Category: health and wellness

The Poor Man’s Slow Hustle #3

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I feel free again, already, knowing that my week will not be dominated by the demands of the man.

Relaxed, like I can breath.  That pressure bubble of time has lifted, and I can think about doing things for myself again.  I can continue to answer my endless list of questions, I can make long lists written in pencil and actually cross out completed missions.

Time can slow down again, and time can relax into a flexible scheme instead of a tightly run plan.

I am no longer fully dominated by work, saving that precious feeling of freedom solely for myself, locked in my own mind just to make sure that I give myself enough attention.

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Eating in America Sucks #1

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Reason number 1: Grocery Shopping.

I am well versed in the art, efficiency, #foodlife, #cheflife, convenience of grocery shopping.  I am basically an all around bad-ass when it comes to grocery shopping, saving money, feeding everyone, being amazing in my personal eating life.  Extracurricular duties consist of bagging and personal transport of product to the house, non-conditional of stairs involved or personal weight limit. I am fortunate to live in a neighborhood where I have an extensive access to ethic and individually owned stores.  But, alas, jewel exists and you do frequent it.  And when you do, you remember…

Food here sucks.  This is one of my many installments “Eating in America Sucks.”

Today’s lesson: Potato, The Lost Staple

Seriously the only options for starchy veg at the Jewel-Osco is the potato.  This classification is further limited to seriously 4 varieties under the exquisite umbrella of potato.  Idaho, Grade B Red, Sweet Potato, Mixed Medley Of Very Small Potato Resembling Thing.

That classic baking potato, the Idaho.  The quintessential Midwestern mashed, the Irish Racism Potato, Idaho no You Da Hoe.  But like honestly, it is the most boring kind of potato ever.  Do no get me wrong, I love, love this potato, but this is number one boring.  More bland than a potato.  Get it?

Moving on to grade B potato.  This is like that golf ball sized red potato, that small red apple resembling thing,  that tastes subtly sweet with a delicately creamy texture.  The grade B red potato is like that, but a step down.  It is larger and it’s silky taste has been genetically modified into the semblance of the hoe from Idaho.

Sweet potato is great but that is the old stand by.  I had sweet potato yesterday.  I came to the store hungry and wanting something slightly different that the same thing I eat everyday.  Been there, done that sweet thing.

Alright are you bored yet? Drink some coffee because this dissertation on the cooking grade potato found at the chain, corporate grocery store in not yet over. Rounding up our potato misadventure is that small, almost rotten bag of medley potatoes that are you last choice, your life saver, the possible one!  First of all, the potatoes are so small that there is no way the potato had time to develop any flavor.  It looks like it would taste like a green strawberry.  Secondly, this potato is too tiny to have any flesh beneath the circumference of the skin’s orbit.  The skin makes up the just about the entirety of the miniature potato.  I am not entirely certain, but I do not think that the peel is commonly preferred as the favorite part of the potato.  In fact, I think that it is common practice in the USA to peel the potato and throw the outermost layer away.  Garbage.  Since most potatoes are peeled, and most peels are garbage, the fate of our skin potato is, how shall we say? Compromised? Delicate? Uncertain? Not me of course, I like the skin, but I still do not want a potato consisting mostly of skin.

Yeah that’s it.  Those are the only potatoes offered, sorry for the lack luster list.  Out of the 5,oo0 cultivated variety of potatoes agriculturally grown, our most influential food retailer offers up a humbling 4. (Seriously 5,000, ask Wikipedia). OMG boring.  But really more than uninspiring it is insulting.  Dear lord I am not paying $3 a pound for a shitty baking potato.  The Tiny Skin Potato Medley of Sorrows is a dismaying $4 a bag.  Are you out of your mind??

Anyway, no other options for a starch element to add tonight’s dinner.  There were no parsnips, turnips, plantains, god forbid a celery root, or rutabaga.  What the hell do you do with that?   I dunno, ask the damn Oracle and use it in place of the uniformly bland white guy.

I must imagine how foreigners and visitors and immigrants and travelers must feel.  Do they feel bad for us?  I mean if they do I understand.  I am an American and have lived exclusively in the Midwest and I still feel like I am missing out.  Missing out on variety. Missing out on freshness.  Missing out on spontaneity.

art as a reflection of personality

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What do my drawings say about me?  They are all symmetry obsessed and almost the entire collection to date is unfinished.  I start, get distracted, move on, content with the beginning, with the promise of a pretty product.  Really I am afraid to continue because I do not want to fuck it up.  I have to be in the mood for perfection, and the mood doesn’t strike all that often.  If its not going to be flawless then mind as well leave it, its good enough.  Does any of this make sense?  Its a bit laziness, a dusty muse, the fear of failure, the strive for self praise.

