If there are one million things the internet has taught us, one of them is that people can feel completely differently about the etiquette of a situation. “I can’t BELIEVE someone would do X instead of Y!!,” someone will rant, leaving others saying, “What?? I thought I was SUPPOSED to do X! I was doing it ON PURPOSE in order to do the RIGHT thing! I thought it was rude to do Y!!”

For example, there are assorted rules covering table manners, and we weren’t all taught the same set. Certain things are clearly wrong (chewing with mouth open, for example), but many things can receive the benefit of the doubt: the “polite” way to hold a fork, the “polite” way to spoon up the soup, whether or not it’s okay to have elbows on the table, etc. There are plenty of rules where some of the population is taught that the X way is polite and the Y way is rude, or that X is hugely important and Y is outdated, while another part of the population is taught the exact opposite. It would be a mistake to judge someone else’s overall politeness or one’s own superiority by standards that aren’t universal.

However, I have been thinking LONG AND HARD, and I can’t think of ANY UNIVERSE in which it’s okay not to RSVP. Can you? That is, I allow for the possibility that I have overlooked a segment of the population that has been taught specifically NOT to RSVP, that RSVPing is rude. But I’m guessing I have not overlooked anything like that.

The only thing I can think of is that I suppose some people might think it counts as RSVPing if they tell their invited child to tell the birthday child that they can/can’t come—but aren’t we all familiar with children and their sketchy reliability? There’s no way for the birthday child’s parent to know if the invited child’s parent was involved, if the invited child accurately reported, if the birthday child accurately reported; there’s no way for the invited child’s parent to know if the message got through. It’s like playing Telephone, and also it ignores the instructions on the invitation for the manner in which the RSVP should be sent. Still: I can see how this could qualify as intending to RSVP, and not being aware that the attempt is failing.

I also know that sometimes a child crams the invitation in the backpack and doesn’t bring it out for days or weeks. In that case, it’s not failing to RSVP, it’s “See also: not letting children be in charge of carrying the RSVP messages.”

I do know, from experience and from thinking, that there can be reasons to postpone an RSVP: sometimes an invitation arrives three weeks before the event, and the family’s plans aren’t yet made, and maybe there’s a known event that is still up in the air but may very well be on that day: a game that will be that day if they win the other game this weekend, family possibly coming from out of town that day, etc. I have myself fallen victim to the “I can’t think about this right now,” put-it-in-the-pile-on-the-counter error. Ever since throwing my first kid party eleven years ago (this is a boring digression, but with Rob the plan was a Friend Party at age five and at age ten; please don’t tell the other children), I’ve avoided this—but it requires active remembering not to do it. (If I really couldn’t RSVP without waiting for more information, I would RSVP that that was the case: that is, “We got the invitation to Noah’s party. Jacob may have a game that day, if they win their game on the 17th. I’ll be back in touch as soon as we know.”)

I also know that there can be mix-ups. I am always a little worried that when I leave a message on an answering machine or send an email/text, that I may have dialed the wrong number or typed the wrong address or maybe the email got caught in a spam filter: what if someone THINKS I didn’t RSVP, when I DID?? *CRINGE CRINGE CRINGE* (This is why, although I wouldn’t go so far as to call someone back to say I got their RSVP, I do answer a text or email to say “Great! See you then!”) So with a certain percentage of failed RSVPs, I make that assumption: I assume that someone DID in fact RSVP, but that it didn’t reach me.

But all these things together don’t account for the number of people who just…don’t RSVP. Just, CHOOSE NOT TO.

I’ve heard that many people feel awkward about RSVPing a no, because it feels bad to reject an invitation, and I can see that. It IS harder than a yes. But which feels worse: telling someone they are sorry they can’t come but they have something else scheduled then, or being a no-show at someone’s birthday party? One of Elizabeth’s friends had a party recently and Elizabeth was the ONLY GUEST who came. The family could have adjusted for that if they’d known, but they didn’t know. Disappointed child, nearly-wasted party-place rental, wasted party bags, wasted pizza. We all made the best of it, but it would have been so much better to have some advanced warning. There were other adjustments that could have been made ahead of time to improve the party, if the parents had known.

