Tag Archives: food

cost of a life lesson is one dollar and eighty seven cents

Posted on by
1

I make breakfast in a very precisely-timed fashion.  I try to make it so that all parts are done at the same time.  Meal timing amuses me.  It’s a fun puzzle to get everything finished all together.  I get in this autopilot mode.  I feel like a Rube Goldberg device.  Until it goes wrong…

We have an ultra awesome snobby low tech groovy coffee vacuum press thing.  Last week I was sick and off my breakfast game.  I was pressing one cup of coffee,  I stirred it and waited for the vacuum to suck.  I flipped eggs and popped the bagel into the toaster.  Our toaster can be a little sketchy (especially since the frosting incident).   Back to the coffee-add more water.

The bagel pops up and it’s burnt.  Damn, I throw it away.  Put another bagel in.  I hate wasting food.  Add black beans to the eggs. Empty grounds out and start next cup of coffee.  Get goat cheese read to go on eggs, green onions and black beans.  Bagel pops up burnt.  I was trying to do the rhythm differently so they didn’t burn but they did.

I felt dumb.  E walks in and I say I burned two bagels.  He turns down the toast setting on the toaster and gives me a kiss on the cheek and grabs his coffee and walks out.  I boggle.

Isn’t it funny that I thought that I was the problem?  I tried to change my rhythms.  I must be wrong.  I am toasting wrong.  Didn’t even occur to me to look outside of myself at the device and see if it needed adjusting.  I frequently try to alter myself to a situation to make it go ok.  I do it a lot less than I used to since I turned in my resignation for being the stage manager of the world.

But it’s my first impulse-what needs to change about me to make everything else ok.  If only I could be better than everything would be ok for everybody.

I burned two bagels and wasted $1.87.  But the price was well worth the reminder.

In the kitchen with FeistyBoots

Posted on by
3

This bloggy has been a bit on the heavy side. The good news is that I am working through a ton of stuff. The bad news is, well, the same. So, I think it’s time to share a little of the joy of my life and I thought we should do a cooking segment today!

Each summer I get a bee in my bonnet to perfect a dish. A few years back, I wanted to make the perfect dessert wonton. And after much experimentation found that a blueberry/banana wonton fried and then dusted with powdered sugar was pure heaven. Then the next year I wanted to make the perfect sorbet. After a great deal of trial and delicious error, the winner was peach (fresh from the farmer’s market) and amaretto sorbet. Amazing.

The summer, I am not motivated toward a dessert. I had a mediocre Italian dinner at a mediocre Italian restaurant. And I told E that I could make better meatballs than this. And I have been trying. Meatballs are more complicated than they look. I made some with beef and sage to make them lighter. I used too much sage, so I named them Tiresias balls.

I’ve been thinking of other nationalities, so I decided to make Indian. I was going to make it with ground turkey, and I had a spinach saag sauce to cook them in. Yes, I got it from Whole Foods and I would feel bad about using it if I was working on sauces, but I’m not. I’m focusing on balls. The following is a stream of consciousness blog so you can know what it’s like to cook with me.

So, I have all of my ingredients:
Latex gloves (cause I don’t like to touch the raw meat when I’m squooshing it)
Ground turkey
1 egg (beaten)
Curry
Tumeric
Onion (puréed so that it will mix in with the meat)
Garlic

I get the mixing bowl. I add everything together and squoosh it around. It’s really wet. After kneading the meat I can’t form a cohesive ball. Oh crap, I forgot bread crumbs. So, I yell to E to please come in the kitchen and find bread or breadcrumbs. He says, he’ll be right there cause he’s doing homework. I wait. Turkey is dripping off of my gloves. Gross. I go into the living room and get on the floor next to E and I hold my hands up like I am a surgeon. He looks up and says “ew”.

“Honey, I need something starchy.” He goes into the kitchen with me. We have no breadcrumbs. We have no bread. I ask him to look in the cabinet for something. I thought oatmeal might be good. No oatmeal. We have brown rice. That won’t work. He is laughing at my latexy meat-dripping hands and he says, “well, we’ve got Cheerios”. “Um, that’ll be interesting.”

So, E gets a couple of handfuls of cheerios and crushes them into my bowl. I tell him we may be ordering pizza tonight.

I knead the cheerios into the meat and I get the consistency I need. Hooray! I start to put the meatballs into the baking dish but it’s too small. I yell to E, “Honey, can you get me a bigger baking dish?” He comes back in the kitchen. “This one?” “No, the other one.” “This one?” “Rad, perfect. Thanks”. I give him a cheek smooch of gratitude.

