Beets

A few weeks ago I suddenly caught Produce Fever, as happens occasionally, and bought about five pounds of vegetables I’d never cooked before. The beets seemed like a great idea at the time—they’re cheap and good for you, and as I’ve mentioned before I do not require my meals to be very interesting.

So I chose six large beets and, not wanting them to go bad, boiled them up all at once. Let’s pause for a moment to reflect that beets are very, very colorful. When you eat cooked ones or cut raw ones, this color is a purpley-red of easily identifiable plant origin. When you boil a huge pot of beets on the stove, though, the whole mess turns the rusty red of fresh blood. It foams. Big chunks of red beet flesh bob to the surface. When you spill drops on the white stovetop—and you will—they dry quickly into the unmistakable signs of a catastrophic nosebleed. I felt like Bluebeard with his boiling bowl of wife chunks.

The cooked beets were indeed blandly delicious, appearances aside, so I set them in a Tupperware vat in the fridge and looked forward to devouring them over the next three or four days.

As it turns out, it takes a lot longer than that to eat a half gallon of beets, for the following reasons:

1. They become a lot less exciting over time
2. Thanks to my lack of self-control at the farmers’ market, I also had a pound of carrots, four cups of broccoli, two cups of cauliflower, a grapefruit, a sack of green beans, four apples, two bananas, and a cantaloupe to eat within the week before they started to ooze
3. I kept thinking about that bowl of blood

All this excess produce fit beautifully into my cooking style, which consists of two methods:

1. Cook some things and mix them together

2. Cook some things and don’t mix them together

In the end I handled the botanical bounty by developing an additional method:

3. Don’t even bother to cook things

Ultimately, I bid farewell to the last half pint of beets and their accompanying mass of purple sludge. The experience taught me a valuable lesson about impulse-buying unfamiliar perishable food, though:

No, never mind. Look, there’s a sale on chard!

I Hate Ants

Let’s get this straight: I am not afraid of ants. I just hate them.

I am about 54,081,290 times bigger than a household sugar ant by volume. This is roughly the number of times that NASA’s largest rocket-building facility is bigger than me, or that Princess Leia is better than Queen Amidala. It’s pointless to fear a creature that can fit under my fingernail.

But ants and I hate each other with a murderous rage that will lock us in mortal combat for eternity. They started it.

One night when I was a few months old, my parents put me to bed and could not figure out why I kept crying. They fed me, they rocked me, they changed me, they sang to me, but every time they put me back in the crib, I would start to scream within minutes.

Finally, through the haze of 3 a.m., someone turned on a light to investigate the bed. That’s when they discovered the ants—evil mutant demon ants with a taste for baby flesh who had crawled up a two-story building, through the tiny window gap, down the wall, across the floor, and up the legs of my bed to EAT ME ALIVE IN MY SLEEP.

My parents managed to drown the minions of Satan, but I still have a scar on my temple from their tiny jaws of doom.

Thanks to the short memory of infants, though, the ants enjoyed a truce with me for nearly 15 years after their unprovoked attack. I tended ant farms. I protected anthills on the playground. I even tenderly moved the creatures outside when others threatened to smash them on tabletops. But all the time they were plotting.

First it was the nest of inch-long, winged carpenter ants that moved into my wall and all of my possessions. For days I shooed them out the window one by one, but when they reached the bed I abandoned my peaceful ways and littered the room with their brittle corpses in an all-night crusade.

Two years later, they surfaced again. My friend Madelyn and I were minding the house for another friend while her family took a vacation, and one night I opened the pantry to discover a battalion of Beelzebub’s beasts advancing toward the chocolate.

After stripping the pantry, obliterating the insect troops, and planting roughly six poison baits per square foot, I sat down to rest with a half-empty bag of potato chips.

Every chip was crawling with ants.

Instead of throwing the bag away, I became a thundering inferno of destruction. Armed with a serving spoon, I shook each ant onto the counter and crushed it into oblivion. The bodies collected. I may have cackled. Madelyn wondered whether to call the authorities or simply run and save herself.

