The "I'm Gonna" Shopping List

I'm so fickle sometimes.

As I was writing out my list for my next shopping trip, I found last month's list. And made myself giggle.

This is last month's list (with its notes):

• Granola (organic, bulk)
• Grapes (for the hydration and late-night snacks)
• Berries - raspberry, strawberry, blackberry. (If on sale. For my smoothies. This month is going to be smoothie month.)
• Prune juice (to make prune pops & to add to smoothies)
• Cereal (the usual: Honey Bunches, Quaker Squares. When I'm tired of grapes & instead of chocolate.
• Only one jar of Vanilla Caramel Creamer. (Gotta cut back on the coffee!)

Okay. I pretty much stuck to the shopping list, but what I did with the items is a whole other story.

I made cookies with the granola and ate the whole pound of grapes during a Netflix night marathon of "Nightmare Next Door". (Gave myself a serious case of "bathroom runs" and made a solemn vow to stay away from the prune juice for a week.

I did use the berries for smoothies. Mostly. Then, since I had no grapes left for snacking, I finished off the berries - all of them - in two days.

The creamer lasted all of three and half days. (Did you know that vanilla caramel creamer is yummy in vanilla chai tea?)

I ate cereal a few times, but I was still pretty cleaned out by the grapes and I heard that the cereal might have the same effect. I still have most of both boxes left over.

Besides the laxative effects grapes have on a grape glutton, I learned that it's very easy to justify making a store run for just one chocolate bar to go with the last of the peanut butter in a jar. I also learned that I really don't like organic, plain granola unless it's in a cookie.

This month's list looks like this so far:

• Grapes (but just half a pound this time)
• Just two jars of Vanilla Caramel creamer.
• Apple juice to blend with the prune juice (just in case I get around to making those pops)
• Two chocolate bars (to save myself the gas money of midnight store runs)
• Some more of that delicious vanilla chai tea (because I'm still cutting back on coffee!)
• Some frozen yogurt (to go with the berries I get on sale)

~sigh~

I should just start shopping meal-by-meal. The way I'm going now, I'm just feeding my fickle belly.

Peace

--Free

The Habit That Kicked Me Before I Kicked It

You might be real tired of hearing about it, but it is about to be Day 34 of my being smoke-free. Every day that I wake up, breathing better, feeling better - and, hell, just not making my sarcoidosis worse - I want to shout and dance like we used to do in church.

The cigarettes and I have a long and entertaining history. Think I'm kidding?

As I was telling +Marla Hughes and +J.D. Hughes last night, there was time when I walked to the store for cigarettes. Not that big of a deal to walk for the smoke, but this was 3 blocks from my job, I was wearing three and a half inch heels, a skirt and it was during the wettest, slip-tricky part of winter breakup. I must have looked like a jones'd-out hooker on my way back to my office, the way I was huffing and sucking on that cigarette...

There was another time that I learned to roll my cigarettes. (It's a sick habit when you are rolling something that isn't really going to mellow you out.) I learned the fine art of cigarette rolling because I had an unreliable husband and lived in the worst neighborhood I ever had. My husband kept the car (when we had one) and might disappear for days. Walking to the store that was down the street was out of the question. Being the slightly siddity, Bougie heifer I am, I was scared to walk to the mailbox without a security detail. Call me what you want, but the first chance I got, I bought a bag of tobacco, some tubes and a rolling machine. (My ex said I even went uppity in that respect. I guess most folks just use rolling papers.)

Like I said, cigarettes had my ass kicked several years before I kicked them. (Listen to me - talking like I've got years under the belt instead of a single month!) I would say that I had a bad thing going, but a friend of mine had it way worse to let her tell it. We worked at the same company but in different departments and, at one point, she had to spend a week on the night shift taking a class I was giving. During breaks, to keep herself alert, she told me stories of her life living and working outside an Indian reservation. I just about died laughing when she told me how she had let herself run out of cigarettes when she was without any transportation but a mule. The nearest, safest place for her to stock up was on the reservation - about six miles away. The funny part was when she demonstrated her riding that mule in dusky light to get to the store or whatever before it was too late. I asked if it was worth it. She said those were the best cigarettes she'd ever smoked in her life. At the time she was telling this to me, she had been smoke-free for about 10 years. 

