On Friday, some Fridays, anyway, I like to re-run a favorite blog post of mine from the archives. This one originally ran in September 2010.

There's a lot of sacrifice in motherhood.

If you grow your children, you sacrifice your body to pregnancy. Nothing will ever be the same. If they come to you another way, you give your energy, your plan, your way.

Click here to read the rest:
http://radiantjess.blogspot.com/2010/09/motherhood-or-dying-to-self.html

(cross-posted from Bound4Life)

When you live with a chronically ill child, certain words and phrases become a permanent part of your lexicon. One of my least favorite is “quality of life”, where we attempt to ascertain the value of another human’s existence. We heard that phrase for the first time in 1999, as we fought to stay pregnant with our tiny son. “Even if he’s born alive,” they said, “which is unlikely, he’ll have no quality of life.” The words were spoken kindly, by well-meaning people, but they were like a sledgehammer to my heart. What did it all mean? And what was going to happen to us, to our baby? 4 days later, hours past the “viable” mark, our 24 week baby was born alive. He was 1 lb, 5 oz, and he was very, very sick.

One night during his first week, they told us to go back to our hotel and wait. “We’ll call you if, when it’s time to say goodbye.” His tiny body was wracked with seizures, his brain a mass of blood and cerebrospinal fluid. We sobbed our way back to our room and lay fully clothed on the beds, waiting. We woke up that way the next morning and realized he had passed the test, he had lived through the impossible. Upon arriving near his incubator, a doctor pulled us aside and strongly suggested that we “let him go.” “You have to start thinking about quality of life,” he told us, frustrated with our youth and our seeming naiveté. I remember feeling so small and shaken, standing in front of this man and his dire predictions, and hearing my husband say to him, “All I want is for him to be able to smile at me. That’s all I want.” So we decided to hang on, to fight for that smile.

He’s 13 now, and his smile is infectious. He celebrates every day. Our quality of life is immeasurably greater because of our little Richy. Some would argue that we should have let go, back in 1999. It’s been an uphill battle, but it’s been worth it. I’d let our little guy battle anyone’s assertion that his life lacks quality, and he’s nonverbal. His face says it all.

The following 15 minute clip is from our radio interview on The Grayson Alex Show, where I tell a little bit more of our story.

Listen to our excerpt from the Grayson Alex Show.

Or to listen to that episode in its entirety, go to the show's podcast.

I know you people revel in my disasters. I'm all like oooh blood and guts and hot glue and fall leaves and everybody hears HJINJKS and CIRCUS OF FUNNY. So okay. I got a wisdom tooth out. You love it.

I actually had 2 procedures scheduled, getting a permanent crown put on #30 and then having a  surgical extraction on #16. I got some kind of junior dentist for the first part. One of the primary problems with junior dentists is that they don't tell you what's going on, they just cram a gloved hand in your mouth and start hammering away at stuff. Then they take it back out and do some other stuff and then cram it back in, right in the middle of your instagramming. Another alarming thing about junior dentists is their tendency to wander off and leave you for unspecified amounts of time, and then when they come back they always explain how the real dentist said they need to do something different so, CRAM GAG FLOSS SCRAPE DRILL ESCAPE. Once the first step was done, they hooked me up to the laughing gas and put an anesthetic swab on the wrong side of my mouth. "That's the wrong side," I thought, after a moment.  "Or IS IT? Because I am HIGH." The real dentist came in and was pretty eye-rolly with the junior dentist about anesthetizing the wrong side, and I was both amused by the smackdown and horrified that the proper side was un-numb.

I stayed under the nitrous for an excessive amount of time. Side note: you guys are hilarious under the influence. Finally the real dentist came and I hit play on the ol iPod, and Randy Travis got in half a verse before the tooth was out and the whole shebang was over.

The junior dentist gave me a stern lecture about dry sockets and chips and cokes and anything that brings joy in this life: verboten. His second lecture was about pain management. "Don't wait too long," he warned me. "Take the pain meds right away, because when it hits you won't see colors anymore, and every day will be a nightmare that does not end." It was something like that, anyway.

I, being a rule follower, came home and took the meds and then couldn't find anything to eat that would not be on my forbidden list so I just drank some milk and went to bed, where I stayed until I started shaking and sweating and crawled down the stairs to be rescued by the MOG and eventually, to puke a lot. Good times. HIJINKS! I'm still pretty queasy today, despite skipping pain meds since then... or maybe because of skipping the pain meds.