But even this display of my ruthlessness in battle did not deter the enemy for long.

One fall in college, I agreed to feed an acquaintance’s cats while she was out of town. On the third day of feeding, my roommate and I opened the kitchen door to find an uneven brown river flowing from the doorstep to the cats’ food dishes.

The fifteen-foot stream of ants reached more than six inches at its widest point. The good news is, when they’re so concentrated, you can mow down thousands with a single blast of poison spray. Take that, turkeys.

We wiped up about a pound of ant carcasses in all. By the time the bloodbath ended, the insect army was out of troops, the homeowner was out of Raid, and my roommate had concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that I was out of my mind.

It’s been a few years now, so I’m probably about due for another exoskeletal onslaught.

Go ahead, ants. Make my day.

Best If Used By...

I baked a cake for my birthday last month. It wasn’t actually very good because I beat the egg whites too much even though I live at a really high altitude, but I like seeing them puff up. It’s like a special kind of magic show reserved for those of us who didn’t learn to bake from scratch until college.

Anyway, the cake was dry to the point that it needed a ten-minute soak in melty ice cream to stop tasting like sheetrock. But I baked it, and it was my birthday cake, and I had plenty of Cookies & Cream, so I was going to eat it anyway, even if it took two weeks because no one else wanted any.

The thing is, it’s hard to tell when a cake is too old to eat except by how dry it’s getting. This one didn’t look any different with the passage of time, and it sure didn’t taste different, so by about Day 13 I was halfway afraid of contracting catastrophic, stubbornness-induced cake poisoning with every bite I took.

I play this game a lot—walking the fine line between waste and personal injury. If old food doesn’t look bad or smell bad, I feel guilty for throwing it out, so I have two options:

1. Leave it in the fridge until it does look bad, then throw it out with a clear conscience.
2. Eat it, claiming to believe it can’t hurt me, and spend the next 36 hours suffering the shadowy malaise of Egg Doubt.

Egg Doubt is the creeping sensation you feel after eating the last Easter egg a week from Tuesday, even though they are only supposed to keep for seven days. Once you make that fateful decision, the rest of the day will be full of phantom stomach pains and episodes of fleeting lightheadedness: Did you imagine it, or are you about to collapse into a pool of flaming botulism doom as your own intestines destroy you from within?

Egg Doubt is the twin of Dairy Doubt; they fall into the larger family of Expirationoia along with their cousins, Potato Salad Suspicion and Mistrust of Room-Temperature Cold Cuts.

It’s even harder to judge the safe zone with other food groups, though, because they don’t come with echoes of age-old parental warning. No one ever says, “Don’t eat that broccoli if it’s been left out!” or “The Jell-O isn’t very fresh.” So this stuff sits in the fridge accumulating Starving-Children-In-China guilt until someone finally takes the plunge, one way or the other.

Odometer

I got into my car a few days ago and noticed that the odometer looked like this:

YES! In only 9.2 miles—within the course of the day’s commute—all the digits would be lined up in order! For a precious tenth of a mile, I would attain a fleeting taste of obsessive-compulsive nirvana. All I had to do was pay attention until the Great Conjunction came.

Anyone whose heart has never thrilled to see a clock reading 11:11 may as well stop reading here, but it’s up there with seeing a straight flush come together in your poker hand. I’ve spent a lot of time awake in the dark waiting for 12:34 or 3:21, as well as any time that reads the same way upside down or backwards.

I also like to check the page numbers in books to know when I’ve reached the exact middle. If I don’t read the numbers for a while and overshoot, I’ll backtrack to the right page and skim it again for any special import or hidden messages. In elementary school I got into the habit of mentally doubling and halving every page number just in case I was missing something exciting.

The odometer is more urgent than clocks or pages, though, because this sequence of numbers will never come again unless you drive a magic car that can run for more than a million miles, exceed the number of available digits, and start over again at zero.

So on the day in question I started driving, glancing down at the gauge every three seconds for about a mile. Then suddenly I had to change lanes. Then I turned a corner. Then my usual route was closed for construction, and a school crossing guard stopped traffic, and a song I liked came on the radio.

