Nothing funny about feldspar

Recently I’ve been eating apple butter sandwiches. I haven’t had apple butter for years, so Plagioclase bought me some artisanal kind, made by organic Michigan elves, for all I know. I forgot how good it tasted, though of course, I grew up on cheap stuff.

I’ve started “doing things” to it though, things that would make my father laugh to see. For instance, for lunch I just ate an apple butter and goat cream cheese sandwich.

“Goat cream cheese?” you ask. Well, it’s artisanal doncha know, all special and expensive and stuff. I love goat cheese — any variety as long as it doesn’t try to pretend to be some sort of Swiss cheese. This stuff, though, is made and sold locally, so of course it’s pricey. My sandwich must’ve cost about 6 bucks, and that was on cheap white bread.

Anyway, as I’m eating the sandwich I realize that the cheese kinda tastes like cottage cheese — a bit damp, a bit acidy. And the memory hits me: one of my father’s favorite snacks was cottage cheese mixed with applesauce. I always thought it looked like something the dog threw up, but he liked it. “It’s all going to the same place, anyway.”

Well, Dad, it is. Into my stomach. Yum!

If I ever become a restauranteur, I would strive to have an affordable per-seat meal cost in an environment that was unwelcoming to people with children. It’s not that I don’t like children (I don’t), it’s the fact that I have to pay megabucks to eat in a restaurant without some urchin announcing in a piercing wail that somebody put mustard on their hot dog.

Why I don’t think I’m a good writer: I overuse, or underuse, commas; I write “too telegraphically;”* and I always have three examples.

Some people have no knack for picking colors.

Why are farts funny?

Engineers are lazy people. Why else are they always trying to make things easier to make or do? When, for example, is the last time you cranked your car by hand? The last time you left the couch to change the channel? The last time you popped popcorn on the stove-top?

Autumn is my favorite time of year, and Halloween has special significance for me. But I hate seeing all of the cute punkins, goofy ghosts, and creepy kitties at the grocery store. Makes me feel like the holiday is crass and commercial, like we don’t have a dozen other days set aside to buy candy. Like Christmas. Why don’t we decorate for that? We do? Oh, right. That’s what I saw in every gorram store since September — fake christmas trees and all the trimmings. Kroger even has the christmas cards on clearance already. Sheesh.

I don’t make meatloaf too often, because I have uncomfortable memories of the hamburger/tomato sauce mixture of my youth. Not that it was bad, just, well…. Anyway, I decided to make meatloaf today because it’s cold and gray outside. It turned out OK, so I’m putting the recipe here so I can find it again!

Put this in a big bowl:

• 1 lb ground lamb
• 1 lb ground beef
• 2 cups breadcrumbs (yay food processor!)
• 1 cup minced onion (yay food processor! — but after the breadcrumbs, please)
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic (I used to keep cloves on hand, but they always got dried out. So now I just use the jarred stuff.)
• 2 eggs

Add spices:

• generous amount of salt
• ditto ground black pepper
• a couple of tablespoons dried parsley
• a teaspoon or less of basil
• ditto oregano
• about a 1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon and allspice

Mix together and dump into the bowl:

• 1/4 cup lemon juice (one largish, slightly dried out lemon ;))
• 1/2 cup whole milk yogurt

Now mush it with your hands. Mush, mush, mush. Put into an oiled loaf pan and bake at 350°F until done, at least 45 minutes, probably longer. Depending on the liquidity of your ingredients (and if you didn’t get enough breadcrumbs in, which I never do), you may have to dump out the juice (after 45 minutes or so) so the meat can brown a little. You can save the juice to make gravy.

Very tasty, quite mild, and no tomatoes in sight!

(Of course, Plagioclase and his mother dumped ketchup all over theirs — philistines!)

Wolfangel has a series of posts on how we talk (or rather, don’t talk) about depression — primarily from the point of view of the depressed person.

The posts and comments are full of good reasons why we don’t talk about depression more than superficially. However, I’m surprised that no one mentioned that we don’t talk about it because we don’t talk candidly about any chronic condition. “How are you?” is a question that most people don’t really want to know the answer to, no matter what your illness.

Also, in everyday conversation we say things like “I’m depressed because my sports team lost” or “I’m down because they don’t have that cute sweater in my size” — so there’s a general perception that depression is not really an illness, not really something to worry about and therefore not something needing discussion.*

From my own point of view (being depressed and knowing it, a situation that I didn’t learn to recognize until recently), I don’t talk about being depressed because, well, it’s boring. It’s not like I have an exciting mental illness — like mania, though sometimes I wish I did, then I might get something done for a change. I’m not even depressed “enough” to want to hurt myself, though I have fantasized that if I was injured in an accident I’d have some reason to feel this badly.

Plagioclase insists that I do have a reason — my dying-not-dying father, my mother’s illness, my long absence from home, my unsupportive sister, blah, blah, blah — but that situation has stabilized, while my emotional state has not.

So when Plagioclase asks me how I’m doing, I usually respond with “not bad” or “not good.” I don’t tell him all the stuff that’s in my head, because he’s a worrier, and I don’t want him to worry about me. He does way too much of that as it is. Besides, the crap in my head is all gray anyway, and that is really a dull story.

See? Boring.

* Unless, of course, one is suicidal. Then all of a sudden it becomes a problem, and everything the depressed person ever said becomes “a cry for help.” But you’re not really ill unless you want to kill yourself. Nope. Not ill. Just down.

Mr. Jefferson, dear Mr. Jefferson,
I’m only forty-one I still have my virility
And I can romp thru cupid’s grove with great agility
But life is more than sexual combustibility.

Whether or not I got the words correct as printed, this is the lyric in my head today. It’s from the scene in 1776 where the declaration-writing committee is coercing Jefferson into writing the thing, and he is trying to decline because he hadn’t seen his wife for far too long. This quote is from Adams’ response.

I was given a copy of 1776 around the time the movie came out. I was about 10 or so, and I loved it. The person who gave me the book also gave me a cassette of the cast recording. I wore them both out. I think I may have the book in a box somewhere, but I’m sure the tape is long gone.

At 10 I laughed at the innuendoes — trying to imagine people my parents’ age getting huffy about other (younger) people thinking they (my folks) are too old for sex. Now that I am that age, I laugh at those younger people who think they invented sex. I laugh as well at those older people who figure their old folks were all prim and proper until they were married. If you wanted to have sex at sixteen, what makes you think your grandmother didn’t?

That’s the problem with trying to assume that books and periodicals of the 19th century are accurate portrayals of 19th century society. They’re not, not anymore than 1776 is an accurate portrayal of the events surrounding the writing and signing of the Declaration of Independence. It has similarities, sure, but it takes liberties with the facts for dramatic impact. (For instance, the movie has Martha Jefferson coming to Philadelphia, where Jefferson, in fact, went to Virginia — but then we wouldn’t have had the salacious “He plays the violin” song and dance, now would we?)

So when I read all the kerfluffle abut the woman who’s posting that same sex marriage is bad because marriage is designed for procreation and in The Good Old Days everyone who was “good” waited until marriage to have sex, well, I just have to think that she’s really got her head in the sand, doesn’t she? 19th c. representations of chastity, etc., it seems to me, are showing an idealized world, not a reflection of the real world. It would be like saying in a century or so that everyone in the late 20th c. must have decorated like Martha Stewart because she had so many books and magazines for sale.

And yet, in my vast storehouse of books, there’s no Martha.