sugar praise

Last night, BF and I went out to our favorite Mexican restaurant and went to see Tron. I should say our formerly favorite Mexican restaurant; we loved it because it was cheap, the food was plentiful and delicious, and the service was lightning-fast. We’d be in and out of there in 35 minutes, which was a giant advantage for me and my impatience. But last night we found that they’d raised their prices, and the service had shifted over on the spectrum to the area between ordinary and pretty bad. We’ll definitely give it many more chances, but it bummed us both out that the things we liked best about it were not in evidence last night.

But then we went to see Tron, which we both really enjoyed. If you’re into the geek end of things, grab it in the theater before it goes.

I’ve been reading Carolyn Hax’s chat archives in a disorganized sort of way, opening years and dates pretty much at random. I’ve been finding lots of pearls, but here’s one thing that stuck out to me, from 2007:

“Chevy Chase, Md.: What do you do with a 7-year-old who thinks he knows everything, can do everything without practicing, and while an incredibly fabulous kid, risks really being insufferable as he grows older? At some point, he won’t be cute and precocious. How do I get him to try things and stick with them?

Carolyn Hax: First and most important thing you can do is make sure there is little to no reward for him in being cute and precocious. You don’t want his emotional digestive system to get used to a steady diet of praise and attention, which is akin to refined sugar–quick fuel, no substance–because he’ll go seeking it well into adulthood. What you want is for his diet to be heavy in a sense of accomplishment, which is the product of hard work, prolonged attention and effort, obstacles faced and surmounted–i.e., the complex carbs and protein–so he can develop a habit of sustaining himself emotionally.

How tortured is my metaphor? Let me count the ways…

Practically, this means steering him to, encouraging, praising, and modeling focus and hard work. It’s, “I love that you stuck with it” when he works to get something right, vs. “You’re so smart!” when he pulls off a parlor trick.

If you’re having trouble thinking of or incorporating specifics, it would be worth a conversation with a child-development specialist.”

Lightbulbs went on all over my brain when I read this. I got a whole lot of refined sugar when I was a kid, coupled with a lot of messages about how disappointed they were with me when I failed to do what they wanted me to do. I.e. I’d hear a half-hour lecture about how my grades weren’t good enough, and they’d wrap it up with “we love you and are very proud of you” and send me to my room to think about it. Highly confusing and not remotely helpful.

That short description of the 7-year-old sounds a lot like lil’ me. I was cute and precocious. I grew up thinking that the parlor tricks (and the praise and attention) were the most important part of my identity, and only in the last few years have I attempted to figure out the substantive things about myself that are likable and worthy of praise and attention. Since I’m not cute and precocious anymore, I worry a lot that people don’t like me, that I come across in ways that rub people the wrong way, and I don’t have anything to present about myself that I am confident about.

It’s not that I think this is the key to all my troubles, but it definitely helped unlock big doors and allowed me to peer in. Carolyn does that for me. She’s quickly become my favorite of all the columnists, and I’m a bit of an advice-column junkie, so that’s saying something.

Well. I hope your Tuesday is full of complex carbohydrates and awesome light-cycle battles.

12/27

Oh, achy and sore. I taught too enthusiastically at my free class on Christmas Day, a bit above my ability at the regular class at 8:30 the next morning, and then taught a third time at 10:00. Most of my body is reminding me that I haven’t practiced with any regularity in a few weeks and I need to do that in order to teach without suffering.

The Christmas Day class was fabulous. I had 13 people, some of whom had never been to my studio before. I got two hugs – including one from a cancer survivor for whom this was her first class after completing treatment – and a present, a tube of “chicken poop” from a very handsome middle-aged man. I wore a sparkly, sequined red top, and had lots of fun. I’m definitely doing it again next year.

Christmas Day itself was pretty great. The family was in fine form and I laughed a lot. I had a bad moment of having to sit next to my mother at dinner and listen to her lie, plainly and obviously, and say nothing, which was painful. In the past I have usually called her on it in front of others and watched her squirm, but I felt so angry and impotent and hopeless that instead I just sat there. BF looked in my eyes and sent me caring, loving messages with his brain (we were seated across from each other instead of next to each other). Other than that moment it was mostly great. I love spending time with those folks.