Or, let’s be frank: there could have been second-string invitations. If the child is allowed to invite, say, six guests, and five of them RSVP a prompt no, then there is time to invite five more people. If there are a lot of uncertain guests, or the RSVPs of “no” come very late, there is no time.

Maybe people are thinking it doesn’t really matter to the host if one single guest doesn’t RSVP: they’re assuming everyone else is doing it, so they’re the only one who isn’t. And there are types of parties where it probably doesn’t matter if only one guest fails to RSVP: maybe it’s a big cook-out with the whole class invited, so if twenty-two of the twenty-three kids RSVP, the one uncertain guest falls well within the number of extra hot dogs and hamburgers that would be on hand anyway. But if five of the twenty-three guests RSVP, there is a HUGE DIFFERENCE between “food for five guests” and “food for twenty-three guests.”

In some cases, the host can call and nag. It’s pretty unkind to the host to make him/her do this, but at least they have an option. For Rob’s five-year-old friend party, where I’d allowed him to invite two friends and neither one RSVP’d, I was able to painfully, agonizingly, awkwardly call, because the kindergarten gave out parent-contact lists. I suffered, but at least I got the answers. But for Edward and Elizabeth’s parties, there are no parent-contact lists. The only way to get the invitations out is to send them in with the child (see above re: bad idea); the only way to get the RSVPs is to have the parents use the contact information provided on the invitation.

In short: RSVP! RSVP!

I’m still stressed about the new job, though less panicky now. It’s almost certainly about 10% genuine, justified worry, and about 90% pure anxiety. The brain wants to find a reason for the anxiety: it says to itself, “We are rational! Therefore we would not be feeling Huge Anxiety unless there was something to be Hugely Anxious ABOUT! Therefore, this must be something to be Hugely Anxious about!” Right now, the high anxiety levels are causing the brain to find explanations such as: “This won’t work!!” “It’s a terrible mistake!!” “I’ve done the WRONG THING!!” “EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE AND WRONG AND IMPOSSIBLE!! WHY ON EARTH DID I THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA???”

The way I’m dealing with it is, first, by remembering that I have felt this way before about things that turned out to be absolutely fine. For the best example: the last time I got a job. But then again, when that happened, Paul was out of work and therefore home with the kids, so I didn’t have to worry about that at all. On the other hand, the four of us were living on my $8/hour plus his unemployment checks, and then the unemployment checks ran out and he still hadn’t been able to find a new job, so perhaps things evened out, concern-wise.

For another example: my once-a-week volunteer thing at the school. I felt as if I’d made a HUGE mistake signing up for that, and that it was going to be a HUGE PROBLEM to get out of it, and also that they would ask me for MORE and MORE and I would HAVE TO SAY NO ALL THE TIME. And in fact, what happened was that it’s turned into something I enjoy doing, and it’s not stressful at all anymore, and they did ask me to do a few more hours of things but it never went further than that, and if anything this gets me OUT of volunteering more, because I’m Already Volunteering. And I get other benefits, such as being a familiar person to the office staff. It’s been such a success, it actually adds to my current anxiety levels: “Oh no! What if I have to give up that volunteer job??”

It’s just, new things can be overwhelming and scary, and the only way to make them NOT overwhelming and scary is to make them NOT NEW. And the only way to do THAT is to do them. (I realize this is Psych 101 here, but I’ve had to repeat this course pretty often.) And maybe after making them Not New, they’ll STILL be overwhelming and scary, like how I feel about the phone: exposure therapy has not done the trick there, so I’ve had to try/use other coping methods. But the only way to find out if this is the kind of overwhelming/scary that will STAY overwhelming/scary is the same as the first way: do it. So either way, the way to get to the next step is to keep going with this step.

So I got my first of two TB tests (receptionist: “Ah! Going into the medical profession!”). No need to think of it as a pre-employment thing for a job I might possibly hate and oh god what was it one of the interviewers said about what to do if the elderly men get fresh while being bathed OH NO THIS IS NOT GOING TO WORK, IT’S IMPOSSIBLE!! No, no, no need for any of that, it’s just a simple test at the doctor’s office! Whistle, whistle, who knows why it’s being done, just check the little box on the list of things to do.

