About She Curmudgeon

She Cur­mud­geon.  It’s a nom­i­na­tive for this blog’s author, a verb (“she cur­mud­geoned on about her work­day,” for exam­ple), an over­all state of being, but it’s not all of who I am or may be– not by a long shot.  Here’s a lit­tle more about she who cur­mud­geons here:

• I’m five foot six and three quar­ters inches.  My license rounds me down to 5’6”. Maybe the Repub­li­can tin­hats are on to some­thing about the gov­ern­ment try­ing to grind us down.… Nah.
• I weigh 145 to 225 lbs., depen­dent on med­ica­tions and mood– right now I’m at 145, the same weight as eighth grade. This is due to meds, not self-control. That said, a person’s weight is their busi­ness, not yours.
• I am a 1974 true Mercury’s child, prickly Scor­pio indeed, Bipo­lar type II.
• Au naturel, I have green eyes and light brown hair.  I reserve the right to dye my greys auburn or blonde.
• I wear horn-rimmed glasses olive green glasses and have strong eye­brows I will arch at you in sar­casm or repro­ba­tion.  Maybe it’s a bad habit.  Maybe it’s not.
• My ears, I am told, are “per­fectly small.”
• I am flat-chested, but the junk in my trunk makes up for the full frontal lack.
• My bot­tom front teeth aren’t quite straight. My top ones are just a bit buck.  I can’t be both­ered with whiten­ing tooth­paste.  Tom’s of Maine says they make a whiten­ing tooth­paste that’s organic.  We’ll see.  I love cof­fee and Diet Coke.  I sup­pose crooked ecru would be the best way to describe my smile, when I do.  I try to smile more, but not on com­mand of some douchey guy who’s ran­domly hit­ting on me or thinks he has the right to say “Smile, sweet­heart!” just because he has a penis.  Those guys, I ask if they knew that some pri­mates con­sider smil­ing a form of aggression.
• I’m smarter than a lot of the peo­ple I meet– not all of them, but enough. I’m also more inse­cure.  Also, I’m damned good at Scrab­ble and Triv­ial Pur­suit, and my Reine de Saba choco­late cake can­not be beat. (See Child, MAFC, vol. 1, p. 677.)  I have adapted it to be gluten-free, and nobody’s noticed.
• I am the Adult Child of a now-sober alco­holic father and a bipo­lar mother who wasn’t diag­nosed until she was 63, when she when she went full-blown psy­chotic.  Up until then, she was “sim­ply” depressed.  Accord­ingly, I have respon­si­bil­ity kinks and can be a real lazy slob and very resent­ful about doing sim­ple adult-type shit.  I’ve got very kind ther­a­pists.  We’re work­ing on it.
• I own five four (my red suede ones gave up the ghost) pairs of Dan­sko clogs.  I wish I owned more.
• I have more brooches and pins than you can shake a stick at. Bet­ter neck­laces, too, many from my mother-in-law, who had exquis­ite taste. And don’t get started on my pash­mina col­lec­tion. But I don’t really col­lect stuff. No. Really, I don’t.
• My mother, mater­nal grand­mother, mater­nal aunt, and pater­nal grand­mother all had breast can­cer.  Get your mam­mo­gram. Don’t put it off.
• If you say a bad word about the writ­ten works of Dou­glas Cou­p­land, Haven Kim­mel, W.S. Mer­win, Madeleine L’Engle or Mary Oliver in my pres­ence, I’m sorry, you’re wrong.  Please try again.
• I read too many sci-fi and fan­tasy sto­ries about mis­un­der­stood teens with magic swords and/or mys­te­ri­ous pow­ers and/or talk­ing ani­mals and/or soul bonds and/or heroic tri­umphs over adver­sity when I was a lonely, fat, unhappy kid. I’m the most cyn­i­cal roman­tic you’ll ever meet.  I don’t think it’s some­thing I should get over.
• I read lots of poetry. I some­times write some. I might post it here. You have been warned.
• I prac­ticed law and even passed the bar in three dif­fer­ent states. At var­i­ous points, I was very good. But I didn’t get out when I became unhappy with prac­tice, and denial, pride, money– not to men­tion the fear of dis­ap­point­ing the peo­ple you love and major bipo­lar depres­sion– are really big road­blocks. I’m not prac­tic­ing now– at this point I don’t fore­see any point at which I’ll go back. You can love some­thing and still know it will kill you if you stick around.
• I worked for the cir­cus when I was in high school. This has its own post, maybe sev­eral, if you search “cir­cus” on the main page.  Ele­phants?  Awe­some.  Sno-cone syrup on your shoes?  Not so much.
