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Wednesday, December 03, 2003

the smell of beans, and other stuff

My house smells of beans. blecch. As is usual on Wednesday nights, my parents came over for dinner (the Bible study we all go to is on Wednesdays, and Mom and Dad live half an hour out of town, so Mom would have to zip home, scarf some dinner, and then zip back into town with Dad; instead, they just stay in town and eat with us instead. Nothing fancy, as you will see from what I'm about to relate). Dad's favorite meal on Earth is -- get this, this is about as Okie as you can get, when this is your Last Meal fantasy -- pinto beans, cornbread, and fried potatoes. Conveniently, this meal is also extremely cheap to prepare, which means that we ate it A LOT when I was growing up since we frequently had very little money. Partly due to this fact, and partly due to the fact that pinto beans taste, pardon me, like farts, I would be content the entire rest of my life without ever eating it again. I don't hate it (anymore), I just never, ever want to eat it. However, I had this big meaty ham bone from the Thanksgiving ham, which I altruistically set aside for a Wednesday night pot of beans, knowing that Dad would love it. Except I almost never cook pinto beans. I don't mind black beans or red beans so I make chili or soup with those a lot, which left me with the false idea that I knew how to cook beans. Beans are beans. Or... not. After a proper soaking and three hours of cooking, these pinto beans could still have been rinsed off and used in a marbles game, I am not kidding. Pinto beans are from the devil. So anyway, I ended up leaving them cooking and we had take-n-bake pizza for supper instead. Which means that not only does my house reek of beans (funny, can't even smell the pizza at ALL), but we now have an entire huge POT of beans -- nasty puky PINTO beans -- just for the four of us. As of this moment I predict that at least half of that pot will be going in the compost bin. Which is a shame because that ham would have made a fantastic split pea soup and now it is doomed to be wasted. Unless I package it up and send it home with Dad....

I have had a creeping headache all day. At times it's almost gone, and I think, YES, victory is mine, but then it starts coming back in like the tide or something, and before I know it I'm mindlessly clutching the sides of my head, which I'm sure is a really flattering pose, but I lapse into it without thinking when the headache starts coming back. Yeah, I'm that cool. And do I take anything for my headache? Nooo. Because, you see, I want to know when it goes away on its own. T and I have actual arguments about this. He says it's ridiculous of me not to take something to make the pain go away. I say, DON'T call me ridiculous, you know I HATE being called ridiculous, and let me deal with this my own way please, and he says not if you're going to complain about it I'm not, OK, look, just TAKE something, and I say he's a closet drug addict who hasn't learned to allow himself to feel the pain without running for a chemical solution (got this line of thought from Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes, which is a really funny-but-interesting book, and which is also pretty much the sum total of my post-elementary education about addiction of any type), and the discussion generally degenerates from there into a "You can't just let other people live their lives without interfering"/"You are goofy and impractical and ridiculous/"DON'T call me RIDICULOUS" kind of thing. Not that this has happened today, which is good, because today was a good husband/wife affection kind of day and I didn't want to ruin that with one of our petty and stupid arguments. (We take the cake for petty and stupid arguments. We once had a harrowing, frustrating, voice-raising, laughable-to-those-around-us argument about whether every object with mass has its own inherent gravity. I won, by the way, that time, although I lost the one about how the space shuttle maneuvers in a vacuum. These arguments are much more easily solved -- but perhaps less interesting -- since the advent of the Internet).


I could almost set my watch by my babbling. I always start getting like this right after eleven. This is not a good time to start an IM chat because I will stay up until two laughing myself sick about things that will not sound at all funny the next day. Bedtime for me tonight, before I make a fool of myself any further.

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