Also, I am reviewing the reasons I thought this would be a good idea to begin with:

1. This is a set of life skills I would like to have. I would like to know how to help an adult walk, help an adult get out of a car, help an adult get dressed; I’d like to know about all the devices and techniques that can help elderly people. This seems like it could be hugely useful as my parents get older, as Paul gets older, as my friends get older, as we ALL get older.

2. I have too much time on my hands. It was fun for awhile, and a lot of it is still fun, but more and more I feel like I might go a little nuts. I could theoretically learn a language, take a class, organize/declutter my house, learn how to do stuff to make my blogs work better, but it turns out I DON’T do those things.

3. I want to feel more useful. I felt crazy in those years when we had all those little kids, but I also felt undeniably USEFUL, and it was clear to any outsider what I DID. Now, when my employment comes up, I feel awkward—especially since most of my acquaintances don’t know I blog, and I’m not about to tell the guy updating our checking account.

4. I’m interested in this work. I’ve been thinking of going back to work ever since I was up in the middle of the night with infant Rob, fantasizing about being allowed to return to the maternity ward, and NOTHING has seemed worthwhile or interesting. YES I could do this job, YES I could do that other job—but it didn’t feel WORTH it, and/or I thought I’d probably HATE it. This job made me feel excited about the idea of working again. I could be TOTALLY WRONG about it, but it seemed worth investigating.

5. This job has a lot of room to do MORE with it. I’d considered going back to being a pharmacy tech, but the only step up from there is certified pharmacy tech, which is a matter of passing a test (I passed a practice version) and making maybe an extra dollar an hour for that. From there, the only step up is pharmacist, and I’m not interested in doing that. But with elder care, there are tons of things I can learn, tons of relatively quick medical licenses I can obtain to allow me to do more things, several longer medical licenses I could train for to allow me to do even more things. I can find an interest (a certain type of elder care, a certain stage of elder care, a certain type of disabling condition, a certain setting for elder care) and specialize in that. When the kids are grown, I can do WAY more: traveling with someone elderly, doing overnights, doing temporary live-in respite care for someone’s mother while someone goes on vacation with her husband, etc. It feels to me like a CAREER path, rather than an entry-level job, even though it IS an entry-level job at this point.

6. I’d been thinking of volunteering for this sort of work. This is like volunteering, but PAID! In MONEY! Money that counts toward my future Social Security benefits!

7. This ties in with #4, but is also separate: this feels like MEANINGFUL work. I read Being Mortal and thought, “YES. People should be able to stay in their own homes as long as possible, if they want to!” That’s something I can immediately start helping with, unlike some of the other world problems. I may find myself swamped/disillusioned by the non-ideal stuff that always, always, ALWAYS accompanies A Nice Ideal, but the only way to see is to try.

8. If Paul were to leave or die, it would be nice to already be working, rather than having to scramble to make decisions and find something. In my anxious fantasies, I can picture myself increasing my hours and carrying on, instead of picturing myself flailing stressfully in an already stressful situation.

Yesterday I got a job (part-time in-home elder care), and today I would describe my status update as blind panic. What was I thinking, applying right before summer, when summer means I can’t work weekdays? …Or CAN I work weekdays? Short shifts? Leaving the children at home? Which would be a great way to get out of some of the hell that is summer vacation? But the agency needs mostly mornings, and mornings is EXACTLY when all the summer activities require my transportation and involvement. Should I just not sign the kids up for swimming lessons? Should I pay Rob to babysit and drive his siblings around? He needs a summer job anyway. But wait, that’s not money coming into the family, that’s money going from one family member to another; that makes no sense for college savings.

And what about when school starts up again? I mentioned to one of the interviewers that I’d put this off because I was thinking about what happens when the school nurse calls. She said yes, it’s a problem they all face because they’re all parents there, and I CAN’T LEAVE UNTIL SOMEONE ARRIVES TO COVER ME, and that could take an hour or more. (Paul: “That sounds like a really optimistic estimate, too: they can get someone to come in that quickly?”) Meanwhile, the school nurse is going to…babysit? How does THAT work?

