Embrace Yourself

Instead of working to change myself, through hypnosis, plastic surgery, or hard work, I have learned to re-realize myself and play off these less-than-perfect aspects of myself as points of pride.

1. My name + bad handwriting=cool signature. My awful scrawl is something I tried to correct as a child (using penmanship books to practice cursive and print), but I've started taking pride in my arabic looking handwriting. Although Spendlove is a name that I have also learned to embrace despite enduring years of bad jokes, 'Jackson' has a nice look when I sign my name. I enjoy the looks I get when I dash off a check or a field trip form. "Is this for real?" is what people's eyes say to my .2 second loops. I like its form on paper, which is great since for my entire elementary through high school career I experimented with a decent way to write my name. The problem is that the letters are very uneven all together (and plainly written out so that you can actually see what all of the letters are), and I always felt like the look of it sort of mimicked (read "mocked") my own physical and social unevenness. Now I think, "Yeah, that's cool," when I see those two scrawls that represent my person.

2. My feet + wide shoes = flat and fashionable. I have no arch. Some of you may be thinking, "big deal," but I doubt that your own mother made you stand on a dowel as a child to press curves into your feet (she swears that it works, but my feet are as flat as a duck's). Arches also provide a way for your foot to not squish out all over the place, despite its length. My own feet stretch as far width wise as they do long. Maybe I'm exaggerating a tad. I used to look at certain shoe styles and wish that I could strut around in those Keds, nike running shoes, or cute heels. Well, it took a while, but I finally found my niche. I have wide shoes that have style, with an element of dorkiness. I stick as much as possible to shoes without tongues or laces, because I have no height on the top of my foot and the tongue gets all bunched up. My current favorite shoes are shown-- and I doubt many people could pull this look off.

3. Messy + Stressed = Appears Industrious. I actually started this post because I got super frustrated at the fact that my bread is not rising (but the recipe in "Gourmet" insisted on 130 degree temperature milk! How was I supposed to know it would kill the yeast?) and because I cannot find my W-2 for 2007. Today is April 13, just in case you yourself have put this beautiful ritual off. I'm sure I put the w-2 in my "extra-special financial papers" section in its extra special semi-pile on top of the bookcase. Now that I've torn the house inside out looking for it and made piles of paper on my bed, I abandoned my search and started writing this post. But man, am I BUSY! Too busy to even finish one task at a time! And I must have some chocolate to soothe my frayed nerves. Especially since Amaya was born, I often find myself considering the next chore while starting another, and then dabbling it all with leisurely productivity.

4. Obsession with food + annoyingly large pile of cookbooks = Foodie. I have discovered that the difference between a foodie and a person with a problem is the quality of the food that the person eats. As long as Gourmet and Cook's Illustrated are the 2 magazines that I pour over and over again every month, and I prefer to visit Maharani Indian Restaurant over McDonald's, people think that I have some sort of sophistication when it comes to food. It also helps when you make food for other people. If you can read at all, you can cook, and any patience I have with cooking is my real obsession with the end product, and people seem to respect that as someone who cares about taste. They also believe that you have talent. At present count I have 22 cookbooks, 50+ copies of food magazines, and a large folder filled with cut out recipes. I have 13 food blog sites on my favorites list, which I check regularly. I also check new blogs out all of the time. I recently dowloaded all of the Diary of a Foodie episodes on itunes. Am I protraying the magnitude of my interest here?

Here's my non-rising bread. It was stuffed with prosciutto, sundried tomatoes, spinach, and asiago (which is exactly like mozarella but twice the price--at least the one from costco). It was a bit dense, but tasted "ok."Pam saved us with salad, asparagus, and mashed potatoes. Luckily.