The meatballs are in the dish, and I cover them with the spinach saag sauce. In the oven for 40 minutes at 350 degrees. I make the rest of the stuff for dinner. Not done at 40 minutes, they go in for another 15 minutes. They are beautiful! I am a little nervous because of the cheerios. But they were delicious, you couldn’t even tell they had cheerios in it!

So there you have it! Feisty’s Saagy Balls!

I think I want to try with lamb and make something Greek inspired next!

Part 4: An astounding lack of preparation

Posted on by
Reply

I didn’t research a tattoo artist.  I just walked in to a studio and asked for a tattoo.  I was alone.  The artist asked what I had in mind and I showed his S’s drawing.  He loved the art and got really excited about the piece.  I sat and flipped through books while he did a draft of it.

The woman at the counter asked me if I had any other ink and I said no.  She asked if I had eaten and I said no.  She told me to eat and come back… something about an adrenaline rush on an empty stomach and nausea.

I was let down.  I was so ready to get it done and not in the mood to wait.  I was too nervous to eat so I grabbed a bagel from Java City and two shots of tequila from The Merc.  I went back and told her I’d had a good lunch.

Walking and dancing with the F word

Posted on by
6

Fair warning, if you are offended by cursing you oughtn’t read this frickin post.

Walking through the Mission District of San Francisco is never boring.  As I walked tonight, other people’s realities perforated my internal stirring.  I was just out of my dance therapy session.  And I was processing what had just happened. This is the first time that I stopped dancing and started feeling and it was hard.

I’ve had an interesting week and I updated her on my goings ons.  I am struggling with my weight and body image.  After so much weight loss the fact that I’ve put some back on is terrifying.  Some of my old binging behaviors are creeping back in.  And I fear I am looking over a cliff and about to plummet into a pit of uncontrollable gain.  She wants to know what it feels like before I eat, overeat or binge.  As I start to talk I disassociate.  She says, “Show me, can you dance it?”

“STAY WITH ME! THE LIGHT IS RED!!! The mom screams to the daughter who is more involved with her milkshake than the oncoming traffic.

I tell her I don’t know how to dance it.  She says that’s good.  I feel like an idiot.  I take a stab and start to move.  It’s not what I would call a dance.  It’s more of a pantomime of anxiety and secret behavior.  I feel all of a sudden angry and vulnerable.  I don’t know how to say what I had just moved.  “What was the big movement?”, she asks.  “My fuck-it moment.  I have a moment where I just don’t care and I am tired of resisting and I say ‘fuck it’ and eventually give up and do whatever.” 

“Dance ‘fuck it’ for me.” She says.

“This is hard.”

“Yeah”, she agrees.  My fuck it dance turns in to a fuck you dance and in the end I am sobbing.

“It’s ok man. It’s ok man. It’s ok man. It’s ok man. It’s ok man. It’s ok man.” He says to himself as he passes me in the intersection. I am startled.

“I feel like a child”, I say.  She says, “yeah.  What do you feel good about right now?  In the last six months you’ve quit drinking and smoking.  You are having problems with your food right now.  You have a big fuck you in you, and that’s good. When you were growing up fuck you saved you.  Fuck you got you out of the cult.  Fuck you still serves you in a lot of ways.  But it’s no longer serving you in your food.”

“Fuck you saved me…you’re right.”

“Hey girl, you probably married or something, ain’t you?”

“Or something” I reply, as I walk on by.

“How do you reward yourself?”

“I don’t know… through food, money”… I list more and I can’t think of one way that doesn’t involve consumption in one way or another.  “Praising myself was vanity. If I did something that was good it was because of god.  If I did something bad it was because of me.”  I can praise others all day long finding perfection in every bit of them.  But me?  That’s different.”

He does a move that is half waltz, and half balboa.  He staggers into the street and summons a juicy loogie from the depths of his soul.  “I’M A CYLON!!”, he screams toward me.  His glassy eyes don’t make any contact.  I keep walking.

She says she bets self-discipline is hard when discipline was so strict and externally imposed.  We were even coerced into confessing our thoughts.  Self-discipline is hard, acknowledging the progress I have made is unthinkable.  Every time I praise myself I rattle off business accomplishments and sound like some disassociated press release.  She had me dance my accomplishments cause I couldn’t make the words.  I tried.

The session ended with that last dance.

“24th and Mission towards Pittsbugh/Bay Point”  I get on the train.

I wonder how other people reward themselves.  How do you celebrate you?

Things to make: dinner and love

Posted on by
Reply

It’s a very small kitchen.

You wouldn’t think you could do much in it.

But we love to cook together.  We have a menu.  Our shopping is full of laughing and finding ways to steal time together.  Our schedules are so hectic. 

We get home and put on something with a little spice, like Gotan Project or something a little sugary like bitter:sweet or Pink Martini.