And how will this work with all the other stuff, the appointments and lessons and extracurriculars and so forth? EVERYTHING IN OUR LIVES (appointment times, lesson times, whether the kids can do this or that extracurricular) is set up on the basis of one parent being home. On one hand, I have more time on my hands than I want or need. On the other hand, it’s all in HARD-TO-CONSOLIDATE PIECES.

Maybe it will be great. Maybe it will be great. Maybe it’s the first step of what will be a long and fulfilling career. It’s so hard to tell what is change-related/new-thing-related panic and anxiety, and what is truly a problem. LOTS of other people do this. LOTS! Okay, maybe they have a spouse who is available to handle some of the nurse calls and other scheduling issues. Or maybe they have other back-up, like non-working friends, or parents in the area (mine are in the area half the year, but not the other half). Or MAYBE IT SUCKS ALL THE TIME AND IS ALWAYS DIFFICULT AND STRESSFUL.

Maybe I should call the agency and quit, and start a new business: helping out working parents. I can pick up your children at school when the nurse calls, and babysit them until you get here! I can run to the store that’s only open until 5:00! I can take your kids to their orthodontist appointments and drop them back to school afterward! I can take them to their trumpet lessons and drive them home afterward! I can pick them up from school on the one day a week they have chess club and therefore miss the bus! I can bake something for the bake sale!

I finally watched Pitch Perfect, just before Pitch Perfect 2 came out.

(image from Amazon.com)

In fact, I watched it twice. Which surprised me, because the first time through I was thinking it was pretty lame/silly. There’s a part where one of the characters says she doesn’t like movies because they’re so predictable, and I was thinking, “TELL ME ABOUT IT.”

And it IS predictable. And a lot of the characters are caricatures, with simplified motivations and feelings and personalities (here’s The Weird One, here’s The Sexy One, etc.), and there are some really dumb parts (“Why won’t you let anyone GET CLOSE TO YOU??,” “Why won’t you let me FOLLOW MY DREAMS, Uncool Parent??,” etc.). And there is some exaggerated gross-out stuff that is not my style at all.

But the real point of the plot seems to be to hold together a bunch of really good/fun a cappella numbers, and it does that job very well. And everyone in the movie is really, really pleasant to look at, which helps too, and there are some good jokes and good lines and good scenes, and I LOVED the songs/performances, and the fact of the matter is that not only did I watch it twice, I’ll almost certainly watch it more times than that. And even though I found it completely predictable, at one point William, age 14, said, “Ug, I know EXACTLY what’s going to happen here,” and I said, “Oh, I know”—and then later he said, “That wasn’t at ALL what I thought was going to happen,” so it may be perfect for young-adult viewers (if you don’t mind them seeing a little crude/racy stuff, which I don’t).

One good thing about the movie is that you can pick up anywhere or leave off anywhere and still enjoy it; I made fudge and had to keep leaving the room and/or looking away from the screen, and that didn’t matter at all. A downside is that the soundtrack is reportedly disappointing: just fragments of songs, and leaves out a lot of the best ones. I had it in my cart to buy on the spot, and then read the reviews and backed off.

I read Find Me, which I thought would be exactly my thing, but it wasn’t:

(image from Amazon.com)

The inside flap describes a girl who doesn’t catch a devastating and hugely contagious illness; she and other non-sick people are taken to a hospital so their immunity can be studied and maybe used for a cure. The subplot is that she’s looking for her mother, who left her on the steps of a hospital when she was an infant.

The book has several really engaging mysteries in it—and then it just chooses not to solve them. I consider that a big cheat: a good hook is only legitimate if a good reveal is coming. Oh, is that not how it works in real life, where we often don’t get to know why something happened or how something turned out? THAT IS WHY I AM READING FICTION. It is so wrong to have a reader follow a narrator right up to the BRINK of the resolution of a plotline, and then have the author be all, “Yeah, but it sounds prettier/deeper if I end philosophically/poetically rather than descriptively/satisfyingly. And by the way, I’m never going to tell you what happened with plotlines A, B, and C, either.”

