The Stomach Unknowable, or, L'estomac Étrange

I’ve never had a huge appetite. To qualify that, I eat plenty – I just can’t eat it all at the same time. My ideal meal schedule would probably be a day-long constant nibble.  At meals with friends I’m usually the last one with a plate in front of them, taking long breaks for conversation with a little bite here and there, letting the server remove my unappetizing remnants only reluctantly. Impatient girlfriends urge me to take bigger bites of ice cream. A doggy bag has accompanied me through countless nights out.

Although the quality of the food may increase the amount I heap onto my plate, it has little effect on how much of it I can fit into my stomach. The only variable that has ever changed that fixed amount was France.  

Don’t mistake me – I didn’t have an eye-opening, Julia Childs, “Eat Pray Love” European culinary awakening that forever altered my palate. I was a twenty-one-year-old on a study abroad, and although my host family fed me the occasional lovingly prepared, multi-course French dinner, I subsisted mostly on the output of pastry shops and crepe stands. It was the carbs that did it.

I didn’t notice the change at first – the restaurant meals split with friends that no longer filled me up, the crepe-venders who knew exactly what je voudraied. I attributed my ability to polish off plates to smaller European portions, and my endless appetite for pain du chocolat to the fact that it was the best.  Then there was the late night I sat outside talking with a friend and eating those little chocolate croissants, not patisserie-fresh but from a slightly stale bag bought at a gas station. It may have been that I was slowly but surely finishing the bag myself, or that I was dipping the already-chocolate-filled bread into my own personal tub of Nutella, but when he teased me about my healthy appetite it was clear that he was right. I did have a very healthy appetite, indeed.

I was, in fact, ravenous. I would finish a mile-long baguette sandwich and ask if you were planning to finish yours. I saved everyone’s last bites of over-filled crepe from untimely demise in sidewalk trash cans. The capacity of my stomach seemed to have tripled. Although I constantly craved carbohydrates, my body began to miss vitamins, and one day I bought a bag's worth of fresh fruit and polished off each piece, one after another. Two bananas, two apples, two oranges, still not quite full. 

My travels ended not long after, and I flew home to California -- a little jet-lagged and bloated, some Swiss chocolate stashed in my bag.  I bought Nutella at the grocery store and found things like waffles to put it on, but it wasn’t the same. I slowly found myself able to eat less of my plate at dinner, and gradually my appetite returned to pre-Paris levels. I still miss it.


(20-minute class free-write. Prompt: intense food craving)

Utterly Unavoidable in 2012

Let's just jump right into the year and not dwell on how this blog is made of sugar and spice and broken promises.

It's 2012 now, and maybe it's the apocalyptic overtones or the numerical roundness that I love, but I'm feeling so good about it! I have a birthday a week and a half before every new year, so it's just all especially fresh. The new year's weather has been particularly lovable -- so far I don't think there's been a single cloudy day, and Indiana has only been mildly cooler than California was over Christmas. 2012 knows the way to my heart.

2012: totally my year.

One of the things I'm most excited about this year is a graduate creative nonfiction writing class I'm taking. Not toward a master's at the moment, but maybe sometime. Tonight was our first class and it's a dream, just fourteen of us in a little room reading and talking about the kind of stories and essays I'm always reading when I should be doing something else. But now I have to!

I also have to write them, and it will be good, because I can't pull a NaBloPoMo flake-out like I can on you people. (But we're not dwelling on the past here, it's 2012!) So you'll probably be seeing some of that stuff. I'm just a little unsure of what my non-internet creative nonfiction "voice" sounds like -- A Little Because Because has a pretty bloggy voice most of the time, with the exclamation marks and whatnot. So that should be interesting. I'm pretty sure I'll be Joan Didion within a few weeks. I was thrilled to get her complete collected nonfiction for Christmas, but whenever I read her essays I have to quietly reassure myself: "The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best."  We can't have quiet woods around, that sounds terrible. Let's all do our part to keep quiet from happening.

