Author, Historian, Storyteller

In science there’s this theory called Occam’s razor. The basic principle is that if you hear hoof beats, assume it’s a horse not a zebra. Why? Because while that cough might be an indicator of a rare lung disease, 99% of the time it’s just a cold. It’s a theory that makes a heck of a lot of sense. Unfortunately, I tend to fall into the 1% zebra category quite often.

When I was a kid, my knees were hurting like hell. They tested my tendons, my ligaments, my meniscus, etc. All of those were normal. Eventually a specialist figured out that I had plica syndrome. Plica what? Exactly. They’ve been testing my thyroid for years and every time it comes back in tip-top shape despite the symptoms I’m exhibiting. Turns out I’m allergic to sulfites. I have made more doctors scratch their heads in puzzlement then I can count. For whatever reason where my medical history is concerned, if you hear hooves you should assume zebra. Or gazelle, elk or a cow. Anything other than a horse.

Therefore, several months ago when I started to notice that my eyes were getting tired and dry after lunch I started investigating. Maybe it was low vitamin A? Eat more carrots, up my A. No help. Maybe one of my prescriptions was causing it? I switched up the timing of when I take my prescriptions to see if that helped. No help. I looked into the different diseases that can cause dry/tired eyes – lupus, scleroderma, Sjogren’s syndrome. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nothing made any sense and nothing I was doing helped.

Then a realized that I work in front of a computer screen all day, under fluorescent lights. Perhaps my eyes were simply dry and tired by the time I hit the afternoon? Today I tried some eye drops. Guess what? My eyes aren’t dry or tired anymore. It’s a good thing I’m pretty. Friggin horse.

In terms of housekeeping, I am not going to win any awards any time soon. Okay, I could probably win “Most Dust Accumulated on a Ceiling Fan” or “Biggest Hair Ball From Under a Bed.” Seriously, who has time to dust ceiling fans and vacuum under beds on a regular basis? Obviously not me. Okay, I have time, but I would rather spend that time doing anything else, wouldn’t you? The problem is, I really enjoy living in a sparkly clean, organized house. Like, reeeealy enjoy it. It makes my little Type-A heart happy. Therefore, I constantly have things on my to-do list like “Deep-Clean Living Room” and “Clean Dust Off Ceiling Fan.” I don’t actually do any of these things. Instead I dutifully move them to another day on my list and promise that on that day I will actually do the cleaning.

Well thanks to my live-in goats, who parade around as puggles, I made a lot of headway into deep-cleaning my kitchen. It was either that, or live with the permanent smell of curry and vodka, so I spent Monday night scrubbing my kitchen. Over the past two days I’ve noticed that I’ve been keeping the kitchen clean, and even cleaning something extra every night. Not to mention, I really love the way it looks now. My living room, on the other hand makes me cringe and I don’t even know where to begin. That’s when I decided to change up my tactics. I am abandoning Operation Clean All the Things and taking up Operation Clean One Thing!

Instead of stressing about cleaning my entire apartment, I am only going to focus on cleaning my kitchen. Organizing my kitchen. Making it pretty. That’s it, only the kitchen. This makes me happy. I love nit-picking and improving things, and I’m going to get done all of things that I’ve wanted to do for so long. Then once those are done, I’m going to get bored with the kitchen. I know this will happen, because you can only tweak a space for so long before you run out of things that need done. Now this my friends, is the pivotal moment. When I get bored with the kitchen, I will then move on to another room, and thus systematically work my way through the entire apartment.

This is the plan. Operation Clean One Thing! Do I have high hopes of this working? About the same as a T-Rex has of clapping his hands. Odds are I will finish that, give up on the rest of the apartment and just start spending all of my time in the kitchen. I’m gonna try this plan anyway, cause you gotta start somewhere man. Who knows, if I start now, I might be able to work up enough momentum to join in on that whole spring cleaning craze . . . maybe.