It's amazing, the suffering that a small hole in your mouth can cause. When I get to heaven, Imma go hang out with Job and I'll be like, "I know exactly how you feel."

I lost a cousin today. You can't ever be ready for it, even when you answer the phone and know.

Travis and I were inseparable in our early years. I remember the day that he shot a neighborhood turkey with a slingshot; we considered it a victory over terrorism. Long Texas summers went so fast, playing in the yards our houses shared, and later, when his family moved in with our grandmother, we would scandalize the GI Joe norms by turning the Indian into a girl, you know, because of the long braid. We got older and he moved away, going years between reunions. It's funny, our lives took different paths, but when we'd see each other the strength and tradition of family would be stronger than the years apart. 

I last saw him at Christmas. It was a good day, a rich day of laughter and family. I didn't know, of course, that it would be the last time I saw him. I wonder, if we were privy to that information, how we would act differently, how our casual familiarity would carry the weight of that boundary. I think in some ways it's a mercy that we don't know. 

I can't imagine never seeing him again, never watching him get old in sync with me, never celebrating another holiday, another milestone. I will miss you, my precious cousin. 

You know what they say... well, they say a lot of things. It could be anything. "Don't eat yella snow!" they say. "Kissing makes babies!" they say. Well, my mama used to say that, anyway, when I was 15. I think I might have been sheltered. The point is, you still don't know what I'm talking about. "You can't win 'em all," that's the one I mean. Today, I think I lost the Revolutionary War. 

I have books, you know, books I am supposed to read with my children, so at least when they come in my room at 3 am, telling me they dreamed they took musket fire and bled to death on a cold battlefield, I will have a frame of reference. But today I was on my laptop, pseudo-cursing at my printer while trying to print a couple of activities, so I made them read the books themselves. 

The printer, last week, was all like, "OMG, I'm totes out of ink, bro," so I bought ink and installed it, and now it's like, "I have a communication error, bro. My bad." So I'm plugging, unplugging, threatening, messing with system preferences and googling like a BOSS, while my children read up on amputation in the late 1700's. "I don't want to read this," Toby says. "I just want to dance." "*&*^$!" I answer, sending laser-ray eyes of death at the printer. 

Some people might say, hey, how about preparing ahead of time, like a grownup? People. I have to think about other things during that time, like youtube videos and couch forts. The problem with technical difficulties is that no one around here understands the THREAT LEVEL MIDNIGHT frustration boundaries. They climb on me, asking questions, like, "Is it working now? Why aren't we having school, mom? Can we take all the brownies and eat them under our bed? Can we go to the zoo right now? Can I glue this paper to the wall? Is it working now? Why is it taking so long? Where's dad? Can I eat all of the grapes? Is it working now?" 

In those early days of the fight for freedom, as colonists patched together uniforms and militias and statesmen became great, I know there were women gathered around rustic wooden tables, yelling at their children. Those were tense days, dark days. Days like today. I felt a kinship with those women today, taping together tricorner hats in a glorious succession of fails. 

They ended up being some kind of goofy crowns, which they paired with Nerf guns and went on the hunt for British soldiers. Listen, um, if you're one of my Brit friends or an Epson executive, you might just lay low till we get through this section...

“And then she said,” I say, warming up, “that navy has never been an in color, and…” I look at my soulmate, the man I married, and his eyes are glassy, like a wax statue of himself, leaning forward in the driver’s seat, intent on nothing. “Hey!” I say, “are you even listening?” and then he lies. Depending on how important the information I have is, I will end up emailing him a reminder, or just internalizing it until someone has a baby and he’s like, “When was she pregnant?”

The problem is, I am awake during the day. I generally wake up in the morning, talk all day long, and I mean ALL day, and then in the evening, when it is dark outside, I go to bed. It’s a quirk of mine, sleeping at night.

So throughout the day, I see the Man Of God, and I talk to him. I tell him about my friends, and their lives, and their kids. I tell him about our kids, and about the house, about food and how much I love it. I talk some more about food. I tell him amusing anecdotes; things that I know you (the bloggerati) will laugh at. 6 out of 10 sentences land on rocky soil and the birds of the air carry them away, so he forms almost half-understandings of my ponderings.