Other things I'm excited about include, but aren't limited to, my eyebrows. My mom gave me the fanciest little eyebrow kit for Christmas, and it's pretty killer. I have a long history of brow-tweezing OCD, but now I have powder and gel and highlighting pencil and I can just go to town on those things. I'm sure you'll notice. I'm working on making them utterly unavoidable. I think that's the language on the kit packaging, actually -- utterly unavoidable brows. Just wait.

Oh, another thing! I was just asked to lead a workshop for our church Relief Society activity in a few weeks. The theme and the workshops are focused on the new year and how to grab it by the tail and so forth, and I'm going to teach the good ladies of the Relief Society all kinds of tricks for getting their time/ lives/ homes organized.  And that is just a totally non-humorous thing that I am telling you about, Potential Future Employers Who Google, there's really no entertainment value in me being given this assignment. I am the perfect candidate! Moving on.

One of my favorite not-for-profits/places to volunteer is Girls Inc. -- you probably have one near you! The one in Indy has an amazing program that trains and sets up volunteers to lead six-week after-school programs for mostly inner-city girls, with topics like healthy conflict resolution and healthy body image. The two I've led before have focused on constructive ways to "work it out" in friendships, and I was blown away by how important that message is for underprivileged girls with few positive role models. Six weeks is really nowhere near enough time. 

So anyway, the exciting thing about that is just that the program cycle starting next week is going to be the best. My friend Rachel is leading it with me, which is going to be awesome, and the topic this time is Media Literacy. Because: "Girls who see models and celebrities as role models have an increased risk for body dissatisfaction, dieting, negative affect, binge eating, and eating-disorder symptoms." Basically with the help of fun and games and lots of stupid magazines, we'll spend our six hours with the girls trying to instill some skepticism of the thousands of hours of B.S. about women that's constantly pouring into their sensitive little heads. I really think a hard roll of the eyes is the most appropriate response to almost all advertising, and if I can help create a few little eye-rollers I'll be so proud. And if you have any kind of "volunteer more" goal for the year, you should check out your local Girls Inc.

In conclusion, thanks for coming back to my blog after our little November trust issue. I'm not promising anything, but I just can't see anything ever going unfinished in 2012. Not with these brows in charge.

Kitty Catso

I hope this doesn't breach some kind of unspoken confidentiality agreement between Elliot Cat and I.

He's our little thumb-sucker.

Sock Bun Remix

Sock Bun is very adaptable. Here, Sock Bun goes to church.

Featured in front of Tropical Dream, the paint of my heart, the color of my dreams.

Also sharing the mirror with silhouettes cut out at Carly's dream wedding reception. Wouldn't Sock Bun make the best silhouette?

I'd also like to take this opportunity to remember Pumpky Booster II, who went the way of all the earth today. He was a good sport to the bitter end:

Three things that did not work out this weekend

1) Yellow kitchen wall.

This past spring we painted two walls of our living room a pale aqua and fell in love with it. The color of the paint, I mean. Sometimes Chris walks in the room and I'm just standing against the wall trying to hug it. The wall, I mean, with the paint on it. It's hard to do. Also instead of a 50-gallon water barrel for disaster preparedness we filled a 50-gallon drum with Tropical Dream so we can paint every place we ever live with it and never worry about the color being discontinued.

We like that paint a lot.

The next project was one yellow accent wall for the kitchen. We were confident in our innate paint-choosing ability, but the yellow paint chips stayed taped on our white kitchen wall for months before fall nesting mode kicked into gear and I started glue-gunning and spray-painting and thinking-about-getting-out-the-sewing-machine like mad. So while I was at the home store picking up bales of straw for garden mulch and more spray paint for more spray painting of things and eyeing all the hanging plants for my window because seriously, I am like a rabid squirrel when it comes to fall nesting, winter is coming hurry decorate all the things! Anyway while I was there I finally pulled the trigger and bought yellow paint -- Citrus Splash instead of Beach Ball. There's no difference between the two, if you were wondering.

