oatmeal

I sell a lot of oatmeal at the Cafe. Do you want blueberries, strawberries, bananas, walnuts, currants or cranberries? Hot or cold, non-fat or whole milk? Brown sugar? Butter? Honey?

My dad has a very specialized way of eating oatmeal. It's more of an Operation. He adds milk first--to cool it down, but also so it's the right consistency. Loose, but not soupy. He folds the milk in with his spoon. His favorite kind of oatmeal comes from this place down the street from our house, Joanie's, where they cook the oatmeal in milk, rather than water.

At Joanie's, they serve oatmeal with three little metal cups of toppings--brown sugar, granola, and raisins. Always, the toppings arrive first and we all begin to nibble at the granola and raisins. Always, our waiter brings us a second set.

After he has added the milk, my dad picks out a section of the oatmeal, near the edge of the bowl, perhaps four square inches. And he adds the brown sugar. He carefully folds the brown sugar into this one patch of oatmeal until it has turned an inviting maple color. Then he adds a few raisins and a few clusters of granola. These are lightly folded in, and then he proceeds to eat those four square inches of oatmeal. Then the next four square inches are duly folded with brown sugar and then raisins and granola and then eaten.

He has this magic talent of budgeting his toppings--I can't remember him ever running out of one topping before the others, or before the oatmeal was all gone. He only ever complained that there wasn't enough brown sugar. He, like me, prefers his oatmeal a molasses-laced bowl of softness, almost a dessert.

On one of my last backpacking trips, we made oatmeal--not the decadent, refined stuff from Joanies, but a thick, bubbling cauldron of cinnamon-y cooked oats studded with dried fruits and nuts--cranberries, prunes, apricots, pecans, walnuts, raisins. The fruit swelled up and started to disintegrate. A totally different kind of sweet from brown sugar, but sweet nonetheless. We couldn't get enough--we were ravenous; the oatmeal was fuel.

I guess the oatmeal at the Cafe is alright--not as creamy as Joanie's, nor as flavor-packed as the camping oatmeal.

Most everyone is baffled, overwhelmed, when I ask them so many questions about their cereal. Some people know exactly how they like their oatmeal, and are annoyed when I ask the questions--it's as if they are saying--Can't you tell I'm a regular? Jeez. The thing that got me thinking, though, was that oatmeal is one of the foods at the Cafe where people really have to think about what they want. Egg scrambles are already created--ham and cheddar, spinach-feta-red onion, swiss chard and bacon. But oatmeal means they have to think, the oatmeal's a blank until they make it their breakfast.

postcards

fancy one?
email me with your address. (pcarryer@gmail.com)
postcards from munich and sienna.

my heart is in a strange-but-happy place.
i'm excited to go home.
i'm excited for italy with my parents.

i'm not excited to fall asleep alone. the last three months have spoiled me. my stranger spoils me.

there will be, i promise, more updating this summer, not to mention more stories.

bad things are coming, we are safe

Last night I couldn't sleep and so my stranger told me a fairy tale about a foot soldier who found a magic jacket that made him handsome. The princess fell in love with him, and even when he took off the jacket, she loved him with all her heart.

I want to talk about my eating disorder.

I want to talk about it because I'm not ok, and I'm not healthy and it feels like some time, somewhere between sixteen and now, a switch flipped for everyone except me.

When you're sixteen, an eating disorder has a subversive kind of glamor--it's an act of rebellion. It's that teenage-girl way of being independent. These decisions are mine.

But when you're almost twenty-one, it's this shameful thing you carry around all the time, silently. When does this go away? Does it ever? Who is there left to rebel against?

When my stranger asks what's wrong, I don't know how to tell him that I feel like my body has nothing to do with my self anymore. That when I'm high is the only time I feel like a whole person, not trapped. That I don't know how to fix myself.

both hands

This last week has gone by too quickly. I wrote and revised, read pages and pages and Friday night, when I was just having a god-awful night for no good reason, my stranger took me back to his house and gave me a massage and cuddled me until I feel asleep.

Just after Brian died, I started having these nightmares--I was afraid to go to sleep for a week, just because I didn't want to have the dreams. So Darren invited me down to Edinburgh and he watched me sleep, to keep away the nightmares. I don't usually ask for help--not first. I always like to try on my own.

With my stranger, there was a degree of complete surrender I've never felt before. Maybe we say this every time we're in love, but this does feel so radically different from anything that's come before. It's simpler. Even when I'm in such a bad mood I'm picking fights left and right, he can curl himself around me, and all of that anger deflates. The first thing I want to do when I wake up is make him coffee and sit outside smoking hand-rolled cigarettes with his arm around me.

"Saved"
"Ghostfish"
"The Ossuary in Paris"

various, etc

Listening to: Ani
Reading: Gaiman's Stardust; Staffords' Queens, Concubines and Dowagers
Writing: Another story about sad southern men
Cooking: Red-wine pot roast with grilled polenta, brown-sugar shortbread cookies
Recently acquired: A French press, a book on Hebrew, three books of short stories that generally make me feel talentless, a feeling of impending finality, a boyfriend of limitless empathy, a drought of words, an obsession with showering and lotion, and a book of Anglo-Saxon poetry that is surprisingly poignant.
Recently desired: A vintage leather jacket (only 60 quid!), a few more hours, deep dish pizza, new highlighters, a cat, a fish, another cactus (mine is flowering), someone to read me to sleep