normal eyes
If you are here seeking quick tips, I was recently reminded that you can make lasagna in a hurry using frozen ravioli AND I have only recently come into possession of a fish spatula but I am converted and wonder how I ever functioned in a kitchen without one. That’s two quick tips. And if you scroll doooowwn there is also a recipe for golden milk, which mixes up in just a minute and therefore also qualifies as a quick tip.
If you are here for a meandering series of loosely-linked anecdotes full of mildly(?) unhinged wormhole detours, however—buckle up, Buttercup!
Many years ago when we all went around doing things in places, my friend Suzi asked me to talk about my writing process on her blog. I recognize this doesn’t sound like a throwback to an earlier time. We can still answer questions with our masks on. But it really speaks to me of a now-antique mindset where everyone was trying to do more things with the end goal of getting “out there” to rub elbows. My elbows are really showing how unrubbed they have been these five long centuries of COVID. Where even is “out there,” I ask you?
When Suzi tossed me this set of questions, the main concept that I remember describing was that I “allow” (can’t stop) one thing that I’m thinking about to rattle around in my head until it seems to be regularly colliding with another thing. Then I let those things clatter together for a little minute until I have enough reason to believe that I can see what connects them, and I start putting words to that. Then I “step away” (get frustrated and go make a snack) and then I come back to see what threads I hadn’t yet noticed in the words I have managed to scratch out.
It’s all very elegant and done by candlelight in longhand on the kind of pad you can only purchase by mail from this one old man in Indiana who deals in deadstock office supplies from the estates of members of the Algonquin Roundtable, or possibly on a 1929 Olivetti typewriter positioned near a window with a gauzy curtain. Naturally I designate three hours every morning before I even look at my phone or email to focus on my craft.
OK look, I wasn’t doing any of that before the pandewhonium, and for sure I am not doing it now. I sourdoughed with the best of them in lockdown #1 but at this point in round twelve, whatever force that once powered my creative lobes has EBBED.
Then again, here we are gathered together on this platform where I tell stories, so something must have sparked up in the old coconut.
In fact, something did. The first marble rolling slowly along the dusty hallways of my mind was this:
I had a call last weekend with a group of women that I went to school with from fifth to 12th grade. We are the steering committee for a conversation about race that has been going on in our alumnae class for almost two years. The steering calls and the bigger group calls are good in a way that has everything to do with knowing each other since we were 9 and finally being able to care more about our shared history than we do about what used to make us pod up in isolated friend groups and say catty stuff.
Two members of this group of 7 got the end time in their heads as the start time so they missed the call. One of the women who missed the call is extraordinarily scrupulous about all things, to the point that she still remembers all of our birthdays. She messaged me after the call and said what gives, we always ping people when they are late/remind them. It brought me up short. Truly every time someone has been late, she has done just that and I have witnessed it—even been gathered in by the gesture myself on at least one occasion, and appreciated it. I apologized, and also struggled to explain what had happened, because it wasn’t that I didn’t notice that she and the other friend were absent or didn’t form a thought about reaching out.
The honest thing to have said in reply to her text was this: I can’t speak for the rest of the group but at this stage of my own unraveling, if someone doesn’t show up for an engagement, it makes total sense to me that they are for the moment collapsed under the weight of merely existing and far be it from me to disturb them. I used to think about how important our meeting or connection was or wasn’t viz their spacing it out, and now I am more inclined to grok that life itself is a big heavy bookcase that has not been properly anchored to the wall and sometimes it has fallen and we can’t get up.
The next marble that clattered into my dusty brain chamber was this:
Long ago at my first mammogram, I saw that the tech performing it had a rubber (not fish) spatula at her workstation. I have pretty strong feelings about the mammogram as a type of technology and I am vocal about these feelings because I have both a family history that suggests frequent screenings are important and a set of melons that do not cooperate willingly (hey ya, all my dense tissue sisters out there say OW OW OW). I get a lot of opportunities to deepen my conviction that the penigram, if it existed, would unfold along different parameters than the mammogram. My hunch is that there would be precious little standing up watching your tender part get flattened beneath a clear plate on a device with cranks and motors that seems determined to yank it from your body. No matter how many times I am reassured that “a woman designed this machine,” I curse the maker and resent the corners that dig into my armpits and ribs, the icy meat-locker temperature of the room, and the presumption that something can hurt this much AND be necessary every six months AND require fighting with the insurance to have it done AND everyone is like “ah, yes, we are doing women’s medicine so profesh, so state of the art—chef’s kiss!”