As we painted on Saturday I heard echoes of our friend Kim eyeing the paint chips and telling me how yellow was tricky, how it turns out so... yellow. I had laughed. I was all about yellow.

It turns out Citrus Splash is way too yellow. Oops.

2) The garbage disposal.

Decided to quit and clog the sink drain Friday at 5:30, which is 30 minutes after maintenance hours and just in time for a weekend full of cooking. Also did I mention we painted the kitchen this weekend but Citrus Splash is way too yellow? So until Citrus Splash is hidden under some goldy butternutty mustardy something that makes my heart sing the song of the perfect color paint, the furniture will remain clustered against the sink and oven and fridge, and butternut squash must be lowered through the barely-cracked-open oven door veeerrry carefully. Couldn't you have at least scootched the kitchen table a few more feet away from the oven to use the oven? Yes I could have.

3. Caramel sauce for carmelized pears.

I don't know why I even try with you, caramel.

Downton Abbey

Tonight was a Downton Abbey night.

I'm kind of passionate about how much I love this show, and I'll add something about why tomorrow, but it's so late and I'm so tired and I have a cat lying on my stomach sucking his thumb.

But let it never be said that I did not post tonight.

Dr. Dog and Sock Bun

I had no expectation of this tutorial working for me, but my hair was in bad shape, we were trying to get out the door, and within two minutes I had cut a sock, rolled it down a hasty pony-tail, and had this lovely pastry-looking concoction perched atop my head.

Pre-concert side-view Sock Bun.

Dr. Dog at the Bluebird in Bloomington. They were a party. My ears are still ringing.

Mid-concert top-view Sock Bun.

It was such a party that confetti-filled balloons kept popping overhead, garnishing my Coke as well as Sock Bun.

Post-concert back-view confetti-garnished Sock Bun.

The end.

This post made possible by Dr. Dog and Sock Bun.

Update: A few people had questions about the tutorial -- this one doesn't show the sock cutting and rolling very well. Make the sock ring by cutting off the toe of the sock, or the whole foot, depending how fat you want the finished sock ring/bun to be. Then roll it as if you were rolling a sock down your ankle, to make a sock scrunchie. And yes, the sock stays in your bun. Don't use a thick athletic sock like me if you want to tone it down. Once you've rolled your sock down your pony-tail anchor with a few bobbies. Magic.

Because I care.

I've been so neglecting my social responsibility as a West Coast Midwesterner.  I had no idea what to expect when Chris and I drove across the Mississippi for my first time, and I'm well aware that many of my friends and loved ones in southern California have only vague, unexamined ideas about what life might look like in Indiana. Or is it Iowa? Illinois? A few hours from New York, right? Everything is, over there? I became especially concerned when I was in California this July and two separate people gave every impression of believing that I had flown there out of the teeth of cold, miserable weather. Maybe I misunderstood, or maybe people really begin to believe that California is the only place the sun shines.

I've mentioned that I actually love it here, but I haven't shared almost any of the thousands of pictures I've taken of Indianapolis, and Chicago, and Louisville, and Cincinnati, and Nashville, and the gorgeous coast of Michigan, and the Smokey Mountains, and West Virginia, and the rivers and forests and gas stations in between. And our faces in front of those things.

It's a little bit daunting, and Flickr says this one post has used a quarter of my photo upload space for November, which is disheartening. But somehow I'll find a way for the people who depend on me. That's you. You have been dying to see what Indiana looks like from The Inside. I know.

These were taken while we were exploring Eagle Creek Reservoir a few weeks ago. The park is hidden in the middle of Indianapolis proper, but somehow we've only really discovered it this fall.

Try to somehow believe me when I tell you that I have so many other photos from other, even more gloriously fall-y days, and that I will show them to you if Flickr will let me.

You're already on your way to enlightened understanding of The Heartland. Can you feel it?