And then the evening comes, and I, quirkily, grow tired. I lie down in my bed and read until my eyes start to close. I drift into my pillow, deeper, and then suddenly, there he is, chipper and awake. He comes in carrying snacks, turning on lights, chuckling about something, some amusing thing that happens in the night, when other people are asleep. “Hey!” he says, “want to hear about this galaxy that probably has water?” “No.” I say, like a good wife. “I want to hear my pillow.” He reads his email for a minute. “Hey!” he says intently, jolting me out of an almost-sleep state. “Hey, are you happy?” “Not particularly, now,” I grouse. A moment of silence, and I’m fading, fading, “I just don’t know how I feel about this eschatology,” he says, frowning at a troubling paragraph. Truth be told, I don’t know how I feel about it either. Hostile, maybe. “Wake up!” he whines, “I miss you.” “I have a great idea,” I say, frequently in the middle of the night, for 16 years, “We should talk at LUNCH sometime, during the DAY.” For 16 years, he says, “I can’t talk then, I’m working.”

It’s the same conversation, the same one, like fighting over the air and heat in the car, the radio volume, the way I leave out the peanut butter, the way he puts car keys in the freezer or uses my toothbrush because his is in California. The two have become one, but one, united and divided, simple and complicated, in union and at war. The state of the union is strong, because the wheels are greased with laughter and familiarity, and the easy battles are easy, because so many hard battles have been won. We might not ever figure out when to talk to each other, but we’ll still want to have each other to not talk to. So, at the end of the day or at lunch, it’s good.  

Disclaimer: This is not directed at anyone specific, that would be passive-aggressive. It’s about a global trend toward negativity. 

“It’s my birthday,” I say, to a group of friends. “I got new shoes.” Another friend addresses the group, “Hope you’re all having fun shopping and eating, because all over the world, people are dying.” I look around at the group. Was that directed at me? I wonder. Who would ever be hostile like that in person? Very few people, really. But all’s fair on social media.

It’s a funny thing, this global connection. We’re able to speak to one another like never before, but I think we’re still getting the hang of using our “voice”. And the art of the cyber-smackdown is being perfected. That’s the removed, passive-aggressive jab at an anonymous person or group of people, a virtual group correction, complete with sarcasm or shame.

Now, maybe I’m a Pollyanna. I really don’t think I am, because I am always aware of the black cloud connected to the silver lining. Still, I guess I’m kind of an optimist, and I like to believe that every day is redeemable, that there is always the potential for joy despite the circumstances. Sometimes that makes the glut of public opinion challenging for me.

Say it rains. 90 “friends” will talk about being depressed, plans being cancelled, the death of the sunny day. A couple of “friends” will bemoan our current President, or a previous administration, who set all the pieces in play to create such a dismal weather day. 2 “friends” will list the toxins found in rain, and accuse any parent who lets their child play outdoors of deliberately killing their child via toxic rain. I’m sitting here thinking, am I the only happy person? My life is not perfect, and I have battles to fight today, but there’s more to be thankful for than to complain about. Is it just me?

Life is a mixed bag. There’s pain and there’s glory, and sometimes on the same day. We’re all together, but removed, experiencing life in thought bubbles and making rash judgments based on our 140-character character assessments. We process differently, we bring different experiences to the table, so, understandably, we will react differently. Because we’re unique, and that’s okay. Let’s give each other some grace, and maybe the benefit of the doubt.

We all have causes, we all have passions, life messages. I’m not saying let’s all post pictures of our lunch. But if someone posts a picture of their lunch, and you have a life message, can we just say internally, that looks delicious and it does not negate the passion I feel for my cause? Let’s enjoy each other, celebrate our differences, be friends and not “friends”. Let’s modify our “voice”, learn to communicate with grace and not anger. This Pollyanna would hear your message much clearer if I wasn’t focusing on you, kicking me in the shins, while you’re speaking.

Life is beautiful, we’re all made in the image of God, and there is always something to be thankful for. Let’s use our voice for good.

Philippians 4:8

8 Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things.

Galatians 5:22-23

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.

Revisiting some of my favorite posts from the past, click the link to read the excerpted post in its entirety.

These are the laws given to the mothers of small children, that none may be unclean or sit upon an unclean surface or touch any unclean thing with their hands.