All at once I was in the parking lot at work, checking the dash to see when I should buy gas, and I saw it:

I had let that precious moment slip away, and it was gone forever. How could I forgive myself? How long until the next magical number would come up? Would I miss that one, too?

I feel like I’m betraying my car. It’s as if I’m the mother and he* is a small child who keeps trying to show me fabulous gymnastic feats, but I’m always looking away at the moment he backflips off the monkey bars.

Every time I fail him, he finds something else to show me—how about 0987678? 0987890? 0988888? I missed them all by a few miles. For the last one I even dangled a sheet of paper on the dashboard over the display to remind me to watch carefully during my next drive, but I was still led astray by the senseless frivolity of paying attention to traffic.

Now my only hope of anal-retentive satisfaction is to watch like a hawk for 0989898. In about 24,000 miles I’m going to need a failsafe system for catching 1234567, or my brain will probably implode. Meanwhile, I have to get back to my book, because I’m almost to page 222, which is half of 444, and if you read the last letter in every line it spells out your secret enemy’s Facebook username and password.

A note to parents, roommates, and coworkers: Not everyone who obsesses about this stuff is crazy. At least that’s what the voices tell me.

*Maybe your cars, ships, and trains are all female. Mine has an established personality and can be coaxed or encouraged verbally. He likes a pat on the driver-side front quarter panel. He loves me back. Go define sanity your own way somewhere else.

Dire Consequences

I draw informative pictures for my office sometimes—stuff like “How to Replace the Toilet Paper” or “This Is Why We’re out of Paper Towels.”

Last week I was asked to branch out from toiletry-based signage and illustrate the importance of our sign-out process for company vehicles. I love a legitimate excuse to draw stuff at work, so I obliged with the strip you see below.

Shortly, Human Resources reminded me that it’s not appropriate to advocate workplace violence. In fact, I seem to have signed a Violence-Free Workplace Agreement that explicitly disapproves of “statements or gestures which in any way suggest that the employee may engage in violent conduct.”

So we just kept the first panel in the office. But I spent a lot of time on the others, so now you get to enjoy the uncut version.

Also, since my HR representative reads this blog (Hi!), I’d like to point out that neither character is wearing a green shirt, so they clearly are not me. I definitely would not commit, threaten, or imply acts of violence in the workplace, even over a matter as emotionally charged as proper vehicle reservation procedures. Honest.

EDIT: Apparently fighting causes the orange girl's sleeves to extend temporarily all the way to her wrists. Go figure.

The Blind Date

I am accustomed to being taken for several years younger than my actual age. For one thing, I didn’t make it past about 4’8” until the 7th grade (the same year I finally stopped wearing stirrup pants), so I got used to people resting their elbows on my head.

Even though I eventually reached a towering 5’4”, the age-to-image disparity still crops up. A couple of years ago, my family was at a farmer’s market buying goat cheese from a lady who gushed, “It’s wonderful that your teenagers will come to these things with you!”

My dad, flanked by his then-18-year-old son and 21-year-old daughter, said, “Well, one teenager.”

The goat lady looked at my six-foot, bearded brother, looked at me, and replied, “And one not quite yet?”


Then again, it seems that I project a somewhat different image at work.

At my office, we work with a number of contractors who teach safety classes and drop by occasionally to pick up materials. One of these instructors, Delia, approached my desk a couple of months ago and said, “Clara, I have a question for you.”

I foolishly anticipated a question about work, but instead I heard, “I didn’t know how open you would be to blind dates.”

“I met this guy in a class I was teaching,” she said, “and I think you two would get along.”

I reflected that Delia frequently taught classes to lifeguards, EMTs, and similarly intriguing groups of people. Even better, she promised to eliminate the uncomfortable one-on-one component: “Ron and I go eat dinner on Fridays a lot, and you should come with us next week.”

So the next Friday I met Delia outside a local Mexican restaurant that offers free hot wings and queso during happy hour, because it’s nice to have a really classy dinner.