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Why I am obsessed with a delicate balance of thin black lines dancing on an off-white sheet?  Why do I find their movements so mesmerizing?  I find a strange serenity in their beautiful agreement, in their simplicity in the need not to argue or demand space.  The dance starts simple as a drum beat, the arrangement soothing.

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Do they have to be so balanced because I am so crooked?  Am I overcompensating? And is that a bad thing? It usually is.  Overcompensating.  Making up for something lacked in an area in which you seemingly have no control.  It’s my souls plea to have a better house, one that does lean quite so much.  I try to console her, saying that it makes the building unique, noticeable, and memorable.  A discontent soul, that one.  A prince could build her a palace and she would say too big, a waste of space, not enough pools.  An artist could build her a bungalow, and she would say too quaint, too excluded from society, bad acoustics.  She should be happy with the nest in the crooked tree.  If that was the case, I would be a better painter.

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Sam

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I don’t like to talk about the curved condition of my spine.  It’s embarrassing.  It’s a sign of weakness.  It’s a deformity.  I know, you might not care very much, but for me, it makes me blush.  There are seriously only a handful of people who know about Sam.  My mumsy and my two best friends being just about the full extent of the all-knowing club.  Which is well-played considering that the physical presence of Sam is not subtle.  He is obvious, he is bold.  There is nothing shy about Sam.

I always have tight shoulders and always need a back rub, but I hardly ever let a friend/boyfriend/lover/ acquaintance/ anyone give me a massage.  I avoid it actually. I always say no. Even if someone is nice enough to offer up some TLC.  I don’t care about the pain, I don’t want them to find Sam and label me in any way.  Or be grossed out, or turned off, or see me as pathetic.  I am very sensitive about what people think about the severe curve that has made a home in the spine.  The only way I can talk about it is through a clandestine mask of Marigold.  She is not as shy as I am.

Remember in middle school when they had an annual check up, when you had to go into the women’s bathroom and bend at the waist so that a doctor could check for a curve?  Well one year after the simplest of tests, it was seen.  Sam was spotted.  As soon as that genetic seed had blossomed, the bathroom doctor sent me to a specialist.

They caught it early. To this day, I still don’t know why they were so concerned with spotting the scoliosis right from the get go.  It’s nothing like cancer, where if you catch it early on it means all the difference in the world as far as treatment is concerned.  As for my genetic mutation, I have no idea why I was paraded from doctor to doctor.  There was and there is no treatment.  They basically informed me early on that I was fucked.

I went to a chiropractor who said he could cure me.  That was a surprising lie (not).  In reality I have never been given any treatment.  They said hope for the best but if it gets worse we are going to cut you open, slicing up your body like a half peeled apple, splicing a spiraling staircase out of your body starting at your breastbone and twisting around my small waist to the upper part of my butt.  They wanted to pop me open like a canister of Pillsbury crescent rolls.  Then they would insert a metal rode, fuse a portion of my spine together, guaranteeing arthritis in the future, and, lastly, an impressive scar for keepsake. Wow, thanks.  I will pray extra hard doc for a miraculous reversal of a crooked spine.

So for a long time instead of growing up, I grew sideways, praying for a salvation that is for all intents and purposes is impossible.  The doctors never said go to physical therapy, they never said do yoga everyday, they never said get a massage every week.  They called me deformed, content with the belief that the only treatment was god’s will.  I have never been a lucky girl.  So instead I closed my eyes and went through adolescence as freak, as a deformed little girl, terrified about the possibility of becoming a bionic girl.

So I hide Sam from the world. I still like to pretend that I am a straight women leading a non curved life.  But really, Sam is my constant companion, he is my reason for being the strange, slightly askew woman that I am.

Since Marigold is to make me a bolder person, since Marigold is a way for me to exercise being comfortable with who I am, and since Marigold is to highlight the best of my amazing life, this post is to help me be more comfortable with what is inside my skin.  To be less bashful, to take myself less seriously.  Life is, after all, short and sweet, not long and severe.

Cheers Chicago.