Another Adventure

Driving on Ice

There are many idioms individuals possess that, however illogical, somehow maintain our sanity and ease our worry in the midst of confusion or in my case, displacement. For me, these are:

—Checking my email every thirty minutes to see if any divine answers have come to me through my inbox.

—Following dimly lit roads after accidently (absent-mindedly) taking a wrong turn, praying that I don’t end up in an industrial park…or a ditch.

—Reminding myself to breath when I hear one of my favorite songs, the one that takes me away to my dreams (especially when driving through deliverance on the wing of a prayer).

And of course there are other guilty pleasures, like singing along with baritones in ballads, and eating ice cream straight from the carton. When you find yourself in a brand spankin’ new arena, its best to hold tightly to something familiar with your left hand, while reaching forward with your right.

Confessions

I am sitting against the wall in my sister’s spare bedroom. I haven’t had a room since July. But I haven’t been paying my own rent, either.

I keep writing and deleting and rewriting. I wanted to write something therapeutic, but not too personal, and not at all narcissistic, though I’m afraid that that is exactly what a blog is. Oh, well. Here I am in Atlanta, quite literally between phases of life, sitting on the floor, comfortably content enough to stay here until morning, when I will be whisked away to the art museum with my lovely family. And they are, truly, lovely. Though when I’m with them, I forget who I am. All my masks and armors melt away and I hunch forward safely over my curled up legs, listening and laughing and interjecting without fear or pretense.

I just wish that this nasty cold would go away.

I departed Mississippi on Tuesday, leaving one set of my parents and my latest home behind, to come play party guest to Emily’s life. I don’t think my sister has ever told me to sit down before 🙂 Strange, it seems, that she is offering me towels and wine, kissing me goodnight and giving me an extra blanket for the spare bedroom. Weren’t we just talking on the phone about boys?

I dream frequently about my own imaginary home. In it, I stand barefoot on the cool tile of my wide open kitchen, leaning on marble countertops, the sunlight reflecting in my steel pots and pans hanging from the ceiling. I am the quiet despot of my humbly rustic abode, with maybe a dog or two, and enough tea to last until my fifties. It’s Nancy Meyers on a slightly smaller scale.

Of course, this is all an illusion, and every time I look in the mirror I remember that I am far more round about the face then I’d like to be, and not nearly collected enough to be my own homeowner.

My dreams have changed so much with every passing year, yet they never cease to be fully visualized and massively elaborate. They never come true. This is why I need to watch less television. As cynical as that sounds, I am perfectly content to not watch TV, to take walks and stretch about on yoga mats and not look in mirrors at all. I realize this may seem strange to my Buckhead residential older sister or any one else my age, but I don’t think I can help that. I don’t want to help that. I want to like it and not give it another thought, because there is too much tea to be drunk before I turn fifty.

On Saturday night, after arriving in Philadelphia and unpacking in my new home, I will sleep, and, God willing, wake up in the year 2012, wondering how in the world I got to where I now am and chortling at how different my life is from what I earnestly imagined it would be right now.

Fasting…Ironic for a blog centered on food…

“If we can’t discipline ourselves in terms of what goes into our mouths, we will hardly be in a position to discipline ourselves with regard to what comes out of our mouths.”

Tonight, I googled “Orthodox fasting and eating disorders.” I came across this website: http://oca.org/questions/dailylife/orthodox-fasting

Amazing that my questions were answered so simply. No, I wasn’t the one who made the inquiry on the website, but I thought the exact same things. This being the first advent I’ve willingly participated in (horribly, too), it’s proved to me far more difficult than I ever could have imagined. Here’s what I thought would happen: Not eating meat and dairy for forty days? Cool, I’ll lose weight. My skin will probably clear up, and I’ll be helping the environment.” In my hazy atheistic narcissistic days, veganism was something I loosely followed, because it was chic in my eyes, just like helping the planet and saving whales. I thought I was a martyr. Ick.

