Touching base

 My mother has recently started noticing when I touch things to steady myself.

I often have a slight balance issue or a few seconds of dizziness, where I just lilt sideways for a moment. It's usually something that happens a few minutes after I get up and start moving around after sitting down for a while or getting up from lying on the couch.

It's normally something that just lasts a second or two, and I just touch the furniture, or the wall, or lean on the door frame for a moment so I don't fall into it. If I can't touch something, I right myself well enough without any worries in a couple of steps – I don't actually fall – I just find it easier to touch something briefly to regain balance and I move on.

The thing is, I've been doing this for as long as I can remember – at least since I was a teenager – but my mother has only recently started to comment on it, like she's suddenly noticed something that's a new development.

I know why: it's because she's having trouble with her balance now, so she's starting to do it herself, so now she recognises it when she sees it happen. But it's still weird. 

You know, I've been tripping over my own feet, bumping into furniture and knocking against walls and doors for decades. For decades, it has gone without comment. Now, suddenly, she's noticed.

To give this a little extra context, my mother has this thing where she always (*always*) assumes something is wrong. She will watch you like an absolute hawk and analyse every unexplained movement or noise to see if something is wrong – which is an absolute blast if you are the kind of person who fidgets, cracks your joints and makes little humming noises to yourself when you let your mind wander.

I'll probably write a whole 'nother post delving into "I'm a natural fidgeter who pulls random facial expressions when I relax, but I get asked to account for every single one of them when I'm with my mother so I feel like I can never fully relax". But that's another ramble. 

The point is, I've spend literal decades of my life begging my mother to stop asking "what's wrong?" every time I twitch to relieve some muscle stiffness ("what's wrong?" - "Nothing, I'm just stretching." "What's wrong?" - "Nothing, I'm just cracking my fingers." "What's wrong?" - "Nothing, I'm just letting my mind wander." "What's wrong?" - "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP ASSUMING SOMETHING'S WRONG!") but she's only just started noticing the touching thing.

I get asked "what's wrong?" if I so much as frown slightly (btw., I frown when I'm tired, and I'm always tired), but I've been falling into walls for decades and she's only just noticed?

What did you think was happening before? That I was just a clumsy oaf clown? Can you go back to that, please? It's way better than having someone suddenly ask "are you alright?" all the time (just a variation of "what's wrong?") when I'm just doing something that has been normal for as long as I can remember

Hair

 

Photo by Taylor Smith on Unsplash

I was looking through some photos if misguided haircuts recently... which is pretty much all of them.

All of my haircuts have been misguided.

Well, that's not entirely true. I have two haircuts that don't look completely ludicrous. One is to have my hair so long that all I can do is pull it back and it doesn't look like it's meant to be anything other than the wild locks of a Highland Barbarian. In theory I could braid that and it would look semi-decent, but I have the fine motor skills of a walrus, so I don't really braid. Just a basic plait every now and then.

The other haircut that doesn't look completely ludicrous is a pixie cut – so little hair that no styling is possible and all I can do is throw in some product to spike it up a bit when I'm feeling fancy.

Every other haircut falls prey to the fact that I my hair is, in fact, the Rum Tum Tugger: it will do as it do do and there's no doing anything about it.

I'll think of a haircut that might look pretty cool. I'll go to a hairdresser and they'll say "sure!" and then it will look kind of okay for approximately 2 hours. Then it looks ridiculous.

Once my hair starts getting its bearings, it turns whatever haircut I have (that isn't "wild woman" or "pixie") into "what the hell were you thinking?"

To be honest, I don't think the wild woman or pixie cuts were particularly good either, they were just not as terrible as all the others.

I had the wild woman hair for most of my teens and early twenties, and then cut it shorter in my late twenties and regretted it. Every single iteration of it. Until I hit on the pixie in my thirties, which works until I decide I want to grow it out. Then I have the challenge of trying to force my way through a dozen terrible iterations of my hair until I can get back to wild woman... and I inevitably lose patience and get it all cut back into a pixie again.

The thing is, I've tried to do the thing where I embrace the fact that my hair is always going to be a bit daft, assuming that, if I do it on purpose, it will actually be kind of cool and funky. It never is.

