I can’t sleep because I’m having vicious allergy attacks. I think the whole neighborhood mowed their lawns this weekend. Green grass is my very best allergy. I’ve worked very hard in my life to make it at least 7 x’s as bad as all the other allergies in my head. My head is full of cement, stuff is dripping out of my nose and down my throat and I’ve given up breathing. Which is making me very light headed and dizzy. But it’s worse when I lay down. Of course.
So I was standing there in the kitchen, breathing through my mouth, staring up at the halogen lights that I don’t really like. And I lowered my sights to the butcher block beside the fridge that held the diet coke my stepdad left behind when he headed back up north today. When I spied some cookbooks. Which I had not noticed in the six months I’ve been back in the house. One of them was called “Help, my Apartment has a Kitchen.” That sounded my speed. So I was browsing through it and, low and behold, the most craved food I never ever ever get to eat… Beef Stroganoff. It said it was an easy recipe. Maybe I’ll try it. It requires me handling food, however. And then preparing it. And I never feel like eating food, if I have to prepare it.
Then I saw a Pictorial Cookbook from Nova Scotia. And that made me laugh. Fucking Nova Scotia! You see, about six months after the divorce was final, my stepdad asked me to stop by the house and water his garden for him, while he went camping. I asked him where he was going and he said he was going to to go up to Canada… drive around… camp a little. At this point, he still had not admitted he was seeing someone. So he takes off, when he gets back, he gives me a cd that he bought for me. In Nova Scotia. He did not drive up to Canada and do a little camping. He went to FUCKING NOVA SCOTIA!! Look, here’s Seattle and ….. here is Nova Scotia. You’ve got Seattle, Venezuela, Beirut, Africa, Cincinnati, Hanging Gardens of Babylon… Nova Scotia.* In my family, it is tradition to tell someone when you are leaving the general area, especially if you are getting on a plane, so if it crashes, we know to drive to wherever and look for your body. You certainly do not go to the OTHER SIDE OF THE FUCKING CONTINENT, leaving the Country, without maybe a little note. It was apparent that my mom used to take care of such things. Anyway, when I relayed the story to her, I was still rather stunned, so every time it came out “He flew to fucking NOVA SCOTIA!! Nova fucking Scotia!!”
So, it’s become a bit of a personal joke that whenever someone does something so stunningly different from what they told you they were going to do, because they didn’t want to tell you something. Like the fact that they are seeing the woman that maybe they were sort of seeing before the separation and she happens to be from Nova Scotia so you are both going there. I like to call that “Going to Fucking Nova Scotia.” I have absolutely nothing against Nova Scotia. It looks absolutely gorgeous! In fact, I’d like to go there some day. I’m going down on record to say that I would like to visit fucking Nova Scotia. As well as Montreal. And Nunavut! I’d like to go to Nunavut to visit Elle. Just not in the winter, as I don’t think I have the proper coat for the climate.
*I love you Eddie Izzard!
i don’t know that they make coats warm enough for me to even visit nunavut in the summer. as for cooking beef stroganoff… i’ve never had it, but i love mushroom stroganoff! even when i wasn’t vegetarian, i couldn’t prepare meat. that just grossed me out.
You know, if it weren’t for the mushrooms, I would so be down for a plate of Beef StrokeMeOff (my Mother’s pet name for that dish. I seriously didn’t know it by any other name until first grade when I said it loudly to my teacher, who laughed her ass off and realized that Tommy Crowell was the little brother of the guy she used to date in High School, and had heard my Mother call it that first hand.)
just between you and me, thomas, i was going to leave the mushrooms out of it.
I used to have the same issue with not wanting to eat the food that I cooked. I had to get over it, though, seeing as how I’m now “the little old lady who lives in a shoe”, and all.
As for Beef Stroganoff, specifically – there are these new, “all in one” crockpot meals, that you can buy, in the frozen section, and you don’t actually have to cook, anything – just dump it all in a crockpot, and it cooks itself! The Stroganoff one is pretty good, IMO.
Wait, I thought your sole nutrition was DP?
Your father has a great way of breaking the news 🙂
if it were possible, i would live solely on dr. pepper, unless i was going out to eat. but, while it does provide me with all the daily vitamins and minerals that i care about, it does not exactly take care of that rubbly i gets in my tumbly. so i must subsidize with cookies and steak and donuts and apples and peanut butter and jelly sammichs and pizza… mmmm… pizza.
i hate mushrooms. blech. which is sad, being a vegetarian and faced with mostly mushroom-containing meat substitutions.
Substitutiary locomotion
It’s the power that’s far beyond the wildest notion
It’s a weird so feared, yet wonderful to see
Substitutiary locomotion come to me
man. it’s got to suck being a vegetarian who hates mushrooms. well, it’s got to suck being a vegetarian in general, in my opinion. but i know a lot of people like doing it. blech.
That’s like being a carnivore, but hating cow products.
I can understand: The part of the mushroom we eat is just for the sole purpose of procreation. The actual fungus lives in the ground. Combine that knowledge with the shape of the mushroom, and you can plainly see that eating mushrooms is nothing more than penis eating. And not in the good way.
fruit is solely for the purpose of procreation, too. in the case of the fruit with seed, though, we’re eating plant embryos. mmmm… fresh fruity fetus.
that is disgusting, fee! you disgusting vegetarian!! fruity fetus?
i don’t know you any more.