I notice that the author previously wrote short-story collections, and this is her first novel. I remember reading another author, one who wrote both short stories and novels (I think it was Jeffery Deaver), say he enjoyed writing short stories because there isn’t the same contract with the reader: with a novel, you have to have satisfying resolution, you can’t kill your protagonist, etc., but with a short story you have more freedom to end things without resolution or with disaster or a sudden surprise twist. It seems to me that Laura van den Berg wrote a novel using the short-story reader contract.

I had such a good salad for dinner tonight. Several of you mentioned a cheeseburger salad on the salad toppings post, and I hadn’t yet gotten around to clicking the link before Paul said he was going to grill burgers. I asked for mine without a bun, and asked for ten minutes’ warning to assemble the rest of the salad. I put the rest of the big bag of mixed spring greens into the bowl, and filled in the gaps with iceberg lettuce (I hadn’t realized the bag of spring greens was so low). I added a handful of grape tomatoes cut into quarters or sixths (some of them are biiiiig grapes). Then some shredded cheddar. Then, today I’d bought some bacon bits, so I added those too: BACON cheeseburger salad! Then the burger was done, and Paul cut it into a lot of little pieces (he asked how small I wanted it cut, and I said I wanted, like, 40 pieces). I put that on top of everything else.

I wondered what to do about dressing, and decided on mustard and ketchup, even though Paul acted grossed out by that. I didn’t use very much of either one, and I mixed everything together, so there was no visible ketchup/mustard anywhere—just a suggestion of the taste. (It made me remember a vegetarian co-worker of mine who said he would sometimes eat a toasted hot dog bun with ketchup and mustard and relish on it, because that was what he was REALLY craving when he felt like he was craving a hot dog.) I think if I’d thought about it more beforehand, I might have whisked together mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard to make a dressing. [Note: I did this on future salads and it was exactly delish.] Ooo, and maybe some dill pickle relish!

It was very, very good, and took a lot longer to eat than a cheeseburger. I didn’t really notice the bacon, so I’d probably skip that next time (though maybe when I take it out I’ll notice the salad isn’t as good). I’d add more cheese instead: I’m not sure how much I put in, but it wasn’t enough.

If I’d thought of it in time, I might have broiled a hamburger bun to make croutons. Instead, I put on a handful of crushed Doritos, and that was SO GOOD.

I’m finding that one downside of eating salad is that everyone, everyone, everyone associates it with weight-loss attempts. So when I put cheese and Doritos on my salad, I feel as if Paul is giving me the side-eye (even though he says nothing, does nothing with his eyes, and this could be all in my imagination)—as if I’m trying to self-righteously pretend I’m Eating Light when actually I’m eating many calories of cheese and bacon and chip. It feels hard to explain that what I’m actually doing is turning a cheeseburger with a side of Doritos into a big heaping helping of greens and tomatoes, plus the burger and Doritos, plus the joy of eating MORE.

[Follow-up: The next week, I added a cut-up dill pickle. SO GOOD.]

One thing I do like about eating more vegetables is it means more eating. I realize this is not a new and startling concept, and yet it surprises me afresh each time. Like, here is two scrambled eggs:

And here is two scrambled eggs with broccoli, red bell pepper, and corn (and some hot sauce and a little cheddar cheese):

That is a much bigger breakfast! I LIKE bigger meals!

I am so happy that MomQueenBee recommended Ziploc steam bags, because I am using them CONSTANTLY. Or rather, I am using ONE, over and over, and I’m happy she mentioned this could be done because I never would have paid $2-something for a box of 10 otherwise. I fill it to the halfway mark with frozen broccoli and frozen corn, put it in the microwave for 4 minutes (the instructions say 3, but our microwave is a little underpowered), and work on getting the pan and eggs and plate and cheese and sriracha sauce ready. After I add the vegetables to the pan, I give the bag a quick rinse and put it upside down to dry for the next day. I’ve done this at least 10 times so far; the zipper is getting a little warped but still works.