If the children eat oatmeal at the table, then that table is unclean. Let the priest examine the table and if the oatmeal is dried on the table, then that table is to be destroyed, unless the priest has a Magic Eraser or sandpaper. If the priest does, indeed have a Magic Eraser or sandpaper then the priest will urge the mother of the children to cleanse the table 7 times, and then it will be clean. 

(read the rest here: complete post)

Disclaimer: this is not going to turn into an exclusively homeschool blog. But even if it were, you should read it, because anything that comes into my life is going to be at least a little funny.

I don't know if it's because I'm eating so much food and can mollify my emotional needs or if maybe I just feel like doing something, but whatever. I decided to make today fun, to learn about the Boston Tea Party and teach it in a way they'd remember. I have a loose idea of what I want to cover this year, and the American Revolution is the beginning, although I might have to jump back in time in November to do the first Thanksgiving...

I'm going to be using the Liberty's Kids series available on youtube, and then the library, of course. This week I had rented What Happened at the Boston Tea Party?  and The Boston Tea Party (Graphic History) which was not, you know, graphic in the sense of dismembered colonists and such but rather, graphic, in that it's drawn like a comic book. I rent stuff like this and leave it around in hopes that someone will happen across it and learn on accident. This is only a problem when I accidentally leave something, like a book about how God makes babies, and people accidentally learn. I was planning on shelving that one for another year or two.

So we sat down to read the books, and I would read about 7 words and then everyone had a pressing question and Tristan wants UP UP, and then 7 words and WHAT IS PARLIAMENT and Tristan wants DOWN, BOOK, BANANA, NO, UP.

And as I'm reading, and flipping Tristan over my shoulder, down to the floor, back up, and pushing people's hands out of their noses and off of each other, I have the thought: this whole story is about rebellion. About a snarky, rebellious act that launched a huge rebellion. So I'm trying to play up what a jerk King George is, how unfair the taxes are, how oppressed were the colonists, but there's like a sober little British sympathizer inside my head, like a little British mom voice saying, well, they accepted British help, why shouldn't they pay taxes? And what about the tea company? Were they innocent bystanders? I was having a tiny little identity crisis, because, people, I am an Merican, with the eagles and the flags and the puppies inside the soldier's boot. MERICA.

I just pressed through, and I think I made a good case for the colonists, but if the colonists around here rise up to fight the power, I'm blaming that punk Sam Adams.

To finish the day, we made boats out of Rubbermaid, pencils, and construction paper sails. We put some tea bags in the boats and set them afloat in a tub of blue water. Oh, and we made headdresses and did a little warpaint, Sons of Liberty style, and then we shouted no taxation without representation for a while, which Tristan heartily approved of. Lastly, we threw the tea overboard and let it steep for 20 minutes, which is the only reason my bathtub is dirty. Both bathtubs, actually. Huh.

Tomorrow, maybe we'll learn about naps. Naps and chocolate chip cookies.

Today was our art day at El Escuela de Clarks en Miniatura. Technically, it should have been a science day, but I switched it so I wouldn't have to go outside or look at bugs. They have a jar full of box elder bugs right now that they collected from the backyard without my knowledge or approval, and every day or two they go release all the dying bugs and catch new ones. I would intervene if I didn't hate those bugs with an undying passion. No death is too violent for them, too drawn out, there is no torture too torturous. I could go on, but I want to stop thinking about bugs. Ew. Another day, maybe when I'm too drunk to care. (disclaimer: I do not drink. But not ruling it out.) 

Back to art. I don't really have any art knowledge. I mean, Fine Arts, sure. Give me a dramatic inch and I'll make it a mile with some monologuing and awkwardly loud show tunes. But the drawing stuff not so much. To put it delicately, I stink. I like\ art, though, and like many other things, I want my kids to love it, even if the odds of it paying for a decent nursing home are super slim. Plus, we have good artists on both sides of the family, so if that's a genetic possibility then I want to develop it.

So a friend of ours is working with them, teaching them art basics, and this week I found color wheels from Pinterest and decided we'd try them. 

First, I got a couple of pieces of posterboard, and then sent the children on a housewide scavenger hunt for 5 items from each of the primary and 2 secondary colors (again, not an artist, so if I get something wrong, ask me to quote a line from Annie. BECAUSE I KNOW THEM ALL.) They found little toys, broken crayons, scraps and straws and made a collection. 

