Nevergirl’s

This hasn’t been a good morning. No, scratch that. Not a good morning is an understatement. This must be the real life equivalent of getting pelted with basement tiles—which the fat, blue cat Oggie’s currently doing to the poor roaches in his basement (and yes, I watch Cartoon Network every day!).

I’ve been up since 7am, frantically trying to knock out as many as I can from my To Do list. Have I told you how ridiculous this list has gotten? It’s grown taller than a building, wider than an ocean. The more I try to finish, the more I remember all the things that need to be done, and I end up sniveling over the impossibility of finishing on time. This must be what a soggy crouton feels like: weepy and useless. My To Do list for the day’s making me cry. There’s no way I can finish all these unless I suddenly split into three, and all three get to work for me.

What do you do when it seems like everything is getting worse and worse, and you fall leagues short of the goals you’ve set for yourself?

What’s with we-speak?

A friend told me it’s from the Carnegie School of How to Be More Likeable. Supposedly, the pronouns “we” and “us” show empathy, immediately establishing yourself as a friend, an ally. This makes we-speak a useful tool for interaction. I don’t know if I subscribe to this idea, though.

A woman I used to work with once had this plural first person phase, and everything she comes up with has a corporate-memo feel about it. For instance, “We would love it if you don’t sing to your Youtube clips loudly.” “We find the idea impractical.”

I can’t imagine We‘ing anybody with the same level of perpetuity unless this person occupies the same body as I. Moreover, I wonder if any parent actually raises a child on we-speak. If so, does the child grow up thinking she lives in a socialist collective?

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Does my eggplant look menacing enough?

For lack of better things to write about, this shall be a recap of How I Spent the Last Day of the Year Chomping. I just had ice cream. And a chocolate doughnut. And lots of eggplant. You’d think that I’d be able to hold off on the eating until New Year when there’ll be even more food than usual.

But no, I could not.

There was cheese last night, and lobsters, and shrimp tempura (which I didn’t have a hand in making, thank God!), and mrs fields cookie gifts which we got from relatives abroad, and so many grapes that the girls and I capped the night with a grape-throwing contest. I chucked the most number into Charlie’s litle mouth.

And then, I bopped around the room and got talked into reading about 20 pages of Shel Silverstein’s Everything On It. If you boil and eat me right now, I’m betting I’d taste pretty foul, like a halo-halo gone three kinds of wrong. You can’t make like the world’s biggest glutton for several days running, and not end up vile-tasting and looking. Happy New Year in a few hours, friends and family! I wish you calories that disappear voluntarily!

I know I flail and fail miserably at cooking, but even I surprise myself sometimes. For instance, last month, I learned to make shrimp tempura—and now I can proudly add that dish to my grand cooking repertoire consisting of tadaaaah—exactly two dishes:

1. shrimp tempura
2. egg in all its glory: specifically fried, scrambled, hardboiled, or done sunny side up

The reaction I got from learning to make tempura is nothing short of ridiculous though. You would think I was trying to feed them a Fedora Hat. Or that I’d shown up in the kitchen wearing a psychedically colored shirt and spreading the gospel of Jesus.

“You’re in the kitchen,” people marveled. “You’re actually in the kitchen, chopping off shrimp tails, and nothing untoward has happened!”

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