Incidentally, at FIRST I thought the bag experiment was a failure, because I looked down the little list of “how long to cook which things,” and I came to broccoli and it said 1.5 minutes, so that’s what I did. I didn’t read the rest of the list. If I HAD read the rest of the list, I would have come to “all frozen vegetables, 3 minutes” at the bottom of the list. It seems like the more general instruction should be HIGHER UP on the list.

I have this song going through my head:

Bebe Rexha “I’m Gonna Show You Crazy.” If you want only the song, you can skip the first minute, which is story set-up for the song. I will note there is a lot of swearing in the song, in case you have kids milling around you.

I found the song because I looked up Hey Mama, hoping I could justify enjoying the bizarre catchiness of the appalling lyrics by seeing it was sung satirically by, say, a grown-up version of the robot Vicki from Small Wonder. Close: it’s sung by a holographic Nicki Minaj, who makes me want light pink hair. I looked in the comments to make sure we all agreed the lyrics were appalling but catchy, and I found a lot of people talking about how unfair it was that Nicki Minaj was getting credit for Bebe Rexha’s singing. (Nicki Minaj does the rapping, and BeBe Rexha sings the chorus—but I don’t see Bebe Rexha in the video.)

So then I searched Bebe Rexha, found I’m Gonna Show You Crazy, and now I go around humming “I’m gonna show you LOco MAniac, SICK bi_ch, psychopath!,” even though I’m about as likely to show you any of those things as I am to find it fresh and new to think craziness is accurately and freshly represented by youth, super-sexy clothes, and artistic talent.

Do you know, it is very hard to complain about asking for advice and getting The Wrong Kind, for free, and with no real negative consequences—but I’m going to do it anyway. [Swistle from the Future sez: “This sentence is ridiculous. What refers to what here? Is it hard to complain for free and with no negative consequences? Because that’s how the sentence reads.” Swistle from the Past: “Meh. I don’t see an easy fix. They’ll figure it out.”]

Here is what happened. My town has a Facebook page for residents. I need to buy three particular related items, and I need them for tomorrow, so I asked on the local Facebook page if anyone had seen any of the items in a local store and specified that I needed to buy them today; I mentioned the one local store where I’d already looked. Of the twelve answers:

• Five suggested I look online
• Four made guesses of stores where they hadn’t seen the items
• One suggested a store two hours away that “might” have them
• One told me the manufacturer of the items
• One suggested the specific store I had specifically mentioned in my question
• One speculated the items would be hard to find
• Three, and three only, mentioned stores where they had seen one or more of the items

(Those don’t add up to twelve, because some comments did several things.) Out of twelve answers, THREE answered the question I asked. (Though I went to the store two of them mentioned, and the store no longer has the items. And the other mentioned a store 40 minutes away that has only one of the three items. But I’m counting all of those as successful answers, because they answered what I’d asked.)

It’s not like it ruined my life or anything: clearly I can just IGNORE the useless answers, at no real personal cost. And I’m certain I’ve accidentally “answered” questions in this way MYSELF, because I have CAUGHT MYSELF DOING IT—and who KNOWS how many times I DIDN’T catch it. But it’s exasperating to ask a question and get non-answers to it—and not an INTERESTING question, where even discussion that didn’t answer the question per se would still be interesting, but just a specific, factual, boring, “What retail establishment carries this product?” question. It makes me feel as if I have to be super-super insultingly specific before I ask. Like, “I need these three items, and I need them today and I don’t want to pay whatever it would cost to have an online place ship them to me by tomorrow morning, so I am looking for a local store that has them. This store should be within reasonable driving distance, which I’d define as ‘half an hour away.’ I would like to know if you have, with your own eyes, seen these actual items I am asking about, in a store that meets the qualifications I just mentioned. WITH YOUR OWN EYES. I’m not asking you to research this for me, or to make a list of Stores That Exist In Our Town, or to give me more information about the products I’m looking for, or to discuss the products in general; I ONLY want to know if you have ALREADY found them.”

So there is my Small Complaint About Something Small for today.