I've had the same approach to my clothes over the years – I don't look particularly good in anything except "uber-corporate", and I find "uber-corporate" clothing impractical and uncomfortable, so I still manage to look like I'm dressed poorly. I tried embracing my "I dress like someone who doesn't know how clothes work" aesthetic to aim for "quirky" and "eclectic". It never looks quirky and eclectic – it just looks like I dress poorly.

No matter how hard I try, it never looks like I did whatever daft thing I'm doing "on purpose" – it just looks like I'm unintentionally unfashionable/untidy/unattractive, which is twice as bad as just being all of those things intentionally because you're bucking the system. I'm not bucking the system, I'm just incapable of making it work... and you can tell.

My hair is super annoying right now, but it's not yet at wild woman stage (and probably never will be), so I can't just pull it back without it looking super silly. I've pulled it back. It looks super silly. I'm going to have to go back to the pixie...

They call me "Bucket"

 That's not even remotely true: no one calls me "Bucket".

But I called myself "Bucket" the other night, which was a bit weird. I think I meant it as an encouraging endearment, as I said something like "Come on, Bucket, you've got this!"

And then I immediately thought, "Bucket? Where the hell did that come from?"

But it's a step up from what I usually call myself, which is "you idiot."

Seened ja kartulid (or: Man I miss onions)

Photo by Lars Blankers on Unsplash

I was having a conversation with a friend about potatoes (which is always something worth doing – I recommend you find a friend right now and have a conversation about potatoes with them), when I mentioned a potato-based dish I used to eat all the time during my schmegan phase.¹

It was an Estonian dish called "seened ja kartulid" or "seened karulitega". This dish literally translates to "mushrooms and potatoes" or "mushrooms with potatoes", and consists of mushrooms, potatoes and onions. Many versions also add bacon (because Estonians add bacon – or "salted pork" – to everything), but you can just have it as a vegetarian dish.

Basically, you boiled a couple of potatoes until just tender (like for a potato salad) and then cut them into bite-sized slices, then you fried up some sliced onion (about half a smallish onion per serving) and as many different types of mushrooms as you could get your hands on (sliced), along with the potatoes. Rapeseed/canola oil was standard, but some nice olive oil would work if you were fancy. Fry the lot until they lose all the excess moisture and start to crisp. Then you just added some salt and cracked pepper.

No sauce or anything like that, just a good oil, good salt and good pepper (along with good mushrooms and potatoes [and onions]). It's one of those dishes where you get the best quality ingredients you can get your hands on and make some magic with only a handful of "basic" things.

I tell you, this was the simplest meal on the face of the earth, but just good wholesome comfort food. The more varieties of mushrooms you could get your hands on, the better, but even if you could only get one type of mushroom it was still Good Foods. Have a slice of good rye bread with it, and you've got yourself a decent meal.

And then, of course, I went on that dratted FODMAP diet where I wasn't supposed to eat onions, mushrooms or rye bread. That pretty well knocked this one off the roster. I've since discovered that rye bread and mushrooms are okay in small doses, but onion is actually something likely to give me grief...

Man I miss onions. They're just so tasty, and so central to all of the good dishes. 

Someone somewhere made a comment that white people start any given meal with cutting an onion, and they're right. You know, when you come from a climate where pretty much the only vegetables you can eat for most of the year are root vegetables, onions become the star of the show. I used to know I was about to make something really enjoyable when I started with cutting an onion.

For some reason, a lot of the dishes I used to make all of the time before the FODMAP thing have completely disappeared from my repertoire, even though I'd probably be able to work out a few substitutions (or just put up with a bit of discomfort). It's like something interrupted the usual transmission and now I've forgotten what I eat.

But I think I'll revisit seened ja kartulid and see whether or not I can get away with it, without too much drama. Good Foods is Good Foods, after all.

Ooh, let's do the recipe blogger thing and add a recipe to the bottom of this post, so you can skip reading the whole dang thing and get a recipe, even though the rambling story about my relationship with onions was the whole point of the post!

