Disease! Germs! Comfort food!

Things strewn about my house when I am sick:

1 small cast-iron skillet, buttered, with fried egg fragments on the 2nd to largest burner of the stove
1 stick of butter, partially unwrapped
1 thermos of earl grey tea
1 mug of almost-gone earl grey tea
1 book of "Extreme Fiction" on top of toilet tank
1 glass of orange juice, empty except for little dried pulp bits
2 cell phones, near laptop
1 laptop, with several internet windows and tabs open
1 blanket, dragged everywhere I go
Several cookbooks, open to different pages
3 plates, 2 bowls, 1 mixing bowl, 2 spatulas, 5 glasses in the sink
A multitude of crumbs
Ideas about cooking
Thoughts about exercise
Feelings of self-pity
Several coughs
Headaches stay in my head
1 jar of Nutella, almost empty
1 knife with faint smears of Nutella on it

Rule: If you spend a bunch of time worrying about and planning a big event, then throw yourself wholly into it, you will get sick. Also: butter is an excellent healing agent.

Topical inane musings: Weather edition

It's about to storm outside. The hall smells like warm licorice. It's overwhelming. The weight of the air feels like a bed sheet. The kind that diffuses light in the morning and my eyelashes brush against it as I blink myself awake.

Outside, there is the metallic smell of earth, and the sweet smell of vegetation. Water makes everything bolder, fearless. The scent of the outdoors gets stronger when it gets wet, as it absorbs, breathes, comes to life. The smell gets into your upper sinuses - a cloud that floats into your brain and hangs there. Water atoms glide around each other, stirring thoughts.

I have a headache that sits like an animal at the back of my skull. It sulks there, cold and shuddering where my spine connects with my brain stem. I'm re-reading The Secret Garden and imagine this rain on the garden. Plump, warm drops enriching the secret. Whispering on each leaf. When I breathe the storm-pregnant air, it makes me excited for the coming release. It feels like I've swallowed something cottony but rich. It is as though I have walked to the back of my mouth, and I am looking down the sheer cliff of my throat, straight down into the pit of my stomach, and in it, I see life, that hot and glowing brick. I am exhilarated by the height, the thought of the drop. I imagine this is how raindrops feel: air rushing by their round faces, the thrilling fall, the eager anticipation to be accepted completely by the earth.

Rule: Splashing around in rain and puddles then taking a hot shower or bath is the best thing ever. No way that is not the best thing ever.

I heart you, Michael Pollan.

So I'm reading Michael Pollan's second big hit, In Defense of Food. I'm going to resist my impulse to make it a rule to read this book, but it's super thought-provoking and I think well-written and researched. There is a little paranoid, but if you read it in conjunction with Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser - for a non-Pollan perspective and body of research; certainly one could also read Pollan'sOmnivore's Dilemma - then the paranoia seems a little less extreme and might seem more like hyper-(justified)vigilance.

I won't ruin it for anyone, but he quotes Wendell Berry - an accomplished writer and defender of sustainable agriculture practices - quite often, and one of the quotes near the end of the book is going to be a rule I'm going to attempt to follow:

Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

Word, Mr. Berry. Word.