Mentally Constipated

When I make a grill-cheesed sandwich, I like to cut into 4 triangles.

I remember, as a kid, my mother would occasionally take us to lunch at The Fifth Wheel, which was a truckstop where her friend was a waitress and she could smoke as furiously as she liked. I always ordered the grilled cheese, not because they made particularly good sandwiches but because of toothpicks topped with colourful cellophane that were always stuck through the middle.
Secretly, I collected these treasures in a hidden cubbyhole in the very back seat of my mother's Ford Aerostar.

Grilled cheeses are such perfect, humble food. So unassuming. People say pie is humble, but obviously they've never had my black and white pie, which is so snazzy I call it my Snazzy Black and White Pie (never underestimate the power of Capital Letters).

That pie is as unhumble as I am. Today I cleaned out my light-rotation closet, and came across some very unhumble ditties, such as my black boa. There is nothing humble about a boa. I remember once wearing it to the movies for no other reason than I felt like having a feather boa kind of day, and the grizzled old man selling the tickets said "I've worked at this theatre for 37 years and I've never seen a boa before" which is one of the highlight compliments of my life.

Personally, I'm not sure if I see many benefits to being humble. I realize the baby Jesus thinks humility is a virtue, but I'm not sure if I'm prepared to take humble lessons from a guy who has his own bobblehead. Patience is also a virtue, apparently, but I notice that this is something usually said by government workers when they've taken 7 years to issue you a passport.

I can't imagine a scenario in which I would have to pick a favourite virtue, but if I did, temperance would be it. Not that I am temperate person, but then, nor am I a virtuous woman. But I love temperance for its valiant attempt to remove from life every single thing worth living for. I don't endorse temperance, but I love the ballsiness of it - anything that feels good must be sin, and therefore it is to be avoided. I remember this one time I was visiting one of those pioneer villages with my friend Anna. The residents of this village, straight from the year 1870, were trying to have us sign an oath of abstinence. Randy teenagers that we were, we could only imagine that abstinence referred to sex (we had seen the pamphlets in sex ed...and promptly put them in the waste bin, where they belong). But imagine our surprise when the abstinence theme song turned out to be a lusty rendition of "Throw Down the Bottle!"

Anyway. I think I was making a point about grilled cheese sandwiches somewhere back there.

Today I am not having a feather boa kind of day, I am having a grilled cheese kind of day. But also the kind of day where I just feel like heating up a pot of extra virgin olive oil and combing it through my hair. It's weird to sit around all greasy in the hopes that my hair will, through the magic of olives, become lustrous and healthy despite the fact that I've burned it beyond redemption with bleach. Also, despite the fact that it's dead. I believe in the power of hot oil treatments...but at the same time, I'm not about to dig up my dead grandfather, rub him thoroughly with a pound of butter and expect him to come back to life. I mean, I'm an optimist. I'm practically a groupie where monosaturated fats are concerned. But I'm pretty sure that all the time and money we spend on the dead stuff growing out of our scalps - the shampooing, the conditioning, the curling, the straightening, the styling, the colouring - it's kind of necrophilic, isn't it?

Well, good sense tells me I should quit while I'm ahead, and though I can't identify what I'm a head of, I am 98% confident that I could sink lower if I kept going. It's just one of those days. Try not to hold it against me.