Nuts

I have a longstanding hatred of nuts. I know that might be a shocking thing to hear a gay man say, but only until I explain that it’s actual nuts from trees and not testicles. Testicles are okay; hell, they’re great. Although I don’t fancy I’ll ever hear a cartoon tiger roaring that one out. Anyway, back to the nuts and my hatred thereof. Like just about every goddamn thing about me, it’s complicated. Well, not complicated, because it’s easy: I don’t like nuts. Except for some nuts, like peanuts, which I do like. Except that they’re not really actually technically considered to be nuts. Is it any wonder I am considering therapy? To try and sum it up: I like some nuts that may or may not actually technically be considered to be nuts, but most other nuts I don’t like. Walnuts: bleah. Almonds are good, but only whole or in big pieces: not slices. I fucking HATE sliced almonds, especially on a salad, because why in the FUCK would anyone in their right mind put nuts in a salad? I don’t know either, and that makes me want to weep in frustration when it happens. That, or killing rampage. But when am I ever not up for a killing rampage? Pecans: barf. And so on. I think that my whole anti-nut thing is a combination of the texture factor (I don’t like the way they feel in my mouth. Tree nuts, you perverts), technical considerations such as the fact they always seem to get caught in my teeth, I mean really wedged up in there tight, and the childhood trauma factor. Hey, what good is a story without childhood trauma?

As you may or may not know, we bake. I bake, my mom bakes, my aunt bakes: we are bakers. Cookers too, although that is not really relevant to the tale I am telling. Now, for some reason, every mother-fucking thing that ever got baked when I was a kid had goddamn mother-fucking nuts in it. Nuts that had to be broken into small pieces, but not too small. Nuts that had been in the freezer since before I was conceived and were frozen so hard they could have been used to create Wolverine’s endoskeleton. Guess which little chump had to break those nuts by hand? That would have been my fat little red-headed ass. I wasn’t even allowed to use a knife to cut the nuts until I was like 15. Which honestly was probably a good thing, especially after the incident with the shovel (another story, another time). I HATED those fucking nuts. They always left my hands red and raw: a peasant farm-wife, I am not. And I could never get them exactly the right size, which I could attribute to my mom’s special flavor of craziness, except that I also know that since I hated doing it so much I am pretty sure that I did as half-ass a job as possible on the hopes that one day, one day I could taste freedom from the nuts. But no. That is not how mom works: if you suck at a job, you have to keep doing it until you can do it well. And then you have to keep doing it anyway, because look how well you can do it! For example, she has been trying to train my dad to put the dishes away for over thirty years now and he still puts shit away in the wrong place. I mean the obviously wrong place: like the wok parts will go in the plastics cabinet, the plastics go in the ingredient cabinets, the lids I think he would shove up his ass if he was capable of it. All just to prove how hopeless he is at putting the dishes away. Mom, however, is not buying any of it. They are locked in an eternal battle, beyond the end of time, to see who will give in first. I think mom will win. Eventually. I, however, won the nut battle.

The path to victory was quite simple, really: when I still lived with them, I took over the baking. So the banana bread had no nuts, neither didmy cookies, or anything else that you could conceivably have put nuts in. I HATE them. Mom would make little comments about missing the nuts at first, but I always came back with “Well, if you want nuts in you’ll have to bake it yourself.” She then tried to cajole me into adding nuts to at least half. I did a couple of times: you know, for special occasions like Christmas or her birthday. But the rest of the time, I drew the line and said “Nuts shall not pass!” I had to give in today, though.

See, I was making the auxiliary dessert for our holiday dinner today. Mom decided she wanted an oatmeal cake. It’s a pretty straightforward affair, but it doesn’t get frosted: it gets instead a topping composed of coconut (acceptable), evaporated milk, brown sugar, butter, and NUTS. Now, it didn’t specify in the recipe the quantity of nuts to include, so I asked and she told me “about a cup”. Now, trying to be generous, I mounded up a generous cup of nuts, put them in the bag to crush them with the rolling pin (since we apparently only just figured out that was the best way to get the desired size), and was all set to start crushing the little bastards when my mom asked me if my laundry was done. Now, I had just checked on it a few minutes before, but I couldn’t hear it running so I went to check it again. The utility room is just across from the kitchen, and once I opened the doors I could hear that the dryer was still running, but I thought “well, it does tend to run past the point of dryness, so I’ll check it anyway.” The clothes turned out to indeed be dry, so I took them out, put the others from the washer into the dryer, and turned to walk out. There was my mom just looking at me, like a deer caught in the headlights, dumping a ton of additional nuts into the nut bag. We had a little chuckle about it, and I just crushed them and tossed them into the topping without further comment. And you know, they really weren’t too bad.

