Monthly Archives: June 2009

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Revisiting the past…

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Yesterday I went to Red Robin and had dinner and drinks with my first boyfriend (and first ex), from way back in high school.  We haven’t seen each other at all for a little more than two and a half years, and the last time was about five minutes a couple months after we’d broken up so I could get back my stuff from him–plus some stuff that was ours that he didn’t want to keep.  It was not out of the blue, however.  We have been casually talking on Facebook for a few months and we were going to meet up and do this sometime this summer anyway.

It was interesting, to say the least.  I had planned to arrive early, so I could be the first one there.  That didn’t work out so well because I had to stop at Target and get some Tylenol for my splitting headache.  So I only ended up arriving ten minutes early and he was already there and had ordered a drink.  My mom had given me twenty dollars earlier, to buy us our first round of drinks, because, as she has said to me before, she really does like him, and just thought that we should break up because it didn’t look like he was going anywhere significant with his life.  I got a lemon drop and after a little bit of talking we ordered food.

The conversation stayed pretty casual the whole time–there were things I was not going to mention to him and I’m sure there were things he wasn’t going to mention to me.  We talked about how our types (in regards to people) have changed and solidified.  I decided that it would be wise at that time to come out to him–he was a little surprised and said if he had known that back then he would have jumped on it.  I was shaking my head that time–that’s not your nature, you wouldn’t have jumped on it, it would have not worked out well–but I didn’t say anything because I figured it wasn’t worth it.  We ended up talking a little bit about sex after dinner–I think it was obvious on both sides that we had slept with other people since we had broken up, and that’s no big deal.  It’s natural.

Overall, I think it was a worthwhile adventure.  I thought for a while it would be awkward, but it wasn’t.  We got along fine.  Looking at it, I realized both why I had been attracted to him at the time (actually physically looks better now than then, so that obviously wasn’t a part of it) and why it was best and appropriate that it ended when it did.  We have both grown as human beings since then, in ways I don’t think would have been possible if we had stayed together, so I have no regrets on that front.

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My email reflects my life…true or false?

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You could tell the story of my life through my email.  You’d be missing some details for sure, but you could.  You could see the relationships as they are: families, friends, others.  Potentials on their way to becoming actuals.  Plans form in steps: coming out, going out, coming home (wherever home is).  Things coming together and sometimes falling apart.  The insignifant things on par with the very significant.  No record however, of how signifcant.  No ticker to say how many times I’ve read this email, how long I spent with it, how long I spent crafting a response in a way that reflects my true feelings.  The times I’ve looked at an email thinking about saying something, really wanting to say something, then deciding it would be best not to.  Or the times I give in and send off a response that I may or may not regret later.  The travails I’m having in my personal life.  My thoughts towards some people in the emails goes unsaid, at least for now.

Combine my emails with my viewing history around those emails and you get a more fleshed in picture of my life.  You see when I’m trying to figure out something, trying to put pieces of a puzzle together for myself.  Trying to figure out what something means.  It would also show my comforts, those sites I go to when I need a distraction or I want something to cheer me up, sometimes the places I go when I’m bored.  But this still doesn’t show the times when I need the silence, I crave it like I crave kisses and I crave talking and on some rare days I crave chocolate (usually it’s something else).

For some people my conversations and my relationship with them is mostly or purely digital.  Sometimes this is hard to do, hard to find the depth in meaning that type-written words that have no physical existence.  I crave that physical existence.  Sometimes I find it in their company.  Sometimes I feel like printing out the words just to give them some kind of physical existence.  Sometimes that’s my only comfort, lacking the physical touch, the words given form by ink and paper will have to do. 😦

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Eating habits

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I’m an odd one when it comes to my eating habits.  I love cooking, even the real simple stuff, and most days I’d rather have a home-cooked meal that took an hour to make than a TV dinner which took five minutes in the microwave.  I’d rather have that TV dinner now than a meal in the dining hall, where I don’t know the ingredients, it was made in bulk, and three out of five times it makes me absolutely sick to my stomach.