The same thing happened that it does every year: I make gifts for everybody, and I get gifts from about 25% of everybody. I try very hard to remember that I don’t give gifts to get gifts, and that it’s better to give than receive, and anyway if I were receiving I’d be receiving gifts like ugly earrings and very ugly salad bowls (just for instance), but what I’m mad about is not the actual lack of receiving of gifts but rather the lack of I Thought About You that’s evident in not getting any gifts. I am careful to think about every single person who attends Christmas, and I make or get gifts for all of them. They do not do the same for me, and this is four years running that this has happened. That makes me feel like a chump.

Am I wrong about this? I’d love opinions from people who aren’t necessarily as materialistic as I am. And before you say it, yes, I’m glad I’m building goodwill with a family that I love. But still. I’m seriously considering having four years of goodwill be enough.

My father didn’t call. My grandmother did, to tell me she was sorry she hadn’t sent my Christmas check yet, but the weather there has been so bad that she hasn’t been able to go out. She would send it right away, she promised. Does everything have to be about money for my family? (One of my mother’s gifts was money from her Roth account for our wedding fund. There are so many things wrong with this that I don’t even want to get into it.) I can’t believe that was her Christmas message. Not “I love you and Merry Christmas”, but “don’t worry, you’ll get your cash as soon as I can totter out to the bank amid the snowdrifts, I swear”. She’s one of the three packages I have to send this week to faraway friends. I didn’t get to it in the two weeks before Christmas because it was just one more item on the list I couldn’t manage. I like it when presents trickle in after Christmas, so I hope it doesn’t bother the friends either. I wonder if her message would have been different if I’d sent her the gift on time.

BUT AS I WAS TRYING TO SAY BEFORE I GOT ALL MAUDLIN AND IRRITATED, Christmas was great, I got lots of lovely gifts and spent lots of good time with family, it was a joyous and lovely holiday, bah humbug fa la la la la.

Do I sound conflicted? Because I am.

For the record, BF got me four seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which is a squealy and wonderful present, and I have already made it through about ten episodes, whilst knitting the hat to go with the scarf which I successfully finished mere hours before I wrapped it and gave it to Mom. It’s been so long since I enjoyed a sitcom, and this show is one of my favorite things to watch ever.

BF is off all week, and I very much wish I was at home with him instead of at work. There’s a very relaxed attitude today, which is good, but I am sore and it’s hard to concentrate and I’d love to be at home with him and Mary Richards instead.

on forgetting. and discovering. and tearing out hair.

So, some undefined period of time ago (weeks? days? last month?), I saw a recipe for eggnog-banana oatmeal on Freshly Pressed, and it looked unbelievably mouthwatering, so I decided that as soon as I remembered to buy eggnog, I would make it.

And I did not print out the recipe.

And now that I have eggnog in my refrigerator at last (I went to the grocery store on Tuesday for the first time in about three weeks and the bill was astronomical), I am ready to try the recipe, oh boy, and the recipe seems to have disappeared completely from WordPress and Freshly Pressed (I scrolled backward FOREVER, it seemed) and the entire damn internet.

Oh, wait, Googling helps. There it is. In the meantime I found this one, which actually…looks better, and by way of this search I also discovered this latter blog, full of DELICIOUSNESS, and yay for forgetting to print things out, I guess?

Things have changed at my job significantly in the last two weeks: I am now the sole support for my four attorneys. Our secretary is gone. For various reasons, they will not be hiring a new one; they are sticking with just me. There is a lot of emotional turmoil around all this for me, but suffice it to say that I will be a lot busier in the coming months, and I cannot say as of yet whether I’m happier about that or not.

Last Saturday’s Dress Day, where the moms and my friend M came over and watched me try on my wedding dress, went off without a significant hitch. The moms get even more meddly around each other than they are on their own, which is very awesome for me, but it wasn’t too bad. My own mom seemed fine, had on a very cute skirt, didn’t do very much of the Mom Stuff that drives me goddamn insane. M said she was exactly the way she’d pictured her.