• I am a huge nerd. I play in fan­dom. I’m not going to link to it here.
• I am the head cashier at a Barnes & Noble, which means I mostly ring peo­ple out, am in charge of returns, and train other cashiers.  I like books, and I like the peo­ple I work with. The job gets me out of the house, I mostly walk away from the job at the end of the day, and my cowork­ers mostly seem happy to see me. I am the mer­chan­dise man­ager at a Barnes & Noble, which means I push the books out onto the floor, man­age pro­mo­tions and changes to the store lay­out, and help open and close the store.  I run around a lot, move a lot of books (a lot) and walk any­where from three to seven miles a day.  There are a hell of a lot worse places to work, even if some days I’m exhausted when I get home or some days every­one who comes into the store is a Needy McNeed­ster.  Plus?  Employee dis­count.  And yes, I drank the Kool-Aid on the Nook Color.  Ask me about it some­time.  I really do like it, and not just because I work there.
• There’s no such thing as too much but­ter. There isn’t.
• Same thing for cheese.
• I could live with­out bacon. A world with­out pro­sciutto or pancetta, however…
• Egg­plant has the tex­ture of semi-solidified mucus and will never not be dis­gust­ing. My friend Bess quan­ti­fied my life­long antipa­thy for this “food” with this insight, and for this, I will always bless her.
• Julia Child is my god. I watched her on week­ends on Boston’s PBS chan­nel when I was lit­tle and her Mas­ter­ing the Art of French Cook­ing was not only the thing my par­ents argued over (besides cus­tody) in the divorce, but the first real court­ing gift I ever got from my hus­band. (See also, there’s no such thing as too much butter.)
• The “A hos­pi­tal? What is it?” bit in Air­plane! is always funny.
• The larch.
• I hated bak­ing (and the feel of flour on my hands) until I bought Dorie Greenspan’s Bak­ing from my Home to Yours. Now she is also my god despite the fact that I think her writ­ing is occa­sion­ally twee, I’m the fam­ily cake-baker, and I engage in stunt-baking. (Crois­sants? Cro­quem­bouche? All projects on my list.) Dorie’s recipes always work. They are per­fect. And a lot of them can be made in the food proces­sor– how awe­some is that?
• I went to a women’s col­lege– I learned a lot, got to be not the only smart girl in the room, and was mis­er­able a lot of the time. I don’t know if it was the col­lege, the loca­tion, or me– but I do think women’s edu­ca­tion in gen­eral is a very good thing.
• I don’t like choco­late that much. Except when I do, usu­ally because salted caramel is involved. But lemony or cus­tardy things .… A lemon curd tart is pretty much my idea of heaven. Unless it’s a fresh bowl of creme anglaise. I could eat lemon curd or creme anglaise with a spoon.  I have, more than once.
• My Nana said I was “always a ner­vous child.” I think my teach­ers always knew I was anx­ious and unhappy, but I was smart and func­tional enough that the fact that I was pro­foundly depressed even as a kid was some­thing that didn’t seem as bad as it was– or that I hid. After all, smart kids are often sen­si­tive, right? I wasn’t diag­nosed as bipo­lar until I was 27. I some­times won­der what my life would have been like if some­one had looked closer (or I’d spo­ken up) when I was younger. Nev­er­the­less, things are what you make of them, so I am now try­ing to make up for lost time.
• I feed the peo­ple I love. It’s eas­ier than express­ing my feel­ings out loud.  Oh, and this blog.
• George Har­ri­son.
• I’m aller­gic to gluten and sun like my Grandma, more and more every year. Sun makes me rashy, gluten makes me intesti­nally upset and worse– both make me cranky in excess, and I’m a cur­mud­geon by nature. Thank good­ness for sun­screen and Bion­at­u­rae pasta, as well as Udi’s white bread. A broad does like her toast in the morn­ing.  ETA:  Maybe not so much on the Udi’s, since it’s thick­ened with Xan­than Gum instead of Guar Gum, and you can read about the start of that debate here.  My per­sonal rea­son for not eat­ing it is that Xan­than acts like a sugar alco­hol in my sys­tem which makes me even more of an intesti­nal cur­mud­geon than I already am.
• I miss being hypo­manic some­times. It was kind of awe­some, get­ting every­thing done. And I mean EVERYTHING. All at once. NOW.  Yeah. Okay. Maybe I don’t miss it all that much.
• Basil is awe­some, even though I hate pesto. Mint’s just kind of meh.  Except when you serve it with peas.