DO NOT get me started on the topic of breast doctors who are men, or you may hear about the radiologist with the ZZ Top beard who came in to the exam room to discuss my findings wearing Carhartts, a plaid shirt, suspenders and a Leatherman tool strapped to his belt, causing me to look around for the goat he was obviously there to tend to.
If we did dig in to that tale, it’s a short hop to the Bill Nye lookalike in the goofy little bow-tie who PATTED ME ON THE REAR while I was face down in the boob MRI machine waiting to get more data on a lump they’d found and said “Bad news! Can’t do the MRI because the lump is gone!” The delay between “Bad news!” and his little punchline only lasted five or seven weeks in panicked not-breathing time (very similar to dog years), so by all means let’s raise our sons to mansplain body parts they don’t even have to people who might be killed by them.
Again, let’s not start on that. But do watch this, if you need a rueful chuckle.
When I asked about the spatula, the nice tech explained that it is sometimes hard to smooth out very large sweater puppies under the glass, and also can be challenging to get enough of an itty bitty titty captured between the mashing plates, so in both cases her workaround was the spatula she brought in from home.
Obviously women’s health technology needs no further attention at this time.
I went home and told my then-teenage daughter about the existence of the spatula. Before I could share the explanation I’d been given, she nodded sagely and said ah so they have that in case they mash it too hard and need to pry it off the glass?
Her unquestioning acceptance, at her tender age in the world, that a risk of cartoon-flattening would be part and parcel of the routine maintenance and supervision of her body strikes a little chord for me with the now-unremarkable feeling of presuming that someone has been steamrollered by the demands of existing as a human, crushed by the burden of consciousness in an unjust world to the point of perhaps gasping on a flat surface somewhere, but only temporarily—they will be back in the zoom room shortly, after a good cry and a glass of water. Oh, her? There on the floor? She’ll be right in a sec, let’s carry on.
It’s just a fact of life now that sometimes the blower is on and we’re dancing, and sometimes we are a little heap of nylon in the yard. I guess the secret prize in our current box of crackerjacks is that the discussion of mental health, of reaching/exceeding capacity, of a bone-deep hunger for rest is becoming something that friends and colleagues sometimes discuss. Extreme fatigue strips the small talk away. Maybe someday soon we will all talk plainly as a matter of course.
Hold the phone, we have another marble!
In the aftermath of that same daughter’s birth, the nurse from the midwife’s office made a home visit (this was a different century), and when I told her my milk supply seemed low she barked out HARDLY SURPRISING SINCE YOU HEMORRHAGED LESS THAN A WEEK AGO.
Women can also be disappointing in their manner at the bedside. Don’t think I don’t know that. So sadly disappointing when it happens, though.
I said, I did what, now? Because this was the first time I had heard this word in reference to myself and the recent activities of my babybaker. After jolly Nurse Wretched pushed off, I called the midwife, whose thoughtful care I had appreciated these last 7 months, to investigate. “Did I hemorrhage?” is a funny question to have to ask, but I asked it.
“Welllllll,” she said. “It’s such a scary word. I prefer to tell my moms they lost a little extra.”
Nothing to worry about when even other women don’t want to alarm women by telling them what is actually happening in their bodies. Best to avoid scary words or their wombs might migrate and we all know that’s no good. It could lead to writing!
I thought I had a pretty good grasp on notions of hysteria through the ages but I was today years old before I knew it was once thought a good hard sneeze could knock the uterus back into position and calm a woman who’d been suffering from its wanderings right down. That’s the underpinnings of the smelling salt technology that revived many a soul being suffocated by a tight corset because it was better to be shaped like a barbell than be able to breathe.
I think we are also bumping into the underpinnings of the concept of losing one’s marbles. Mine, anyway. Be free, little round friends! Roll on! [Quick, someone—my salts!]