On to salads! I tried another really good one. I based it loosely on the Spicy Chicken Caesar Salad that Paul had at Wendy’s the other day. Very, very loosely—like, just used the “spicy chicken” and “Caesar” words.

I started again with a lot of mixed spring greens. I added some shredded cheddar because I didn’t have whatever that pretty white shaved cheese is that Wendy’s used. Then tomatoes, and sunflower seeds because those were so amazing in the other salad and I’m not sure I ever want to eat a salad without them again, and some leftover chicken/herb-flavored couscous, and Caesar dressing.  Meanwhile, I cooked five Tyson boneless buffalo wings in the toaster oven, then cut each one into nine pieces and put them on top. YUM.

Elizabeth and I were both waiting for the first day back to school after the long weekend, to see if there was anything new on the two-parties-on-the-same-day situation that emerged when she gave out her birthday party invitations on Friday. And there WAS something new: the other girl changed her party day. Whew.

********

The day before yesterday, all day I kept thinking, “WHY am I so HUNGRY??” I think the likely twofold answer is that I was smelling barbecue chicken cooking in the crockpot, and that every five minutes there was another emailed comment with another yummy salad idea.

Yesterday at lunch I intended to try a salad, but felt overwhelmed. Looking into the refrigerator, the combinations seemed too many and too difficult. “Maybe instead I will go out for Chinese food,” I thought. But then: a rush of resolve! A rising to the challenge! Things put out onto the counter one after another with decisive little smacks!

I took a picture I feel fails to capture any salad deliciousness at all, let alone the specific deliciousness of the particular salad, but it’s too late now, I have eaten the salad, and no one has ever mistaken this for a blog where people say “BEAUTIFUL picture, what settings?,” and the picture is already taken so let’s just place it into the post as intended and move on:

maybe if I’d photographed it before mixing

I started with a nice big bowl. I put in a bunch of the mixed spring greens.

Then I added some leftover shreddy barbecue crockpot chicken from dinner the night before. I felt very uncertain about HOW MUCH of each thing, but this is how we learn, so ONWARD, just scattered some chicken on it until I felt as if that was about how much chicken I might want to eat if it were on leaves instead of on a bun. A quarter cup or so, was my guess.

Then I cut a handful of grape tomatoes into halves/thirds/quarters and put those in. Then I put in a little leftover corn, but with a light hand because I’d had corn with my scrambled eggs that morning and wasn’t sure I wanted to have more corn. On the other hand, corn is so good in the Wendy’s BBQ Ranch chicken salad, and I was using BBQ chicken, so it seemed on-theme.

Then some shredded cheddar cheese, maybe a couple of tablespoons of it. Then some sunflower seeds, maybe a scant tablespoon. Then some shredded carrots, with a heavier hand because all of this is supposed to be about vegetables. Half a cup? Two-thirds? It’s hard to measure shreddy things anyway.

The whole time I was making the salad, I was feeling anxious about the dressing. Dressing feels as if it could immediately gross the whole salad. Then: inspiration! When I get the salad at Wendy’s, they always give me two packets of BBQ Ranch dressing but I only use one; I always save the extra packet Just In Case. I took one of those packets and put it on the salad. Then I mixed it up.

And it was GOOD. I really liked it! There was a nice amount of crunch: the carrot shreds and the sunflower seeds. Next time I would heat up the chicken, I think: it was fine cold, but I think I would have liked it even better warm. I also might tear up the lettuce a bit; I didn’t feel like messing with it this time while I was on such a tentative roll, but some of those leaves were the size of a cat’s head.

I finally watched Victor/Victoria (Netflix link), which I added to my list after reading a couple of books about Julie Andrews.

(image from Amazon.com)

There were a lot of things I liked about it. I was completely charmed to see Robert Preston from The Music Man working with Julie Andrews from The Sound of Music; I’ve watched both movies quite a few times. I liked James Garner in it, too, and it was fun to see Webster’s dad in something that wasn’t Webster.

(This reminds me to recommend The Garner Files, if you like celebrity autobiographies. I barely knew who James Garner was when I read it, and yet still enjoyed it and found it interesting. It’s been awhile, but I remember finding it funny, too. I think he looks a little like David Boreanaz. See?

