The Writing Life

[This cat cares nothing about my writing life, nor about the cheese cauliflower.]

I was combing through my archives trying to find something old and not terrible to post today, because I’m supposed to be working on something else, but I couldn’t find anything that didn’t make me gag. Boy I am wordy, and rambling.

I started blogging every day a couple years ago to make myself into a better writer. I figured the internet was full of garbage anyway, and the best way to discipline myself to the writing task was to conjoin my own bucket of vanity with the vast ocean of vanity on social media. My hope was that I would desire very much not to humiliate myself, and that that fear (of sure humiliation) would push me to do better every day.

In many ways, I think, it has worked. If you go back and read the space between 2010 and 2014 I think I’m much much better now. Though still rambling.

My justification then, for writing every day, was that eventually I would produce something of substance. (You can buy my book here. If you love it, leave me an Amazon review.) But what it really did was turn me into an addict. Here I am, supposed to be working on something else, but I can’t let go of the morning blog. That is dysfunction if ever there was some.

Ok ok, I’ll go write my other thing. But first let me just tell you about this amazing discovery I happened upon yesterday. I have a powerful weakness for cauliflower–either raw or cooked, it does matter, and I don’t care that it’s not good at all for my thyroid. I’m going to die sometime. I don’t want to live the next twenty years of perfect health with no cauliflower, nor butter for that matter.

But I don’t always have time to cook cauliflower the way it deserves. You know, with butter, in a pan, slowly, always adding more butter, until it begins to get crusty and gorgeous, then adding a little more butter. I didn’t have time for that yesterday. I only had one minute to cook lunch. That’s how much time was in the schedule.

So, while I was shoving the enormous ham in the oven, by itself with nothing because of the one minute lunch prep time, I couldn’t let go of my powerful craving for just one head of cauliflower. I dug one out of the vegetable bin, lopped off the leaves, shoved the whole head onto a piece of tinfoil, rummaged around for a block of cheese, uncut, unshredded, but I did take the wrapper off, balanced it precariously on the top of the head of cauliflower, wrapped the whole thing tightly in tinfoil, and placed it on top of the tin-foiled ham. Then I did remember to turn on the oven and walked away and came back two and a half hours later.

And guess what. It was delicious. I cut the thing in half and gave one bite to each child, the rest of the half to Matt, and ate the other half myself, with a slice of ham, which is not my favorite. But the cauliflower. Oh man. #winning

So there you go. I guess now I’ll face down another kind of writing. Boy I feel persecuted.