I have another friend who almost lit her hair on fire. She was tossing a cigarette out of the car window (karma, karma) and it blew back in on her long hair. She damn near killed herself, trying to bat out the fire. 

Another friend got all dolled up for a date - fake hair, fake nails, tits might have been real - and, while lighting a cigarette, set an acrylic nail on fire. Had to dip her finger in her drink. Believe it or not, her and her date have now been married for a lot of years...

The most embarrassing things that have happened to me because of smoking have to do with bad luck, clumsiness and/or drunkenness. I have burned my fingers, burned my lips, and almost torched the front porch... (That last one was bad luck: Outside having a smoke, house phone rang, I dropped lit cigarette into what I thought was a paper cup with water in it. No water in cup. Cup lit up. Smoke alerted neighbor. I felt stupid. Shit, I could have felt homeless.) Once, when extremely drunk (off half a bottle of wine), I tried to put out a cigarette with my foot, forgetting I wasn't wearing shoes. I almost missed an important flight once because I just had to risk that smoke-break during a layover. Try leaving and re-entering Dallas-Ft. Worth airport's security with a twenty-minute window. Go ahead, try it.

Despite all the negatives to smoking, I can honestly say that cigarettes did serve some sort of purpose in my life. It was having a cigarette that saved my ex's life a couple of times. If I hadn't had that few minutes of smoking while I plotted, I might not have talked myself out of his murder. Think about it: no smoking in jail. There were times when the girls were teenagers and never had to find out what it would be like to have the taste slapped out of their mouths, the black beat off their asses or being knocked into a new year. This was all due to the calming influence of tobacco. Now that I think about it, my sister and I raised four kids and helped with another ten or twelve kids. I'm lucky that cigarettes is all I ever smoked. If I could drink, I'd have ended up an alcoholic, but I never get past the third glass of anything... Not to make light of it, but I'm pretty sure that crack was going to be next on my list of addictions.

Peace

--Free

Ethnicity & Food

Okay, I'm going to piss off a lot of people, but I will go ahead & say it:

Black people (in general & especially) need to eat healthier.

~waiting for hail of stones to stop raining down~

Now that I've gone and put it out there, let me explain what I mean.

Not all black folk eat unhealthily. I know a lot of black (brown, taupe, tan, deep chocolate,etc) people who do watch what they eat and understand why they need to. That said, I also know a LOT of "us" who still use the excuse of "Grandma did" to eat things that are so bad for anyone: lots of pork and "drippings," red meat, salt, salt and salt. I am not joking when I say that I knew an older woman some years back who actually ate salt sandwiches. Did you hear what I said? SALT sandwiches. She would cut up a raw onion, some tomatoes and literally coat this in salt and make a sandwich. Seriously. (She is dead now. Died at around 58 years old.)

My mother was an "old school" foodie - she ate a lot of green stuff, cooked and raw - but she had that salt habit. Salt and pepper were her seasoning staples. She also ate tomato and onion sandwiches. She didn't coat them with salt, but she did use salt.

When babies were born into our family, some of them teethed on pork gristle. Yeah. Kind of gross, but at least there was no salt involved. Yet. (I have one niece who has been a chicken-or-fish-only gal for about 15 years & if I really want to make her ill, I remind her that her teething was done on a pig ear! LOL)

The biggest excuses for a lot of poor eating habits, no matter what your ethnicity is, is: "Mama did it," "It's a black/German/Puerto Rican/Polish/etc thing." Like La Nostra Cosa (hope I didn't mangle that). Yeah, and sometime "Our Thing" will kill your ass. As deadly as it it cool-sounding.