(image from Amazon.com)

I also very much enjoy the way he puts the author’s name right on the cover, instead of implying he wrote it himself. /digression)

The main trouble I had with the movie is that Julie Andrews didn’t look or seem even one tiny bit like a man to me. Not one tiny bit. She looked and sounded like a poised lady the entire time. Possibly it’s that I’m too familiar with her as an actress (and particularly as a short-haired actress, so that when she dramatically Removes! Her! Wig!, she just looks like her regular self with her hair slicked back). But mostly it’s that she just Didn’t Look Like a Guy, At All, not even like a guy who was enormously successful at pretending to be a woman. She looked like a woman in a suit, and not even like a woman pretending to be a guy in a suit: just, like a woman in a suit. So it was difficult to get into that fairly major plot point of the movie, which is that she would be fooling and amazing audiences with her act.

I also found the musical acts themselves kind of meh. Everyone in the movie is just BLOWN AWAY by her talent, but I barely remember the songs or the performances—unlike movies such as The Sound of Music, where you could watch and re-watch it just to see the songs.

Regardless! I liked the movie and was glad to have seen it, and I feel increased affection for all the actors in it.

I was very interested to read this book:

(image from Amazon.com)

Some Girls: My Life in a Harem, by Jillian Lauren. Here is the description: “A jaw-dropping story of how a girl from the suburbs ends up in a prince’s harem.” Well! That sounds spicy!

But here is my understanding of “harem”: It’s like a collection of women, owned and cared for by the collector. They’re not paid; they may be given gifts, but it’s hard to know what ownership means if the person is owned by the gift-giver. They don’t come and go; they’re unlikely to be free to leave. They can be family, living there domestically with their children (as opposed to a more sordid image of the life there), but they’re not employees or guests.

And here is my understanding of “girl from the suburbs”: if you could equally well say “prostitute from the city,” and if in fact the latter term would be considered more accurate, then readers of the book are going to be a little disappointed.

What I was picturing before I read the book was a nice college girl traveling to another country, perhaps as part of her education, and ending up accidentally or deliberately part of a harem. Perhaps the girl would be majoring in journalism, so would turn the experience into a great story showing the inside of something we never get to see—and very likely de-sexualizing the image quite a bit. I wondered how she would manage to escape in order to publish the book.

The actual story is that woman working in New York City as a prostitute is hired to be a “party girl”: to come voluntarily and be paid to look pretty and be fun at the royal household’s nightly parties, and to have sex with the princes when they want to. She can leave if she wants to, and she does; she then returns; she then leaves freely a second time, taking her jewelry and clothing gifts with her each time. She is very well paid for this job. She’s not part of a harem, even though that’s what she calls it. We get a peek into the inner life of a hired party girl, not a peek into the inner life of a harem member.

As with many non-fiction books, this one seemed to have about two chapters of story stretched into a full-length book. The story is watered down with other talk about the author’s life. I found it very difficult to get into, in part because the story was so stretched out, in part because I was irritated that it was sold as one thing when it was actually another thing, and in part because I found the narrator so unlikeable. The way she describes other people is so mean (and done with such cunning faux innocence) it almost made me gasp—and if she was telling the truth, she failed to sell it. It’s one thing to “tell your story” and “not be ashamed,” and it’s another thing to publicly and viciously tell one side of a story, with the worst possible spin and assumptions, in a forum where the other side can’t respond. Reading it, I felt as if she’d noticed that other people got sympathy and pity when they used certain language and told their stories certain ways, and so she tried to copy/use that formula to make her own story sympathetic—but instead it reads as false/wily/manipulative/sociopathic. In the second half, her occasional brief sympathetic/self-aware remarks had become cumulatively successful (in a way that made me wonder if I were getting a better idea of her, or if I were succumbing to manipulation), so that I no longer found her unendurable—though still felt a strong urge to armchair-diagnose her, and still felt very sorry for everyone she skewered.

I don’t even recommend it as an “inner life of a party girl” story, because it wasn’t that interesting. What this book did was whet my appetite for someone ELSE to write such a book.