I am teaching a free class on Christmas Day at my studio. I really thought this would be a nice idea, and I am weary of teaching tiny classes and want a big one to rev up my enthusiasm for teaching. I don’t expect a ton of people, but more than two would be good.

I hate being out and about during this season. Everyone’s energy is so high that being around people in stores is like being in a beehive. It’s so noisy with energy and stress that I can barely think. It’s certainly pushed my own stress up higher, when I’ve got enough to think about, thank you.

Usually before Christmas I am super-prepared. Ordinarily I have been making jam and other handmade things for months, I have everything wrapped and ready by the 18th, and I slide into Christmas Eve with ease and aplomb. This year all of that has failed. My handmade idea is a pretty good one and I’m confident that I’ll have it all done before the 25th, but none of the gifts are prepared, the scarf I’m knitting my mother is not even halfway done, only BF’s gifts are wrapped, I have NOTHING for MP, and basically I’m a mess. This has been one of the more stressful and difficult months of the past five years for me, and I am just not in a place where I can whip myself up into a frenzy and stuff and prep and wrap everything. (And when I said something about how difficult this month has been in an email to MM the other day, she sent me this gooey email telling me to count my blessings that made me want to smash my monitor with a bowling ball. Are count-your-blessings messages EVER a good idea? In this case it just made me feel that she didn’t hear me and didn’t sympathize at all.) I am doing the bare minimum right now and I’m going to get down to business tomorrow (I have the day off and will do what I need to do) (and will be starting off my day with a baked oatmeal custard, yes indeedy).

I just don’t want to do any of it. I don’t even want any presents. I want to curl up in my house and eat macaroni and cheese and watch Pixar movies. It will be nice when I’m there on Christmas Day – and even nicer when it’s over – but this year I am feeling reluctance of a different sort than the usual this-will-be-a-waste-of-time and I-don’t-want-to-talk-to-these-grownups-all-day types. This year I want a rest, a dark quiet room, and I’m willing to forgo all the good stuff if I can have one.

No such luck. But – next weekend is New Year’s, which is always calmer and happier for me than the prior week’s festivities, and I’m taking off Thursday as well. That will be a nice rest. I don’t know if I’m going to make it till then, though…I am frazzled and worn out and the last thing I want to do is assemble and wrap 10 handmade gifts in the next 48 hours.

tagged, Tiffany edition

I am speechless with annoyance at a count-your-blessings message I received this morning, and know that I have a lot of events to write about for catch-up purposes, and the solution to both of these problems seems to be a meme that Tiffany tagged me for.

1. Favorite holiday TV special, Christmas or not.

I don’t…have one…that I know of…this question has totally stumped me.

2. Favorite pre-1960 movie.

Oh, God, the majority of my favorite movies are pre-1960. The first movie I thought of when I read this question is Sunrise, so I’ll go with that.

3. Most embarrassing moment of the year 2010.

Stumped on this one too. I have a lot of mildly embarrassing moments – realizing that my yoga top is too revealing for demonstrating forward bends to male students, etc. Nothing huge is jumping out at me.

4. Do you love football in the snow as much as I do?

No.

5. Do you think people that sweeten their coffee with honey are totally weird? Or are you ONE OF THEM?

No, I don’t, and no, I’m not, as I don’t drink coffee. You can put whatever you want in your coffee, it’s no skin off my nose. (Even if I do think sugar substitutes are eeeeeeevil.)

6. What’s your guilty pleasure?

Twilight. Bam, I admitted it.

7. Would you video tape yourself dancing to cheesy 80′s music? Please? No, seriously, please? Name the song!

I doubt I would videotape it, but I would do it in front of friends if asked (and coerced with drink). Song would probably be either “Billie Jean” or something or other from Footloose. Awesome soundtrack.

BONUS QUESTION: Who was the last person you drunk-dialed, and what were the circumstances?

I have racked my brain, and I can’t think of a single time that I drunk-dialed. During my prime drunk-dialing days, I generally knew even when drunk that it was not a good idea to use the phone in such a state.

oh, fuuuuuuudge

Someone has decided that I don’t have enough on my plate right now, because today I lost my wallet.

