Mrs. Dalloway's Coffee Break

Some food stories. As we speak, Kristi Carlson, the author of the warm-hearted, all kinds of fabulous, and so cheerful Eat Like a Gilmore cookbook, the title of which I paraphrased as one of the labels on this blog, is collecting funds to kickstart her second Gilmore Girls related assembly of recipes. Now, I haven’t exactly tried any of the foods on the existing book yet, because I’m such a dang-a-lang and a whatchamacallit who buys a cookbook and then fails to make anything from it, but I have tagged a lot of pages with pretty neon-colored post-its, marveled at the fun of just browsing through it, and discussed having a Gilmore Girls feast, inspired by Carlson, with at least three or four people. While I have already shared earlier the one recipe I have mastered in my life on this blog and have nothing else to add to the world of gourmands but my undying enthusiasm and cookbook browsing, I will now proceed to share some of my food related stories from the days of both yore and p...

I had to wait for the doctor to give me an ultrasound afterwards. The wait felt like a long time, and while lying there in the dimly lit room, I alternated feeling worried and bored and on the verge of a panic attack and peckish and sleepy, and after crying a little, for having to wait so long, for being there alone, for fearing the results that, while horizontal on the examination table, felt, for the first time, both looming right in front of me, and inevitable, and apocalyptic, I started wondering if I could shield the fluorescent light from my field of vision with one or both of my Caterpillar boots, and I was just giving it a try, with both my feet up, in a fine right angle, with one eye closed and bare-breasted, when he finally arrived. It all started about six or seven months ago, when I started experiencing a strange pressure, almost like a hurt, on my left side, around the breast area. The pain would be intermittent, like it still is, and would only last for a few seco...

Last weekend, I did a ten-hour shift with Norton. Remember him, the guy with the monkey lamp I told you about earlier? I hadn’t seen him in a while, and him being a fellow tsundoku , and a general popular culture enthusiast like myself, we had lots to process. Because of my two-week long date with the hot water bottle and some aspirin, I had literally been out to lunch, out of the ballgame, out to damn pasture, just – out of it, so I was being a dumb-ball ignoramus compared to all his meanwhile accumulated knowledge. I had had to cancel four sets of movie tickets during my atchoo, and every time, hoping I would get well in the next twenty-four hours, I would only cancel one at a time, missing, in alphabetical order although not at all really, screenings of the following: Cinema Paradiso; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; In This Corner of the World, a one-time only special event, like Cinema Paradiso, in fact; The Post, and I am a huge All the President’s Men fan; and a...

During a lengthy illness, I had a complete meltdown regarding interior design. The first week I decided I wanted to change the room order in my house entirely, then, at some point during the next, that I hated the whole apartment with fiery passion, and finally, in the final moments with the sweats and a hankie, that new house plants were to be the answer to the age-old question one presents herself when sick: just why the hell did I arrange my house in this manner, and why do I have to lie around all day and look at my terrible walls and boring furniture? So basically, having circled all the way to the Dark Side and back with a severe case of cabin fever, I decided to get right on it and go buy some of those pesky new house plants. Naturally, this venturing outside the sickbed and apartment would not have been the true adventure of a woman just regained her good senses, if it hadn’t included a little clothes shopping on the side. I hadn’t been to my vintage shop in ages, and...