“I told Ronald that if he’s not dead, in the hospital, or in prison, he’d better be in this restaurant,” Delia told me. She led the search for Ron while I wondered just how probable those options were.

When Delia stopped to talk with someone at one of the tables, I thought at first that she had run into another friend by coincidence. This turned out to be the right table, though, featuring the first plate of hot wings, a pitcher of margaritas, and my date—a polite-looking, largely bald man at least 45 years old.

To his great credit, Ron clearly had not been warned that he was being set up with someone half his age. We introduced ourselves and began doggedly pretending to forget that this evening was intended as a date, but Delia kept awkwarding it up every few minutes by reminding us. “I just realized,” she’d say, “his last name is Barton. If you two get together, you’ll be Clara Barton!”

“Ha ha ha ha ha,” said Ron. “Who needs more salsa?”

We all sat there for an hour eating cheese dip while I made sure that every story I told featured my parents or high school or both. “We used to have another guy who would come eat with us,” said Delia. “He’s about 22. But then he got a car, and I guess he didn’t want to hang out with us old folks anymore.”

“Kids today, huh?” I said.

Finally, Delia announced that she had to leave. “I’m teaching a class early in the morning. You two stick around and talk.”

“You could stay!” offered Ron enthusiastically.

“Oh, no! This is a blind date! You’re supposed to get to know each other without me hanging over your shoulders. Good night!”

Ron and I made it through the last four hot wings and went our separate ways. “I have to help my roommate with a project,” I lied. He didn’t actually say “Oh good” out loud.

Delia was in the office again on Monday, and she wanted to know how Ron and I got along.

“You know,” I said, “Ron seems like a really nice guyyyI’m 23.”

“Oh,” said Delia. “So he’s a little too old for you, then, 'cause he’s 49. I guess that’s the last time I play matchmaker.”

It is also the last time I accept a date without inquiring whether he is 213% of my age.

My Brain Is Fighting Against Me and Winning

I heard about some research indicating that humans aren’t very good at anticipating or remembering what it’s like to feel other ways besides how we’re feeling now. Like how when it’s 120 degrees in your car because you forgot to park in the shade in July and the AC stopped working in 1997, you drive home with your sweaty hands slipping off the wheel and can’t seriously believe that it will ever be January again because “too cold” is clearly not a state that exists in the world.

This idea makes sense to me because it’s usually how I feel about food. When I’m stranded in the half-mile line at Chick-Fil-A, likely to waste away at any moment, all I can think about is the last time I had access to a veritable smorgasbord and how foolish I was not to eat more of it to protect against this cruel starvation.

On the other hand, when I am suffering under the weight of my “one of everything” approach to potlucks, I become convinced that no food will ever appeal to me for the rest of my life and I might as well spend my ice cream budget on posters of Han Solo.

This phenomenon is also to blame for my perpetual self-inflicted sleep deprivation. I can spend the entire day exhausted, doze off in my Cup O’ Noodles, bite through my lip trying to stay alert for a staff meeting, skip the gym on account of a potentially fatal lack of muscle control, and drag myself home willing to miss dinner in favor of an extra half-hour of sleep...but first I have to check my e-mail just for a second in case I have another Nigerian lottery prize waiting.

Now the internet has already won.

Google’s home page has Pac-Man on it, so I have to play that for a while. Then I’m not sure when Ms. Pac-Man was introduced, so I need to check Wikipedia. That article has a link to Atari, so now I have to look up that one game with the castles. I’m definitely awake now, so I might as well draw some pictures for my blog. Then I need to check four or five other blogs in case they have new posts, and I should watch that video my brother sent me again. That reminds me of the book I was reading, and I can fit in one more chapter before my reserve back-up emergency late bedtime. Or maybe two more chapters. Heck, I’m already up this late, so what’s another fifty pages? Besides, it’s not like I’ll be sleepy tomorrow—I’m awake now, and it’s the middle of the night, so how could I not be awake at 7 a.m.?

So the next day I arrive at work feeling slightly less alert than the furry take-out enchiladas in the breakroom fridge.