Anyhooters, I read this New Yorker article that is ostensibly about a movie that we should all maybe see, or not, but for our purposes here is also about a movie director who takes a bio break from a zoom call with the interviewer and never returns. The interviewer sits there for two! hours!, periodically warbling a loud “hello?” as one does in a suspected pocket dial situation, before giving up. When he next sees the director, this interlude is never mentioned, but the whole escapade makes it into the article in the New Yorker as if tra la la this is how things go now.
Possibly we are all losing our marbles.
“Seeing yourself as a fixer may cause you to see brokenness everywhere, to sit in judgment of life itself. When we fix others, we may not see their hidden wholeness or trust the integrity of the life in them. Fixers trust their own expertise. When we serve, we see the unborn wholeness in others; we collaborate with it and strengthen it. Others may then be able to see their wholeness for themselves for the first time. ”
What can ground us? I think we know by now that I’m of the mindset that taking care of our chother, as my daughter used to say, is the best way to get or stay rooted. I put on a clean shirt a little while ago to talk about what we can do in the kitchen to build the kinds of communities where everyone feels safe. You can see a snip of that here and at the end of the clip you’ll see a link to the full talk.
That talk was connected to my book, which I opened up the other day because I had foolishly run out of golden milk mix and needed to beef up my supply. Golden milk, whatever its hipster associations, is such a comforting, nourishing little moment in the day. It’s anti-inflammatory, calming and supportive to digestion and the nervous system. It’s also delicious. I don’t like to run out of it.
I’ve always made it the way I’ve always made it, until recently when I started adding all kinds of other little fillips that are good for health. Growth and change are possible! Maybe you are trapped under a metaphysical bookcase and can’t fathom doing anything more energetic than feebly flicking the “place in cart” button; I see you. I’ve been on that rug. In that case, you are hereby excused from all zoom calls until at least Tuesday and I recommend this source for golden milk, recently gifted to me and devoured.
Nowadays a pre-made mix for this beverage is pretty widely available—Google tells me it’s even at Walmart. You really don’t have to make it yourself. But like anything, the little jolt of pleasure that comes from interacting with the aromatic ingredients and the satisfaction of building into it just what you need are magical extra nutrients that you can only (and very simply) derive from stirring it up yourself. My friend Laura says whiffing a warm spice blend really makes you understand how the spice trade drove global exploration; now it can stand in for it. Stand by the window and sniff your way out into the great wide world.
golden milk mix
basic formula:
¼ cup ground turmeric powder
¾ cup coconut milk powder (commonly available in big health food stores and supermarkets, and all Asian groceries)
2 tablespoons coconut sugar
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons ginger powder
¼ teaspoon sea salt
optional additions:
¼ teaspoon ground cardamom
¼ teaspoon ground coriander
2-3 teaspoons reishi mushroom powder
2-3 teaspoons chaga mushroom powder
2-3 teaspoons ashwagandha powder
2-3 teaspoons dandelion root powder
2-3 teaspoons maca powder
For one serving
3 teaspoons Golden Milk Mix
2-3 teaspoons honey (if you like things sweeter)
½ cup hot water
¾ cup milk (plant or dairy)
1 teaspoon ghee (optional)
1. Combine all dry ingredients in a small bowl. Stir and whisk thoroughly, until completely combined and free of lumps, bumps, and clumps. Store in a glass jar with a tight-fitting lid.
2. To use, combine 2-3 teaspoons of the mixture with a little honey in a mug and add about half a cup of hot water. Heat (or even better, steam/froth) ¾ cup of any kind of milk, and add to the hot mixture.
3. A teaspoon of ghee stirred into this is both entirely unnecessary and profoundly delicious.
Need spice sources? That global spice trade referenced above has not been kind to the source countries, to say the least. Try these lovely fair-trade merchants:
And if you are NOT trapped under a bookcase, but instead are feeling something extra moving through your blood or pantry that you are looking for a way to share, I warmly encourage a search for a community fridge near you that you can slide some nourishment into, or some other way to move meals into hungry hands.
More inclined toward less edible ways to reach out? This is a favorite spot to stop in and share any extra friendship you may have around the house.
Stay warm!
xo