I got an email this morning from someone that used to be a large part of life. However, over the years, this person has faded into the periphery. This was done consciously on my part for mental health reasons, and reading through the email this morning I was reminded why I made this decision. No matter what I do, this person assumes the worst of me. To my knowledge, I have never done anything to warrant this thinking, yet it pervades. It not only pervades with this person, but they also do their best to swing other people over to their way of thinking. It is always assumed that I am acting out of selfishness or ingratitude or have some sort of devious ulterior motives at play. Or maybe they think I’m being passive aggressive, which is laughable. The majority of people who know me would describe me as just plain aggressive, or blunt. I don’t think the word passive would appear anywhere near the top fifty words used to describe me. That’s not how I roll. Yet, it is how this person perceives me, which begs the question do they even know me at all?

In all honesty, I think the answer is yes, but with a caveat. That caveat being, that everything they know about me is filtered through the negative lens that they view the world with. And that I will never understand. How exhausting must it be to go through life expecting the worst from everyone you encounter? I can’t imagine. Even people who have let me down in the past, or repeatedly flaked on me, I still give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m not completely naïve and I adjust my expectations so that if they let me down again it won’t take me by surprise, but I don’t write them off completely. I don’t automatically assume that they will be a flake forever and always. Maybe that person was having a bad day, week, or month.  Maybe they have worked to improve on their weaknesses. Short of psychopaths, murderers and rapists, people deserve to be treated as a worthwhile person regardless of, or in spite of, what they may have done in the past. Especially if they don’t even know of anything they ever did wrong to the other person. Because guess what, if you believe that someone has slighted you, but you’ve never addressed that with them, then that bad is on you, not them. People can’t apologize or make amends for slights that they don’t know exist.

At any rate, it is abundantly clear, looking at the current people that I have surrounded myself with, why I am happier now then I have ever been in my life. It is amazing what a difference it makes to be surrounded by people who expect good things from you, and think positive thoughts about you. It was a difficult decision to cut this particular person out of my life, but after this morning’s email, I see that it was well worth it. During this week of Thanksgiving, I am thankful for the positive people that I have in my life.

I have a confession to make. Every time that I hear about someone going on a diet and whining about it being soooo hard, and cheating constantly and then eventually giving up, I judge them. I totally judge them, and I feel justified in this because let’s face it, I have spent almost my entire life on a diet. An extreme diet. Yet I don’t complain, I don’t whine, in fact my friends tend to make a bigger deal about it then I do. So if I can handle an extreme diet all day, every day FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE, then I feel that people can stick to a weight loss diet for a couple of weeks without complaining or cheating. I would now like to take the time to apologize to every woman I have ever Judgey McJudgersoned in my head.

Because of medical conditions, and food intolerances I have had food restrictions since I was eight. The big blow came at 24 when I found out that I have Celiac disease, which meant goodbye for good to all gluten. Since then, my list of foods to avoid has stayed mostly the same. Occasionally something new gets added when I try a new food for the first time, but for the most part it has now become second nature. That is until about two months ago, when I found out that I have a pretty severe sulfite intolerance. The severity will probably lesson as it gets out of my system, but it’s around to stay. This diagnosis was met with very much the same reaction as my diagnosis to Celiac disease – Fuck!!!

Yet one more thing that wipes out a HUGE chunk of foods that I can no longer eat. Not to mention wine. No more wine for me. No more hard cider. Really no more alcohol at all with the exception of gluten free vodka. But I can’t mix it with fruit juice because, with the exception of freshly pressed, most fruit juice has sulfites. Joyous! After a couple of days of serious moping, I put on my big girl panties and set about figuring out what I had left to eat. After about a week of cutting out sulfites I felt immensely better. Whenever I would accidentally eat some, there’s always a pretty significant trial and error period with these things, I would feel it immediately. The reaction would hit me fast and hard and wipe me out for at least an hour. Needless to say, the fallout should be plenty to discourage any intentional cheating.

Despite this, over the weekend I cheated, and quite frankly I’m planning on cheating again this evening. Not hugely, but I did put wine and garlic into the red sauce I made for tonight’s lasagna, and both of those definitely fall onto the no-no list. But, I’m sorry, while you can make red sauce without wine, you can’t without garlic. It just doesn’t taste right! So, if I have immediate repercussions from cheating and yet I can’t stop myself, how in the hell is somebody who has no repercussions supposed to stay perfectly on course with their diet? Really I’m starting to believe that diets were made to be broken. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. And for those who are now concerned, I promise that the only Chianti I will have tonight will be in the lasagna, and not in a glass . . . at least that’s the intention . . .