Now, if only I had an electric mixer (and a blender and a food processor), everything would be perfect.
I have become a punk-fucking-rock Martha Stewart, I tell you. On Sunday I made peanut-butter cookies because the boys eat so many damn cookies that it's too expensive to buy Chips Ahoy or whatever. It's just cheaper in the long run to bake them from scratch. And my mother gave me a huge bag of M&Ms from her Y2K stash, so I added those on top of them. Fuck making two separate batches of cookies.
I also made banana bread, because I committed the cardinal sin of assuming, when I bought a bunch, that the boys would eat them within a week. I mean, they usually manage to eat half the groceries within three days, so why not the bananas? But no, they let them sit until they were very heavily brown-spotted, then told me that they couldn't eat them. Now, unlike them, I've actually starved before (back when we were living in Norfolk and didn't have any money whatsoever), so I'm not going to waste bananas even if it makes me sick to eat them plain. So I went to this site that my friend Amy sent me, fatfree.com, and got a recipe for banana bread.
Have I ever mentioned the fact that I've never made any kind of bread in my life, even banana bread? I was amazed at how well this stuff came out. The only really gross thing was mushing the bananas by hand and mixing that, by hand, to the egg, sugar, etc. I don't have a mixer, so I have to just jam my hand into the (improvised) mixing bowl and squish everything together. Yum. That looks damn appetizing.
Anyway, the bread came out great, even if I substituted two tbsp of oil for the four tbsp of applesauce that was supposed to make the recipe low-fat. Oil, I have. Applesauce is a luxury item. I ate it for breakfast. Dirk did, too. Aaron just went ahead and finished off all the cookies I made the other night.
I swear I won't be surprised if they're shitting out half the stuff they eat completely undigested. I eat, like, a third of what each of them consumes.
I've also started exercising. Dirk got tired of listening to me moan about how fat I was getting, so he dragged me to our complex's fitness center. I used the stairstepper and the weight machine. I'm terribly out of shape, so I only exercised for about twenty minutes. It's a start, though.
Nikki asked me the other day if I ever got depressed. The truth is, I only get depressed for a few hours at a time, at most. That time I took my keys to my arm and left scars (which are now gone) was the longest-lasting depression I ever experienced: four hours.
To be quite honest, I don't often feel strong emotions. I had a mother who would use everything against me. When I was devestated by my friends telling me that they didn't want to be friends with me anymore, she used that for months. Everytime I did something wrong, or something she didn't like, she'd tell me that was why my friends did that to me. When we rescued a sick kitten from the docks, only to have it die in my arms from an acute infection two days later, she told me it was my fault it died. I was 11.
When I showed that I liked something, or had an aptitude for something, it was the first thing she'd take away. When I was happy, she would go out of her way to make me angry. She was capricious the way a child would be, and given to the same sort of cruelty you'd expect from a child. After a while, I learned not to feel everything she did to me. It was like a game, or a religion.....she would do something to hurt me, and I'd sit there, forcing myself not to react. Not to feel. Because it was the reaction that she was looking for, it always has been. That's why she curses like a sailor now....because she wants a reaction.
It's easier for me to remain calm these days. I don't really feel pain of the emotional sort, aside from random moments of depression. It's easier for me to be happy rather than upset; I don't know why. It's still easiest of all for me to get angry, but I so rarely do that these days.
Anyway.
I'm suddenly reminded of when Dilbert went to see a psychiatrist, and she told him that all of his problems were caused by her mother, who was an evil, evil woman.
I'm going now. Thank you for the recipes you've sent. I'd appreciate more.
As a final note, it's our (mine & Dirk's) anniversary today. Two and a half years, and still lovin' it.
