearly ruptures her spine.

4. Olive walks the empty space where her litter box once was. She yowls mournfully, as though for a lost friend.

5. Penny is the first to pee in the CitiKitty. We use positive reinforcement and barrage her with praise and cat treats. Then Olive comes over and we give her treats, too, for no reason. Then Penny swoops in and eats Olive’s treats. She knows she deserves it.

CONCLUSION:

At this stage, the cats seem confused and disoriented. Their water bowl has been replaced with a tray of litter and they mourn the absence of their litter box. Nonetheless, they are testing the waters.

Thoughts for 2013

We survived the Mayan Apocalypse. So now what?

This year, I hope you make yourself very uncomfortable and enjoy perpetual stomach butterflies. I hope that in making yourself uncomfortable you meet delightful strangers and eat peculiar desserts. I hope your cats make the conscious decision to use the toilet like civilized people and relieve you of the duty of scooping clumps from their litter box. I hope that someone gives you a gift for no reason at all and that this gift is not a PedEgg. I hope there is a scented candle that smells like chocolate chip cookies, and that you are given a prototype of this candle to test its functionality. I hope you notice little details that fall into the background of your life, like the plumy swirls in your teacup and people with interesting faces. I hope that everything changes for the better and you feel more like yourself.