Our family "thing" with food has always been a lot of variety as long as it's battered, buttered, fried or salted. Or all of the above, damnit. I got better about my eating habits as I got older (mostly out of shame), but until I was around 20 and got married, I ate a lot of delicious and bad-for-you food. My first husband was from a country where the food is bland but the people live for-freaking-ever! I'm from Texas. Take a look at what I can tell you about:

Homemade cakes (Pound, Chocolate, Pudding)
Fatback (deep-fried and eaten just like that, drippings poured into vegetables as a seasoning)
Grits, rice and hot cereals (with butter - lots of butter)
Hominy (which is the only "grits" we ate without butter)
Eggs, eggs and eggs (scrambled, sunny-side, runny or hard-cooked - as long as they were salted and sometimes, believe this or not, buttered)
Pork (chops - breaded or not - bacon, skin fried or pickled and funky - aka CHITLINS)
Breads (rolls of all kinds, corn-batter, hoecake, corncake, fried, grilled and sun-cooked)
Greens (always with drippings, salt and a hunk of that damned fatback)

Do you see what I mean about good food & bad habits? It's a joke among black people that we will waste no part of a pig. "From the rooter to the tooter." I mean, seriously, we eat the feet, tails, ears, ass and freaking guts. Ya know. That's not a diet, that's damn near an addiction. I remember the stench that hovered over the kitchen whenever the family sat around cleaning "chitterlings" (my British ex-husband actually called them by the proper name & I damn near laughed my ass into a fit every time he said it. He kind of liked that nasty shit. Ugh!) If the smell of "chitlins" didn't put you off any food until the smell of rotted ass died down, I don't think you can be cured of Pork. You almost couldn't fix chitlins without have the neighborhood knowing. I think the only reason folks eat that mess with so much hot sauce is to give their senses something else to concentrate on while they eat it. I'm sorry, but, damn.

Some food that I heard my parents talk about might not have been bad for the health, but it still just didn't seem right for humans to eat. Let's visualize what "Rocky Mountain Oysters" are, shall we? They are bull's balls. I promise. Apparently, my Grandma Jack just loved her some R.M.O. (What's really nasty is that I hear they have a gelatinous texture. Ewwww!)

But back to my original point. We (meaning anyone who grew up eating unhealthy foods) have got to do better, people.

One of the reasons given for a bad diet (other than the old "Good enough for Mama" excuse) is that "Mama" and her mama & daddy  ate the way they did because of poverty. Okay, a lot of people (especially in this economy) are still feeling impoverished. (And trust me when I say that I can teach you some creative ways to spell "broke.") That's still no excuse not to do what we can. Guess what's free? NOT adding so much salt. NOT adding so much (or any) "drippings." Not cooking everything in a batter or butter or fatty oil.

Guess what else? Not being a diabetic, amputee, kidney patient is cheaper than anything. We can make all the jokes we want about people having "Sugar" (diabetes) and "Salt" (high blood pressure), but that shit isn't even a little funny when it hits home or heart. I know firsthand.

With that little mammy-made rant of mine over, I will say this: I've recently learned that it is possible to do better. And it's not as hard or expensive as we'd like to think and in some ways is cheaper (go price a pound of butter if you don't believe that). It's not easy though. Breaking life-long ways and habits is never easy. Just trying is better than nothing at all.

I recently learned that I can eat my vegetables without curing them in salt. I am having a hard time getting used to eating so many vegetables, but my goal is to eat vegetables as much as I used to eat meat. I'm not giving up on meat (I'd be out of mind to swear off Lucky Wishbone forever!), but I'm not making it a part of every meal as if I can't live without it. I can and of I get any sicker or broker, I will have to.

For Memorial Day, I had a two burgers. One beef patty during the barbecue we had and one Portabello mushroom later when I went back for more. It wasn't bad at all. I consoled myself with the fact that I could have just a thin beef patty but a fat-ass mushroom burger! I think it's partly in the seasonings and partly in the mindset.

As I try new vegetable dishes, I tell myself what my former mother-in-law told me was an old English joke for the newly married virgins: "Just close you eyes and think of England." That never fails to crack me the hell up! I just close my eyes and think of life not on dialysis or in and out of a hospital.

Good eating, everyone. After a couple rough days, I'm having a lucid one so I'm off to work on the book.

Peace
--Free