We prepare and pull out our implements.  Reach into the spice cabinet.  A kiss on the cheek.  Go into the fridge, a hand across the back slowly.  Stirring everything together we meet in the middle.  Eyes locked, we dance.  Things are simmering, kisses, more dancing.  The kitchen is so small but the tight space is perfect, we dance close.  Taste the sauce, bite the neck.  Bring it all together.  Delicious and filling, cooking is all about chemistry.

special

Posted on by
Reply

We had been running errands for a million years.  I mean, it felt like it.  I was only 4 at the time.  My uncle stopped at Thrifty’s and as he held my hand, we walked up to the ice cream counter.  He looked down at me and said, “I’m going to get two cones, one for me and one for someone very special.  What flavor do you think they would like”

I was crestfallen and I mumbled, “chocolate chip”.  He took one cone and handed me the other.  When we had driven almost all the way back to his house, I asked him for a napkin.  The uneaten cone was melting all over my hand, and Sacramento gets very hot in the summer.

He looked confused, “aren’t you going to eat your ice cream”.

I said, “but you told me it was for someone special so I was holding it so we could give it to them.”

“It’s for you.  You are special honey.”

I licked up my melty ice cream and we drove the rest of the way home.

stuck

Posted on by
2

I learned a lot this weekend.  I learned about how I get stuck in some communication patterns with some people.  I learned how in a lot of ways I am stuck in my alcohol consumption and I don’t want to be there anymore.  I learned how it feels to be physically stuck as I was trapped in an elevator, in the dark, thankfully not alone.

I learned that behaviors I thought had changed are stuck to me like glue.  I learned that even though I walked through a sticky situation that I did the right thing.  I know that I’ve got some stubborn friends that have stuck with me and I love them so much.

I get so fixated on what is negative that sometimes I feel so fearful and incapable of noticing all of the positive changes I have made in the last year.  And I am so grateful to be so lovingly reminded, as I was on Saturday.  So, I am far from perfect and fully grateful.  Had a wonderful time with one of my dearest friends, reconnecting.  I am making positive steps towards resolution.

And about the alcohol.  I don’t know what my peace and balance will look like with this.  But for now, I am starting to get open to different possibilities.  The addictive part of me has bounced from food, to alcohol to cigarettes, sometimes all three at once.  (Well I don’t smoke while I eat, that’s gross) I think there will always be that addictive thing in me.  And I frequently feel scared and anxious, and want to put something in me to change how I am feeling.  This makes sense to me.

What I know is that I don’t want to be stuck in it anymore.  And I am grateful for all the compassion I am shows and that I am starting to accept.

It’s weird out there.

~Feisty

Pendulum

Posted on by
2

My grandfather looked at me and asked why “I was in Rebellion”.

“Rebellion against what?”  I asked.

He gave me a knowing look, as if I should know.

I knew.

I don’t follow the script.  He was glad I was out of the church, it never sat right with him.  He was glad I didn’t have a head covering.  He worried about my education in the church run school.  But I had been out and on my own for a few years and he wasn’t pleased.  I didn’t look right, and a girl’s appearance is very important to him.

(swing)

He didn’t like my hair.  But I could never really rock a buzz cut.  He said I was too fat, and yeah, 265 pounds is way too much for me to be healthy at my height.  I guess the tongue piercing was irritating to him as well.

(swing)

Funny to have a normal problem like a family member judging me.  I was taught to be the “perfect” daughter.  Be quiet, be clever, obey, cook, clean, iron, anticipate the needs of the authority figure and provide them.  But don’t be presumptuous.  Letting go of that training helped me leave the church.

(swing)

I feel like all of that perfection brain washing came back as soon as I got married, the first time.  I stopped being me.  And I completely stuffed down my personality to be a caricature of a wife.  I got over that when he and I split up.

(swing)

The conversation with my grandfather happened a few years after my first divorce.  Last time he had seen me I had the long hair that he loved.  It was a shock to him that I had very short hair, overalls, a girlfriend and a very angry attitude towards men.  Mom said, of course, I was a lesbian because of so much abuse by men in the church.  I told her that if every girl who had been abused became a lesbian we would have a whole lot more lesbians in the world.

(swing)

I could never pull of the butch look, because I am me. And well I am about as butch as a feather boa or some vinyl gogo boots.  I think at my core I am a drag queen in a woman’s body.  But I digress…

(swi….. get back to the point…)

So, I learned some things.  I had to have my hair long and then short on my own terms.  Because of the time all my hair was cut off as a punishment.  I had to get fat.  (I know weight is a touchy subject, so this is kind of awkward, so here goes…)  I was terrified to be out in the world on my own just from a cult.  While growing up my food had been heavily controlled, moderated and withheld.  When I moved out at 17, I was stalked four times in a year and a half.  I was not prepared to be in the world, or to receive the attention that a 17 year old dancer gets.

