Eggs that should have tasted better, and transmission

Renewal, transcendence, and telling some people to fuck off

Gargantubaby, age seven for another month now, is obsessed with atoms.

GB: Do you think there are an even number of atoms in the world?

GB: How many atoms are in that necklace?

GB: How many atoms are in me?

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GB REALLY doesn’t want to leave the house on the weekends, while as a remote worker I REALLY want to leave the house. I’m racking my brains to think of things he might want to do as he plays Minecraft on the couch. We live in a major city, so the number of times I feel stumped is shameful.

Jenny: Remember when we went to the Japanese Tea Garden and drew?

GB: Oh, yeah!

Jenny: Want to do something like that again?

GB: Someday. But not to-day.

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I make a big noise in the kitchen as GB is putting on his shoes so we can walk down the block and see a Kiki ball for Pride (a first for us both, although I consumed Pose) because we live in the best neighborhood in the best city.

What happened? he calls.

Oh, I just knocked over my wine glass, I say, preparing to sop up the last sip I was really looking forward to.

He traipses into the kitchen in his pajamas and checkered Vans.

I know how it feels, buddy, he tells me. I know how it feels.

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I worry about a lot of things. From imagining all the ways the world can harm my child, to imagining all the ways the world can harm me, which would harm my child, my brain is on an endless loop of disaster prep.

To some extent, the endless loop is comforting – stay with me – because I am endlessly dreaming up solutions. It is, however, an invasive and ultimately destructive habit, and I often find myself needing to do a Ctrl+Alt+Delete on some god-awful scenario that has infected my thoughts for which there is really no satisfying solution (the deaths of people in my household are a recurring theme). I wake up most mornings in a panic – the sound of the alarm sets my heart racing. I have theories about why I’m like this.

I get uncommonly hung up on existential questions. Witness: the constant feeling that my days involve a series of tasks to be checked off so that once they are all done … what? I die? WHAT’S THE POINT EXACTLY. In short, I am not enjoying the journey as much as I could be, as I am fixated on the destination, when THERE IS NO DESTINATION (except death). Repeat.

I’m certain this is why, when I used to do drugs (more than 20 years ago now), I didn’t want to just do some lines and sit on a couch and talk to some people I didn’t like very much to begin with. I wanted my brain to SHUT UP. I wanted to sit on a pillow, smiling dopily, and just feel good, no caveats.

In a quest, as I near 50, to lead a less anxious life, I have been radically addressing some underlying issues. For example, I have always had a mantra. Years ago, that mantra was “I hate myself” – “I hate myself”! The thing I repeated to take control of whatever I was feeling and calm myself down! It took years to understand that certain coping mechanisms had served their purpose and to move forward I needed to replace them. At 48 3/4, I don’t even listen to sad songs anymore. The first time I heard Maggie Rogers’ “Light On” I sobbed my brains out in the car because it touched something deep and animal and familiar. So I don’t listen to Maggie Rogers anymore. I am not trying to plumb any depths at this age, I’m just trying to GET THROUGH THE DAY.

My mantra now is “what you feel is important.” Not what I think (which is also important), but what I feel, and it feels radical to repeat this – that it is not only “our” feelings (because I am an “our”: women, middle-aged people, perimenopausal people, etc.) that are important, but my feelings, Jenny True Pritchett’s feelings, and that it is OK, in my private world, to believe that they are IMPORTANT. VERY, REALLY IMPORTANT.

Also: I thought, when I turned 40, I had excised my last shitty friend. I had collected so many, starting in middle school, mostly women, mostly dynamic, smart, and sometimes beautiful but always alluring women, who either crossed my boundaries or kept me around to let me know how charmingly dumb, slutty (yes), drunk (yes), inappropriate (yes), or annoying I was to them, and who occasionally let loose with abuse of one kind of another, a dynamic I happily fostered. (To be sure, I’ve also been a shitty friend, but this is MY BLOG and people can write about me on THEIR BLOGS.)

Recently, I realized I had not cut out everyone I needed to. The excising continues.

Other things that feel like radical change: enjoying the feeling of my bare feet on the floor, and spooning my sleeping child as I think: This is the point.

The interesting thing about my anxiety (is it, though?) is how I react when bad things actually happen. No one in my life would accuse me of dealing either well or graciously with stress, but the way I deal with it is Much Improved. To wit, when my 2013 Ford Focus (officially a clunker, which I did not know when I bought it in 2016) finally died, lo, near the Pacific Crest Trail in Northern California when I was on vacation last week with Strong Jaw’s delightful family, and I had to make many Big Decisions in a short period of time, I only sat upstairs in my air-conditioned room vibrating for parts of each day. The second and final time that week I had to have the car towed, when it shuddered to a stop 200 miles north of San Francisco, where we live, I made use of the fact that it died near a Vans outlet store. Bully for me.

Two for you, one for me.

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On the way from San Francisco to the Dunsmuir area at the beginning of the trip, GB and Strong Jaw, my partner, rope me into 20 Questions, a game I loathe. It stresses me out to NO END. The possibilities! The madness! Also, playing 20 Questions with a seven-year-old:

Jenny: GB, you said “copper” was a vegetable.

GB: I did? (Looks concerned.) Oh. I wasn’t paying attention.

SJ tells us the story about how, when his daughter was GB’s age, she stumped him TWICE IN ONE DAY when she picked “carrot” and he had narrowed it down to an orange vegetable.

SJ: I was like, an orange vegetable? There is no orange vegetable!

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The joys of hippie in-laws: Every summer, and sometimes at the holidays, we rent a cabin somewhere on the West Coast, divvy up the cooking and cleaning duties, go on hikes, splash in the hot tub, do art, sprawl on the couch to read and write, and, every night, play games. This year we played a version of charades, and when my father-in-law pulled “tutu” and we absolutely could not guess what he was pantomiming, although it appeared we were getting close with “priest” and “bishop,” we discovered he had been trying to telegraph the Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

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Gargantubaby (just waking up, eyes closed, matted hair, croaky voice): Snuggle with me. Snuggle with the snuggliest man in town.

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ALERT ALERT UPDATE FROM SJ: “You should write about how heroic your husband was for driving your car 67 miles [before it quit for the final time, near the Vans outlet in Anderson] and saving us $700 on the tow” (since AAA only covers 200 miles and we started out 285 miles away, with me and GB in an emergency-rented Toyota Corolla and SJ driving the Focus with crossed fingers in the slow lane).

These eggs from an Instagram video looked amazing but weren’t. If I made them again (since, I mean, THAT IMAGE), I would cook the eggs less so the yolks would be softer and I would take out the honey.

You need:

• 3 large eggs

• 1/2 small yellow onion, chopped

• 1 jalapeño, chopped (I didn’t do this because children, but maybe I should have)

• 3 garlic cloves, chopped

• 2 stalks green onion, chopped

• 1/4 cup water

• 6TB soy sauce

• 2TB dark soy sauce (I don’t know what dark soy sauce is so I just used 8TB regular soy sauce)

• 5 tablespoons honey (I think this is what ruined it for me, I don’t like sweet ingredients in savory food)

• 1TB Korean red pepper flakes (available at a local market, since the brand Mother-in-Law’s is mainstream)

• 1tsp MSG (didn’t do this but maybe next time)

• 2TB sesame seeds

You need to:

• Watch this video to see why I made them.

• Add cilantro.