But pumpkin it’s meant to hurt thems is the good stuff
Halloween week is here and it’s a mixed bag of emotions and experiences. Things always seem to be that way especially now that I am entering into life from the perspective of being a parent. This is as opposed to how I used to commemorate and celebrate the passage of time which was from a dual-income-no-kid, living life to the max kind of way. I was that perpetually young Peter-pan syndrome ragamuffin human. That’s how I have come to view my life pre-gremlin baby. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Things like Halloween were more about you know maybe getting drunk skunkies, eating chocolate, staying up late, sleeping in the next day, dressing ‘slutty’ (is it ok to use this term in 2024? asking for a friend). Still, you know, showing some skin while pretending to be someone or something else, scary, magical, pun-tastic, or anything that took your fancy….the whole gamut of fun. Now it’s all about finding all the local ‘trunk or treat’ events which is like trick or treating but to parked cars so I guess safer (fear is powerful these days). It’s a season of going to pumpkin patches and watching my child climb on them and fall off crying while sweating my balls off in the 100-degree heat because what is sweater weather in this day and age? Even better is the act of googling ‘easy homemade Halloween costumes for toddlers and time-poor parents’. Results run the gamut of extreme mom-ing. To be shown extremely complex, hours-long crafting projects to make a glamourous designer baby costume involving items, I would literally have to go buy at the store and costing me more in time and sanity than a shite pre-made costume would have and what would I be trying to prove at this point?
It’s all so very funny. I like belonging to this weird parent club. It’s kind of great mostly not sometimes. It’s all very messy I try not to analyse it too much but all this comes to mean is I can’t wait to finally….finally get to eat my child’s trick-or-treat candy as I rightly deserve. None of this ‘switch witch’ bullshit in our house. If you don’t know what that is google it, diet culture be trying the most to get kids young.
Reads
We are a couple of weeks away from the American elections for President and all the other things to vote on and I can’t wait for it to end.
This is the worst thing about living in the US and it has really broken my spirit over the last near-decade I have lived here. I’m my innocent youth, politics was once something I thought of as an interesting way to discuss philosophical ideas, cultural, and historical movements over time. It was lofty, intellectual and big picture stuff. Now it feels like a weapon of harmful discourse, exhaustingly derogatory ideology, and a revelation of what happens when humans become the worst versions of themselves. We are brown beaten by the political realm, politics is the new religion.
So it’s just kind of a bummer here at the moment. Everywhere you turn someone makes every little thing that exists under the sun a political cause/statement/opinion/assumption. It’s exhausting from that deep bone-tired place I haven’t been in since the newborn days of my daughter. In the spirit of trying to keep on living through all that and keeping perspective on the fact that other things are going on that are far more interesting and significant, I found a new website that focuses on positive news stories so that has lifted my mood a little. Here is their weekly roundup of interesting, positive global news stories.
What went right this week: the good news that matters
This is another article I read on Positive.News this week that left me thinking it might be ok to be a human in this world if it could only be like the one in this article. I am sure it will be realised for us, and poetry is definitely a vehicle that will carry many passengers to this new sweet destination of being in personhood. We just have to let it become.
Well versed: the pharmacy that dispenses poems instead of medicine by Isobel Lewis
Bants
Over the weekend I watched two fantastic films for very different reasons. The first film, I am going to do a full-on, in-your-face review because it was shockingly brilliant and I had absolutely no idea what I had signed up for. The second was Dan Levy’s film, Good Grief, about a man who is trying to live in the aftermath of the sudden death of his husband. I had heard this was a deliciously human story with some tastefully gorgeous set designs, wardrobe choices, and that quippy millennial zing of creative joie de vivre we are all searching for. Plus Ruth Negga is in it and I love her because she is Irish and just sizzles on screen. Highly recommend a watch, I wanted to share a sweet little quote near the start of the film that made my heart do that ba-bump ba-bump thing it hasn’t done in a while. God I love how some people can write, if only.
“I have longed for people before, I have loved people before.
Not like this.
It was not this.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.”
It seems it’s a hell of a lot easier to fall asleep on life. There are many days in life where I have thought to myself, “I wish I could go back to before all the….knowing”. In a way I think part of me finds the allure of sleepwalking through life quite attractive because once you are awake to it all, the good and the bad, you feel everything and so much weighs on you. I liked this ted talk I stumbled upon by the illustrator Wendy McNaughton who addresses briefly how what we expect changes in our minds what we experience and we don’t really often see what’s really in front of us.
Lastly, I will share this old podcast episode with you I listened to yesterday. Seems like I am circling a lot of grief centric subjects in my mental consumption habits lately. Hmmm wonder what that’s about? Anyway, this brief interview is with Lucy Kalanithi in 2018. She was the wife of Paul Kalanithi who wrote an exquisite book during the process of his dying from terminal lung cancer. At the time she ended up finishing the book for him. I read the book back when it came out in 2016, When Breath Becomes Air, and it was profound. I have carried much of it with me since. Such a beautiful conversation on love and loss this was.
Eats
I was recently tasked with cooking up a dish for a group of women in a mom-group thing that I semi attend and my category was ‘wild card’. So I could bring anything as long as it was yummy (the standard I set myself) and somewhat brunch-y. Here is the kicker, I am by far the person living in the lowest income bracket of this particular bunch. We live in a wealthy area and vis-a-vis that means something like this, a local mama club where you need to have childcare on a weekday to attend , tends to generally be a group of pretty financially secure humans. Which is fine but I couldn’t really be affording to spend a lot of money on this. So I went with something that’s yummy, easy enough to make in bulk, vegetarian (because I wanted to eat it) and I make it pretty frequently because it’s made up of cheap ingredients that you more than likely already have in your kitchen.
The delicious Elote Style Quinoa Salad by Pinch of Yum.
I don’t, however, make her dressing. I don’t like it that much so I make my own from a different recipe I found which I forgot the source but will share it here. Now I made this dish en bulk so I tripled it I think and it was plenty for this massive group of women, I had to carry it into that place in my dutch oven and it got gobbled up. So that felt very validating. It wont look this big when you make it as in my picture. I also added red onion to it. One time before I made it with bell peppers and also I used canned corn because I do not have the brain space to be shucking and husking corns on the cob. Versatility is the name of this game with this you can easily add shredded chicken which I have done before or do a different grain like say couscous might be nice.
Street Corn Dressing
3 tbsp mayo
2 tbsp plain greek yoghurt (or regular full fat)
1 lime zested and juiced
to taste: sea salt, paprike, chili powder, cayenne pepper
Use 1/4 tsp at a minimum of each or less if you want but the salad itself is unseasoned so I like to make the dressing as spicy and salty as can to zing up the salad.
My toddler the second her feet touch the ground
As you can see from the above meme I am a weary follower of the worlds most go-getter toddler-baby. On we press into November one of my all time favourite months!