(swing)

I had no tools, but I had food.  With food I could be alone and eventually maybe left alone.  Not watched, followed, threatened and harassed.  I tried to use my weight as an invisibility cloak, and that worked really well for a while.  Until I started a business.

(swing)

Starting a business was a huge exercise in visibility and vulnerability.  Every fear and insecurity came right up at every corner.  I had to get major emotional help, which helped with my business, my abuse issues and my emotional eating.  I lost 85 pounds.

(swing)

Life is long.  And now what I want to do is heal and grow and evolve again.  I want to meet and know others who have survived spiritual and other abuse.  I want to help others heal.

(swing)

I started writing this post a few days ago, it starts with my grandpa.  And after I started writing about him I got an email that he may not be around a lot longer.  He has been sick for so long.  I hope he can have peace, in whatever form that takes.  Multiple Sclerosis is a horrible disease.

Strangers on a train

Posted on by
2

When I got on the train for my daily commute yesterday morning I took the available seat.  The woman next to me was very large and taking up more than half the bench.  She held herself as small as she could as I sat.  She apologized to me.

I was flooded with emotions and I wanted to say so many things to her.

I understand, really.

I used to be morbidly obese too.

I know what it feels like to take more space than you should everywhere.

I know what it’s like to want to disappear.

I know what it’s like to apologize for my body and being with every breath I take.

But I didn’t say any of those things, because I used to be morbidly obese and I remember the people who would have random opinions or comments for me.

Wow, was ice cream on sale?

You know, there are a lot of big people in my family.

You just look so uncomfortable at that weight.

If you get any bigger you may need to buy a bigger car.

When are you due?

I smiled at her and said, “no worries”.  And the train sped on.

unspoken rules

Posted on by
3

This is a follow up from SSSHHH.  When I wrote about silence in abuse, of course, a lot of it isn’t conscious.  It’s subtle.   Sometimes it was explicit, but mostly you just knew you weren’t supposed to talk, when you do talk you know in your gut that you’ve sinned.  Another aspect that allows an abusive system to flourish: unspoken rules.  You have to guess what’s expected of you and the authority may change the rules at a whim.  You only find out about the rules when you’ve broken one.  Then you face punishment, humiliation or isolation.

I used to dream I was walking blindfolded down a hallway and trying to get to the other side.  There were random, painful obstacles or people yelling at or striking me.  Living in an abusive situation, is the same exact feeling and it nourished the paranoia and hyper vigilance aspect of my PTSD.

You don’t know what to say, do, think or feel.  and you are dreading some random pain or consequence.  But there were also random rewards.  Our leader was brilliant and charismatic and when he would shine his light on you it was hypnotic and I felt the warmth of inclusion and acceptance.  When you were in his good graces everyone behaved in the same way and I was favored and fearful only of when it would end.  When you were on his bad side even your good deeds didn’t matter because fault was found with your motivation or spiritual foundation.

I once gave a speech about how “the sky is full of shoes” because I know the feeling of constant dread, anxiety and panic.  That badness can fall from the sky and harm you at any time.  That you have to bob and weave, dodging obstacles, pain, calamity and always be on guard.  Always waiting for the other shoe to drop, because the sky is full of shoes.

It’s still hard to let that go.  The dread and the fear of random rage.  A lot of the motivational and inspirational speeches I gave were powerful because it came from a deep, knowing place.  It also connects me with them and brings me out of isolation.  Hoping that I can use my pain, struggle and recovery in a way that will benefit and move others.   Because perhaps them, as Lena Lamont says “it won’t have been in vain for nothing”.

I’m not over it, it’s all part of the cycle because in my core I feel that as soon as I feel and trust that it’s ok then THE BIG PAIN will happen as soon as I let my guard down.  I don’t know what the big pain is, but it’s awful scary.  Maybe it’s cause I live in California and we’re always waiting for THE BIG ONE.  I try to talk myself out of this panic every day.

One of the things that I’ve noticed about this cleanse that I’m on where I’m not drinking alcohol is that I would have a cocktail to shut those voices of panic up.  Well, I have eliminated that option for today and I am staring at them.

The sky is full of shoes.

The sky is full of shoes.

The sky is full of shoes.

I sure hope it isn’t today.

(OOOO And if they are, I could use a new pair of brown heels.  My cute ones that I’ve had re-soled (re-souled?) a few times have finally given up the ghost.  Thanks, Santa)

Much love and clear skies to you,

Feisty