I retraced my activity over and over again, tore apart the house and car, and it’s just not here. BF and I have determined that due to the time span in which I probably lost it, whatever has happened to it, it’s up to someone else if I get it back or not.

There was stuff in that wallet I can’t get back.

And I don’t even want to think about identity theft.

I pray for help about once every couple of years, but tonight is going to be one of those occasions.

UPDATE: Holy crap, God is good.

I went and got gas this morning at the same station where I got gas on Sunday morning in BF’s car. That was the last time I remembered using/seeing my wallet. I always do the same thing when I get gas, though, so I was pretty certain I’d put the wallet back in my bag. It was so goddamn cold, though, I remember that far better than the actual getting of gas.

This morning as I got gas, it occurred to me that I very well might have left the wallet on the roof of BF’s car and driven off. He has a hatchback so I didn’t put the wallet on the trunk like I sometimes do with my car. I figured if that had happened, it was probably gone for good, but I still idly scanned the shoulder as I got on the entrance to the highway.

There was something orange in the shoulder. It was the right size.

I pulled over and ran, and there it was, my wallet. It had been run over and was totally mangled. My license and my bank card were missing, but the $3 in cash I’d had was still in there. Nearby I saw one of my yoga business cards in the grass, and then my social security card. I walked up and down the embankment with tears welling in my eyes, gathering cards, and eventually I found my license and a number of the other cards I’d had in there. My bankcard appeared gone, so I got in my car and prepared to leave, but then I spotted the red and gray card in front of my car. It was broken and unusable, but the number was intact.

I laughed and cried a little when I got in my car, and then I called BF in hysteria. He was so happy for me. I told him this was SCIENTIFIC PROOF that prayer works. (I had a miserable night, barely slept, prayed a lot, went over and over what could have happened to it, made promises about being more careful with my money, etc.) He suggested I have the broken wallet shadowboxed and hung on the wall, and I may just do that.

I know I could have replaced almost all the stuff in that wallet if I’d had to. But I was miserable and heartsick at the thought of it, at all the trouble, and very angry at myself for being so careless as to lose this essential item. I am so grateful, from the very bottom of my heart, that the universe decided to give me a break this time.

sobre mi madre, II

Wednesday was the day my mother was supposed to have shifted her address to one about 25 miles away from where I live. I think she took a week to drive here, because I know she left her home in Florida last week. But she didn’t really fill me in on the details of how she was making this trip.

I am in an emotional state of near-panic about this. Most of the reason is that I have absolutely no idea what to expect from the next six months (I don’t know if it’s six months or a year that her fellowship here runs). I don’t know if she’s going to want to spend more time with me, which could end up making things worse between us, or if she’s going to be too busy to spend time with me, which (despite being glad for not having the potential conflict hanging around all the time) would psychologically be yet another rejection of me on the part of one or the other parent, just as hurtful as all the others.

I don’t know what she’s going to want. When I said this to BF’s cousin and MM at Thanksgiving, BF’s cousin asked, “Well, what do you want?” This question stopped me cold, and I said “Uh,” about four times with my mouth open like a codfish before I finally decided that I could not answer that question and said as much. It made me think, though, and after thinking about it for three weeks I still have no idea what I want out of our relationship for the next six months.

I have no idea what I want out of our relationship, period. I confessed in therapy that I wanted my parents to be more like BF’s parents, more loving and involved and genuinely interested in my life instead of solely their own, more capable of making family a priority. It hurt badly to admit such a thing; I’d thought I was mature enough to accept what will and will not happen with my family members, understanding what I know that they can’t give me and appreciating what they can. But it turns out that I still want what I want.

Also, all I can think about lately is all the wrongs she’s done me for the last 15 years. I am suffering about them now, over and over again, unable to stop thinking about various things she’s done and said that have wounded me. Currently, she behaves like a fair-weather mother, an ADD-ridden one, who can’t keep a promise and can’t remember what’s going on with me and doesn’t seem to care about what I say. I feel that she sees me as a valuable bauble, something bright and shiny and needing minimal itinerant care, but with nothing about it that requires deeper exploration or thought. I’m worthwhile to her because she can be proud of me, bring me up in conversations as something she’s accomplished, visit me and see how attractively I’ve turned out and how cleverly I can keep up my end of a conversation. (She can also criticize and nitpick, trying to shape me into the version of me that she imagines.) But I don’t have anything to offer her beneath that, and certainly she need not offer me anything. No one needs to keep promises to such a thing.