Back to tell

I'm just going to ease into this. One sentence yesterday, a few more today. It is really difficult to make myself write something and post it, for whatever reasons, but I'm hoping I can fake it/make it into feeling comfortable doing this really uncomfortable thing. It's been the usual -- all kinds of things that want to make their way onto paper, something damming up the flow, my brain sputtering for air and drowning in the backwash. You know. So NaBloPoMo it is!

This fall has been impossibly beautiful, and it's a good place I'm in. A good place to move forward from. I had a silly but profound little epiphany the other day as I was driving homeward from downtown Indianapolis. One fun thing about our corner of the city (there's not all that many fun things about this particular corner, so you have to take what you can) is that there are infinite permutations of routes home through the messy grid of neighborhoods and back-lot industrial areas and what have you. Some permutations will cost you a more jolting, pot-holey ride than others, and some come with high risk of being stuck waiting for a very long train to very slowly pass, but you know they say changing up your commute keeps your brain from molding.

In the spirit of brain freshness I took a road that curved behind a corner I usually go around, and ended up on a street I thought I knew but which suddenly dead-ended. The obnoxious, pointless kind of dead end where it looks like you're about to intersect with the street you're heading toward, but instead of a stop sign at the intersection you're met with a curb and a small strip of grass, feet away from cars merrily going the way you want to go. And I was like, Gah! and then I reversed and five-point turned the car around, found a short connecting road that led to the parallel through-street I had thought I was already on, and within less than a minute I was one of the cars happily on their way.

I didn't sit at that stupid, unforeseen curb and honk my horn at it, throw the car into park to think about how much precious time and gas I had wasted getting nowhere, berate myself for being a horrible driver, and gaze pining at the cars zipping by just out of reach. I turned right around, found a street that went through, and kept going, gosh darn it! And if I wasn't waxing philosophical I would have completely forgotten I ever took a wrong turn -- it made no difference in where I ended up.

Which is to say that I am clumsily maneuvering myself around and looking for a through street -- one where I get paid money to do the things I'm good at and love doing. I trust it's out there.

The dead-end epiphany reminded me of these lines by one of my favorite people writing on the Internet:

I have driven this far in life
squinting more often than not
into the rear-view mirror,
moving forward only
in reverse.

I am circling my vehicle now,
climbing back inside. I have
removed the rear-view mirror,
discarded it on the side of
the new road. Animals will
marvel.

There is only so
much hindsight that
one can bear. I have
died of hindsight and
come back to tell.  

          -Excerpt from "No One's Expense" by Jenn Mattern at Breed 'Em and Weep 

If I haven't died of hindsight yet, I've certainly been gagging on it for ages. I can't tell you how much I love thinking of my rear-view mirror cracked and forsaken on the side of the road. I spent summer putting miles between me and the ugly little stretch where I finally had to leave it. It was such a good, non-stop, all-over-the-place summer, and it was equally good to get back and resettle, nest, reconnect.

And now, forward.

Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond gets it:

I am a bird in water, a whale on sand
I am the flood, the fire, the oil spill
I’m feeling scared and I am overwhelmed
And so I don my mask and finger bells

Sh-Sh-Sh-Shara now get to work
Sh-Sh-Sh-Sh-Sh-Shara this is going to hurt
Be brave dear one
Be changed or be undone
Be brave dear one
Be changed or be undone, undone

It’s so hard, it’s so heavy
To be hungry, to be happy
It’s so light, it’s so easy just to be

Oh God, what would you do with me
Oh God, what’s my responsibility
God, what would you do with me
Oh God, what’s my responsibility

Sh-Sh-Sh-Shara now get to work
Sh-Sh-Sh-Sh-Sh-Shara this is going to hurt
Be brave dear one
Be changed or be undone
Be brave dear one
Be changed or be undone



You should listen, she's amazing.

3:30 a.m. This is going to be a good NaBloPoMo.

It's that time of year.

It's NaBloPoMo time.