Seened ja Kartulid

Ingredients:

• Mushrooms - sliced. As many as you like and as many different kinds as you can find.
• Potatoes - cooked until just tender and sliced. Approximately one small-medium potato per person.
• 1 medium onion - sliced.
• Oil for pan frying (no I'm not going to give you proper amounts - just wing the darn thing).

Method:

Heat oil in a frying pan and cook the onions until soft. 

Add the mushrooms and heat through, then add the potatoes and keep stirring until the onions are translucent and the mushrooms and potatoes begin to crisp.

Serve with sea-salt and cracked pepper, with a slice of rye bread to the side.

To drink? Beer. This is a good meal to have with a good farmhouse ale.

(1) For anyone who is new here, I spent a couple of years cooking and eating vegan food - more or less for the heck of it - but wasn't actually vegan as I ate everything on offer when someone else served it to me. Hence, "schmegan".

Oh, rats!

 I've been thinking about this article from Hakai Magazine almost constantly since I listened to the audio version a few nights ago:

In Defense of the Rat

Text by J. B. MacKinnon

Illustrations by Sarah Gilman

I subscribe to both the newsletter and podcase of Hakai Magazine, and usually enjoy the stories when I can get my act together to look at them. Listening to the audio version, I didn't realise that there were pretty neat illustrations in the print version. But there are, so you should look at them even if you (like me) are a listener.

Sarah Gilman

I don't mind a rat. When I was growing up, I knew a couple of kids who had pet rats and I used to play with them when I visited, so I know they can make lovely pets. I also pet-sat someone's mice at one point, so I know rats are the superior rodents when it comes to pet rodents (they're so much cleaner and more sociable).

I also read Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, so it's hard not to have a soft spot for rats, really. Or, for that matter, a deep-seated mistrust of scientists – particularly scientists who work with rats. Or any animal.

At some point during his article, MacKinnon mentioned that vets sometimes recommend people who want a really small dog should get a rat, which is something I've come across before (because they're as playful as dogs but take up way less space and don't need walking).

He also mentioned an experiment where scientists worked out that rats enjoy playing hide-and-seek (both hiding and seeking) and will happily play games just for the fun of it, with no reward wanted other than tickling – which they respond to by squealing with laughter (the rats, not the scientists). The scientist played with the rats, had great fun, tickled them, developed a fun and playful relationship... and then killed them to examine their brains.

What the hell, scientists? What is wrong with you? Why are you soulless jerks? Why are you always soulless jerks?

Honestly, what is it about biology and biologists? You think scientists are getting into whatever field they've gone into because they love their topic and they are interested in learning more, but the truth is they're a bunch of destructive monsters who kill and dismember everything they "love". And they have no empathy for non-human life forms. And quite frankly I find them very disturbing.

As far as I'm concerned, the only good scientist is the scientist who noticed what they were doing is abhorrent and stopped doing that.

Please, just leave those rats (and rabbits, and armadillos, and every other pour tortured soul in a laboratory) alone!

Pudding Vegans and Pudding Omnivores

Photo by American Heritage Chocolate on Unsplash

One of my friends at work is a vegetarian, but I've never seen her eat a vegetable.

Well, that's not strictly true; I have seen her eat potato chips. So, to be precise, I've never seen her eat a vegetable that wasn't a deep-fried potato.

When we've been out for dinner and I ask her if she's ordering food this time, she assures me she's eaten something at home so she doesn't have to worry about ordering something suitable at the restaurant, and she occasionally makes comments at work about recipes that involve vegetables, but in all the years I've known her I've yet to see her eat something that wasn't 2 minute noodles or chips. 

And we're not talking huge serves, either. Basically, I can't figure out how she's not dead.

Now, what she eats is her business and I really shouldn't pass judgement, even if she is skinny as a rake and freezing all the time so I have severe doubts that she'll survive the winter on her current caloric intake.

But whenever I notice what she has for lunch, it puts me in mind of a phrase that has stuck with me ever since I read it in a cookbook back in my ill-fated vegan experiment: "pudding vegans."