Then we traced circles on the board using a dehydrator tray as our line. This is where things got a little tricky. I know how to make a pizza, how to divide a circle into 8 parts. Somehow, dividing a circle into 6 parts was extremely complicated. "Well," you say snootily, "You just divide the meridian by the rhombus and then pi and that's your circumference. Duh." To which I say, I feel charming, oh so charming, it's alarming how charming I feel, and so pretty, that I hardly can believe I'm real. BOOM.

There was a lot of erasing and an enormous amount of questioning my measuring abilities, which stung a little. It's humbling, admitting your mental weakness to people who still pee in their pants sometimes. This is the not-Pinterested part of the show, where I snap at the children, and take their pencils away because I do not want lasers shooting through the color wheel, the color wheel does not need any lasers. How am I supposed to facilitate this heartwarming simple art project if people keep drawing lasers? 

Once there were 6 radically different triangles traced, I wrote tiny letter clues for what color to paint each section, and they were off. Tristan helped by throwing Legos at people's heads and trying to run away with the paint every 18 seconds. While the paint was still wet, they started gluing in their found items. Somehow, despite my obsessive back to school shopping, we are down to one glue and one pair of non-lethal scissors, so there were a few scuffles in between getting clocked in the head with blocks and deciding if it was blood or paint.  

In the end, it was a fun, fairly messy project that we enjoyed, especially Tristan. Plus, I think I know the color wheel. Also every word from Beauty and the Beast. EVERY WORD.

I've been reading a lot of fiction lately. I usually don't have a ton of time to read, because of Facebook. Oh, and my 4 kids and emotionally compromised spouse. But recently, I've been on a diet, you know, and also I paid off my grand larceny fees at the local library and have been reinstated as a member, although I feel the baleful eye of the law on us from every direction.

Let me tell you, I read some pretty weak fiction on occasion. I think I'm in a downward trend; I started reading when I was 4 and, being the last child of geniuses, began with Dickens and Tolstoy and then have gradually dialed it back to Christian romantic comedy, pretty much. I know it's in part because life has kicked me in the face a couple of times and so I'm not in a hurry to read about existentialism and suffering. Or Russians. I'll read about a Russian ex-spy who fell in love with an Navy Seal and got snuck out of the country, sure. But in general, I am wary of Russians, because of all the movies. 

I'm a smart person. I'm not terribly educated, but I'm smart and I'd like to think, relatively deep. So why is that I am thrilled by a good marriage-of-convenience novel? Two souls, forced into a marriage of convenience, which will never last because one of them is about to die or something, or get deported or something, and they don't even like each other, but they start falling in love because they're all married and stuff. And then, once they decide they do love each other, then the plot twist where they get an option to bail out of their sham marriage and maybe they even do, but then they regret it and they have to run really fast in the rain and stuff. 

I've been married 16 years, and I love my husband, but I have yet to a) weep in the rain or b) run in the rain. When it rains, we generally are in the car, together, talking about bills, and then when we get out we don't spend any time kissing in the rain, we get the heck inside where we have climate control. That's romantic, air conditioning. 

But I do love it when they find each other and there's some crying and witty banter even while they're getting bombed or kidnapped and some smooching in the rain and then the epilogue where she's pregnant, even though that was supposed to be impossible or something. Sometimes I even shed a tear. That book was almost grammatically perfect, I think, blotting my eyes with a tissue. Almost.

I don't know what that says. It's probably something psychological. Or maybe a vitamin deficiency, who knows?  Anyway, I have to wrap this up now because there are some ladies who thought they were working a homestead deal to own their own land but the unscrupulous man in charge of their travel has actually advertised them as brides from the East. Bad news. Predicting bad guy gets busted, ladies find love, Civil War PTSD victim shaves his beard and is stunning. Also finds love. 

Oh, and also, there's these kids running around here. Something needs to happen with them. 

it's grey today
but a cheerful grey
one that says rain is coming
open the windows and smell the new

and the wind
ready to sweep
through the old leaves and debris
and change everything again

so rest, He says
rest in the chaos
and wait
for the rain and the wind

Disclaimer:  I know I have a 13 year old. I live with him, and I remember being a parent back when movies were still black and white. Still, because of his "wonky brain" (medical diagnosis) (not really) I only give myself parenting credits for about the last 6 years, which is how long I have parented a normal typical child with a non-injured brain.

