What did I do today. I considered calling Kaiser because I think I may have broken my toe, the middle one on my right foot. It's been a week and the swelling hasn't gone down and it still hurts. But I so much wanted to be alone today that I decided my toe could wait a few more days.
I made some coffee and hot buckwheat cereal with raw almond milk, currants, chopped walnuts and half an apple, and I sat sideways on the couch and wrote in my journal. I put an essential oil blend called Believe in the diffuser as I wrote. I cannot remember what I wrote, except that it instantly turned into rough draft material for my book, something I hadn't been intending. My cat Ted was feeling passionate, so he and I spent a good amount of time on the couch, cuddling. He came from a kill shelter, and I asked him if he was happy I rescued him. He seems to be. Yesterday, Kevin told me that no-kill shelters are dwindling dramatically due to budget cutbacks. Governor Jerry Brown wants to repeal the Hayden Bill, California's animal shelter protection law, in which impounded pets are held for 6 days before killed. Repeal would mean instant death for many animals. I was asked to write a protest poster for an event that's happening at the Berkeley Art Museum in May. I wish I'd chosen this as my topic. When he was dating Linda Ronstadt, Jerry Brown was a good liberal. Now he's a puppy killer. SAVE THE HAYDEN BILL!
After breakfast, I made some gluten free bread with almond meal. It was from a recipe, and it had 5 eggs in it. I don't eat eggs very often, but I'll eat them in baked goods. Five eggs sounded like a lot. I was right. The bread turned out perfectly but it tasted like dead animal waste. I threw it out. I cleaned up the kitchen and read a bit and made a green smoothy for lunch. I put most of it in the refrigerator, and forgot to drink the rest of it.
I got dressed and drove across town to an empty office because the person I had an appointment with forgot to call me and tell me she had stomach flu. I walked around and bought a bright multicolored scarf and drove home. Miraculously I found parking mid-day.
I sat cross-legged on the couch, wearing my new scarf, with a shawl draped around my shoulders and meditated for 40 minutes. This was the best part of the day. During meditation I was finding my thoughts very boring. I realized that today my biggest desire was not to think, like all I wanted was to sit there and breathe.
When I got up I decided to use the one egg I had remaining to make some gluten free scones. To soothe my frustration at throwing away the morning's toil. I made the scones with currants and chopped walnuts, and orange zest. I zested the orange on a microplane, and slipped and shaved off the top of my thumb knuckle. I have a bandaid on it. The gluten free scones turned out okay. Good enough that I'd play around with some variations. I know it sounds like I'm this Earth Mother baker, but I'm not. I bought the almond flour over a month ago, and this is the first time I could get myself to touch it. I cleaned up the kitchen some more.
I answered some email and played around online. I found a photo-sharing site where Nada Gordon posted dozens of photos of the dollhouse she's furnishing. I was fascinated by this project when she posted about it on her blog—meticulous, beautiful, magical—so I was in hog heaven finding this bucket of images elsewhere, an elsewhere I would be hard put to find again, I just stumbled upon it somehow. I also stumbled upon someone who I don't know who implicitly claims to have identified the buddhist in their comments on the book—they wrote the name of a real buddhist and claimed it was the buddhist in my book. I never speak the buddhist's name online and rarely outloud. I found the person's email address and wrote to them, asking how they came to link this real life person with the buddhist. This development feels uncanny, like the buddhist's real life name is a haunting, and I want it to go away, to go all filmy like ectoplasm and dissolve.
It was getting late and I hadn't really had dinner because of sampling the scones, so I shredded some cabbage for some coleslaw. I used the food processor to do this, but thought of when I used to work in a burger joint in college. Back then, coleslaw meant getting out the giant chef's knife and chopping the cabbage until it was in teeny bits, like rice. Heads and heads of cabbage, all hand minced. This wasn't some artisan thing, this was normal. It frightens me how anything made by hand is this big deal now, how coffee made with a plastic filter cone is now called "hand poured." It's like we're forgetting that bodies were made to interact with the world. In some absurdist Sci-Fi future I imagine in-person sex referred to as "hand touched."
The coleslaw turned out well. I made it super simple, with hand-diced green garlic, Meyer lemon, Himalayan salt, olive oil. It needed mellowing, so I hand-juiced half of the orange I used to make the orange zest, and threw that in. Everything but the salt and olive oil was from my weekly farmer's box, which I'm always rather desperately trying to use up. I heated some vegetable bean soup with giant purple lima beans I made over the weekend. And I topped the soup with a glob of coleslaw and some hand-chopped avocado. And it was fucking awesome. I also made some rooibos chai with coconut creamer. And I cleaned up the kitchen some more.
Now I'm typing this. So what do I think? No wonder I eat out so often.
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