Many years ago one of my work friends was vegan, and he usually couldn't eat anything brought to the office parties except whatever he made himself. I decided to take up vegan cooking as a hobby so I could provide at least one alternative for him at the morning teas. I ended up reading many, many vegan cookbooks, and I went through a period where pretty much all of the cooking I did was vegan.

As I mentioned in a post I wrote back in 2016, I kind of fell in love with the smart-arsery of vegan cooking. I loved experimenting to see what I could come up with that was delicious and nutritious without a single animal product. One of the things I absolutely hated, though, was the way the majority of vegan recipes were so meat-centric. But that's a digression for another post.

For a while there, I went so far down the rabbit hole that almost all of the food I made for myself was vegan - and I usually tried to buy vegan food when I was out, too. I'm pretty sure there was a time when the only non-vegan ingredient I had in my house was honey. But I still ate whatever my family was eating when I had dinner with them, so I didn't regard myself as "vegan" - just "vegan-adjacent", or "veganesque".

Then I was put on a FODMAP diet to sort out my IBS, and the whole veganesque thing went out the window because you can't be FODMAP and vegan at the same time without dying from malnutrition.

Which brings me back to "pudding vegans."

I first encountered this term in a cookbook that had been translated from German, and I think it's an Austrian thing. Basically, its about vegans who hardly eat any vegetables. The majority of their food is "plant-based", but not "plants". I think the "pudding" thing refers to the fact that most of the food they eat may as well be pudding.

It's a concept that haunted me during my veganesque phase. I made damn sure that I didn't just eat a plant-based diet, but ate actual vegetables. I wanted to make sure my meals had more nutritional value than pudding (even if I did eat my fair share of pre-packaged food from the freezer section of the supermarket).

I noticed recently that my "vegetables first!" approach to food that I had during my veganesque period had severely fallen by the wayside in my post-FODMAP meal planning. I've fallen back into my old habits of using cheese and meat as a crutch. Who needs real food when you can have grilled cheese on toast? Who needs to plan a proper meal when you can have a corned beef sandwich?

Not long ago I read a "cheat's guide to meal planning" article where the woman said she starts by asking "what's my source of protein?" and builds the rest of the meal around that. I realised I need to do that with vegetables. So now I'm trying to approach each meal by saying "what's my vegetable?" and taking that as the starting point.

It doesn't help that 80% of the time I really can't be bothered thinking about food, but at least trying to make myself think "vegetable first!", like I did back in my veganesque days, is helping me get some vegetables into my system.

Hopefully, if I keep this up, I won't be too much of a "pudding omnivore."

What would a healthy person do?

Photo by Mishaal Zahed
on Unsplash

 It's a question that has been plaguing me since I read Atomic Habits, by James Clear: "What would a healthy person do?"

The idea behind the question is that if you want to be a certain type of person, you should think about the choices that kind of person makes, and make those choices. The "healthy" person isn't making good choices because they are healthy, they are healthy because they are making good choices. Too often we put the cart before the horse and think that changing our lifestyle will make all of the little things fall into place, when really it's putting the little things into place that changes our lifestyle.

Unfortunately, it's not a question that pops into my head before I make decisions. Usually I do something entirely unhealthy, then think "what would a healthy person do?" and realise the answer is "not that."

"What would a healthy person do?"
"Be in bed by 10.00pm"
"What time is it now?
"11.30pm."

"What would a healthy person do?"
"Plan their meals to get a good balance of nutrition"
"What are you eating right now?"
"I don't know - I suppose I should eat something - Oh, look I have toast."

"What would a healthy person do?"
"Leave the office at a reasonable hour and get some exercise."
"What are you doing right now?"
"Sitting at my desk, in the dark, writing a blog post."
"Could you at least move enough to activate the lights?"
"Apparently not."

My problem is, I know what I should do, but I don't listen to me. I only have so much energy in the day and I save that for worrying about disappointing other people. I can disappoint myself - that's okay. I mean, it's not okay - I will absolutely beat myself up and call myself names about this stuff. I mean, seriously - how much better would I feel if I was well rested, ate proper food and went for a walk every day? Miles better. So much happier. But... eh. I'm only hurting myself and I don't care about me any more than I listen to me.

Having said that, maybe I should go for a walk.