• I like my cam­era, a Pana­sonic Lumix DX3, even though it’s a fan­ci­fied point and shoot, and I like tak­ing pic­tures. Peo­ple have said some nice things about my pic­tures. One of these days I’ll get an SLR– but I’ve got a col­lec­tion of cook­books I hardly cook through as it is.  My dad bought me a Canon Dig­i­tal Rebel EOS T3i.  OH. Yeah.
• Sell­ing books exposes you to the entire cross-section of human­ity, from those buy­ing Pent­house to man­u­als to how to have sex for the first time to guides to leav­ing abusers. It’s both as inti­mate and as dis­tant an inter­ac­tion with some­one as you can get, because you don’t know this per­son at all, but you’re privy to this thing that they’re buy­ing that no one else in their life may ever see. You are bar­tender, babysit­ter, research librar­ian, psy­chi­a­trist and per­sonal shop­per in one. And you have to upsell them on the pro­mo­tions, explain to them that yes, the return pol­icy is on the back of the receipt, and that yes, it is more expen­sive in the store than online because “over­head” means the ten min­utes I just spent look­ing up the name of the book you knew noth­ing about.
• I am a human who tries to be humane to the peo­ple around her, even if I don’t always suc­ceed. I believe in God, Bud­dha, the divin­ity of a good lap cat, the sacred­ness of Silent Meet­ing, the per­fec­tion of a song, book or poem that speaks to the moment you’re in, the beauty of flow­ers, fall leaves, the first snow­fall, birch trees, and the sun at that angle through clouds tinted that color. I believe in try­ing and try­ing again.
• My desert island meal is a well-aged steak with bear­naise sauce, a baked potato with but­ter, and some sim­ple steamed broc­coli. Which is funny, con­sid­er­ing all the fancy food I can make.
• If I could eat only one junk food for the rest of my life, it’d be a hard toss-up between sour cream and onion Ruf­fles and the dearly departed Planter’s Cheese Balls. Oh, Cheese Balls, how I miss you.
• Grosse Pointe Blank is an excel­lent movie, but John Cusack’s finest work is still Bet­ter Off Dead. I want my two dollars.
• I have mad park­ing skills. Truck dri­vers and cops have clapped when I have pulled into impos­si­ble spaces.
• I drive a beige sta­tion wagon. It’s a visual illu­sion, because it doesn’t look like it’s capa­ble of being dri­ven at 80 miles an hour by a com­plete asshole.
• I own four Pen­del­ton skirts. And I wear them. With pearls and sweaters. Because Wasp/soccer mom is a kink and I work it.
• I have spent a large part of my life hold­ing things I felt in and all it did was make me unhappy.  Every once in a while I’d explode before I started to repress things again.  If I make you uncom­fort­able now, well, I’d rather tell the truth than be a mis­er­able, unhappy per­son.  Maybe it’s self­ish, maybe it’s healthy, maybe it’s nei­ther, maybe it’s all of those things at once.  But it’s dif­fer­ent from what I’ve done in the past, and I’ll try some­thing dif­fer­ent from what hasn’t worked.
• My iTunes is equal parts emo old school R.E.M., Tori Amos, Rufus Wain­wright and Fright­ened Rab­bit and angry white boy rock like A.C.D.C., Metal­lica, NIN and Foo Fight­ers.  I can’t carry a tune in a bucket or remem­ber lyrics for shit.  That doesn’t stop me from singing.
• I used to blog under the pseud bipo­lar­lawyer­cook– but I am no longer prac­tic­ing as a lawyer and I don’t want to define myself just by my dis­ease, plus my (bipo­lar) med­ica­tion changes have affected my rela­tion­ship with food such that there are months when I don’t cook because, well, I’m just never hun­gry.  I decided for lots of long, over­thought and prob­a­bly over­wrought rea­sons that a name change was in order, and that I didn’t want to limit myself to just a few descriptors.
• I am mar­ried to a man I’ve known for more than four­teen years, some­one you’ll see referred to in old posts as “The Bet­ter Half.”  We’re sep­a­rated.  I will prob­a­bly file for divorce in 2012.  Some­times peo­ple change and you can’t make it work, no mat­ter how much you want it to, and I very much did.  Posts now tagged “mar­riage” talk about my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion.  I care about him very much and always will, even as I sort through the things we couldn’t work out.  Yes, he and his fam­ily are aware of this blog.
• My pantry is a lit­tle bit nuts. Smoked paprika, crys­tal­lized gin­ger, fenu­greek seeds, canned toma­toes by the 16 and 32-oz. can, unsweet­ened coconut shreds, dried navy beans, every kind of sugar? I am your woman. Just don’t come look­ing for Planter’s Cheese Balls. Oh, Cheese Balls.
• Also?  42.  And mayonnaise.