So I often look down loftily from my perch of 6 years and think, "I got this" about one aspect of parenting or another. In what I am starting to suspect is a recurring cycle, I am learning that I don't know much. But that's parenting, that's so much of it, just winging it and using your parental instinct, and safety laws and advice from your mother-in-law. "We don't eat oatmeal with our fingers," you say.  "We don't drink the bathwater, we don't call grownups by their first name unless they're in our house 6 days a week. We don't take toys in the restaurant." Stuff like that, or, as a young parent, you decide or are convinced that your sleeping strategy is the only one that will keep your precious child out of a cold penitentiary some day. A guy goes nuts and drives his car into the Dairy Queen, and you take a small measure of comfort reading in the paper that he was not breastfed. 

All this to say, I did something wrong and I need to try to fix it. I have invented techno geeks and now I have to try to un-geek them somehow. I introduced Toby to computer games, back when he was just a 2 or 3 year old genius, because I wanted him to have something to do besides asking me impossible questions or attempting science experiments in his room. And it was great for a while. He taught himself to read, Brynn taught herself to read, largely thanks to starfall.com, and they got super environmentally conscious, and to this day will cast a scornful eye on me for discarding a plastic container instead of recycling it or running the water whilst brushing my teeth. 

But somewhere along the way, I started leaning too heavily on my electronic babysitter, and that, combined with the slightly addictive personalities of my little people, has started giving us boring bored children, who have a difficult time breaking out of video-game world to be present, much less creative. I put time limits, but still, too much time, too much focus. And my little geniuses have just been drying up a little. I love computers, we use them for our living, for family connection, for education, so many valuable resources. But somehow we need to get back to using them as a limited tool and not as a cure-all. 

So, I'm making a change. My plan right now is to shut their computer access down during the week, except for the couple of educational apps I use for supplementing their school day, and then having a few hours available on the weekend. It's not going to be easy. Yesterday, as the MOG and I were just discussing some minor cutbacks, Toby started panicking and trying to throw out some serious negotiations. And it won't be easy for me, at first, because they don't know what to do without screens, so they just climb on me and fight each other when we unplug them. But these kids are little, and they're bright, so it will work. I know that. 

If I could go back and do something differently, I think I would wait to introduce screens in general, and I would severely limit their use and importance once introduced. That's assuming that TimeTravel Me is smarter than Past or Present Me. 

Also I want to start some kind of incentive program, where they can "earn" small blocks of computer time for chores or excellent behavior, something like that. 

Do your kids do screen time? How much and how do you limit it? Any success with incentive/point reward systems? Help a sister out. 

I'm trying to write a blog here, but I'm on a diet, and it takes a lot of focus. I pretty much have to think about food all day long, because I'm restricting myself from certain things, so that makes my brain compensate for the lack of pleasure with just constant, obsessive thoughts about eating. I don't even discriminate, I think about broccoli almost as often as I think about a SONIC BUTTERFINGER BLAST OMG.

Food. I love it so. I mean, I don't think I'm totally normal how much I love it. I would be more concerned about it if I cared. So fasting is the worst. I mean, I do it, and I totally understand the intangible religious benefits, but man. It is the worst. Fasting is worse than dieting. I'm trying to make myself feel better, sitting here snacking on a plastic tub of baked cauliflower. It's a 10 day diet, a fat burning diet, and I'm on day 2. I can eat lean meats, vegetables, fruits, eggs and beans, just survival food. Just staying alive, stayin alive.

It's just... what is the point? What is the point of anything, when you can't eat tortillas? Why am I here? Today I took the kids to McDonald's and I ate a salad and drank water, like some kind of prisoner.

And the thing is, I just chase that high, that french fry high, that satisfaction that comes from eating something that tastes awesome. I eat eggs for breakfast,and there's no joy. So I think, maybe some Greek yogurt, some berries. A few grapes. Some soggy curry-spiced cauliflower. And while I'm chewing, I'm okay, but then it's over and somewhere, people are eating chocolate chip cookies. Oh man, when this thing is over, I might pendulum so hard over to Cookie World of Happiness.

Somebody out there is analyzing this, determining that I use food as an emotional crutch. Of course I do, because I have to eat something, it might as well taste like butter and salt. Or chocolate.