I should probably also mention that I have a history with disordered eating. Now that the fast is almost over, it’s just now hitting me how much of a disordered eating approach I’ve taken to Advent, and I’m ashamed of myself. Truly. The process of binge eating (which sadly leads to binging and purging) involves eating (involuntarily, it often feels) copious amounts of food, usually after going several hours longer than typical without food. It occurs in dieting quite a bit when one deprives oneself of vital macro and micro nutrients obtained through plant and animal foods (yes, both). So, I’m no stranger to the process, having been on every possible diet imaginable. Usually what I would do was eat little to no protein, fat, or carbs, and then wreak havoc on a jar of peanut butter or some fat free potato chips. My body was crying out for nourishment.

We cannot survive without food. It is essential. It can also be wonderful, especially when lingered over with family or friends. But so often I hate food, because I allow it (or some facet of it) to have power over me. And that’s what this fast became for me. Another way for food to have power over me.

So clearly I missed the point!

Another great point the aforementioned website brings up is the fact that fasting is not, NOT, a form of self deprivation, suffering. I mean, it is suffering, in that I have to suffer through another peanut butter sandwich and suffer through not eating ice cream for forty days, but that’s the backwards thinking, not the true joy of fasting! “We fast in order to get a grip on our lives and to regain control of those things that have gotten out of control.” Like self indulgence and greed. Ironically, the process of choosing a college is possibly one of the most narcissistic indulgences, and for that to be happening during a Great Fast is just cruel. God, why are you doing this to me?!?!

Calm down, Melanie. It’s not about me. It’s about Him. Maybe you can use these next few days to remember that. I feel light, and like I’ve gone through this before. Maybe I have and am just sluggish so I can’t remember.

The Great Cookie Project; an IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT!

(You can skip to the bottom if you are just curious what the IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT is 🙂
)

Something is amiss in the kitchen. Dishes, piled high in the sink, from two days ago–the dishwasher whirs and grumbles from its abuse– dried drips of chocolate, and, is that powdered sugar on the refrigerator door?

Powdered sugar on the refrigerator door.

Yep. And on the freezer door, too. I’m pretty sure the next time I sneeze, I will expel powdered sugar.

Let me explain. Every December, my Aunt Annie sends us all (that’s six plus families, all in various parts of the country) massive tins of cookies. Chocolate, butterscotch, raspberry, more chocolate, some peanut butter, and of course, more chocolate. They often arrive in a state of crumb like consistency, of which my sister and I justify our eating them–we’re not really eating ten cookies, just a lot of random cookie crumbs!!
But this year Annie, to my giddiness, I admit, enlisted me to help her out a bit.

Well, three pounds of butter later, I’m not sure this was the best idea.

Don’t get me wrong; I love cookies, especially around Christmas time. But living at home has forced me for the past several months to get it through my head that I am not the only one in the house, and yes, four other people use the kitchen too!!!

Oh, maaaan! Why can’t I just bake in PEACE? Well, because this isn’t my house. One can dream, though, and believe me I do. In my head I see a daintily decorated spacious kitchen with enough counter space to sleep on. I picture an art deco pale green on the walls, five wide gas burners, a white tea kettle nestled snugly in the background, and a large window inviting me outside into this:

But I digress.

In the midst of so much internal chaos, anxiously awaiting my final college letter, and writing pro and con lists (seriously), I spent the last seven days in a sugary haze, reteaching myself how to breathe. But what to do when baking becomes the source of anxieties??? Oh, Lord, help me.

By the way, I think I have made a decision. The cookies are boxed up, my regretful impulsively bought boots are ready to be returned, and my pro and con lists, mathematical figures, packing lists, and to do lists are being scribbled down, scratched off, and continuously attended to. This is good. This is very, very good.

Happy Baking.

-MEL

**At the risk of shamefully self-indulging, I have entered a short fiction contest sponsored by Seventeen magazine; the winner gets a cash prize that I am salivating over for my incredibly expensive yet ironically vital college education. So, please, PLEASE, head over to Figment.com and click the Heart button underneath my story. You don’t have to like it. Just pretend. God bless you!