Happy New Year!

Happy New Year people. After a rocky two months, I’ve decided to return to ranting. I didn’t notice any difference during my break, so I’m back. Unabashedly back. With lots of rant-worthy topics that have been piling up during my hiatus. Sidebar: Yesterday I woke up too early in a haze and stayed in bed to think about silly things while I listened to my fridge rumble—this is one of the new glories of my studio apartment. I obviously don’t have such a handle on my low-grade anxiety problem because I spiraled out of control thinking about how in a couple of years we’re going to have this problem with the 20-teens dates. It’s stressing me out. I already have a bankcard that expires in 2011. Whenever I have to tell people when the expiration date I always falter for a second. You can’t really say “11” yet which, for some unknown reason, bums me out. I know most folks would say, “whatever, just say twenty-eleven.” But that sounds weird when you say it out loud sometimes. So I’ve just taken to saying it: two thousand and eleven. Then I feel like a tool.

You should know that my posts may veer off into the food category every so often. I thought of starting a separate blog for my handful of faithful readers (I read your blogs too!) but decided that was lame since, you know, I have a hard time keeping this one looking so high tech and updated and all. Why food? Well, apart from protecting our rights to decide how we manage our lady-parts, I really like eating, reading, and talking about food. At the end of last year I thought that I could both indulge my interest in food and actually take my therapist’s advice of branching out of my comfort zone. It has been almost six months since I started seeing her, and I just haven’t really even done much of my homework so far. Forty-five minutes feels like nothing each week, but six months of them really adds up. No more excuses. So I signed up for a food writing class. When I told my therapist she didn’t even look that pleased, I think partly because it’s not really social and it’s a class, so that’s not technically out of my comfort zone. She suggested a social dancing class, ok? I thought this was compromise.

I collected story ideas for weeks. And as I tend to do with anticipation nerves, I took it way too seriously and proceeded to completely wring all the fun or joy out of the assignment so that by the time I arrived on the night of the first class, I was pickled in my own de-fun-ification and felt like I’d already taken the eight week course. The class is probably what everybody else in the class wants, and maybe what I should want from the experience. It’s geared toward teaching us how to sell stories and write for publications that might actually ever publish our stories. When I read out my ideas I was told that I was a pontificator, and that no one knew who I was so why would they want to read my rants on food…even if it they were entertaining? Ouch. I’m having to pump myself up to return.

Anyhoo, I’ve decided that I’ll just post the stuff I’d really like to write about here. And figure out how to write for the class later. I have to go off to babysit (also not following therapist’s advice on that one either), but I’m going to list out some of my ideas that were shot down so that you can have some teasers about what may be coming in the next week.

-a description of “zone eaters” and how it’s not actually just an ocd problem.
-how different people cook for one, and what this might say about how they feel about (often) being alone
-a rant on how cookbooks start with what you need to buy instead of anything on taste or…food
-tomato paste. yep tomato paste

Ok, see you soon.