Since coming to college, and even during my years here, my eating habits have changed a lot.  I started out on three square meals a day (on 80-90% of days) to only eating breakfast when I get up really early and it’s the only thing that will keep me awake in my 8:00 class this quarter.  Back at my folks’ place, especially on the weekends, breakfast is mandatory and it is mostly eggs, maybe sausage, and some kind of carb (toast, pancakes, cornbread if my dad’s cooking) plus some kind of heavily caffeinated tea.  Here, when I do have breakfast, it’s either a bagel with cheese or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich because they both have protein to keep me up and my lovely bottle.

When it comes to lunch, well I do try to have something here between the hours of 11:00 and 2:30, sometimes 3:00.  It’s hard when my class schedule almost prevents me from having time to eat anything much.  It varies highly, depending on where I am when I get hungry.  Back in high school, it was pretty varied too, but I always had it at roughly the same time and I always had something.

As for dinner, that’s the only meal that’s for sure.  Not a consistent time, but I will always eat it.  They say that breakfast should be the big meal of the day because that’s when you need the energy provided by the food most, but dinner is always my big meal.  Back in at the folks’, dinner is some kind of meat (they’re usually nice to me, so it usually isn’t chicken) and some kind of vegetable if someone is thinking ahead.  When I cook there, I love cooking dinner.  Dinner means most of the family will be there and it means I can feel justified spending an hour or more in the kitchen.  When I cook I generally don’t like touching raw meat, especially red meat, so often enough it is vegetarian (which my dad almost loathes) or the meat is pre-cooked/processed.  I like making casseroles, so much so that a couple summers ago when I was making dinner fairly often my mother had to tell me to find something other than a casserole dish.  I’m better now, but I still do love them.  When I’m there for a few hours during the day I will also often make bread in my mom’s bread machine, especially if I’m making Italian food for dinner.  There’s one recipe in the cookbook for the bread machine that I modfiy fairly heavily that my sister absolutely loves (she’s a teenaged adult, so there’s very little a family member can make that she loves).

Before I get wrapped up in the deliciousness of food, which is not the point of this post, I need to move on.

I touched on this earlier, but here at school I have practically become a vegetarian, not by ideology, but because of availability and a commitment to try to eat in a more local and sustainable fashion.  I have meat twice or three times a week and if you ask me when I ate it last I’ll have to think about it a bit (last night I had a ham and cheese sandwich).  This is especially true in the case of red meat.  Of those two or three times, maybe one of them is red meat.  The last time I had red meat was in a burger I ate half of last Sunday.  Red meat for me is mostly beef, but I recently tried bison and found it rather delicious.  When I get back to my childhood home I will probably end up eating more meat just because of my dad’s cooking/eating habits, but I will try to look for more local/sustainable meats at the local farmers’ market.  Cheese, peanut butter, and hummus have become my main sources of protein, and I’m good with that.

Cheese.  I have discovered, since I started college, that I am mildly to moderately lactose intolerant.  Not such a big surprise, but kind of a disappointment because I love my cheese and ice cream.  The one week I went without cheese was an incredible exercise in punishment for me.  However, I have gotten smarter about how I consume my dairy.  One, I realize that I can have soy milk or a really good local lactose-free milk in my cereal and it still tastes real good.  Anything I think I can substitute soy milk in for regular milk, I will try.  It’s pretty good in smoothies and damn fine in chai tea lattes (in fact, better than regular).  Two: when I do eat dairy, more than nine times out of ten I will take a lactase supplement with it.  The lactase supplement doesn’t help perfectly, but it allows me to eat cheese and gelato without regretting it for hours afterwards.  If I don’t take it with gelato sans lactase I do and will regret it for hours because of the stomach aches.  I learned that the hard way in Florence, Italy.

That’s the most words I’ve written in a blog post in a long time, if ever.  Almost essay-length.  Well, now that I’m hungry I have to wait about an hour before I have access to good food.  So is life.