I could be wrong. But she does not behave as if I’m interesting, or even worth her time. She behaves as if she needs to maintain me, talk to me every now and then to keep things up, keep me apprised of her comings and goings for the sake of safety. I know she loves the idea of me, the daughter who has become an adult and who loves her, but she only makes small talk with me over the phone, she does not expose her actual unmasked self to me unless I make a huge effort, and, at the heart of it, she does not know me. And if she suspects my real personality, she does not like it.

None of this should really matter, because she’s my mother and we love each other as family is bound to do. But all of these things (and many others) have allowed her to hurt me, over and over, and I am so tired of excusing her and going around her and putting up with her. I do not want to do it on a regular basis in the flesh for the next six months.

Last night BF listened to me while I told a story of some of her crappy treatment from my adolescence. He was very upset for me. It felt indulgent for me to do this, because as I told him, my parents weren’t drunks, they didn’t beat me or each other up, my childhood was not dysfunctional or bad on the face of things. But the more I look back, the more dissatisfied I am with how they parented. It was a chilly and self-involved family I lived in, a frighteningly consequence-filled early life, with two people who have no capacity to love openly and unconditionally. It has left scars. It is hard for me to bear. I can’t deny this any more than I can deny that I feel spoiled for complaining about it.

BF advises that I take things with her one day at at a time through the length of her visit here. That I just sort of see what happens, if she’s going to be in touch with me all the time or be too busy to be in touch with me, and worry about the hurtfulness when and if it happens. I think this is wise advice, but my apprehension just knows no bounds right now. Tomorrow is Dress Day, when she and my friend M will come to MM’s house and they’ll all watch me try on my wedding dress and shoes and so forth. I don’t know what to expect from her. I don’t really want to think about it too much; I just want to presume it’ll be somewhat fun and soon over, and get through it.

I guess that’s true for the next six months, as well. Soon over. But her role as my mother is not a limited performance, whether local or out-of-town, and I continue to be at a loss as to how to sit in the audience and watch her performance without leaving in tears.

to JD or not to JD

While we’re on the subject of very hard admittances, I am more and more conflicted about my current choice of career. I looked at the website bios of many of the young lawyers at my firm last night. I found that one of the reasonably well-established attorneys down the hall is only one year older than me, while a female attorney who is beloved by all (and currently pregnant) is a year younger.

They hired four new associate attorneys this year, three women and one man. One of the women, who is married, apparently wealthy, and two years younger than me, sits in an office near me. She is a chatterbox to her family while she’s at work, and so I’ve heard all about the house that she and her husband are building, about her relationship with her father, about the cruel injustices of bad drivers and baristas alike. She has demonstrated total snottiness whenever I have been engaged in conversation with her or with her and others. She wears beautiful suits and beautiful pearls, and drives a BMW.

I cannot help but look at her and wonder about the life I didn’t lead. I made the choice not to pursue law school a few years ago, and to go ahead and be a paralegal instead, giving up lawyerdom forever unless something wholly unforeseen happens. Because of that, I’ve given up the status and wealth that come with lawyerdom, the pearls and the BMW, the ability to be snotty to those beneath me. The thing is, I own heirloom pearls. I went to private school and a Seven Sisters college. My mom can use up a metaphorical case of tissues with her snottiness. I have a lot of the markers of status that this attorney (and all the other young attorneys) have; I just don’t do what they do, don’t run in the same circles, don’t (can’t) spend the same amount of money on my clothes. I’m a paralegal, apparently now and forever, so I’m not allowed to have conversations with them.

In choosing to give up lawyerdom, I’ve given up a lot of things that I can easily do without: extremely long hours, often-dull company, a general despising of my profession by the masses. I’ve also given up membership to the club that I think my mother intended me to belong to, the women who wear pearls to work and build houses to suit them at age 28. Ordinarily I don’t regret this a bit, because I still strongly do not want to be a lawyer.

