Better than fruit salad

HOWDY

Things are much better now, thanks for asking. People have graduated, we have celebrated the graduation, we have celebrated other things, some of us have crawled out of our shells a little bit, and we have dealt with some intense projects at work with comperable ease. So that’s the nutshell version. Now I can get back to details.

Yesterday I was at the gerocery store buying food. One of the food units was yogurt, because I could only see one in my mental picture of the fridge, and I need three yogurts at all times in the house*. Ideally, I’d have three at work as well, so that I’d stop eating a hole in my pocket with all these 80 cent packets of white cheddar cheeze-its, since they aren’t even enough to quench my hunger-thirst anyway, to say nothing of the fact that white-cheddar is an inferior flavor. To cheddar. Yogurt also seems more like real food to me. (Is it? Maybe.)

I walked up and down the isle a few times, trying to find the mango. Or peach. I have been in an orange mood lately. This wouldn’t have taken more than one swing through the isle, but there was a rather cumbersome gerocer person who was sort of in the way, covering several different flavor rows simultainiously and making it hard to see much of anything. He didn’t seem to be doing anything but rather kept taking random cups, looking at them, and putting the back. He was milling up and down like I was, precisely in opposition to me to the degree that I thought for a breif moment he was doing it on purpose. Eventually I located the orange section and parked right in front of it, determined to take my time becuase I was in no mood to rush, and because I was afrad that if I picked out my things and then got them wrong I might never make it in there again.

As I’m selecting three yogurts, a younger gerocer person walks up to the first gerocer person.

FGP: Have you looked at these labels?
YGP: ..No?
FGP: Hmm. Why are so many of these expired?

Holy shit. I look down at the one in my hand and sure enough, it is dated MAY 13 2007. Not that one day or two means anything usually, but I am very squeamish about dairy products. I supressed a yelp and quickly replaced the cups I had selected, and then carefully, with GREAT DIFFICULTY, found three yogurts that were not going to spoil the moment I set them in my fridge. I breifly wondered why the hell so many of the expired things were sitting there, (some of them were dated considerably earlier,) but there is no practicality in driving 30 miles to a fancier gerocery store for mundane things like UNSPOILED DIARY PRODUCTS, so I suppose I will just be more dilligent in my date-checking from now on. If only my milk man delivered yogurt.

*This Three Yogurts rule is a completely arbitrary number in that is has nothing to do with any conspiracy theory in its own right. (My psychosis is not number-based, remember.) But that does not mean I don’t get to defend it a little:

1. One yogurt is stupid, because before you’ve even adjusted your mental fridge inventory to include the one yogurt, you’ve probably eaten it as a late night snack.

2. Two yogurts is very close to one yogurt, and because it’s an even number I feel like I’ve got plenty of yogurt, when in fact I’ve only got two, and then I eat one and I only have one, and one yogurt is just so close to no yogurt, which is none.

ONE
NO
N- ONE
NONE

3. If you were paying attention, one yogurt at home + three yogurts purchaised actually means four yogurts altogether. Four yogurts. 3+1. But remember how one yogurt is like no yogurt? Also, I have this additional problem with one yogurt, and that is that I can’t seem to remember that I have it. Because one yogurt is basically no yogurt, as good as eaten, why bother remembering it, right? Then a few days go by, maybe I eat out or bring my lunch to work or something, and then suddenly I look in there and I can’t remember when I bought that last yogurt and that’s what it’s become. No longer one yogurt, but the last yogurt. Mysterous last yogurt. Are you still okay to eat, last yogurt?

4. Four yogurts is pretty close to five yogurts, which corresponds with the 5/$3.00 thing my gerocery store sometimes does, but five seems like abject excess and the store discounts each individual yogurt anyway.

[May 8th, not published then because I'd misplaced it.]

So I had a weekend that I did not necessarily want to glorify with text at the time, because while some good (Italian) things happened (Penne Gorgonzola, homemade ravioli, Chianti, espresso), some pretty dismal things happened as well. Things like trying to be friends with a rough bark-like substance that has mysteriously replaced Anthony, being somewhat unsavory myself, finishing poorly on both Big Huge Papers (four smallish papers are forthcoming, I’m already a-sop in drafts, books and used teacups, and the tears welling up in the stricken I have had ENOUGH face do not help the situation,) discovering I have badly mis-budgeted and therefore have literally NO MONEY until probably the next-next paycheck, and learning that Grad school is evidently not on the plate for the aforementioned fauna. To say nothing of the previous week, when my car broke down* thereby making it impossible to go to the wake of a friend who recently passed away.

Seriously. When it rains it fucking pours. Still.

I have avoided, as best I can, carrying on in detail the hideous psychological gorefest the last few months have been because Lord knows I hate to read a journal of pure and solid whine whine whine, and I am sure you are no different. But while dwelling on the slime certainly doesn’t help — I do that enough on my own I think without having to type it all up in a word document — there is a liberating aspect to getting it all out of my head and in the living world, albeit the pixilated digital living world. So, sucks to be you.

FEEL FREE, OH YE OF FAINT HEART AND MIND, TO SKIP THIS PART AND MOVE ON TO SOMETHING LIGHTER

The last two weeks have been particularly foul, in the midst of times I thought could grow no fouler. It is doing a number on my sanity, I am more or less constantly exhausted and emotionally frail and petty. I continue to pick meaningless fights which now at least have the decency to announce themselves. Now conversations like this one, a lengthier version of which came up twice on Saturday at a party, are becoming frequent:

Me: You are doing a thing that makes me obliquely sad.
Other Person: Should I not do it?
Me: No, because it is cosmically wrong for me to dictate your life. Instead, I will sit here and be mad about it.
OP: That is kind of whack.
Me: Indeed, I am a total whack-job for even thinking about it in the first place. (Sobs)
OP: …

What possesses me? Seriously, what? There is no good that can come from this, particularly if I’m just going to beam emotions at people rather than come up with solutions. While on the one hand the things I mentioned on Saturday are things I genuinely worry about, I’m not sure NOW was the best time to add Random Insecurities And Judgment Calls to the grimy cauldron of General Malcontent. If you aren’t part of the solution you’re part of the problem and all that. Furthermore, if I’m going to try and be all assertive (rather than the goopy worm I’ve felt like lately…oh you need me to do all these tasks for you? No problem. Oh, rather than let me vent a little, or even let me cheer you up a little even though I am CIRCUMVENTING ALL MY NEEDS FOR COMFORT RIGHT NOW AND TRYING TO DO SOMETHING NICE FOR YOU BECAUSE I AM TRYING TO BE A GOOD PERSON, DAMNIT, you are just going to fire me line after line of unrelenting negativity? Awesome.) not suggesting solutions by and large makes that whole attempt at assertiveness a sort of moot point. Because then you’re me, saying I’ve noticed something I haven’t bothered to fix.

Really I think the problem is both of us have been in a State for an equal number of weeks, and so we feel abrasive, get all abrasive with each other, and then react accordingly. The Foulness balloons. And then some good stuff happens (like Penne Gorgonzola!) and instead of going with the happy Something Else manages to make the frowny mouths and hunched shoulders come back, and you’re back where you started. You had a taste of happiness, and it was ripped from you. Now you’re reduced to a anti-social, unappetizing hollow shell. Like tree bark.