What more can I say?

Here.

Wedding Bitters

The very first thing I will have to say is that this post has nothing at all whatsoever to do with the weekend wedding of my dear friend Nathalie. The ceremony was nice, the reception fun, Nathalie radiant. I have nothing but joy for Nathalie and Patrick, and wish them long lives filled with happiness. If that sounds a little "the lady doth protest too much", well suck on it: I'm allowed to effuse real human feeling from time to time, and you're just going to have to deal with it. So. That having been said, let me come to what the post actually IS about.

Friday morning, some of the staff had a wedding shower in the library for two of our staff members who are getting married. Not to each other, though. However, I will say that I derived a great amount of amusement from the fact that the wedding cake said "Congratulations Amy and Heather", because let me tell you it damn sure DID look they were marrying each other. I had to take pictures of course, because apparently no one else is capable of pressing a silver button while holding still to look at something. That sort of put the pinprick into my bubble of inner laughter. Because, you see, the thought that occurred to me as I clicked away was "I will never get something similar to this from the staff. I'm a faggot. Faggots can't get married. Faggots don't deserve nice things. Faggots should not be anywhere near children but instead should be locked up and 'cured'. I have to live my life in secret because of their hate and ignorance." Yeah, like the title says: bitter. It really started a whole interior shit storm that I wasn't really prepared for. I mean, I had to put in for a wedding gift for these two, one of whom I don't even really like, but what am I going to get back from this? Not a goddam thing. I looked around and saw that I was the only Y-chromosome bearer: it was a total taco-party, to borrow a paraphrase. And here I was, the queer, taking little pictures, supposedly oozing syrup of wahoo from every pore over the fact that I was just on the outer cusp of the radiance of the pageantry... that I am not able to have. Just a drone, a bee to hover around the queens, and be tossed aside when my usefulness is done. Remember the title: bitter. So, I was in kind of a shitty mood for most of that morning. But then, I got over it, because I knew that I was going to be with my friends soon, that they loved me (as I love them), that they want me to be happy (as I want them to be), and they accept me (god knows why).

Oh, shit

I once read in a book a character’s lament that went something along the lines of ‘anytime anything wet falls out of the sky, it always lands on me.’ Which is generally true of me as well: I always get hit by the mystery drop, that bit of water that has somehow managed to condense from the clear sky above; that pregnant drop dangling from every wall unit air conditioner, leaky ceiling, or other overhead surface capable of keeping the slightest bit of water tension, waiting to birth its sodden offspring into the nursery of my shoulder. It’s quite an amazing feat really, statistically speaking. I mean, there has got to be an almost infinitely small chance that out of all the surface area of the earth, out of all the time that I spend indoors versus outdoors, that I so often happen to be in just the right place at just the right time to receive these little drips. I figure that either I am a distant cousin of the rain god Douglas Adams wrote about or that god is spitting on me. At any rate, it was not really a surprise today when I felt that sudden splat, that little pixie’s flick on my head. No, the surprise came when I went to wipe it off and I felt the texture of it. Yes, texture is a bad sign. My horror continued to grow as I pulled my hand away and saw white on my hand. I think that it’s a testament to my defiance of bird-flu hysteria that I did not immediately (this was just at the start of my evening walk) turn around and give myself a Silkwood scrub-down. I waited until my walk was complete to do that. But I needed to figure out how badly I had been shat upon; after all, one doesn’t want to walk around so uncaring about one’s appearance. Besides, that would have been giving license for passersby to call me “shithead”. So I sort of scrubbed at it, flinging my hand in what I hoped was a subtle yet effective method for shaking the “doo” off the lily, until I could perceive no more residue on either my hand or head. And then I made my merry way up and back down the trail, joyfully cursing every feathered friend I met and wishing them a horrid, miserable death.

I love books

Okay, I was feeling a little disconnected recently. Fortunately, I just rediscovered an old favorite book: Generation X: tales for an accelerated culture. It's basically the story of three young people who get burned out on the yuppie-tastic lifestyle that was pre-ordained for them, and end up in the Palm Springs desert, getting by on subsistence retail jobs, but actually living the way they want to. It really hit the spot. Now I just have to wait for my six new books that I ordered to arrive. Hopefully by Thursday. That would be super awesome. Otherwise I am stuck reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Not exactly light summer fare, ne c'est pas? Although the cool-factor will just about beat the snot out of the books of everyone else on the plane. Unless they're reading the DaVinci Code. Can you believe it: Jesus had kids!