But I don’t like it when people underestimate me. Seeing the dates of matriculation of all these young lawyers on our website – one of them was an incoming freshman at my high school the year I graduated – made me feel bitter, and angry with myself for giving up (and, in some ways, being prevented earlier on from pursuing) a life that might have been better for me.

Might have. I didn’t give up the idea of lawyerdom without a great deal of thought. My decision was ultimately based on the idea that I can make enough money as a paralegal, with a lot less stress and permanent affect on people’s lives, and that none of the status issues or anything else matter more to me than my inner life. I didn’t think I cared what people thought of me and my choice of career. But looking at these young lawyers eye-to-eye is a different thing than making a decision after weighing the factors logically, and right now I just feel like I want to belong to the club.

Q&A goes a long way

Why do I feel the need to exercise a proscribed number of times each week (four, five)?

Because I want to stay strong, healthy, fit, and reasonably thin, from now until such a time as it becomes impossible for me to stay that way.

Why does this exercise have to be yoga?

It doesn’t, but I discovered that yoga could help me to be strong, healthy, fit, and reasonably thin a couple of years ago, and that it also calmed my mind and made me feel wonderful, and I decided to stay with it as the form of exercise that I wanted to do. I’ve tried other things, and although running helps me work particular things out and aerobics makes me drop weight in a hurry if stuck with, running also embarrasses me because I can’t go very far at all and aerobics gets really tiresome in a really short time.

What’s wrong with doing yoga as an exercise a few times a week?

Nothing, on the face of it.

Then why is it making you unhappy to keep coming back to it?

…

That’s the hard part to talk about.

All I can think about is what I can’t do. The further flexibility that I haven’t reached. It hurts me, it makes me feel worthless, that I can’t do the things that I see others do, that I see pictures of. All that “only I can do my own backbends” is all well and good but at this time it is impossible to remember it on a day-to-day, pose-to-pose basis. It just hurts and bothers, over and over, chafing on my inadequacy, without fail and without end. I do not know how to recapture the old feeling of nothing else mattering except my mind and heart on the mat; it all feels competitive and stained.

Okay. So what else about exercising is troubling you?

It feels like washing the dishes: endless maintenance that is not getting me anywhere. I see people all around me who don’t exercise regularly, or at all, and they don’t seem to have the guilt and suffering wrapped up in the notion of exercise that I do. Not just the yoga struggle that I talked about above, but the feeling that I have to do this, this is a necessary thing to do, and it’s a necessary life sentence.

There’s a lot in my life right now that I’m doing for the sake of health, saving money, and the future. All things that I’m doing to try and get healthy or stay healthy, or to conserve what I have or what we have. I try to cook food that’s healthy, filing, and low-cost. I bring my lunch to work every day and make my own breakfasts. I think about where I can fit exercise in the requisite number of times per week. I bring reusable bags to the grocery store. I refrain from buying things I want. Yet I am surrounded by excess and waste, fast food and people who eat it, vast quantities of cheap crap being cycled in and out of people’s lives in the form of food and material consumption, and it all looks so easy. It looks like the hard work I do to scrimp on calories, cents, and overuse is laughable and purposeless. That I should just eat breakfast at Chik-Fil-A and lunch at Noodles & Company and dinner at California Tortilla every day, and go to Best Buy for a new DVD every night, or some variation therein, in order to stop having all this shit on my mind every hour of every day and live more like a normal American. Tofu doesn’t seem like the solution, it seems like the problem, when I’m muddled like this.

I think the thing to do is exercise and eat healthy without adding in all the guilt and suffering, all the anxiety about whether I’m doing it right or enough, and if I don’t manage it, don’t worry. But that just leads to shiftlessness, I’ve found, a total lack of discipline, a messy house, a huge food bill, tight pants.

It’s very frustrating. I’m unsure about so many aspects of the way I’m living, whether it’s just leading to a bigger ego trip, sense of superiority, sense of worthlessness, whatever. It’s mixed-up and hard to figure out. All I see and hear are messages, whether intentional or not, telling me that there’s an easier way, and that my struggling – even if it does give me a strong and nasty feeling of self-satisfaction – is for nothing, for ideals that don’t make any sense in the place and time I’m living.

I feel lost. It doesn’t seem like a big deal; exercising and eating right don’t seem like they should be the source of a great hole of existential misery in one’s life. But it’s intruding on more and more of my life, the guilt and the struggle, feeling superior and feeling worthless, wondering what I’m doing it for. Especially because food plays such a big role in every given day due to my hypoglycemia. It’s microcosmic, symptomatic, whatever. It sucks.

snapshots from the last week

Me, muttering to myself in the shoe store as I struggled with boots: “I do not have fat calves. I refuse to accept that as an explanation.”

My formerly difficult boss, joking with me yesterday, pretending not to hear the weird noise in the office down the hall, so I sounded crazy.

Same boss at the office party on Friday: “That’s right, POOP.” (At 15:19.)

D, in therapy: “It’s more about what’s normal for you.” I’m not sure if she really meant it, but if she did, my life might change.

Me, last night: doing slow-n-steady yoga, surrendering to it. Feeling better afterward.

Curled up on the couch on Saturday, trying to understand my snarled emotions while BF held my hand.

Planning Dress Day this Saturday.

Planning my big, bad beginner’s workshop in January.

Planning the half-hour demo class I’m teaching this Saturday.

Bagging up ingredients for this year’s handmade Christmas gift.

Picking out a dress for a Christmas dinner party this Saturday. (This Saturday is turning out to be my November 12, 1955 this year. It’s crazy.)

Teaching, teaching, teaching again.

Not being able to figure out how to return here. Stumped as to how to write, what to write about, how to frame my words when everything seems so petty and meaningless, and for the first time there are things I can’t say. How to find time, when there’s all this work to do at work, and even more work to do at home.

Feeling lost, and insignificant, and happy, and bored, and satisfied.

strawberry pretzel…thing

The person I got this from calls it a salad, and the recipe itself calls it a dessert, and in my opinion it’s somewhere in between. Whatever, it’s delicious, a guaranteed hit with the whole family, make it today. Of course I included lots of ”helpful” notes for you.

2 cups crushed pretzels
3/4 cup melted butter
3 tablespoons sugar
1 8-oz package cream cheese [I used neufchatel cheese, which is lower in fat & calories and tastes virtually the same, and it was fine]
1 cup sugar
1 9-oz [or thereabouts] container of Cool Whip [the recipe calls for "frozen whipped topping", which is, you know, Cool Whip, and I could only find 10-oz containers]
1 6-oz package strawberry Jell-O
1 quart fresh sliced strawberries or 20 oz frozen sliced strawberries*

Prepare by layers.

For layer 1, mix crushed pretzels with melted butter and 3 tablespoons of sugar. Press into a 9X12 baking dish. [The recipe calls for a 7X12, which I didn't have; I used an 8X11 and it was completely full and spilling out and making a Jell-O mess everywhere, so next time I'm using a 9X12.] Bake for 10 minutes at 400F, and then put it in the fridge to chill thoroughly [in my case overnight].

For layer 2, blend cream cheese with 1 cup sugar. [My advice: use a hand mixer.] Fold in Cool Whip. Spread over the pretzel layer in the baking dish and chill again. [I only chilled it during the time it took to do the next bit, and it was fine. I think if you let the cream cheese sit out and get warm you'd need to chill it longer.]

For layer 3 (frozen berries), dissolve Jell-O in 2 cups boiling water. Stir in frozen berries and stir until slightly thickened. Pour over cheese layer in baking dish and chill for several hours.

For layer 3 (fresh berries), dissolve gelatin in 1 cup boiling water. Add cold water; chill until egg white consistency is reached. Fold in sliced fresh berries and pour over cheese layer in baking dish. Chill until it feels like Jell-O.

Cut into squares and serve.

*MM noted on the recipe that she uses frozen. After reading the recipe, I don’t know who would use fresh, unless you have tons of strawberries sitting around that you have to get rid of; if you use fresh, you have four chilling periods, the last of which you have to watch carefully, instead of three unattended ones. What a pain. I vote for frozen. But be sure to buy sliced ones or it’ll be a lot of trouble to serve and eat the thing.